The Medium is in the Message

Poetry is one of the freest forms of writing when the author so chooses it to be. A poet can follow an Italian sonnet, a Shakespearean sonnet, or a Spencerian sonnet. Or, for that matter, he could write in prose or an endless stream of quartets. E. E. Cummings emphasizes feeling over syntax, saying “who pays any attention to the syntax of things” (Cummings 155). His poem “since feeling is first” immediately makes me think of Liz’s embroidered satchel; life is indeed not a paragraph and will not follow any enforcement of form. So, then, why should poetry either?

The subtext of this discussion board is “the Medium is in the Message.” The dictionary gives many definitions of the word “medium,” but most are erroneous in this context. The most apt description of the word is “an intervening agency, means, or instrument by which something is conveyed or accomplished.” The message of the poem, or what Cummings mentions as the “feeling,” implies how the poem is conveyed in this sense. Authors like Cummings and Rico argue that the essence of poetry lies in its ability to combine the left and right portions of the brain in “joining word and image” (Rico 140). From the very first discussion post in this class over hypermedia, we have wrestled with the concept of linking the hemispheres of the brain to create a more tangible image of the words we read. An image in poetry is merely “a mental production, an imagined sensational or perceptual experience” (Keats 138). Rico, in turn, argues that the metaphor is the vessel through which these images are made tangible and real to the reader. Poems like “The Lotos-Eaters” and Oliphant’s “San Jacinto” would not be able to effectively communicate their messages without adequate imagery to set the scene for the audience. “The Lotos-Eaters” uses metaphors and other literary strategies to create all sorts of vivid images for the reader to grasp. For example, the weary mariners compare the music of the lotos-eaters to petals, granite, dew, and tired eyelids. Oliphant dramatically describes a Longhorn football game to actually cast the focus on the waterway adjacent to the stadium. Though the message of the poem does not necessarily reside in its vivid descriptions, the images authors create through metaphor and similar devices can set the tone for or throw the focus toward the essence of the poem.

In Thomas’s “Fern Hill” and Arnold’s “Lines written in Kensington Gardens,” the authors communicate their sense of place through imagery. Blake creates feral images in “Auguries of Innocence” to set the natural setting. These poets all spend great effort communicating to the reader the setting of their prose. What I’ve noticed is that none of these authors contort their poems to achieve some desired form of syntax. Doing so would destroy the poem’s ability to effectively communicate its message. Poetry is not about the fact-based or the literal; “Get past the literal and your Design mind will produce images that can be transformed into metaphor” (Rico 143). Poetry is a wild stream of thought, flowing untamed like the running water described in “The Lotos-Eaters.” Limiting its message by regulating its structure would be imprisonment for the message of the poem. The message is not in the medium. The medium is in the message.