Poetry and the emergence of the voice

Abstract

Poetry seems to occupy an ever-diminishing place in contemporary culture and this situation has given rise to speculation about its coming to an end, as so many other realms of human spiritual creation have seemed to do. However, in its essence, poetry is the unending endeavour of poets all over the world to re-enact the origin of human speech. It continues to respond to humankind’s need to bridge the chasm which modern science has created between itself and the world. But man himself is torn between body and soul. The quest for unity, then, is a quest for the identity of human beings, which finds its expression and confirmation in a voice. In poetry, prosody
offers the possibility of making that voice heard again in its mysterious power of making sense with articulated sound.