| | Mary, I feel I must give a response to your comment.
You seem to imply that poetry should not be constrained by rationale or logic. Do you disagree that poetry has underlying meanings? Do you disagree that any poet is trying to tell a story?
If you like poetry because of the non-sense of it, you aren't fully appreciating it.
Here's an example from a well known poem, (Shall I compare thee to a summer's day, by William Shakespeare)
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds doth shake the darling buds of may
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
In this extract we can see there is definitely logic involved; in fact it is quite intellectual. He is comparing his wife/lover to a summer's day, saying how she is more lovely and such, and doing a good job of it I would say. Is it rational? It is not conventional, but I do think it is rational.
It is vital for a poem to have some continuity, which binds it together. A poem should never IMHO leave you feeling like something was left out. This central theme is definitely rational. The method of expression in poetry is with metaphors and such, but underneath it is rational. A poem with no rational backbone would be a waste of words.
Stolyarov's poem is a bit plain, and doesn't stimulate the imagination all that much, but don't slam the rationality that it has. The author perhaps should have tried to make it less explicit, but that is merely my subjective opinion, and I am not by any stretch of the imagination a poetry buff.
However, in the context that the poem was written, I can understand the explicitness of it. Objectivists being as there are are enamored with what is real, and I think they don't much appreciate illusion and such. For this audience, such an explicit poem might be better received.
The only real problem I have with it this:
Quote:
"Each bite of nourishment by purposed plight provided, I shall not turn the other cheek upon this day. Whim-riddled overlords my fate shan't have decided, 'Tis time for Man-worship to have its say.
"Nature will laugh, no longer by blight tarnished, And on its outskirts human outposts shall arise"
I don't understand the line "Nature will laugh, no longer by blight tarnished". The rest of the poem seems to imply that nature suffers its blight but humans have overcome it. It than says humans will work for themselves. How then is nature saved from this blight? This statement hangs in the air, disjunct from the flow of the poem. The rest of the poem has good continuity, though.
Also, the reference to 'whim-ridden overlords' seems rather strange, as it doesn't imply anywhere that the man isn't driven by whim himself. In what way will he be better? The author has left the reader guessing as to whether nature will be better off or not, even though it says it will be, and whether this man is any different to the 'whim-ridden overlords'. These are the only problems I see.
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