Poetry

literature
Written By:

 Howard Nemerov

See Article History

Poetry, literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific

emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm.

Poems hanging from an outdoor poetry line during the annual International Festival of Poetry in
Trois-Rivières, Que., Can.Christiane St-Pierre, Festival International de la Poesie

Poetry is a vast subject, as old as history and older, present wherever religion is present,
possibly—under some definitions—the primal and primary form of languages themselves. The
present article means only to describe in as general a way as possible certain properties of poetry
and of poetic thought regarded as in some sense independent modes of the mind. Naturally, not
every tradition nor every local or individual variation can be—or need be—included, but the
article illustrates by examples of poetry ranging between nursery rhyme and epic. This article
considers the difficulty or impossibility of defining poetry; man’s nevertheless familiar
acquaintance with it; the differences between poetry and prose; the idea of form in poetry; poetry
as a mode of thought; and what little may be said in prose of the spirit of poetry.

Attempts to define poetry

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

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.

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 inferences produced
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 page Poetry as a mode of thought: the Protean encounter

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More About Poetry

45 references found in Britannica articles

Assorted References

 American Civil War

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

association with

music

 In rhythm: Metre
 In musical composition: The Romantic period

 folk music
o In folk music: Rhythms and scales
 vocal music
o In vocal music: Medieval and Renaissance periods

 short story
o In short story: Origins

elements

 humour and wit

o In humour: Verbal humour

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 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

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