World Poetry Day 2017

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!