Poetry and pretension are things that, to most people, seem to go hand in hand. On the surface, it’s a form of writing that can be very much representational, chock-filled with sometimes hard-to-interpret metaphors, and framed with intricate structures that can be difficult to wrap your head around. “What the heck is this poem actually saying? What does iambic pentameter mean anyways? I can barely write a rhyme scheme that doesn’t sound like a nursery rhyme!” Meanwhile, the snobs who quote Robert Frost and Allen Ginsberg in the same breath just stick their noses in the air and look down on you because they seem to get it and you don’t.
This shapes many assumptions about poetry: it’s a “sophisticated” form of art for “sophisticated” sorts of people. How can poetry be accessible to everybody if it’s inherently high-brow? But what these assumptions forget is the basic premise of ANY art form, what even makes it art in the first place. And that premise is very simply: expression. Art is meant to evoke something in the recipient. When you listen to ‘Hello’ by Adele, doesn’t it make you sad? When you watch Anchorman, doesn’t it make you laugh? This is the intention, and in the same sense, poetry is meant to draw out an emotional response through language, as opposed to through sound or visuals. It’s easy to forget that certain things are art, or, on the other hand, it’s easy to forget WHAT makes it art. Poetry is another form of expression, just like music or film, one that has structures and rules the same as any other art.
In that context, what can make poetry seem pretentious is insincerity. Because of the generally accepted principles of poetry – complex structure, metaphorical and eloquent language – perhaps people feel pressured to focus less on honesty and more on aesthetic. After all, what is poetry if not really good sounding words, right? But it becomes easy to focus on this aspect and lose sight of where the impact really lies, which is in honesty. People sacrifice that in order to create something that might seem more technically proficient, but in the end hurt their own artistic integrity.
Any art form can be pretentious under certain circumstances. Movies can be pretentious, music can be pretentious, and of course, poetry can be pretentious. But that does not mean that the art form itself is inherently pretentious, merely that it is a product of insincerity and misuse of the art form. Poetry is raw emotion, translated through language and a form that puts emphasis on words and their meanings through their placement on the page, to create a feeling that resonates deeper than if perhaps it were simply written in paragraph form. So before you instantly write off poetry as an art form that is out of reach and too pretentious to bother with, consider reading some, or even writing some. Don’t knock it before you try it, and maybe you’ll be able to put those poetry snobs in their place.
