by Risa Wolf

Created on: March 22, 2009   Last Updated: October 26, 2010

The question of "What is poetry?" has exercised the pens of many writers across thousands of years. Depending upon the period, poetry has been defined as song, hymn, verse, rhyme, imagination, philosophy, heightened language, the soul, a synthesis, the true and the beautiful, fiction, illusion, magic, metaphor, play, romance, and shadow of reality.

To Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with poetry, "the primary imagination is a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am." Percy Bysshe Shelley maintained that the language of poets is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts.

So, what is Poetry? Metaphor? But all words are metaphors; a tree is a metaphor for that object with a trunk and branches. Rhyme? Charm chants rhyme, but are charms poetry or merely rhyming verse? Can poetry be defined by its forms? But it matters not at all if a poem is a villanelle or an ode, a sonnet or a haiku. The many forms are irrelevant to a definition of poetry.

We could question every term used to define poetry, but it is difficult to surpass Edwin Greenlaw's concise definition: ". . . poetry is not merely verse, or music, or high imagination, or dream and fantasy, but reality... It is distilled and concentrated experience."

Or, as Laurence Perrine states it: "Poetry takes all life as its province. Its primary concern is not with beauty, not with philosophical truth, not with persuasion, but with experience. Art focuses and organizes experience so as to give us a better understanding of it. And to understand life is partly to be master of it. "

Poetry reflects the constant flux of the infinitely changing aspects of the world as it is experienced by the senses. It illuminates the otherwise inexpressible world of the emotions. It is condensed and concentrated; a poem focuses on a single aspect as a means of understanding reality. Poetry states the most in the fewest words. It chains this constant flux both through its language and through its rhythms.

Poetry consists of two inseparable parts: content and rhythm. Both content and rhythm interact with our senses, No great poet has ever claimed that poetry be defined by its forms, poetic devices, or patterns of verse. Nor do we need to be poets to understand these forms and poetic techniques. These forms and techniques control the poet and force the poet to condense, to concentrate, and to create multiple layers of meaning.

Poetry brings order out of chaos. Order, understanding, experiencing life fully; these are the keys to defining poetry as well as to poetry's still important role in the "real" world.

References:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria. Chapter 13.

Edwin Greenlaw, The Province of Literary History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1931, p. 128.

Laurence Perrine, Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanich. 7th ed. 1987, p. 9.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Defence of Poetry and Other Essays. (1814; 1840)

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