Poetry for me
What do you think of when you hear “The Industrial Era, European city, 1800s?”
Me? Well, I think of cold dark rain on the shiny cobblestone streets. Of smoke stacks. Yellow smog from the production. Yellow smog brushing down the streets and tapping the lead paned windows. I think of a man, J. Alfred Prufrock, walking up the stairs in his black suit with tails, sending shivers through the party-goers with a smug look. The yellow fog lingering at the window panes, watching, softly tapping.
J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot has been a poem seminal in my creative thinking, I think. When I first read it in high school, I was captivated and tried for so long to figure out what it meant, to grasp it. It was so long and daunting, but I loved it. The language was beautiful, the descriptions were strong and almost haunting, the rhythms were harmonious. These are the pleasures of poetry, as is the search for the deepest heartstring or morsel of meaning that is the poem. These are exciting. The perils though are perhaps the same things – of not understanding all your tools, of not finding that core. But the perils are nothing compared to the pleasures, because any attempt at this search is better than all the failures at which you may eventually arrive.
You write about this poem very well. Becoming a reader of poetry, I think, is just as important as writing it. Many people dismiss poetry because it seems obscure or cryptic and they don’t want to spend the time. You’ve really latched on to something in this poemt, abd I love how your first paragraph contains lines that seem so come from poems, such as “Yellow smog brushing down the streets and tapping the lead paned windows.” Reading poetry is really the only way to begin, and this review manages to combine creative and critical thinking in one.