Everyday Canvas

Poetry, the Myth, and Unresolved Things in Life

Prompt: "Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portraits." Jean Paul Sartre What are your thoughts on this?

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Megan, you just gave us a quote from one of my teenage idols, Jean Paul Sartre, who was an existentialist. Let me see if I may be able to put into words what I understand from it almost intuitively.

Poetry alters and enhances the relationships between the words and feelings through metaphors and other poetic tools, and thus, material things, elaborate descriptions, and straight meanings become superfluous. This is how the poet remains in harmony with his inner world. In this way, what the poet creates is like a myth, high up there, unreachable by the common pen or by the commoner’s thought processes or feelings. In other words, poetry creates poets who may probably be misunderstood, and in their being misunderstood, they may be looked upon as losers. They are, however, true winners even if they look like losers. A poet is a writer who is honorable and whose spirit is a self-respecting one, and that myth the poet creates is still a form of speech or writing.

Prose writer, on the other hand, explains that myth, opens it up to easier understanding, and explains the meanings, feelings, and thoughts that made those poets who they are. Although the prose writer expresses the concepts of the myth more clearly through significant, meaningful words as if connecting the dots hidden in a poem or as if “drawing the portrait of the myth,” his prose may still be under the influence of the poetry. So, even the straight, dry prose contains echoes of poetry because when words refer to clear concepts, social thoughts, or ideas, they may contain obscurities or hidden references to some feelings and notions as well, and then, same as poetry, prose contains words and is a form of speech and writing.

Prompt: “Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.” Rainer Maria Rilke
What is your take on this quote?

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We all have unanswered prayers or wishes. We may have unresolved hurts inflicted on us by life or other people, too. Instead of crying over spilled milk, I think Rilke wants us to look at and analyze the unresolved situations and learn from them.

In life, not everything has a solution and not everything needs to be resolved. It would be to our benefit to live life as it comes and not expect instant gratification for every single thing that pops up in front of us.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have dreams and goals, but what it means is we shouldn’t get hung up on a certain woe that can hurt us through the rest of our lives. If we feel grief or disappointment over a situation, we may question why we feel this way and then maybe readjust our understanding, quest, or dreams so they may come to fruition. That, I think, would be trying to love the questions themselves.