Purpose and Symbolist Poems

            For me, as an individual, writing a poem is good for expressing complex emotion that is hard to put into words. Often in our lives we are fighting to express ourselves, and language is a far disconnect from actual raw emotion. Through the figurative use of our available language, we can near those raw emotions a bit more than just in plain words.  For me, reading a poem is good for finding yourself. Sometimes, we don’t have the words, and although the author might not have meant it, we often resonate with whatever we need to resonate with in our lives. Thus, a poem can often offer some insight into what that is.

The hardest part about writing a symbolist poem was actually finding a symbol that could truly represent what you wanted to express in all of its forms. It was a while before I could pin down exactly what I wanted to express and how. For me personally, I also had a hard time choosing subject matter because I wanted to make sure that I wrote a poem that meant something to me, not just fulfilled an assignment for my poetry class. Thus I struggled between concepts, jumping back and forth between ideas and lines I had come up with, until one finally spoke to me. After that I think I did a fairly good job at writing a symbolist poem for the first time. Although I didn’t write a universal poem, that just anyone could understand, I think, to the people in my community, it can speak loud and clear.