Attempts To Define Poetry

Poetry is the other way of using language. Perhaps in some hypotheticalbeginning of

things it was the only way of using language or simply was language tout court, prose
being the derivative and younger rival. Both poetry and language are fashionably
thought to have belonged to ritual in early agricultural societies; and poetry in
particular, it has been claimed, arose at first in the form of magical spells recited to
ensure a good harvest. Whatever the truth of this hypothesis, it blurs a useful
distinction: by the time there begins to be a separate class of objects called poems,
recognizable as such, these objects are no longer much regarded for their possible
yam-growing properties, and such magic as they may be thought capable of has
retired to do its business upon the human spirit and not directly upon the natural world
outside.
Formally, poetry is recognizable by its greater dependence on at least one
more parameter, the line, than appears in prose composition. This changes its
appearance on the page; and it seems clear that people take their cue from this
changed appearance, reading poetry aloud in a very different voice from their habitual
voice, possibly because, as Ben Jonson said, poetry “speaketh somewhat above a
mortal mouth.” If, as a test of this description, people are shown poems printed as
prose, it most often turns out that they will read the result as prose simply because it
looks that way; which is to say that they are no longer guided in their reading by the
balance and shift of the line in relation to the breath as well as the syntax.
That is a minimal definition but perhaps not altogether uninformative. It may be all
that ought to be attempted in the way of a definition: Poetry is the way it is because it
looks that way, and it looks that way because it sounds that way and vice versa.

Poetry And Prose

People’s reason for wanting a definition is to take care of the borderline case, and this
is what a definition, as if by definition, will not do. That is, if an individual asks for a
definition of poetry, it will most certainly not be the case that he has never seen one of
the objects called poems that are said to embody poetry; on the contrary, he is already
tolerably certain what poetry in the main is, and his reason for wanting a definition is
either that his certainty has been challenged by someone else or that he wants to take
care of a possible or seeming exception to it: hence the perennial squabble about
distinguishing poetry from prose, which is rather like distinguishing rain from snow—
everyone is reasonably capable of doing so, and yet there are some weathers that are
either-neither.
Sensible things have been said on the question. The poet T.S. Eliot suggested that part
of the difficulty lies in the fact that there is the technical term verse to go with the
term poetry, while there is no equivalent technical term to distinguish the mechanical
part of prose and make the relation symmetrical. The French poet Paul Valéry said
that prose was walking, poetry dancing. Indeed, the original two
terms, prosus and versus, meant, respectively, “going straight forth” and “returning”;
and that distinction does point up the tendency of poetry to incremental repetition,
variation, and the treatment of many matters and different themes in a single recurrent
form such as couplet or stanza.
American poet Robert Frost said shrewdly that poetry was what got left behind
in translation, which suggests a criterion of almost scientific refinement: when in
doubt, translate; whatever comes through is prose, the remainder is poetry. And yet to
even so acute a definition the obvious exception is a startling and a formidable one:
some of the greatest poetry in the world is in the Authorized or King James Version of
the Bible, which is not only a translation but also, as to its appearance in print,
identifiable neither with verse nor with prose in English but rather with
a cadence owing something to both.
There may be a better way of putting the question by the simple test alluded to above.
When people are presented with a series of passages drawn indifferently from poems
and stories but all printed as prose, they will show a dominant inclination to identify
everything they possibly can as prose. This will be true, surprisingly enough, even if
the poem rhymes and will often be true even if the poem in its original typographical
arrangement would have been familiar to them. The reason seems to be absurdly
plain: readers recognize poetry by its appearance on the page, and they respond to the
convention whereby they recognize it by reading it aloud in a quite different tone of
voice from that which they apply to prose (which, indeed, they scarcely read aloud at
all). It should be added that they make this distinction also without reading aloud;
even in silence they confer upon a piece of poetry an attention that differs from what
they give to prose in two ways especially: in tone and in pace.
Major differences

In place of further worrying over definitions, it may be both a relief and an

illumination to exhibit certain plain and mighty differences between prose and poetry
by a comparison. In the following passages a prose writer and a poet are talking about
the same subject, growing older.

Between the ages of 30 and 90, the weight of our muscles falls by 30 percent and the power we
can exert likewise…. The number of nerve fibres in a nerve trunk falls by a quarter. The weight
of our brains falls from an average of 3.03 lb. to 2.27 lb. as cells die and are not replaced….
(Gordon Rattray Taylor, The Biological Time Bomb, 1968.)
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been….
(T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets.)

Before objecting that a simple comparison cannot possibly cover all the possible
ranges of poetry and prose compared, the reader should consider for a moment what
differences are exhibited. The passages are oddly parallel, hence comparable, even in
a formal sense; for both consist of the several items of a catalog under the general title
of growing old. The significant differences are of tone, pace, and object of attention. If
the prose passage interests itself in the neutral, material, measurable properties of the
process, while the poetry interests itself in what the process will signify to someone
going through it, that is not accidental but of the essence; if one reads the prose
passage with an interest in being informed, noting the parallel constructions without
being affected by them either in tone or in pace, while reading the poetry with a sense
of considerable gravity and solemnity, that too is of the essence. One might say as
tersely as possible that the difference between prose and poetry is most strikingly
shown in the two uses of the verb “to fall”:

The number of nerve fibres in a nerve trunk falls by a quarter

As body and soul begin to fall asunder

It should be specified here that the important differences exhibited by the comparison
belong to the present age. In each period, speaking for poetry in English at any rate,
the dividing line will be seen to come at a different place. In Elizabethan times
the diction of prose was much closer to that of poetry than it later became, and in the
18th century authors saw nothing strange about writing in couplets about subjects that
later would automatically and compulsorily belong to prose—for example,
horticulture, botany, even dentistry. Here is not the place for entering into a discussion
of so rich a chapter in the history of ideas; but the changes involved in the relation of
poetry and prose are vast, and the number of ways people can describe and view the
world are powerfully influenced by developments in science and society.
Poetic diction and experience
Returning to the comparison, it is observable that though the diction of the poem is
well within what could be commanded by a moderately well-educated speaker, it is at
the same time well outside the range of terms in fact employed by such a speaker in
daily occasions; it is a diction very conscious, as it were, of its power of choosing
terms with an effect of peculiar precision and of combining the terms into phrases
with the same effect of peculiar precision and also of combining sounds with the same
effect of peculiar precision. Doubtless the precision of the prose passage is greater in
the more obvious property of dealing in the measurable; but the poet attempts a
precision with respect to what is not in the same sense measurable nor even in the
same sense accessible to observation; the distinction is perhaps just that made by the
French scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal in discriminating the spirits of
geometry and finesse; and if one speaks of “effects of precision” rather than of
precision itself, that serves to distinguish one’s sense that the artwork is always
somewhat removed from what people are pleased to call the real world, operating
instead, in Immanuel Kant’s shrewd formula, by exhibiting “purposefulness without
purpose.” To much the same point is what Samuel Taylor Coleridge remembers
having learned from his schoolmaster:
I learnt from him, that Poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes,
had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more
complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets, he would
say, there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word.
(Biographia Literaria, chapter 1.)

Perhaps this is a somewhat exaggerated, as it is almost always an unprovable, claim,

illustrating also a propensity for competing with the prestige of science on something
like its own terms—but the last remark in particular illuminates the
same author’s terser formulation: “prose = words in the best order, poetry = the best
words in the best order.” This attempt at definition, impeccable because
uninformative, was derived from Jonathan Swift, who had said, also impeccably and
uninformatively, that style in writing was “the best words in the best order.” Which
may be much to the same effect as Louis Armstrong’s saying, on being asked to
define jazz, “Baby, if you got to ask the question, you’re never going to know the
answer.” Or the painter Marcel Duchamp’s elegant remark on what psychologists call
“the problem of perception”: “If no solution, then maybe no problem?” This species
of gnomic, riddling remark may be determinate for the artistic attitude toward
definition of every sort; and its skepticism is not confined to definitions of poetry but
extends to definitions of anything whatever, directing one not to dictionaries but to
experience and, above all, to use: “Anyone with a watch can tell you what time it is,”
said Valéry, “but who can tell you what is time?”
Happily, if poetry is almost impossible to define, it is extremely easy to recognize in
experience; even untutored children are rarely in doubt about it when it appears:

Little Jack Jingle,

He used to live single,
But when he got tired of this kind of life,
He left off being single, and liv’d with his wife.

It might be objected that this little verse is not of sufficient import and weight to serve
as an exemplar for poetry. It ought to be remembered, though, that it has given people
pleasure so that they continued to say it until and after it was written down, nearly two
centuries ago. The verse has survived, and its survival has something to do with
pleasure, with delight; and while it still lives, how many more imposing works of
language—epic poems, books of science, philosophy, theology—have gone down,
deservedly or not, into dust and silence. It has, obviously, a form, an arrangement of
sounds in relation to thoughts that somehow makes its agreeable nonsense closed,
complete, and decisive. But this somewhat muddled matter of form deserves a
heading and an instance all to itself.
Advertisement

Form In Poetry
People nowadays who speak of form in poetry almost always mean such externals as
regular measure and rhyme, and most often they mean to get rid of these in favour of
the freedom they suppose must follow upon the absence of form in this limited sense.
But in fact a poem having only one form would be of doubtful interest even if it could
exist. In this connection, the poet J.V. Cunningham speaks of “a convergence of
forms, and forms of disparate orders,” adding: “It is the coincidence of forms that
locks in the poem.” For a poem is composed of internal and intellectual forms as well
as forms externally imposed and preexisting any particular instance, and these may be
sufficient without regular measure and rhyme; if the intellectual forms are absent, as
in greeting-card verse and advertising jingles, no amount of thumping and banging
will supply the want.

“Forsythia” (1966), by Mary Ellen Solt, is an example of concrete poetry, a genre that lacks such traditional poetic
elements as regular measures or rhyme and instead takes exclusively visual forms.By permission of Mary Ellen Solt
Form, in effect, is like the doughnut that may be said to be nothing in a circle of
something or something around nothing; it is either the outside of an inside, as when
people speak of “good form” or “bourgeois formalism,” or the inside of an outside, as
in the scholastic saying that “the soul is the form of the body.” Taking this principle,
together with what Cunningham says of the matter, one may now look at a very short
and very powerful poem with a view to distinguishing the forms, or schemes, of
which it is made. It was written by Rudyard Kipling—a great English poet somewhat
sunken in reputation, probably on account of misinterpretations having to do more
with his imputed politics than with his poetry—and its subject, one of a series of
epitaphs for the dead of World War I, is a soldier shot by his comrades for cowardice
in battle.
I could not look on Death, which being known,
Men led me to him, blindfold and alone.

The aim of the following observations and reflections is to distinguish as clearly as

possible—distinguish without dividing—the feelings evoked by the subject, so grim,
horrifying, tending to helpless sorrow and despair, from the feelings, which might
better be thought of as meanings, evoked by careful contemplation of the poem in its
manifold and somewhat subtle ways of handling the subject, leading the reader on to a
view of the strange delight intrinsic to art, whose mirroring and shielding power
allows him to contemplate the world’s horrible realities without being turned to stone.
Advertisement
There is, first, the obvious external form of a rhymed, closed couplet in
iambic pentameter (that is, five poetic “feet,” each consisting of an unstressed
followed by a stressed syllable, per line). There is, second, the obvious external form
of a single sentence balanced in four grammatical units with and in counterpoint with
the metrical form. There is, third, the conventional form belonging to the epitaph and
reflecting back to antiquity; it is terse enough to be cut in stone and tight-lipped also,
perhaps for other reasons, such as the speaker’s shame. There is, fourth, the fictional
form belonging to the epitaph, according to which the dead man is supposed to be
saying the words himself. There is, fifth, especially poignant in this instance, the real
form behind or within the fictional one, for the reader is aware that in reality it is not
the dead man speaking, nor are his feelings the only ones the reader is receiving, but
that the comrades who were forced to execute him may themselves have made up
these two lines with their incalculably complex and exquisite balance of scorn, awe,
guilt, and consideration even to tenderness for the dead soldier. There is, sixth,
the metaphorical form, with its many resonances ranging from the tragic through the
pathetic to irony and apology: dying in battle is spoken of in language relating it to a
social occasion in drawing room or court; the coward’s fear is implicitly represented
as merely the timorousness and embarrassment one might feel about being introduced
to a somewhat superior and majestic person, so that the soldiers responsible for killing
him are seen as sympathetically helping him through a difficult moment in the realm
of manners. In addition, there is, seventh, a linguistic or syntactical form, with at least
a couple of tricks to it: the second clause, with its reminiscence of Latin construction,
participates in the meaning by conferring a Roman stoicism and archaic gravity on the
saying; remembering that the soldiers in the poem had been British schoolboys not
long before, the reader might hear the remote resonance of a whole lost world built
upon Greek and Roman models; and the last epithets, “blindfold and alone,” while in
the literal acceptation they clearly refer to the coward, show a distinct tendency to
waver over and apply mysteriously to Death as well, sitting there waiting “blindfold
and alone.” One might add another form, the eighth, composed of the balance of
sounds, from the obvious likeness in the rhyme down to subtleties and refinements
beneath the ability of coarse analysis to discriminate. And even there one would not
be quite at an end; an overall principle remains, the compression of what might have
been epic or five-act tragedy into two lines, or the poet’s precise election of a single
instant to carry what the novelist, if he did his business properly, would have been
hundreds of pages arriving at.
It is not at all to be inferred that the poet composed his poem in the manner of the
above laborious analysis of its strands. The whole insistence, rather, is that he did not
catalog 8 or 10 forms and assemble them into a poem; more likely it “just came to
him.” But the example may serve to indicate how many modes of the mind go
together in this articulation of an implied drama and the tension among many
possible sentiments that might arise in response to it.
In this way, by the coincidence of forms that locks in the poem, one may see how to
answer a question that often arises about poems: though their thoughts are
commonplace, they themselves mysteriously are not. One may answer on the basis of
the example and the inferencesproduced from it that a poem is not so much a thought
as it is a mind: talk with it, and it will talk back, telling you many things that you
might have thought for yourself but somehow didn’t until it brought them together.
Doubtless a poem is a much simplified model for the mind. But it might still be one of
the best models available. On this great theme, however, it will be best to proceed not
by definition but by parable and interpretation.
PAGE 1 OF 2

NEXT PAGEPoetry as a mode of thought: the Protean encounter

LEARN MORE in these related Britannica articles:


biblical literature: Major themes and characteristics
There is poetry of the first rank, devotional poetry in the Psalms, and erotic poetry in the Song of
Songs. Lamentations is a poetic elegy, mourning over fallen Jerusalem. Job is dramatic theological
dialogue. The books of the great prophets consist mainly of oral addresses in poetic…

biblical literature: Psalms

Hebrew poetry has much in common with the poetry of most of the ancient Near East, particularly
the Canaanite poetic literature discovered at Ras Shamra. Its main features are rhythm and
parallelism. The rhythm, which is difficult to determine precisely because the proper pronunciation
of ancient…

education: Education of youth

Poetry served to transmit all the traditional wisdom, which combined two currents: the ethic of the
citizen expressed in the moralizing elegies of the 6th-century lawmaker Solon and the old Homeric
ideal of the value of competition and heroic exploit. But this ideal equilibrium between…

education: Education of youth

…education was the explication of poetry, its rise was hindered by the slowness with which Latin
literature developed. The first-known of these teachers, Livius Andronicus, took as his subject matter
his own Latin translation of the Odyssey; two generations later, Ennius explicated his own poetic
works. Only with the great…
 

education: The Tang dynasty (618–907 ce)

…the golden age of Chinese poetry. There were thousands of poets of note who left a cultural legacy
unsurpassed in subsequent periods and even in other lands. Prose writers also flourished, as did
artists whose paintings reflected the influences of Buddhism and Daoism.…

ADDITIONAL MEDIA



MORE ABOUT Poetry
44 REFERENCES FOUND IN BRITANNICA ARTICLES
Assorted References

 American Civil War

 In Remembering the American Civil War: The
poetry and songs of the Civil War
 imagergy
 In poetic imagery
 importance to literature
 In literature: The scope of literature
 translation difficulties
 In language: Translation
association with

music
 In rhythm: Metre
 In musical composition: The Romantic period
 folk music
 In folk music: Rhythms and scales
 vocal music
 In vocal music: Medieval and Renaissance
periods
  short story
 In short story: Origins
elements

 humour and wit

 In humour: Verbal humour
VIEW MORE
ADDITIONAL READING
EXTERNAL WEBSITES
ARTICLE HISTORY
ARTICLE CONTRIBUTORS
FEEDBACK
Corrections? Updates? Help us improve this article!Contact our editors with your feedback.

Poetry
LITERATURE

View All Media

KEY PEOPLE
 William Shakespeare
 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 John Milton
 Samuel Johnson
 Michelangelo
 William Blake
 Dante
 Miguel de Cervantes
 Voltaire
 Homer
RELATED TOPICS
 Literature
 Prosody
 Epic
 Ballad
 Hymn
 Sonnet
 Heroic poetry
 Utopian poetry
 Ballade
 Light verse

RELATED TOPICS
  Epic
 William Shakespeare
 Shakespeare and Opera
 Viewing Shakespeare on Film
 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 Ballad
 Sonnet
 Heroic poetry
 Utopian poetry
 Ballade

SIMILAR TOPICS
 Novel
 Children's literature
 Dramatic literature
 Biography
 Rhetoric
 Folk literature
 Short story
 Romance
 Satire
 Oral literature

FEATURED ON BRITANNICA

DEMYSTIFIED / HISTORY
Did the Vikings Discover America?


LIST / MUSIC
Behind the Scenes: 7 Historical Figures in Beatles Lyrics


COMPANION / HISTORY
Timeline of the Titanic’s Final Hours


DEMYSTIFIED / PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION
What is the Difference Between Daoism and Confucianism?
BRITANNICA LISTS & QUIZZES


MUSIC QUIZ

Australian Popular Music

HISTORY LIST

Military Commanders of World War I

SPORTS & RECREATION QUIZ

Australian Open

HISTORY LIST

Weapons of World War I

TRENDING TOPICS
 Steer
 Compromise of 1850
 Stephen Hawking
 Lewis and Clark Expedition
 Raphael
 South African War
 Mary Wollstonecraft
 Jackie Robinson
  Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the
Citizen
 Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla

CONNECT WITH BRITANNICA

 Introduction
 Attempts to define poetry
 Poetry and prose
o Major differences
o Poetic diction and experience
 Form in poetry
 Poetry as a mode of thought: the Protean
encounter
KEEP EXPLORING BRITANNICA

Buddhism
Buddhism, religion and philosophy that developed from the teachings of the Buddha (Sanskrit: “Awakened…
READ THIS ARTICLE

Sharīʿah
Sharīʿah, the fundamental religious concept of Islam, namely its law, systematized during the 2nd and…
READ THIS ARTICLE

Islam
Islam, major world religion promulgated by the Prophet Muhammad in Arabia in the 7th century ce. The…
READ THIS ARTICLE

VIEW MORE
STAY CONNECTED

 About Us

 About Our Ads

 Partner Program

 Contact Us

 Privacy Policy

 Terms of Use

©2018 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

CONTENTS
PAGE 1 OF 2