“Poetry is from the Greek poiein, “to make”: a poem is something made, or in English we would more naturally say crafted. Yet everyone agrees good prose is well crafted, too. Prose means, literally, “straightforward,” from the Latin prosa, proversus, “turned to face forward” (whereas verse is all wound up, twisty and snaky, “turned” in every direction except, apparently, forward). Yet we all know that poems can be clear and direct, too, especially when they’re songs.”
“Sidelining sonnets and quarantining quatrains in the poetry ghetto does produce a certain clarity. But of course it also creates problems when translating from languages that gerrymander poetry differently. In German, for example, writer is a word even more literal than the English “someone who writes”: it’s Schriftsteller, a put-down-on-paper-er (Schrift = “writing,” stellen = “to place, to put”). Autor is a word used a bit less often for pretty much the same thing, unlike in English, where there’s a difference: author expresses a professional and financial identity (there are no “unpublished authors,” unless maybe the manuscript is finished and the contract is signed), while a writer is someone pursuing an activity (published or not, paid or not, read or not).”
“And then there’s a Dichter, usually translated “poet” but meaning a creator of poetry in the grand sense. The verb dichten means “to write poetry, ” and a poem is a dichten-ed thing, a Gedicht, but dichten means more generally to write poetically and well. The good stuff. The writer as hero of the spirit. How do you say that in English? We don’t have heroes of the spirit.”
“Dichten originally meant to write something down so it could be read or sung, something that had already been worked out in the mind (from the Latin dictare, “to say, to dictate”).”
“Sometimes, though, “poet” risks being downright misleading. A twentieth-century German writer named Uwe Johnson, known as the Dichter der beiden Deutschlands (the Dichter of both East and West Germany), wrote only prose. Call him the “poet of both Germanies” and people will think he’s a poet. He is more like “the voice of divided Germany,” or even “the bard,” despite being neither a songwriter nor Shakespeare. In English, we can get the grandeur (voice) or the job (writer, author, novelist), but not both.”
“Coincidentally, dicht in German also means “tight,” as in watertight or airtight (from Old Norse þéttr, apparently completely unrelated etymologically to dictare), and the verb dichten is also “to seal, caulk, make impermeable,” as well as “to make more dense or compact.” Ezra Pound played on the pun in his second most well-known slogan for what poetry does (after “Make it new”): dichten = condensare. An imagist manifesto in twenty characters: to write poetry is to condense and supercharge language. (Pound attributed the equation to the poet Basil Bunting “fumbling about with a German–Italian dictionary”; actually, Bunting knew what he was doing, and wasn’t exactly fumbling. Pound = condescendere.)”