I sent the original link to Mr. Colin Holcombe . Following is his email in response:



Dear Kashan,

I’ve read the interesting blog posts, the Guardian article and checked a little on the internet. I don’t have the time, unfortunately, or the knowledge, to add much more than broadly agree with desiresjab’s remarks. It all depends on what you mean by poetry, or what you think is most important about the art form. If it’s the aesthetic sense that’s emphasized, then all architecture is poetry of some sort. It has to be if the building is not to be a complete eyesore. Medieval religious buildings, east and west, went further and incorporated a ‘sacred geometry’ which governed proportions of height, width, length, arch span and so on right down to geometric patterns in tilework and stained glass. There’s a large literature on that.

Traditional poetry is also governed in part by aesthetics: patterns of stress or syllable length, stanza patterns, balance of argument, and much more. Poetry had to be moving, beautiful and express something worth saying. Contemporary poetry has somewhat forgotten all that, and can end up being only tiresomely clever. (That would be my assessment of the Simon Barraclough piece, incidentally: The Guardian does sterling service in bringing contemporary poetry to public notice, but the taste of reviewers can be alarmingly uncertain.) Medieval poetry, certainly in the west, but I’d imagine in the Muslim world too, often embodied numbers that had symbolic importance. Chinese poetry also has complicated rules governing tone, line and stanza lengths, which again go back to numbers, though the prescriptions are probably not overtly symbolic. Musical notes also have a number base in their pitch and harmonics. And so on. Whether your extensive analogies help in the appreciation of poetry, I wouldn’t know, but rather doubt it. Poets keep patterns in their heads that help them select the words appropriate to what they want to say, but they’re held unconsciously there, with the selection being a coming together of many requirements. On meter I’d only add that prosody is a fascinating but contentious field, though of course I’ve written about it in my free guide to verse writing at

http://www.ocasopress.com/verse-writing-a-practical-guide.html

(if of any interest).

Please excuse this very brief contribution -- my time for correspondence is very limited-- but many thanks for alerting me to the many enlightening posts on arood.com.

With all good wishes,

Colin
Colin
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