Poetry and prose and the two great structural classes of human script-art. Prose is the standard, in our view, and poetry the exception. Of course, historically poetry has a much stronger presence in the world of art than prose, being much better suited to an oral tradition; prose is relegated to the practical, the contractual, and the mundane. With the rise of the novel, however, prose took center stage in art as it long ago had in non-fiction. As a result, we tend to read much more prose than poetry, if only because that’s what we’re offered. It makes sense, too, from an economic perspective: writing prose is, in the age of the printing press, much more time-efficient than the work of poetry. Yet poetry persists in our consciousness, with and without music. We want to know, therefore, what poetry is.

Dictionaries have made their attempts. Merriam-Webster gives the following definition as its second (the first being too restricted by far): “Writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm.” While perhaps correct, it is not a particularly elegant definition, and a more helpful iteration can be made. Meanwhile, ‘Poets.org’ offers a list of definitions, all of them affectively correct in their own way, none of them particularly pragmatically useful.¹

I propose this initial definition, then, as a more practical, more elegant summation than either of the above (if imperfect itself): poetry is language ordered at the level of the word by a principle exterior to grammar and near-grammar convention (i.e. paragraphs). This definition is structural rather than content-based, it must be admitted; it fails to encompass swathes of art which have a similar effect to poetry as it is conventionally understood, but I find that the term ‘poetic’ is a better fit for these than the term ‘poetry.’ If we define poetry only by its emotive tendencies, the term becomes to amorphous as to make ruling text out of the ‘poetry’ category an impossibility.

The definition has several essential components. First, poetry is a work of language; this should not be controversial. Second, it has an ordering principle beyond ‘grammar’ and ‘near-grammar conventions’. This does not mean poetry lacks grammar- though it does generally lack paragraphs, except insofar as stanzas may be counted a replacement. No, this part of the definition highlights the extra-grammatical structures which separates poetry from prose: line breaks, altered capitalization, rhyme, meter, syllabification, etc. Note further that this structure is micro, not only macro, dictating elements as small as the word, though certainly large scale patterns are feasible (but in that poetry is not differentiated from prose). In tradition Western poetry, these strictures tend to be quantifiable, being so many syllables to a line, such and such pattern of end-line rhymes, or a repeating schema of up-beats and down-beats. In other forms, however, such as Biblical Hebrew poetry, while these quantifiable structures may or may not be present,² other, less tangible differences separate poetry from prose- an extreme use of parallelism, for example.

Additionally, as I have not included in the initial definition, poetry typically- but not necessarily- engages in heavy use of imagery. This imagery may be metaphor, simile, symbolism, or less direct forms, such as Eliot’s use of assonance in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.³ Regardless, we can see this in the Merriam-Webster definition (“concentrated imaginative awareness”). It is partially this intensive use of imagery which leads into the final element to be considered, the emotional impact. Poetry is traditionally viewed as a medium more adapted than prose to the explanation of the emotive, ephemeral, and elusive, though not the conceptual-abstract.

This leads us to the final definition: ‘Poetry is language ordered at the level of the word by a principle exterior to grammar and near-grammar convention, typically with an emphasis on imagery and the emotive element of man.’ This encompasses all ‘poetry’ universally acknowledged as such; it also includes blank verse, to an extent, though more controversially, as blank verse does use line breaks as an additional format, albeit without a strict structure (the principle is instinctive or content-based rather than structural or formal).

Why the Restrictions?

Why do poets accept the restrictions? Are not limits death to art? Art, we may feel instictively, ought to be boundless, free, expansive and uninhibited? It is the modern ideal, a part of the idolization of the artist, and it is utterly wrong. Chesterton put it well: “Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.”⁴ More, art must have a limit to an expanse in order to have a height. Think of it in terms of a glass of water: you can fill an infinitely wide glass to an infinitesimal height, or you can fill an infinitely narrow glass to an infinite height. Of course, neither of these glasses is at all useful; instead, you fill a glass with a specifically limited diameter to a height fitting to its purpose.

Poets choose to limit their work artificially, in a sense, but in the ideal of poetry they limit their work in order to exalt it. Every work of art has some such limit. A painting has only the size of its canvas, only the color of its paint. A novel has a length, a set of divisions, a language chosen for the purpose of its writer. So too with poetry, save that the limitations chosen are intentionally tighter, intentionally heavier upon the artist’s shoulders, guiding his stream of thought into a narrower channel.

These limitations, however, are precisely the strength of poetry, for they simultaneously create affect and stimulate creativity. Take the second part first, and consider a man locked in shackles, given a piece of wire. He will without a doubt be more ingenious with that wire than he would be were he simply seated at a table, given the wire, and told to stand on his feet. The limitations of the shackles will drive him to greater creativity, to new patterns of thought. So too with poetry: limitations foster creativity.

As for the affective nature of poetry, the very strictures of poetry are a part of its communication. Poe’s The Raven derives its power not merely from the meaning of its words but from their assonance, consonance, rhyme, and rhythm. ‘Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary’ has a power to it that ‘Once, at midnight, I was thinking while both tired and depressed’ rather lacks.⁵ It is by the efficacy of the concatenation of word-relations and images that The Raven justifies its poetic nature. The structure of the poem increases and coordinates its affect; the limitation has become a tool, not a hindrance, to the art.

Next week, we’ll look at more specifics of the structures used to order poetry and sum up the ideas.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – You can find the webpage I refer to here.

2 – You can find the article I refer to here.

3 – The poem is available here.

4 – I quote here from G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, Ch. 3. It’s a book well worth reading.

5 – Poe’s excellent poem is here.