Importance of Poetry Essay

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Mongolian poet Galsan Tschinag, poetry is "an enormous counter-force against the oppressing weight of the material world." Robert Bly expresses a similar sentiment in "A Meditation on a Poem by Goethe." In "A Meditation on a Poem by Goethe," Bly reflects on Georg Groddeck's essay "Charakter and Typus," a psychoanalytic essay that exemplifies a new era of human consciousness, according to Bly. Bly notes that Goethe's poem "Wanderers Nachtlied II," and Groddeck's analysis of the poem, represent a shift away from what Tschinag calls "the oppressing weight of the material world." Goethe discusses the stillness and silence from a detached point-of-view, as if channeling a universal voice. In "Wanderers Nachtlied II," Goethe does not write to show the impact of nature on the narrator so much as he is "sending his energy, or it is being pulled out of him by the hills at evening," (Bly 280). Although the value of poetry cannot be reduced to simply a buffer between the individual and the modern world, this is one of its current functions. The value of poetry is much like the value of art or music; it connects a person with the spiritual world via a creative vehicle.

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Poetry helps the individual transcend the mundane and connect with the existential. One of the core ways that poets like Tschinag and Goethe transcend the mundane and connect with the existential is by rooting their verse in imagery of nature. Tschinag writes, "When you leave me / I will turn to stone / On the north face of life's mountain." Tschinag's shamanic heritage imbues the poem with even greater spiritual force, as the speaker is not being metaphoric for the sake of literature but as an extension of the Mongolian consciousness. As Tschinag states in "Defense of Poetry," "my first verses were shamanic chants." Goethe likewise transcends the mundane to connect with the existential in poems like "Wanderers Nachtlied II." When the narrator states, "Simply wait: soon / You too will be silent," the suggestion is that the person ultimately becomes one with nature just as Tschinag's narrator does. The natural universe is equated with the existential and transcendent; whereas the mundane world of human worry….....

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