Notes
on the Definition of Poetry
Here follow some notes on the definition of poetry, taking into account
not just the formal features of poetic genres, but also the social and
artistic contexts in which poetry is written, read, circulated, invoked
or used.
It may seem paradoxical that many elements
characteristically found in poetry are not strictly definitory or
characteristic of poetry, as they may be found in other kinds of
writing or other arts. These may be important in a given poem, although
they are not exclusive to poetical compositions. (E.g. narrative
structure). The specificity often lies in their combination.
According to the Princeton
Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, "A poem is an instance of
verbal art, a text set in verse, bound speech. More generally, a poem
conveys heightened forms of perception, experience, meaning,, or
consciousness in heightened language, i.e. a heightened mode of
discourse" (938).
There is some fuzziness in the concept, therefore: poetry spills over
into other artistic modes, and other types of discourse may share
elements with poetry. We'll have to consider the existence of more
typical or central, and more peripheral or even questionable kinds of
poetry.
Typically, poetry is divided into recurrent formal units smaller than
the text (verse): lines and stanzas. Verse is an important constituent
of poetry, both formally and historically (poetry was necessarily
associated to verse until the nineteenth century). Prosody may be
primarily aural, or visual (in written poetry), or both.
But already Aristotle said that verse is not enough to define poetry:
poetry requires something else. For him, it was the original retelling
and the shaping of a story, and the creative use of language. Many
after him will emphasize creativity, invention, intensity of feeling…
Then, poetry is too encompassing a term, and it is perhaps more useful
to speak of poetrical genres with specific conventions, historically
situated. E.g. tragedy, odes, sonnets, surrealist poems, imagist
poems, prose poems…
A looser sense of "poetic" includes other kinds of texts or artworks:
- Verbal but not artful texts (e.g. rhetorical elements in practical
discourse, all the way into 'unofficial' art)
- Artful but not verbal works: 'poetic' elements in other arts,
associated with iconic value or intensified experience. "These
foreground the act of attention itself, which is the paradigmatic
criterion of aesthetic events" (Princeton
939).
In the poems most characteristically poetical (especially lyric poetry,
in our tradition), speech and meaning are memorably intertwined: the
poem is a memorable expression of perceptions, situations or feelings,
articulated through words chosen and organized in such a way that their
sound, their associations, their rhythm, become part of the experience
or perception which is expressed through them. In poetry, "the medium
is the message"—the texture of language is an essential part of the
poetical experience, which is what makes it difficult and partly
impossible to translate. A poem cannot be adequately summarized,
because it is made of the specific words which make it up, not just of
an abstract meaning. That is one reason why poems, like other artworks,
are "display texts", that is, they are carefully preserved in their
original shape and are not expected to be altered in their transmission
(although this may happen of course).
Poetry can be defined by its aims (e.g. instruction, delight, or
instruction and delight), but there is one primary aim of all poems,
which is a claim on the reader's attention, and an attempt to hold it
and guide it through the poem—the poem's invitation into its own
virtual world, so to speak, which may be instrumental to other
ideological or practical aims, e.g. to promote a mode of feeling, a
political idea, or to get the poet a pension or a prize.
A
poem, then, is an intervention on the reader's consciousness and
perception–first of all by fixing the reader's attention upon it, its
situation, speaker, objects, attitudes and feelings, characters. Then
by shaping these into a small-scale model of the world—therefore, the
poem offers itself as a shaping instrument to redefine our perception
of the world, and it intervenes indirectly on the way we experience
things in the world apart from the poem —in this respect it is similar
to other works of art like painting or film.
Each of these two steps may be emphasized: the poem may either focus
primarily on itself, the experience intrinsic to poetry—and present
itself as quite another world from that of ordinary experience (reflexive axis). Or the poem may
emphasize its continuity with the world beyond the poem, and its
ability to represent or model it, its intervention in the life-world (mimetic axis)
In a particular historical context, we should take into account that
poetry is what is generally taken to be poetry, and is used as poetry
in a given circle. For instance, there is nowadays an explosion of
poetic self-publishing in the form of poetical blogs: many of these
poems would probably not be considered "poetical" or even artistic by
many critics or writers, but nevertheless they use poetical conventions
and are appreciated as poetry by their readers. Both good and bad
poetry are criticized and rejected, or appreciated and praised, by some
section of the public—which doesn't mean that one should reject ideas
of goodness and badness altogether.
Poetry exists to some extent in the poems, but the poems are nothing
apart from the ways they are used and read. The same poem may be used
or read very differently: for pleasure, or for analysis, to take two
extremes. More generally, the text is an expectation of response, and
it appeals to a number of conventions and presuppositions. When
analysing a poem we should be aware of the different circumstances of
its production, circulation and use, as it is only through an
understanding of discursive conventions that discourse in general can
be understood and used. The fixed text of a poem is only a part of
these circumstances and conventions.
Also, poetry changes along with its media. In the remote past, poetry
was typically sung by bards or rhapsodes. Then, many genres were
developed as reading matter, and poetry became a kind of writing, not a
kind of sound or speech. The printing of poems was also influential in
the perception and circulation of poetry—a literary canon was created
or rather reinforced, and poets wrote with a view to having their poems
published in the literary marketplace.
All
of these elements survive in some
way, and make for diverse and multiple expreriences of poetry. And
poetry may combine with other art forms: with romances and novels
(inserted poetry), drama and songs, musicals and opera, visual arts,
video, television and film…
Nowadays
we speak of blogs and social networks, in which the readers
and the poet can interact directly. The transformation of the written
medium through electronic
textuality will have far-reaching consequences for the practice of
poetry, but one additional thing about poetry is that it already
carries the substance of its history along with it, surviving through
many modes and contexts of social communication, and it is already
partly defined by what it has been, while remaining open to future
transformations.
_______
References
Preminger, Alex, and T. V. F. Brogan, eds. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry
and Poetics. Assoc. eds. Frank J. Warnke, O. B. Hardison, Jr.,
and Earl Miner. Princeton (NJ): Princeton UP, 1993.
García Landa, José Angel. "Notes
on the Definition of Poetry." Vanity Fea 26 Sept. 2011.
http://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2011/09/notes-on-definition-of-poetry.html
2011
_____. "Notes on the Definition of Poetry." Ibercampus (Vanity Fea) 26 Sept.
2021.
https://www.ibercampus.eu/notes-on-the-definition-of-poetry-5422.htm
2021
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