"All happy families are alike, and all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way."
The beginning of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina speaks not only to the state of the world's families, but also to the state of the world's literature. The phenomenon of people failing to write compelling happy novels is discussed constantly, and one of the primary reasons for this phenomenon that comes of these discussions is the assertion that uniqueness in stories arises from the story's conflict. Without some conflict to make the characters unahppy, the story will likely fail to be unique and fail to captivate its audience.
This problem has fostered a culture where one can never expect a story to be hunky-dory all the way through. Even a story with a title like Katherine Mansfield's "Bliss" is expected (rightfully) to have major strife.
But in poetry, this is not the case. Plenty of poems successfully capture happiness in a way that is seeminly impossible for longer works of prose. Why is this? I posit this hypothesis, which I implore you to riddle with holes: Whereas prose has to explain a feeling uniquely, poetry has to simply describe it uniquely. In prose, we need to know why the character is happy; a plot event must happen to make the character feel that way, and plot events must keep that character happy in order for this feeling to remain. It is exceedingly difficult to do this and maintain a compelling story. With poetry, however, no justification is necessary; if the poet writes about happiness in an uncommon manner, the reader will be transfixed. As a result, happiness is much more plausible in poetry.
I wonder whether happiness,
jhcanel — September 26, 2011 - 18:07I wonder whether happiness, in its "truest" sense, is inevitably intertwined with struggle and sadness. The work of art that seeks solely to express bliss would thus be insincere at some fundamental level. The length of a story exposes such insincerity in the form of tedium. The advantage of poetry is merely its length... we appreciate poetic moments of "happiness" (on certain occasions) because the brevity of a poem does not expose to us the measure of our foolishness.
Left v. Right Brain
ljsmith88 — September 27, 2011 - 00:10Perhaps it is that poetry appeals to the "right brain" while prose appeals to the "left brain"? The left brain is sequential and rational; it needs to follow the steps that lead to a logical conclusion. The right brain meanders, it leans back in its chair and squints one eye, it looks at the painting from up close and across the room; it absorbs and accepts the whole without thinking too much about the parts. I have always experienced poetry as something that needs to steep in, and reading poetry tends to be a more emotional, whole-body experience. Reading prose on the other hand, entirely absorbs my mind. I can only "lose myself" in a book when the literary world is well-constructed and supported by a logical framework. I think that, since poetry is the right brain child, it lends itself much to expressing emotions in a much more realistic and acceptable way.
Relatability in Literature
cdolling — October 11, 2011 - 12:39I would have to agree with the previous comment that poetry certainly seems to stand firm as the more emotional of the two forms. This is not to say that good prose is by any means lacking in the power to prompt emotion – rather, I suggest only that this emotional value tends to be discovered more through the interactions of events and circumstances presented in the work than through simple pleasure taken in the language and imagery employed (though, as I am sure we will all agree, the best of prose frequently includes these very elements!).
I think that the issue of happiness (or its deficiency) may stem, at least in part, from a certain degree of “relatability” which readers tend to demand of prose literature. There is a seeming need for the reader to find a work of prose “believable”; there is an expectation that even if a story is taking place in Candyland or on Mars, something of it needs to hit home in such a way that the reader will find the entire narrative plausible. For one reason or another, it has become engrained in our culture to hammer in the fact that “nobody's life is perfect and wonderful”, and readers seem to take especial comfort in the universality of an idea like “I have problems, you have problems, and everybody else in the world has problems”. While this is probably true in the grand scheme of things, plenty of people do lead fairly humdrum and happy lives, at least for stretches of a few weeks or months at a time. There is nothing wrong with uneventful and pleasant – many of us strive for it – and yet, when confronted with ordinary, contented happiness in literature, we don't want to buy it; we don't believe it could possibly be real.
Poetry, on the other hand, seems to be held to an entirely different standard. Perhaps it is, as was earlier suggested, simply an issue of length – it's begun and done in so brief a time that we can't be bothered to stop and inquire into its credibility. I think that to a certain extent, however, it has to do with the way in which poetry is approached: often with a small sense of wonder, puzzled over as if it were some foreign or even alien thing, poked and prodded with at once both reverent admiration and terrible curiosity. I know that I myself have, on plenty of occasions, read through a poem without absorbing a single ounce of what it actually meant, so fixated was I on the sounds and pictures present in the language. I think that happiness in poetry is accepted because poetry, as often as not, is as much (or even more) about how a thing is being said as it is about the said thing itself.
Perhaps this is a bit of a double standard – but then, poetry and prose are differentiated because they are different, and certainly there are enough exceptions in either category to frustrate any of the defining rules with which we might come up :)