The Value of Nonsense Poetry

Many people have a hard time finding the point of poetry, much less poetry that boasts of its nonsensical content, but poetry is the literature of compacted significance. Where the novelist uses a whole plot to unfold a few different ideas, the poet can bring whole traditions of thought into a few lines because of his freedom to assume that every poetic choice has great significance, only limited by the history of language and the reader’s imagination. Therefore, a poet takes great pains to find the perfect word and the perfect place for that word in the poem.

But, unlike the standard poet, the nonsense poet's style is much less laborious. His process is free and easy because, as a writer of nonsense, he reserves the right to assume readers don't fully comprehend every aspect of his meaning. Out of the inability to articulate an exact interpretation, we have the freedom to confidently assert truths about its objective meaning. Readers, then - especially young ones seeing it for the first time - get lost in wonderment at the ambiguous, foreign loveliness of the words and their success at communicating a story of good winning over evil through courage, perseverance, and skill.

So is that really the whole point? Just surprise at the nonsense of the words? Well, yes. We use the word “wonder” when we do not know something and would like to know it—a simple quotidian example. To expand it, wonder is the action of the mind, soul, and body when it encounters something it does not and cannot comprehend. It is a suspension of rational thought, a moment—brief or long—when we behold something of great beauty or horror, and through that encounter, grasp at truth. Wonder leads us to the eternal. 

From an article by Amanda Gehrke at The Federalist. Read full post here.

Blessings,