What does a poet need to create beautiful forms with useful beautiful content. Knowledge of poetry? Not at all. This knowledge is necessary for literary scholars, and having theoretical knowledge without poetic ability will not create a poem, while masters of the word do not think about how they write – whether correctly, according to the forms of versification, and, guided by inspiration – the gust of the soul – create brilliant creations.
What quality do you need to have in order to awaken the ability to write poetry? Revelation does not come at once – as the necessary information accumulates, the hour of the answer comes. It, like a flash of light, leaves no dark spots – doubts. Logical completeness comes to an end, it remains only to set out in writing my conclusions, consonant with the opinion of the few authors with whom I had the opportunity to talk on similar topics – what is poetry and why this art to understand only a few. In the course of my discussion I understood that a poet must have a poetic ear to hear his own poems and the poems of others. If there is rhythm in the poem – the music sounds without falsity, then the poet has managed to create an ideal sound form. But the form is not enough, you need more content.
In ancient Greece there was a science called rhetoric. The study of the art of the word – the creation of the correct grammatical forms – allowed us to capture the attention of our listeners. And the poet must be able to create a musical form, to create grammatical form, he must have the wisdom to give a deep meaning to the poem and have the perception of an artist, in order to create a beautiful picture through the palette of words.
But what is rhythm, the basis of poetry? The conventional wisdom is that rhythm is the ratio of the durations of sounds in their sequence. But sounds can have different durations. One and the same vowel letter in combination with others sounds differently – in duration and tonality. In different variations the sounds form different rhythmic figures, of which the overall rhythmic pattern of the work – verse. And the more complex the rhythmic pattern, the higher the quality of the poem. Creating a complex rhythm repeated through several lines is truly accessible only to geniuses with innate poetic abilities.
What does a poet need to be a poet? Probably a poet needs to create his soul – to bring the mind and the senses into harmony. The soul has everything – all the necessary knowledge – you just need to learn to listen to your soul, to catch the musical forms in it, and then it’s up to the mind – for erudition, the stock of accumulated words and the ability to apply grammatical forms in practice.
Poetic deafness is the bane of modern poets. They cannot produce not only their own musical forms, but also hear the music in other people’s poems. Lack of proper knowledge in many fields of science is even more grievous – the poet, lacking erudition, is scarce in words, for inability to create his own verbal forms, borrows someone else’s – stamps.