MA ENGLISH WHAT IS POETRY?

WHAT IS POETRY?

Poetry (ancient Greek: ‘creation’) is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. A poet is therefore one who creates and poetry is what the poet creates.

It is defined as:

1. “A metrical composition; a composition in verse written in certain measures, whether in blank verse or in rhyme, and characterized by imagination and poetic diction”.

2. “A composition, not in verse, of which the language is highly imaginative or impassioned”.

3. Poetry is language written with rhythm, figurative language, imagery, sound devices and emotionally charged language.

4. Poetry is a literature art form where the author elicits emotion or thought from the reader through metered writing.

Poetry is as universal as language and almost as ancient. The most primitive people had used it and the most civilized has cultivated it. In all ages and in all countries, poetry has been written, and eagerly read or listened to by all kinds and conditions of people. It has been especially the concern of the educated, the intelligent, and the sensitive, and it has appealed, in its simpler forms, to the uneducated and to children. Poetry in all ages has been regarded as important, not simply as a form of amusement. Rather it has been regarded as something central to existence, something having unique value to the fully realized life, something without which we are spiritually impoverished.

There are numerous definitions of poetry, which from time to time have been offered by critics of poetry, and by poets themselves. A few of these may be quoted by way of illustration:

1. Johnson: Poetry is "metrical composition.”
2. Johnson: Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. 
3. J.S. Mill: "What is poetry but the thought and words in which emotion spontaneously embodies itself."
4. Macaulay: "By poetry we mean the art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination, the art of doing by means of words what the painter does by means of colours.”
5. Carlyle:  Poetry is "Musical thought"
6. Shelley: Poetry "in a general sense may be defined as the expression of the imagination/'
7. Hazlitt: Poetry is "the language of the imagination and the passions.”
8. Coleridge : "Poetry is the best words in the best order.”
9. Wordsworth: "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility.”
10. Matthew Arnold: Poetry is “ criticism of life.”
11. Ruskin: Poetry is "the suggestion , by the imagination, of noble grounds for noble emotions."
12. Eliot: “Poetry is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”
13. Robert Frost: Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. 

Poetry is more than just rhyming and prose in meters and verse. It is a way of reaching something beyond the commonplace. It is an art form. Poetry is about expression. Poetry expresses the way we feel about a certain subject through imagery and other senses. It helps us deal with our daily life, be it good or bad.

The emotion which is put within each meter brings it to life. A poem without emotion is not a poem at all but is simply prose. Poetry is what makes us feel happy or sad, mad or gleeful, loving or broken hearted. Poetry is life through words. It does not need to be of a certain subject or even rhyme, it only needs emotion.

Poetry is poetry. It has its own mind. Our life is our life and no one can tell us what we have been through but ourselves. We know best not some stranger reading our poems. Our poetry is our life, not what someone says. Robert Frost says: “Poetry is what gets lost in translation”. 

Poetry appeals to the imagination. It enables us to see in our imagination the beauty of the snow sparkling to the moon and to feel the cold stillness of the winter night. There is no wonderland to which poetry cannot take us through the imagination. It takes us back into the Middle Ages with Keats in ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ or leaves us

Alone, alone, all , all alone

Alone on a wide, wide sea

Novalis says:

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. 

Poetry is one of the three major types of literature, the others being prose and drama.