Obscurity in Poetry

[Leanne]

Tectak raises the question of whether there's a point to obscurity in poetry in this thread.

But the point is, there IS NO point in obscure verse, except to those who covet it and assign purpose to it; criticise it but at your peril. Because something appears to be nonsense only makes the judgement of it more prone to misconstruance, and that is the extent of the risk that the writer makes. The risk to the critic is much greater because whilst great poetry is constructed according to universally accepted ( or at the very least, recognised) rules, to judge outside the guidelines can lead to the king's new clothes scenario.
What am I babbling on about? Just this. If anyone writes anything which someone does not understand then what is written has failed by some criterion.Live with it or change it. The critic, well intentioned, may say " I fail to grasp the meaning in stanza 2"..........this may well be a statement!

There is an excellent essay by poetry editor John C. Goodman addressing precisely this subject, entitled Obscurity in Poetry.

Goodman begins by linking contemporary "obscure" verse through the ages of English poetry, from the kenning of Anglo-Saxon poetry to the riddle poems at the turn of the last millennium, along past Donne (always and forever my favourite poet) and the metaphysical poets, into the surrealism and symbolism that so heavily influenced the postmodernists. He writes:

Rather than dismissing non-narrative poetry because it is difficult to understand, a productive approach is to try and discern the writer’s underlying poetic and ask why a poet would want to write something abstruse in the first place. Language is what we use to communicate, so why would anyone intentionally write something incomprehensible?

The answer has a lot to do with the way our minds work. Our minds are constantly attempting to knit the world together and the tool the mind uses to structure reality is association. Our minds are associative engines continually binding our fragmented experiences together into a unified whole. Where there is no association between discrete events, the mind will supply one.

and later:

One artistic reaction to this psychological trap was Dada which sought to disrupt conditioned responses through the introduction of the random and unexpected. Surrealism followed soon after with the incorporation of images from the only place where we are free from our conditioning: the natural symbolic language of dreams. If our lives – and even our creativity – are directed by uncontrollable subconscious forces, why not give up the illusion of conscious control entirely and go straight to the source, the subconscious mind? For the Surrealists, psychic events are just as meaningful as physical events and the subconscious is a viable source of both experience and artistic subject matter. Symbolism, as found in dreams, is the natural, innate language of the psyche. That we symbolize before we can talk as evidenced by a child too young to speak who has already formed an attachment to a blanket or stuffed toy – the object is a symbol of security. We have to be taught to speak, but we don’t have to be taught how to symbolize.

Since it's already been written so very well, I would encourage everyone to read the full article. It is lengthy, but worth the time.