The craft of poetry has a lot of terms for metrical and rhetorical concepts, but not very many for artistic concepts. The following is a list of nine concepts or topics that might deserve, if not names, then at least an investigation of properties.

1) Oberon's perspective. In A Midsummer Night's Dream there's a very famous passage (II.i.153–181) where Oberon talks to Puck about having seen Cupid shoot his bow and turn a flower from milk-white to purple. This is reflected later in the play when Theseus talks about the poet in a fine frenzy rolling his eyes from earth to heaven and back again. The same sense of perspective can be found in many different poems; Kubla Khan, for example, clearly has it in spades.

2) Awen or muse. The Greeks used to invoke the muses to show that they were using classically accepted genres and patterns, but it's also a common metaphor extending into the present day for the process of an artist receiving external inspiration. The Welsh have the word “awen” that describes this kind of thing, which roughly translated also means poetic inspiration. The Japanese term kensho is similar, in a loosely connected way.

When we write about poetry, however, we don't tend to say “I had good muse that day”, or “I had good awen”. There isn't really a word for poetic inspiration that's heavily loaded with the connotation of the paradox of creation: that we only create based on what we already know.

3) Metatropes. The word metatrope is already used, but in such a way that I can't find out exactly what it means; perhaps, like “methodology”, it's just a shibboleth that proves you're a bad writer. So anyway I'm borrowing it for this concept.

This is the most difficult one to pin down. To me it's a feeling which you get from situations, periods, styles; things like that. It's an æsthetic or a kind of flavour in the poetic mind. Sometimes you can listen to a piece of music and you feel a really particular way about it, in a way that you don't feel about anything else. It's not an emotion or a logical thought, but it's very tangible in an odd way. I think that what Dylan said of Blonde on Blonde, that it's “thin wild mercury” music, is the closest description I've read of this kind of thing.

You certainly get this from good poetry, but it can also fade once you've become too accustomed to it. I find that it tends to get very amplified if two situations occur that have a similar metatropic flavour together: that if you're in a particular place which makes you feel a certain way, for example, and you're reading a good book which also makes you feel similar, then those things can be exceptionally bound.

I'm not sure what a metatrope is, how to classify it almost at all, and yet I think it's such a commonplace thing, the very basis of the poetic experience. For me, good poetry is one which encodes a metatrope. But even crocuses peeping through somebody's lawn, or a supermarket, or whatever, can invoke this. It's just very hard to describe. And whilst I class them all as being of a similar kind of thing, most of the instances feel quite different from one another.

It might have something to do with the process of creativity that depends on bustle; of wild times, good company, and intellectual upheaval. As a pun, I call metatropes “quails” when I'm writing in notebooks and so on. The whole idea of it fascinates me. The prefix meta- in metatrope is more like that in “metaphysics” than “metadata”.

4) Transformative alchemy. Shakespeare's plays were quite often just rewritten from old plays. King Lear is a good example. Masters of War is what you get when transformative alchemy is applied to Nottamun Town. White Summer of She Moves Through the Fair. Coleridge was transforming Purchas for the opening of Kubla Khan. Shelley's Ozymandias was better than Smith's.

This concept is related to awen or muse as described above in that, presumably, it's the thing that the artist's subconscious mind applies to the inspiration in order to produce something artistic. But what's being added to it? Can metatropes literally be invented ex nihilo and applied to awen or muse? It's very difficult to talk about these things when the terminology doesn't really exist for it yet; and especially when my choices don't really reflect the ideas very well. Just sounds faintly ridiculous. I wonder what it was like, say, to write about meteorites when the mechanisms behind them were in the process of being discovered?

5) Contrastive connotations. The phrase that I mentioned above, “thin wild mercury music”, is also a good example of the concept that I'm describing here: words which don't make sense when you put them together, and yet speak about something which goes beyond those words. They're kinda like idioms made up on the spot. They're immediately lexicalised. Another good one from Dylan is “cathedral evening”; it doesn't literally mean an evening in a cathedral. It takes the connotations from cathedral and applies them to evening.

In other words, it's playing with connotations; but you have to be a very skilled poet to be able to do this properly. What is the process called? What are the words in these lexicalised idioms called? Do they have names? This is more on the mechanical, craft side than the creative, artistic side.

6) Magic. I'm not sure how this concept differs from that of a metatrope, but I do feel that there is some kind of distinction. It's the quality that a good poem has in that it feels vibrant, it vibrates with intelligence. When you feel about a poem the way you'd feel about a really strong motif, that's when a poem has what I call “magic”, though magic is perhaps not a good choice of word for it given its already myriad senses and connotations.

7) Overlays and ambiguity. This is a bit like Oberon's perspective, only it describes a disjunction of perspective, not a conjunction. So for example, the fact that A Midsummer Night's Dream is ostensibly set in Athens, but actually sounds a heck of a lot like Elizabethan Britain. The fact that the amount of days that are supposed to elapse in the play is very difficult to put a finger on. In fact, this kind of tension in a play, that things aren't quite right thematically somehow, seems to be an absolute trademark of Shakespeare. You don't get it performed as well elsewhere, but it does happen.

8) Folk imagery. Nottamun Town is a good example of this. There's a kind of particular feel about some of these old folk songs that is stunning when you know what you're looking out for. Perhaps this is the kind of thing that Tolkien was trying to describe when he talks about Faery; but not, alas, when most of his fans talk about Faery. So it's a kind of quality, perhaps a metatrope, that folklore and mythology have.

9) Subconscious perspective. This is a good one because it combines Oberon's perspective and overlays and ambiguitites in a strange way. I said that the former was like a conjunction and the latter like a disjunction. Well in that case, this one is a superposition. It's the kind of way that our subconsciouses look at the world. Things can be very different. One thing that comes up for me is that trams are bizarre. Normally railway lines are very dangerous, so they're segregated from society with warning signs and barriers and fences. But with trams, everything's out in the open. It's bizarre, subconsciously, that two such similar things should be handled so differently. Consciously it's very understandable why, and we just don't notice it.

It's a bit like G. K. Chesterton said about train stations. He wondered why adults are always grumbling when they're at train stations and they have to wait for a little while, because it's certainly not true of kids. Kids can think everything's fascinating, when they're in the mood for it. I still remember the feeling that I got when I was young at railway stations, and I do wonder how it's changed. Sometimes it does phase in again. I think it's always there at the subconscious level, and could perhaps do with a name.