The Writing-Practice Journal

Places and Poetry -- article

At one time or another, each poet is impressed by a place. Places encourage poetic sensibilities and leave their mark on the poet’s work. Those places are sometimes real, sometimes imagined, but they usually serve as metaphors for concepts and feelings more powerful than any certain place.

In Carl Sandburg’s Chicago, the reality of the city is vivid, dominant, and action-filled.
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

When he talks of his imagined garden of love, William Blake says: <br>
“I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;

Blake, with idealistic verve, also tries to unite the spirit of two real places in <i>Jerusalem</i> when he says:
“I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.”

Then, Emily Dickinson brings together the spirit of the place and her imagination in: By the Sea:
“I started early, took my dog,
And visited the sea;
The mermaids in the basement
Came out to look at me.”

Rudyard Kipling takes the wider, epic view.
“Cities and Thrones and Powers,
Stand in Time's eye,”

Sometimes, a poet internalizes the place he lives in and etches its landscape on the pattern of his life. Robert Frost spent the later years of his life in New England, and his most noted poems allude to that area.
“The firm house lingers, though averse to square
With the new city street it has to wear A number in.
But what about the brook That held the house as in an
elbow-crook?” From A Brook in the City

Walt Whitman was born and grew up around Huntington, Long Island, New York, and without doubt, the place and its surroundings left an impression on his poetry.
“Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore;
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide;
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west,
and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east;
Others will see the islands large and small;”
From Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Sometimes a place is not a town, a country, or a region with a name, but still a place where a poet has warmed up to and made his own, as John Howard Payne has said:
“Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home;”

Donald Justice, too, took a liking to a bus stop.
“Stand in the rain
So quietly
When we are gone,
So quietly . . .
And the last bus
Comes letting dark
Umbrellas out—
Black flowers, black flowers.”

Some poets use a place starting with its cinematic overview or describe it inside their poem; others do not mention a place name or attempt a description, but judging from the poet’s background, the readers know that a certain place has inspired the poet’s work.

To sum it up, places influence poets, and poets have their own hiding places, because they are childlike. As Alberto Rios says,
“We live in secret cities
And we travel unmapped roads.”