Problematic : To what extent can we say that poetry is universal ?

Subject : Poetry

Problematic : To what extent can we say that poetry is universal ?

“Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come” by W.H. Auden. This quote comes from the poem Funeral Blues, evokes the mourning following the death of a person. There is a protography too. The picture seems to express loneliness, and a form of melancholy, see sadness. Which can join the idea of mourning with the poem. These two works illustrate the problematic “To what extent can we say that poetry is universal ?”.

Poetry has three main subjects, often used. Nature, Love and Death. These are, all three, subjects where the author can express feelings by drawing inspiration from their experience. Thus, the poets speak of universal feelings, to touch other people who experience these feelings but who do not know how to express it.

The photography rather expresses negative feelings through the dark colors, the cloudy sky and the posture of the person sitting alone. This picture illustrates loneliness which is a feeling that everyone has ever felt or will experience in their life. The poem is about the death of a person. A person who counted in the eyes of the poet, because he said “I thought that love would last for ever : I was wrong”. Mourning is a very painful feeling. That, unfortunately, everyone knows. The hardest part about this feeling is that you never know how long this pain will last, you feel weak in the face of it all. However, you have to be able to overcome all that because love poems also exist. And in a poem by Amanda Hamilton (we don’t know if she is a fictional author or not), she said “But who decides the time to die ?” in her poem Broken Gull of Brandon Beach.

To conclude, we can say that poetry is generally universal, because it evokes feelings that everyone can feel, although in different ways. As William Shakespeare says “Poetry is the music that every man carries inside himself”.

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