Abstract Art:
Poetry is similar to music in many ways, but as a source of wisdom and basic evolutionary thought, I don’t consider it terribly reliable (unless I get to hear the poet read it personally). While it is true that, like movies and music, poetry succeeds because people can relate to it, it isn’t presented in as much context and therefore people’s relation to it must be more abstract and subjective. For the same reason, in dealing with music, I limited myself to music with lyrics. One of the most important qualities of poetry is that it means different things to different people, and clearly that’s not what I’m looking for. Words written on paper can be read any number of ways, and reading them differently can change their meaning.
In the case of a book, there are enough words there to create their own context. In the case of a song, the singer interprets the words and presents them the way he or she thinks they sound best, and musicians surround them with music they think suits them best. If the singer also wrote the lyrics, wrote the music, and/or performs the music that accompanies the lyrics, it makes the process of creation, interpretation, and performance that much more direct. If the song succeeds, it does so because it has lyrics everyone can relate to and the singer’s performance and accompaniment support the ideas of the lyrics. (I am talking about songs that have lyrics that listeners can understand. If listeners can’t understand the lyrics, all bets are off.) In the case of a movie, the context is created by the script, the directing, the acting, the sets, the lighting, the sound, the music, the costuming, the makeup, the hair, the props, the cinematography, etc., etc., etc.
Poetry and all art forms that don’t communicate information to their audiences through words depend on the way they make their audiences feel, and that is not dependable enough for my purposes. While such art forms are just as important and legitimate as any other, the effect of pure aesthetics on people’s feelings gives me no anchor point from which I can objectively analyze the process. (If you can figure out how to write a book to demonstrate conclusively the objective scientific meaning of orange, be my guest!)