Birdyline Book Blog

While different thematic movements in poetry utilize different strategies to create meaning, the art that results has often challenged social conventions in the same way. Romanticism and the poets of the movement enforced strict boundaries around creating poetry from how many syllables there could be per line, rhyme structures, and stanza structures. Modernist poets have often parted ways with these formulas and instead write free verse. Free verse poetry can be seen as the unrestricted, more authentic, and natural way of creating poetry. However, art represents the human being behind it, and the topics that have captured human attention across generations are, at many times, the same. 

In Kate Baer’s poem, “Idea,” she writes repeatedly “I will enjoy this life.” This poem is striking as a seemingly simple celebratory reflection on the good things life has to offer, and the bad things that are better to ignore for your own sake. This is a poem we’ve seen before countless times in other poetry, but also in our own minds. Decades prior, Emily Dickinson wrote poem after poem about her impending death, even theorizing what it may look like. At first glance, these poems would seem to be opposites, as Dickinson’s describes dying and Baer’s describes living. However, it could be argued that the underlying context for Baer’s poem is the setting that any human reader will acknowledge- in other words, a mortal world. We all have a limited amount of time, and that is what makes Baer’s goal to enjoy the time she has so impactful. In other words, death provides the deadline- the pressure to figure out what is “right,” because there is not always time to arrive there naturally. What is the what if in Kate Baer’s “Idea?” What if she worries about cliches? What if she wastes a little time? The unspoken consequence is regret. That is, a feeling that would be largely irrelevant if tomorrow always came and one could always do the reverse. We won’t always have tomorrow. In this way, her poem is also about death because it relies on the human reader’s awareness of it in their life.

Emily Dickinson was a Romantic-era poet. She was incredibly fascinated by death. Her poems such as “Because I Could not Stop for Death” and “I Heard a Fly Buzz,” while composed in a specific style, focus on a topic that has captured the attention of human beings for all time. Countless other poets including John Keats and P.B. Shelley, who both lived a continent away, wrote about death frequently. In Ozymandias, Shelley writes of an ancient king’s statue surrounded by barren wasteland. “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!/Nothing beside remains. Round the decay…” (lines 11-12) Shelley is almost sarcastically recording the actions of a man who believed he’d built a legacy but actually failed. Perhaps Shelley would agree that Ozymandias should have taken Baer’s advice and focused on loving and being loved in life or at least treating life “like a peach in season…” (line 2) Regardless, Ozymandius lived life the “wrong” way, and humans have been debating this idea since long before either of these two poets were born. 

John Keats, too, wrote about the way he believed one should approach death. To comfort his brother, who was diagnosed with tuberculosis, he wrote “On Death.” The poem reads “The transient pleasures as a vision seem/And yet we think the greatest pain’s to die” in lines 3 and 4. Here Keats is reminding the reader how temporary everything in life is. Unfortunately, that includes Baer’s loves and wants. Does that invalidate Baer’s poem as frivolous? Or does it stand to strengthen her reasoning that one should enjoy life when they have the chance. The ending of John Keats’ “On Death” is the very conclusion aformentioned in this essay- everyone will face their “future doom,” (line 8) and furthermore everyone is already aware of this fact. 

The styles of poetry writing have changed over the centuries, and they will surely change again. The dramatic shift we can see in writing is an easy observation. Harder is the addition of the fact that these poets have the same mortality and the same creative curiosity about life and humanity. The thoughts and ideas across many styles of poetry remain unchanged and yet ever-evolving, as artists ask themselves the same questions and come to an unending number of answers.