Obligatory Poetry Blog

In class the other day I initially chose #19 from the list of definition's of poetry. This quote reads as "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these things." I'm not sure why exactly I chose this quote. It just stood out to me. After much contemplation I decided that this quote meant that poetry isn't a form of expressing emotions; but instead a way to escape them. This of course only makes sense if you want to escape happiness for anger and frustration since poetry does nothing but annoy me. Another quote that really stuck out to me was the one by Isaac Newton: "(Poetry is) a kind of ingenious nonsense." I really liked this one because it describes exactly how I feel about the majority of poems that I read. At first glance, most poems seem vague and lack any inherent meaning. But upon further reading, it is usually likely to find implicit messages that were not visible before. Whether or not these messages were intended is often irrelevant since it only matters what people interpret it as. However, I still think that poetry is just a way for authors to string together incoherent and purposefully ambiguous phrases in hopes that people will mistake complexity for proficiency.