Towards or From

I stumbled across this comment from Dylan Thomas, who wrote about a Stephen Spender review: "...the difference between of writing poetry towards words and the writing of poetry from words." This is only a part of the letter, but it captures an interesting idea, though it is probably so difficult to define that writing of it is pointless.

I'm frankly not even sure what it means or what Thomas valued. Spender wrote that the difference was one of the feel versus the intellectual content of words. In my youthful days, I wrote a poetic manifesto (what poet in his or her early twenties lacks such an ideology) that focused on "expansive" versus "compressive"--these were my own terms and bear no relation to any other ideology. Basically, I made some arguments about compression leading to obscurity but relying on a multitude of connotations and denotations to convey the meaning, while expansion relied less on packing meaning into words and more about their essential nature (by which is meant the current denotation and dialectical use).

Alas, I ramble yet again. The point is that one can write poems from which the sound of words is their driving element or write poems from which the meaning of words is the driving element. Neither is write nor wrong. In fact, I think most poets have written poems of both kinds. But lurking in there, I think, is some fundamental notion of words and how we use them. I think it may be my listening to opera in another language. The sound of the words is music. But we even need not go that far. Robert Plant's vocals in Led Zeppelin are often incomprehensible...they become in essence sounds as much as the Jimmy Page's guitar strumming. I wouldn't change a thing about how Plant sang.

Dylan Thomas ended that comment with "that's, of course, oversimplification."