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. Poetry is a vast subject, as old as history and older, present wherever religion is present, possiblyunder some definitionsthe 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 beor need beincluded, 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. 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. Poetry may be distinguished from prose literature in terms of form by its compression, by its frequent (though not prescribed) employment of the conventions of metre and rhyme, by its reliance upon the line as a formal unit, by its heightened vocabulary, and by its freedom of syntax. The characteristic emotional content of poetry finds expression through a variety of techniques, from direct description to highly personalized symbolism. One of the most ancient and universal of these techniques is the use of metaphor and simile to alter and expand the reader's imaginative apprehension through implicit or explicit comparison. This may involve an appeal to sense experience, especially visual sensation, or to emotional experience or cultural and historical awareness. Thus, by conjuring up pictures or images and by invoking different kinds of imaginative associations, the poet elicits in others something of his own feeling and consciousness. Poetry encompasses many modes: narrative, dramatic, aphoristic, celebratory, satiric, descriptive, didactic, erotic, and personal. Within a single work the poet may move from one mode to another, preserving overall unity through the consistency of the formal pattern. The formal patterns available to the poet vary considerably: in English poetry the formal unit may be the single unrhymed line (as in blank verse), the rhymed couplet, the rhymed stanza of four lines or more, or more complex rhyming patterns such as the fourteen-line sonnet. Poetry is an ancient mode of expression; even before the development of writing, primitive societies seem to have achieved poetic renderings of their religious, historical, and cultural awareness and to have transmitted them to the next generation in hymns, incantations, and narrative poems. Something of this early association with the cultural traditions of the tribe has persisted in later theories of poetic inspiration and poetic privilege, though from the time of the Romantics the autonomous creative imagination has been regarded as the source of poetic energy and the guarantee of poetic authenticity. Some modern poets, such as the Surrealists, would claim that the poetic faculty is a mode of access to individual and collective unconscious experience. In the 19th and 20th centuries Western poetry has responded more to the expressive possibilities of poetic idiom and convention in different traditions. Some poets have experimented with reviving or adapting the subject matter and the verse forms of other times and places. For other poets it has been important to break with tradition and convention and attempt a studied informality of manner, an approximation of the relaxed rhythms and colloquial vocabulary of ordinary speech, and a self-consciously prosaic imagery. Additional reading The most convenient way to get to know poetry is to read poetry. It would be invidious for the writer of a general article on the subject to prejudice the reader by making a selection of poems or poets; in experience, anyhow, one's acquaintance with poetry comes about chiefly by love and accident, supported, when not undermined, by schools, colleges, and libraries. Beyond that, the bibliographical temptation is to put before the reader numerous learned works that are not poetry but about poetry; whatever their usefulness at various stages of study, and it may be great, they must not substitute for the reading of poetry itself. Therefore no such list is attempted.The beginning reader, however, may well be able to use some help in interpreting, such as a critical or explanatory anthology. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry, 4th ed. (1976), is still probably the best of its kind, as numerous imitations amply attest. See also Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction to Poetics (1981; originally published in French, 1973), a comprehensive introduction to modern poetics.