The Triggering Town Summary and Analysis

Hugo begins this chapter by drawing a parallel between writing poetry and writing news stories. News stories, he writes, use language merely to communicate information. In order to write good poetry one must weaken the bonds between the words and the subject and strengthen the bonds between the words and the writer. Hugo then writes about the triggering subject in poetry as if it were a town or towns. He uses this illustration of the triggering town also to explain why one shouldn't write a poem about something with which they are too emotionally involved. The home town represents situations that the writer is familiar with but has too many emotional ties to allow them to write a good poem. Although a person is more comfortable in their home town, they also know too much about the...