World Poetry Day, yes.
Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry” has often been a
source of inspiration. Thinking today about contemporary poems, and about the context
and support offered by the internet, I paused over this section:
[Poets’] language is vitally metaphorical; that
is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things, and perpetuates
their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become through time
signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral
thoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the
associations which have become thus disorganized, language will be dead to all
the nobler purposes of human intercourse […]. In the infancy of society every
author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a
poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word the good which
exists in the relation, subsisting first between existence and perception, and
secondly between perception and expression. Every original language near to its
source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: the copiousness of lexicography
and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age, and are merely
the catalogue and the form of the creations of Poetry.
Whatever your activity, your “poetry,” may it bring you happiness!