On Freedom Of Speech and Poetry

Let us talk of Freedom. Everyone seems to know about it, but I am yet to meet someone who can define what it is in its entirety.

If we are to define freedom as the capacity to do what we want, then by its definition, we are limited by what we want. Or in other words, we are bound by our imagination. Is that freedom?

If someone puts me in a cage, I would claim to be not free. What if the cage was as big as a house? Or a town? Or a country? Would I then be free?

Or is freedom simply not knowing where our boundaries lie? Is ignorance truly bliss?Perhaps, like everything else, this too is relative.

As I stand today, who I am is limited by my imagination.

My imagination is limited by my language.

My language is limited  by my words.

My words are limited by my knowledge.

To cut a long story short, we are what our words make us. 

Freedom doesn't lead to speech as much as speech leads to freedom.

Now, a word on poetry.

I have, since the past one year, been associated with a wonderful group of people, who're part of The Poetry Club. And while there is a whole blogpost - worth of stuff to write about that, the point here is that it made me think of aspects of poetry which had never occurred to me before. And the first of these, had been the basic one. What do we mean, when we say Poetry?

I had an interesting conversation with Ankita a month ago, where we drew up a list of differences between prose and poetry. While that was enlightening, I couldn't help but suspect that the answer has to be a simple and single one, and two days back, it came to me.

I was listening to rap music, and thinking how similar it was to poetry. But I noticed that rap uses a lot of extra words and repetitive lines, in order to match the beats, or fit a rhyme. And prose, meanwhile, has an even greater luxury of space, and time; it can afford to spend a lot more words on a thought.

So, my first conclusion is this -  In poetry, there is economy of words.

Often its not just the quantity of the words, but their relative relevance to the rest of the body in terms of meaning and placement. In prose, a word may still be used flippantly, or the order of words changed in a sentence, and the overall structure would not suffer. In a poem, however, each word is so carefully decided upon, and delicately placed, that to change it would be to change the poem.

This is my second conclusion - in poetry, there is delicacy of words.

Finally, the big picture, the message. Here, it is more difficult to differentiate prose and poetry, as both can convey the message they carry equally well. Perhaps, prose has the edge,  considering the ease with which it can be understood, because in a poem, the same message gets woven into a more condensed form, a more intricate pattern.

So my final definition of poetry is - any piece of  art, spoken or written, which displays an economy, delicacy and intricate pattern of words.

(You will notice that I have not added rhythm or rhyme into my definition; however, I do believe that poems which follow rhythm and rhyme of some manner have a more easily identifiable pattern to appreciate.)

To put it in another perspective, to write a poem, I can't use a word that I deem extra, I can't 
use any other word in place of the word I choose as fitting, and the sequence of words cannot change - without changing the poem.

A Corollary: 

If art is defined as something we create, then life is the biggest example of art possible. In that case, poetry, as an art form, becomes a way of life. And on applying the same definition, a poetic life would imply one in which every action, and every event has meaning, a deeper purpose, and forms a pattern with the rest.

To me, that sounds like a worthwhile dream.