ars poetica

It has been interesting to read all of the different ars poeticas for this week. I found T.S Elliot's to be a little obnoxious. I felt like he raised a lot of good points, but they seemed a little obscured by his pompous tone. However, I thought the part where he said "Some one said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know." was really powerful. It made me think of earlier in the semester when Professor Hummer said that we would not only write poetry, but also read it to develop a conversation with the world of poetry. I think that is exactly what Elliot was trying to convey. Whether a new poet is developing a technique because he disliked the tradition of poets that came before him, or if he is attempting to take a technique that they employed successfully and make it new, every new author is defined by their link with the old. I think this is a really cool idea, to think that every new poem that is written is in someway impacted by every other poem that has ever been written. It is an interesting idea of connectivity, where the authors that influence me as a poet, were influenced by other authors themselves and so on. So the poetry that we write today, designed to be fresh and innovative, is actually the product of generations of reactions and ideas of the poetry created before us. I like the idea that poetry that we may never have read, and poets we may never have known existed, indirectly shape the work we do today.