Prior to learning poetry in this class, I believed it to be a genre written more for enjoyment, and for free expression, or simply associated it with your traditional poetry with rules and full of stylistic techniques due to the scholarly environment we needed to look at them in. On the grounds that poetry was taught in the secondary school system as entities filled with particular literary devices, my brain was stuck thinking that they were simply difficult and extraneous texts sometimes made to make the English language harder to analyze. However, within our poetry unit, we have looked at ways poetry impacts society and how we come to identify ourselves in relation to others, and the world. Although it was within my realm of knowledge that poetry is a very malleable form of art, it is full of limitless possibilities and has the power to convey any message, I did not think of poetry as a platform to make these connections between individuals visible, contributing to a global discourse and creating a sense of solidarity.
In the past few weeks, as we’ve explored poetry as a form of documented cultural and political artefact, I discovered how it constructs an intimate bond between individuals, and enables the past to be spoken about through hidden narratives of others. For instance, the narrator of “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”, reflects a message addressing how badly soldiers were treated back then, as if they were animals and were easily replaceable. In John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields”, the stanzas promote a strong sense of nationalism and perhaps a call to action. It is interesting how when analyzing these two poems with a close set of eyes, it is notable that they may initiate a feeling of belonging to a collective group, thus instilling certain opinions into peoples’ minds, making some narratives more dominant, while diminishing the others simultaneously.
It then occurred to me, that poetry is not a simple work of art made for reading pleasure, but writes out narratives for people to absorb, reconstruct, attach meaning to, and position themselves accordingly. It is another form of media, which can make our thoughts align with what we see or hear documented. More than an unnecessarily complex piece of verbose language or something that looks aesthetic, it determines the past, present, and future.