The Ineffable Nature of Language as it Relates to Poetry

Poetry, regardless of its sometimes elusive definition, can be on the most basic level considered a method of communication of concepts, emotions, and perspectives, created with intent and direction toward that goal. However, as with all communication there are limits not only inherent in the medium, in this case the written language, but also in the nature of communication itself. This barrier is a constant obstacle for any writer and became the object of particular interest during the Transcendentalist and Modernist literary movements, in which poets were concerned with concepts and understanding they considered to be ineffable, or unable to be related through traditional methods of writing, which rely on imagery, metaphor, and scene to convey the desired effect. But there is more to the construction of poetry than the structuring of sentences and word choice, which can be analyzed easily by grammarians following formulas and even etymological break down; there is something less tangible that arises from the context an author is creating, the subtle relationships between every word, not just in the respective sentences, but in the entire work, each word building something new and slightly different from the ones before. There are no formulas to follow to manipulate this contextual soul of an artwork, and as with all great art, would it not diminish the value of the product if such was the case? It is this quality that eludes us and has driven poets through experimentation and frustration in hopes of finding new and profound ways of connecting with our fellow humans.

Concepts of relationship are perhaps the easiest to communicate since they tend to be tied to tangible objects, but the problem occurs when attempting to relay a highly complex concept or an abstraction. A useful tool in accomplishing this is the construction of metaphor and simile, which provide comparison and tie abstraction to the physical. But no matter how accurate a metaphor may be, it can only approach the concept; it is not itself the concept. The concept of metaphor is itself an abstraction, one which William Carlos Williams attempted to illustrate in his poem "Portrait of a Lady."

Your thighs are appletrees
whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? The sky
where Watteau hung a lady's
slipper. Your knees
are a southern breeze-or
a gust of snow. Agh! what
sort of man was Fragonard?
-as if that answered
anything. Ah, yes-below
the knees, since the tune
drops that way, it is
one of those white summer days,
the tall grass of your ankles
flickers upon the shore-Which shore?-
the sand clings to my lips-Which shore?
Agh, petals maybe. How
should I know?
Which shore? Which shore?
I said petals from an appletree.
(Williams, "Portrait of a Lady", pg. 278-279)

The speaker in this poem is attempting to use metaphor to describe a woman, to romantically compare her body parts to objects of beauty, but continually fails to make any real connection bearing any true resemblance. If one says that a woman's breasts are like mountains, they mean they are large. Do they also mean that they are cold at the peaks and rocky? Perhaps they mean green mountains, which might mean the breasts are hairy. Change the object of comparison to something more accurate, say warm bags of pudding; there are more grounds of resemblance, yes, but it is still inferior to the object itself. In the same way, this poem is not the inadequacy of metaphor, it is simply a sign pointing to it, which perhaps Williams meant as a statement in its own right.

Human emotion, be it universal, is abstract, and the perception of and reaction to different emotions varies per person and experience. Also, people have little control over how they will emotionally respond or how they will feel at any given time, since emotion is a function of character rather than intellect. Stephen Crane often wrote poems resembling a riddle format addressing phenomenon of the human condition, one of which, "Behold, the grave of a wicked man," portrays a woman grieving over a man she loved, despite him being undeserving.

Behold, the grave of a wicked man,
And near it, a stern spirit.

There came a drooping maid with violets,
But the spirit grasped her arm.
"No flowers for him," he said.
The maid wept:
"Ah, I loved him."
But the spirit, grim and frowning:
"No flowers for him."

Now, this is it-
If the spirit was just,
Why did the maid weep?
(Crane, "Behold, the grave of a wicked man", pg. 205-205)

Notice Crane did not make any attempt to describe the grief the woman feels, or the love for that matter. If he had used metaphor to do so, it would have led him down a road of finite expression. Instead he illustrates the situation surrounding the emotion, and then asks why. The reader in trying to answer that question must define both the love and the grief the woman in the poem is experiencing, except they insert their own concepts of it, which are idiosyncratic due to the diversity of personal experiences.

Personal perspective is the most incommunicable asset or our lives, but that has not stopped poets from attempting to convey it. The problem lies in how perspective is shaped, through a lifetime of experiences and rumination, which are unique to everyone no matter how similar two peoples' lives have been. Walt Whitman understood it is something that cannot be simply told and spent his entire life writing poetry in hopes of altering the way people live. His method involved stimulating a reader with a combination of scene and rhetorical questioning to urge them to arrive at the intended conclusions on their own terms. The intent for his book, "Leaves of Grass", was to act as an experience rather than a message, with the scene providing the information, the input, as experiences do in our lives, and the rhetorical questions spurring the rumination, the production, which we generally do in retrospect of events every day or sometimes years later. Here is an example from "Song of Myself" in which Whitman impresses upon the reader with stimuli and then follows immediately after with rhetorical questions.

The smoke of my own breath,

Echoes, ripples, and buzzed whispers....love-root, silkthread,
crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration....the beating of my heart....
the passing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and
darkcolored sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belched words of my voice....words loosed
to the eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses....a few embraces....a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields
and hillsides,
The feeling of health....the full-noon trill....the song of me
rising from bed and meeting the sun.

Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the
earth much?
Have you practiced so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
(Whitman, "Song of Myself", pt. II, pg. 85)

Whitman gives us an almost hypnotic list of sense details and scenery and then poses questions that do not have clear answers. The unusual word choices serve a similar purpose as the questions, in that they require the reader to make a decision on how they are to be received and provide enhanced contextual significance, such as the underlying sexuality created with the word combinations like "love-root, silkthread, crotch and vine." Though Whitman has affected countless people through his writing, the method he chose isn't perfect. Due to the fluid nature of his work, he intended it to be read often, studied, until the reader at some point understands his broad and ineffable meaning. Because of this, a huge spectrum of interpretations have been voiced, some so diametrically opposed with one another that it begs the question if Whitman truly succeeded. Each interpretation of "Leaves of Grass" tends to lean in favor of the cultural and religious ideas of the reader, which only leads to argument of those ideas. If the goal of Whitman was to confound and incite debate then he succeeded, but if it was a concrete philosophical or spiritual perspective, then the arguments persist.

As communication and the arts grow and change into more efficient and expressive forms, our ability to understand, to truly empathize with people, remains barred by the inability to take on another's life and feel all the things they feel. Words will always have a definition and in defining something, you limit it, though often leaving it applicable to a wide variety of situations in need of describing. How many of those different circumstances really warrant the same word? The grief one feels is not the same as the grief of another. Perhaps one day humans will transcend the need for spoken language and the restrictions it imposes, to communicate telepathically, completely understanding someone's entire disposition at a glance. Until then, poetry will continue to redefine itself to better fit the needs of expression, as do we.

Works Cited

Lehman, David, Ed. The Oxford Book of American Poetry. NewYork: Oxford U. P. 2006