Beauty or Meaning

It's not the job of poetry to be meaningful but to be beautiful.

(Adapted from something Kenneth Koch said)

Discuss (with examples, brickbats, insults etc etc)

Similar to this Basil Bunting quote which I have at the top of my poetry blog: "Poetry is seeking to make not meaning, but beauty".

Obviously I agree with it but I'd always interpreted meaning here as narrative whereas your Koch statement sounds like he's saying beautiful but meaningless. I rarely write straightforward narrative poems but that doesn't mean that they are meaningless it's just that meaning isn't top, second or even third priority.

It's beauty in poetry that attracts me the most, I'm not at all bothered if I don't get the meaning. I loved Plath and Eliot long before what I knew what their poems were about.

I'm not sure how common or popular this view is in the UK poetry scene, it seems to me a more American thing, of course I may be entirely wrong!

It is the duty of poetry to be both or either.

As long as it is good poetry nothing else matters.

I think the chief purpose of poetry is to hate prose.

After that it's to be jealous and insecure and a bit deaf.

Finally, it must be obsessed with cake, oral hygiene and show a penchant for soup and pins.



I think readers “mean”, in the sense that it’s not an inherent quality of a text? Texts aren’t piled up in a corner, sat meaning together or even meaning separately, even. Busy busy busy, mean mean mean. Meaning can only be understood as an act of readership. As far as I’m aware texts don't read themselves

Beauty should be left to Estée Lauder, dontcha know. Or perhaps L'Oréal — “Because you verse it.”

'There is no wing like meaning.'
Wallace Stevens

or, regarding the offstream:

There is no wing like meanness.

It's not the job of people to be meaningful but to be beautiful.





That's better.

A poem should be mean, not twee.

I'm not really sure how, in art, you would go about separating "meaning" from "beautiful." Isn't the whole point of a work of art to create a new kind of meaning, and through that to be beautiful?

Or, through creating a new kind of beauty we reach a new kind of meaning.

I don't think you can separate the two either, I don't think anybody does. But I rarely start a poem these days thinking about what it's about or what it means. I think about how one line sounds interesting, or beautiful, against another line, and through that reach for a kind of meaning. Sometimes I don't know what a poem means until much later.

I'm well on track here.

The drugs are working. Pain is not absent, but is far more manageable than this time last week. Expect a return to form within a few days!

Beauty/meaning? With song lyrics, meaning is either unimportant or massively underpinned by rhythm and melody. Is the same true of poems?

Not at all the same, of course (a rhetorical question?). But one could argue that everything in a good poem, metrical or otherwise, is underpinned by rhythm. As for melody, depends naturally; as Fenton and others have remarked, much of Dickinson's work can be sung to the tune of The Yellow Rose of Texas.

Glad the drugs are working; I had an abscess once: pain was spectacular.