Everyday Canvas

Poetry and Authors Influencing Authors

Prompt: Do you like writing or have you ever written poetry? What does poetry do to its poets and readers? And do you think writing poetry is important especially for the writers of prose or fiction: Why?

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I have always loved poetry first for its meaning, then for its play on words. In fact, my first writings were poems when I was very little.

Not everyone loves and understands a poem because a poem can be extremely personal and sometimes only its poet may know what he or she is trying to say. Then, sometimes, because of this, a frustrated reader will say, in a polite but passive-aggressive fashion, “I appreciate how you felt the need to write this poem.”

Poetry in addition to being therapeutic for its poet and even for its readers, it helps them to understand people, be it from a specific perspective. It also helps to understand and appreciate the significance of the words, to improve ideas and to develop writing skills and the art of creative expression.

A prose and fiction writer who also writes poetry tends to become more of an artist with spirit because he or she has explored the boundaries of language and its best usage to describe feelings and has organized the experience the poem is about.

When read aloud, poetry is music, sounds, beats, and rhythm, and because of this musical quality, it helps the memory to retain what it is saying. This is why small children like poetry set to music.

The best way to appreciate poetry is to let it to wake us up to the poet’s feelings and to new ideas and the art of usage and to let it communicate with the deepest parts of our beings because this is how poetry humanizes us.

Prompt: Let's consider this on creation Saturday for discussion.
Dorian Gray, written by Oscar Wilde, is the subject of a full-length portrait in oil by Basil Hallward, an artist who was impressed and infatuated by Dorian's beauty; he believes that Dorian's beauty is responsible for the new mood in his art as a painter. Through Basil, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, and he soon is enthralled by the aristocrat's hedonistic worldview: that beauty and sensual fulfillment are the only things worth pursuing in life. Dorian expresses the desire to sell his soul, to ensure that the portrait, rather than he, ages and fade. Dracula, Bram Stoker's character also had the capability of never aging. Have you read both books? Were you aware of the similarity in their two books? Do you think Wilde and Stoker influenced each other's work?

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I saw the movies of those two books. I didn’t read them. As a genre, horror rarely talks to me, although I’ll read and write horror if I can find some meaning in it. Then, I never read a book if I have seen it in its movie version first because I am partial to books, and also, if I read the book and see the movie later or vice versa, you can be sure I’ll hate the movie.

As to these two authors influencing each other’s work, it is definitely possible. In addition to self-expression and presenting one's views and art, literature has to do with becoming influenced by other and usually earlier writings. This is why the fairy tales and the Greek and Roman tragedies and comedies have been used over and over through the centuries while taking a different meaning or form with each use.

Then, when all is said and done, human psychology is the hinge that opens or closes all doors, and good role models have always been impressive as they motivate us to do a good work with whatever we set our minds upon.