By: Jasmansyah)*
Language learning is closely related to the development of literary and art. Learners are introduced to literary works and getting use to with appreciating them through learning a language. A literary and the developments of human life go along together. Man may begin to appreciate literary works from early student hood, and it keeps going when a student enters a formal education. However, literary appreciation has been considered to be fail in language learning in our country (Alwasilah, 2004). The failure is probably caused by the content of language learning activities in the classrooms. Students have a very limited experience in literature because they have been led to understand literary works merely as texts and not more than that. They have never been given any opportunity to expose their own opinion, feeling, or argument toward literary works they read.
Language teaching and learning activities have been paying too much attention to text orientation or factual aspects. According to Rosenblatt (1991), a literary experience has to let students have freedom in paying attention to the text they are approaching. Students need to experience the poem or the story they read and express their feelings and their own opinion about the poems or the stories.
Poetry as part of literary works is important thing to be introduced to students early, since it has specific characteristics. Poetry is not only having specific characteristics, furthermore, it can be also used to say something (Musthafa: 2004). It is important to be learnt by students because most students in Indonesia don’t understand yet about poem in term of: how to understand it, how to appreciate it, how to read etc. Poetry makes us possible to know “how does it feel” to live in this world. It makes us to be able to answers hard questions in our life and to understand ourselves as well as the value system which is tightly kept in our consciousness.
Thus, poetry is our response and evaluation towards our experience with the real world and our opinion towards it. It is a multidimensional quality of experience, a world in which we respond our total sense, emotion, and thought, and its complete form can mobilize the whole soul in an activity. Teachers in general are more familiar with one single correct answer in reading activities (Musthafa, 2004). This is why students feel useless to explore a text from their own experience, and they consequently have less appreciation to literary works, especially poetry with its limited words format.
Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility and by recollecting, we learn to feel, learn to experience nature in all its wild beauty, learn about the mysteries of the universe, and learn about love, happiness, joy and sorrow. We are enriched in more than one sense and are instinctively transported into a world where rhythm, harmony and creative forces integrate in the most delightful way possible. Unfortunately, poetry is found to be missing in many people’s lives. Teaching poetry is a means of establishing a link between mere existence and life itself, thereby uplifting mortals to a higher plane of excellence.
B. WHAT POETRY IS?
What exactly is poetry? There are as many definitions of poetry as there are poets. Wordsworth defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings;” Emily Dickenson said, “If I read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry;” and Dylan Thomas defined poetry this way: “Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing.”
Actually, there are no comprehensive definitions of poetry. A good definition for the classroom is words in an enclosed form that call attention to themselves. The difference between poetry and regular speech is that most poetry has more meaning per word than prose. Words of a poem have an extra consciousness about themselves. Because a poem is more concise than prose and measured, every word counts. The words a poet uses are specifically chosen and “on purpose.” Poetry changes the way in which words normally refer to things in order to make us see things in a new way. “Poetry is concerned with the massiveness, the multidimensional quality, of experience” (Brooks and Warren 6).
C. CATEGORIES OF POETRY
