Do poets ever write but the one poem over and over again for the duration of their writing careers? Is there ever more than one theme in any poet? Or can poets ever transcend that one core motif? The more poetry I read by authors I like the more it strikes me that all they're doing is rewriting the same poem [with slight variations in figure, diction, shape and rhythm] over and over again. Didn't Neruda say something similar in his Memoirs when he wrote that [I'm quoting from memory], 'this year I'll write and publish another book, the same as I did last year, and it will be the same book as last year, and next year I'll do the same, and on and on ...?'

What do you think?

ZB, I have two different answers. (They are in separate posts since Slate is not accepting everything as one post.) Choose your favorite.

ANSWER # 1 -- The American poet William Matthews (1942-1997) once wrote --

a short but comprehensive summary” of all the subjects for lyric poetry

I went out into the woods today and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious.

We’re not getting any younger.

It sure is cold and lonely (a) without you, honey or (b) with you, honey.

Sadness seems but the other side of the coin of happiness, and vice versa, and in any case the coin is soon spent and on we know not what.

To make the list even shorter, I’d say that lyric poetry is about love and its flipside, death. Or, as Dana Gioia has said, “As long as humanity faces mortality and uses language to describe its existence, poetry will remain one of its essential spiritual resources.” Or, as Billy Collins has said, “There's one subject in lyric poetry, and that is that you have this existence and at the end of it you're going to experience non-existence.”

ANSWER # 2 -- Toward the end of a friendly, if well-watered, evening at Key West, Fla., in the 1930s, the poets Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens allowed their competitive tempers to rise. ''The trouble with you, Frost," said Stevens, ''is that you write about subjects." ''The trouble with you, Stevens," responded Frost, ''is that you write about bric-a-brac."

Contemporary poetry, all these years later, has not done much to settle what poems are, or should be, ''about." Some poets and critics, with Stevens, take the lofty view that ''poetry is the subject of the poem." Sure. How can a speaker avoid embodying the way he or she speaks? Others, with Frost, insist that ''theme alone can steady us down."

For me, answer # 2 boils down to whether poetry is about words/language or about ideas.

Finally, one favorite poet of mine who, I think, did write different poems at different stages of his life is James Wright. As a young man he wrote unsentimental poems about Wheeling, West Virginia (ideas). After reading some Surrealists, he wrote Deep Image poems like “A Blessing” (words/language).

The first part of this answer confuses means with end, They're indistinguishable until both combine to mean something.

Re. Wright: How can you be sure he didn't adapt or modify his style alone? After the well of ideas runs dry the poet turns his gaze to his tools.

There's only one "Shakespeare", whose identity is uncertain and possibly multiple; meanwhile, all other poets are Pierre Menard retranslating their Quixote.

The first part of this answer confuses means with end, They're indistinguishable until both combine to mean something.

Frost is saying a poem must be about ideas, otherwise it's just bric-a-brac. Wallace (no slouch as an acclaimed poet) disagrees because for him a poem's "ideas" are not important.

"A poem should not mean, but be."

Re. Wright: How can you be sure he didn't adapt or modify his style alone? After the well of ideas runs dry the poet turns his gaze to his tools.

I am sure because his Deep Image poems are not about Wheeling W VA. Besides, his Deep Image poems are original and better than his early stuff, which is like that of lots of other poets.

I think you're dismissing answer # 2 because your mind is already made up that no poet can ever write about something different.

Where is he when he's needed?

Uh, I dunno.

Text flows at a website

At Poets.org they have text flows.

It’s animated poems.

Its purpose is to enliven the reading and increase the enjoyment of poetry.

Just doesn’t work that way for me.

It feels slow and out of context for this darting reader.

I like to animate my own reading.

I appreciate it when the poem gives me a handel.

I find your expression, MaryAnn, that the flipside of love is death a rather lovely sentiment, poetic in its own right.

Take care,

Joe

I find your expression, MaryAnn, that the flipside of love is death a rather lovely sentiment, poetic in its own right.

Wish I could say it's original with me, Joe, but it's not.....

Garden of Forking Paths. I got that off Funes the Memorious, another one-note Charley.

I think it's a given that most writers, novelists, playwrights, poets and essayists, have a finite number of ideas that they'll develop and work with through out their careers. Creativity is spontaneity and all, but it is also a mastering of techniques and devices that , with any luck, turn into an individual style that can avail with a manner of honing, modifying, adjusting, or extending their tropes through a life's work. The minor and the mediocre poets , of course, remain merely competant at what they do initially and do not seem to interested (or capable) of trying something different , or challenging themselves.

They are hacks in the worst sense of the word, mere professionals who, like newspaper columnists or trigger-fingered bloggers can produce so many inches of typing that amount to rearranging the same furniture in the same room for years.

As with the old furniture, the ideas , images and conceits are likely to show their frays and tears. The truly good writers, the artists , let us say, manage to reconfigure their defining metaphors ; the essential quality in any genius is a healthy boredom with with one's style and a desire to challenge their own assumptions. Eliot, Stevens, Ashbery have done this to reveal bodies of work that show an evolution , although the respective styles remain distinct. Billy Collins , Neruda and a shelf of other best seller bards , in turn, have poems that could have been written at any given time in their careers.

Good, thoughtful answer, Ted. I agree with much of what you say. How many poets have the courage to destroy everything and start over, like Georgia O'Keeffe did? I bet the mediocre ones are always those most apt to hang on to the old saws.

Frost is saying a poem must be about ideas, otherwise it's just bric-a-brac. Wallace (no slouch as an acclaimed poet) disagrees because for him a poem's "ideas" are not important. "A poem should not mean, but be."

In a similar vein Wittgenstein mused:

"An observation in a poem is overstated if the intellectual points are nakedly exposed, not clothed from the heart.", or in the case of Frost perhaps it's from mind that they must be veiled to allow for a personal discovery or interior experience. Doesn’t written language enter the brain along silent corridors and from these into the mind and then into the blood? (I am thinking of eyes and in the case of braille: fingers) Certainly this is not the same pathway that spoken language; the language of poetry with its vital relationship to sound and music traveled in the past.

Perhaps this accounts for part of the reason why we’ve lost some of the intimate and vital connection that classical Greek audiences are said to have had with poetry and poets.

However, I think Zeus Boy has a point that doesn't necessarily contradict either of these views. I find Wittgenstein's writing to be highly concentrated and "poetic". He wrote somewhere that: “Philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.” And he said of his philosophy that, “Each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, i.e. the same thing over and over again; it is as though they were all simply views of one object seen from different angles.”

The idea that ideas are necessarily unnatural and foreign to being is implicit in Wallace's viewpoint. Wittgenstein makes some observations and statements about Shakespeare and his writing that have probably alienated many Shakespeare admirers but seem to coincide in the extreme with Wallace's view. Here is a sampling:

"I do not believe that Shakespeare can be set alongside any other poet. Was he perhaps a creator of language rather than a poet?

"I am deeply suspicious of most of Shakespeare's admirers. The misfortune is, I believe, that he stands by himself, at least in the culture of the west, so that one can only place him by placing him wrongly."

"It is not as though Shakespeare portrayed human types well and were in that respect true to life. He is not true to life. But he has such a supple hand and his brush strokes are so individual, that each one of his characters looks significant.."

"Beethoven's great heart" - "nobody could speak of Shakespeare's great heart. The supple hand that created new natural linguistic forms would seem to me nearer the mark."

A poet cannot really say of himself "I sing as the birds sing"- but perhaps Shakespeare could have said this of himself.

"I do not think that Shakespeare would have been able to reflect on the 'lot of the poet'. Nor could he regard himself as a prophet or as a teacher of mankind. People stare at him in wonderment, almost as at a spectacular natural phenomenon. They do not have the feeling that this brings them into contact with a great human being. Rather with a phenomenon.

"His pieces give me an impression as of enormous sketches rather than of paintings; as though they had been dashed off by someone who can permit himself anything, so to speak. And I understand how someone can admire that and call it supreme art, but I don't like it. - So if someone stands in front of these pieces speechless, I can understand him; but anyone who admires them as one admires, say, Beethoven, seems to me to misunderstand Shakespeare."