Poetry and Its Nature...

Poetry is the closest in the literary arena to a painting in its approach... indeed, a painting could be considered as a logical, even inevitable outgrowth of poetry - the ULTIMATE in 'saying more and saying it more intensely', with the saying being completely visual, completely synthesized into the SHOWING more and more intensely... in achieving this, it is instructive to remember the distinction between DENOTATION and CONNOTATION - which applies as readily to an object chosen for rendering as it does to a word in a poem... a 'denotation' is the specific concept which the word is a symbol of or for - the dictionary definition... a 'connotation' is an associated meaning attatched to an object or word thru contextual usage... connotation is very important to an artist because it is one of the ways in which meaning can be concentrated or enriched, and there are often several connotations to a specific concept or word or object... by the same token, just as a word or object often has a variety of connotations, so, too, it can have several denotations - and this allows also for an enrichment to the rendering... it's thru connotations, however, that I have found a solution to the problem of what to render - and why...