Sasha11 May 2004

Poetry is words, not thoughts. You can have the most moving, inspiring thought, idea, or emotion and still have it turn to verse as commonplace as the paper it's written on and as dispensable.

Whether poetry is good or not has absolutely nothing to do with whether it "somes from your soul" or not. It's good if the words are strung together in a way that is pleasing both aurally and cognatively.

True, good verse and feeling can coincide and they often do, but the fact is that they are independent of each other. If the Aeneid represents Virgil's emotions then he's the king of psychopaths.

If you had conquered the self-admitted problem of your "short attention span" and read through the poem of mine you viewed, which is a translation of Antonio Machado's Retrato, you would have seen that it was written in a very detatched, unemotional manner. The poem had nothing to do with the way machado was feeling.