[R. Nemo Hill]

If the thoughts in or meaning of a poem can be clearly and completely paraphrased, then I believe it is not a poem. Poetry is for the expression of those states that cannot be expressed in the usual logical language of so-called meaning. It's the difference between allegory and symbol. An allegory is a stand-in for something else, a riddle with an answer. A symbol is chosen because there is no other way to express the inexpressible something that it dares to approach. It is a question whose only answer is itself. This is I think what Rilke meant when he said (in his Letters To A Young Poet) that the point was to "live the questions now" rather than "to seek an answer". Poetry is symbolic language, not allegorical language. If there is not some crucial core to a poem that cannot be translated or interpreted or reduced to the clear-cut meanings of the language of discursive thought, then it isn't speaking in the language of poetry. It is only the inexpressible that poetry expresses. And, of course, there are exceptions to every rule--even this one!

Here is a brief collection of tidbits from my own teachers, some of whom contradict each other.


People pretend not to pay too much attention to the fact that the logical mechanism of the sentence alone reveals itself to be increasingly powerless to provoke the emotive shock in man which really makes life meaningful.
(Andre Breton
Second Manifesto Of Surrealism/trans Mary Ann Caws))


So were assembled in my mind before the birth of a poem the ideas implicit in it. But when the poem was born it was as much a surprise to me as if a flower had suddenly glowed before me in the hollow of air... I can only assume that the philosophical antecedents in some way followed the psyche into that high state where, as the seers tell us, the gold-gleaming genius makes beauty, joys, rejoicings, dance, and song, and it changed the dry-as-dust logic into color and music and a rapture of prophecy.
(AE
Song And its Fountains)


Even if we measure the footsteps of the goddess, note their frequency and average length, we are still far from the secret of her instantaneous grace.
(Paul Valery
The Art Of Poetry: Problems Of Poetry/trans Denise Folliot)


You could almost touch it. But you did not touch. Because you cannot touch a music, a flowering of water, the white smile on the sleeper's mouth.
(Patrick White
The Aunt's Story)


.....a disclosing that lets us see what conceals itself, but lets us see it not by seeking to wrest that which is concealed out of its concealedness, but only by guarding the concealed in its self-concealment.
(Martin Heidegger
Poetry, Language, Thought: "...Poetically Man Dwells..."/trans Albert Hofstadte)


The poet must seek in himself the impression of being mute, of not being able to say what he has in his hold, and then strive to phrase it without ever finding fulfillment.
(Ramon Del Valle-Inclan
The Lamp Of Marvels/trans, Robert Lima)


We make of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they won or may win, we sing amid our uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders.
(W. B. Yeats
Mythologies: Per Amica Silentia Lunae, Anima Hominis)


In a poem, therefore, the sense must not triumph over the form and destroy it beyond recall; on the contrary, it is the recall, the conservation of form, or rather its exact repetition as the sole and necessary expression of the state or the thought it has provoked in the reader, which is the mainspring of poetic power. A beautiful line is constantly reborn from its own ashes, it becomes again—as the effect of its effect—its own harmonic cause.
(Paul Valery
The Art Of Poetry: Commentaries On Charmes/trans Denise Folliot)


We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & inobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject. —How beautiful are the retired flowers! how would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, "admire me I am a violet! dote upon me I am a primrose!"
(John Keats
Letters, Letter of February 1818/ed, Robert Gittings)


So then he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and so to propitiate the austere spirit of poetry whom still, though at a great distance, he could not help reverencing. "The sky is blue," he said, "the grass is green." Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight a girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. "Upon my word," he said (for he had fallen into the bad habit of speaking aloud), "I don't see that one's more true than another. Both are utterly false." And he despaired of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a deep dejection.
(Virginia Woolf
Orlando)


The essential poem at the center of things,
The arias that spiritual fiddlings make,
Have gorged the cast-iron of our lives with good
And the cast-iron of our works. But it is, dear sirs,
A difficult apperception, this gorging good,
Fetched by such slick-eyed nymphs, this essential gold,
This fortune's finding, disposed and re-disposed
By such slight genii in such pale air.
(Wallace Stevens
A Primitive Like An Orb)


Without metaphors it is impossible to express a single thought. All effort to rise above images is doomed to fail. To speak of our most ardent aspirations only in negative terms does not satisfy the craving of the heart, and where philosophy no longer finds expression, poetry comes in again.
(J. Huizinga
The Waning Of The Middle Ages)


Things seem pretty crummy, but if they could carry us away with them, we'd die of poetry.
(Louis Ferdinand Celine
Death On The Installment Plan/trans, Ralph Manheim)


Contrary to opinions prevalent in the Twentieth Century, for him a poem was not a linguistic structure whose meaning originates in, and is inseparable from, the structure, but rather the by-product of a spiritual attainment which must precede a poet's struggle with the insufficiency of language.
(Czeslaw Milosz
The Noble Traveller, The Life & Writings of O.V. de L. Milosz: Introduction)


.....poetry cannot be defined as being either the subject or the form of the composition; poetry is a state of mind or soul—'un etat d'ame' the Symbolists were to call it later—and this state of mind or soul will find its own inevitable expression.
(Enid Starkie
Biography of Arthur Rimbaud))


Poetry occurs less in what is being said than in its passing through language all the way to silence, the beginnings, the inaudible. The greatness of this poet is not that he fell silent, but that he arrived at silence: Rimbaud's work was not abandoned, it is complete.
(Alain Borer
Rimbaud In Abyssinia)


Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you—like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist—or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore, around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.
(F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Crack-Up: Letter—August 3, 1940/ed, Edmund Wilson)


A poem must be entirely inexhaustible, like a human being and a good proverb.
(Novalis
quoted in Novalis: A Romantic's Theory, Kristin Pfefferkorn)


Within this temporal body composed of a hundred bones and nine holes there resides a spirit which, for lack of an adequate name, I think of as windblown. Like delicate drapery, it may be torn away or blown off by the least breeze. It brought me to writing poetry many years ago, initially for its own gratification, but eventually as a way of life. True, frustration and rejection were almost enough to bring this spirit to silence, and sometimes pride brought it to the brink of vanity. From the writing of the very first line, it has found no contentment as it was torn by one doubt after another. This windblown spirit considered the security of the court life at one point; at another, it considered risking a display of its ignorance by becoming a scholar. But its passion for poetry would not permit either. Since it knows no other way than the way of poetry, it has clung to it tenaciously.
(Basho
The Knapsack Notebooks/trans Sam Hamill)


Nemo