Good Poetry and Bad

 Some notes:

                To attempt to evaluate a poem should never be made before the poem is understood; and, unless one has developed the capacity to feel some poetry deeply, any judgments one makes will be worthless.

¡  The ability to make judgments, to discriminate between good and bad, great and good, good and half-good, is surely a primary object al all liberal education, and one’s appreciation of poetry is incomplete unless it includes discrimination.

Three questions we need to ask in judging a poem:

¡  What is its central purpose?

¡  How fully has this purpose been accomplished?

¡  How important is this purpose?

***WE need to answer the first question to understand the poem.  Qs 2&3 are those by which we evaluate it. Q2 measures the poem on a scale of perfection. Q3 measures it on a scale of significance.

Some of the several varieties of inferior poetry:

¡  The sentimental-Is indulgence in emotion for its own sake, or expression of more emotion than an occasion warrants. Sentimental literatures are “tear-jerking” literature, which aims primarily at stimulating the emotions directly rather than at communicating experience truly and freshly.

¡  The rhetorical-Uses a language more glittering and high flown than its substance warrants.  It offers a spurious vehemence of language—language without a corresponding reality of emotion or thought underneath.

¡  The purely didactic-Has the purpose to teach or preach.  It is probable that all the very greatest poetry teaches in subtle ways, without being expressly didactic; and much expressly didactic poetry ranks high in poetic excellence: that is it accomplishes its teaching without ceasing to be poetry.  When the didactic purpose supersedes the poetic purpose, when the poem communicates information or moral instruction only, then it ceases to be didactic poetry and becomes didactic verse.