Try writing poetry when you're mature and have content to express
According to many philosophers of aesthetics, of art and beauty, poetry is the highest from of art and the poet the highest artist. Some say it is because the word is itself spiritual and the beauty of the spiritual shows most clearly through the sounds and music of poetry. Some say God himself was speaking poetry, joining idea and sense, idea and material, when he created the world. Poetry, others add, is the speech of the heart, the best coming when the artist speaks from his depths. Hegel maintains that poetry is best performed by the mature of mind and experience, the poet writing poetry as if creating reality itself. Poetry seems almost inherent in each of us, the putting together of ideas in words somehow harmoniously flowing one into the other, regulated by patterns, by rhythms that have a correspondence in the very rhythms of the world. Writing poetry, even if only for your own enjoyment, can be a self-revelation, producing a concrete something that manifests what is hidden within yourself.
Writing poetry seems natural for the young, yet their poetry shows their age. They have not reached a level of experience and maturity, a depth of understanding, that seems to be demonstrable in the best of our poets. The young also seem to take to music with keener interest then the more mature. Even before they have known love, great despair, the agony of life and the euphoria of life's triumphs, they seem able to compose beautiful music in which even the more sophisticated find aesthetic pleasure. This is because the heart comes equipped with the range of emotions that music can represent, and these emotions are also to be found in poetry. But music is not enough for a poem. Experience and knowledge is also required. Thus, the youth, before their minds have had the opportunity to correlate lived experience with those musical patterns, those flows and harmonies that seem there in the heart as if an instinct, generally produce poetry that lacks depth. Unfortunately, Hegel is right, writing poetry, while requiring the forms of music, also requires a depth of understanding and experience if the poem is to be more than an expression of the superficial or trite.
Are you now at a stage in life where you find yourself wanting to write down some of your experiences, write about what you felt when you were a young lover, before the years taught you the reality of love, its pains as well as its pleasures, its call for sacrifice and humility as well as its robust strength and dizzying intoxication? Are you wanting to write about the joy and meaning of being a grandparent surrounded by the fruits of your love? Does you heart cry out to write about your society, what is proud and what is base in it? Writing poetry might just be the venue for this need.
Poetry is most aptly enjoyed by the mature, those who have gone through wars, depressions, the death of a mother, a father, a child, those who have struggled to be and become and have found themselves standing atop conclusions or in desolate valleys. Join your spirit and its memories to words that sing. Writing poetry is not only for young lovers and literature majors. Poetry is for one and all, especially the mature.