Poetry

From Guidevines

What is Poetry? Definitions are for the most part alike unsatisfactory and treacherous; but definitions of poetry arc proverbially so. Is it possible to lay down invariable principles of poetry, such as those famous invariable principles of William Lisle Bowles, which in the earlier part of the century awoke the admiration of Southey and the wrath of Byron? Is it possible for a critic to say of any metrical phrase, stanza or verse, This is poetry, or This is not poetry? Can he, with anything like the authority with which the man of science pronounces upon the natural objects brought before him, pronounce upon the qualities of a poem? These are questions that have engaged the attention of critics ever since the time of Aristotle. Byron, in his rough and ready way, answered them in one of those letters to his publisher John Murray, which, rich as they are in nonsense, are almost as rich in sense. So far are principles of poetry from being invariable, says he, that they never were nor ever will be settled. These principles mean nothing more than the predilections of a particular age, and every age has its own and a different from its predecessor. It is now Homer and now Virgil; once Dryden and since Sir Walter Scott; now Corneille and now Racine; now Crhbillon and now Voltaire. This is putting the case very strongly, perhaps too strongly. But if we remember that Sophocles lost the first prize for the Oedipus Tyrannus; if we remember what in Dantes' time (owing partly, no doubt, to the universal ignorance of Greek) were the relative positions of Homer and Virgil, what in the time of Milton were the relative positions of Milton himself, of Shakespeare, and of Beaumont and Fletcher; again, if we remember Jeffreys' famous classification of the poets of his day, we shall be driven to pause over Byrons words before dismissing them. Yet some definition, for the purpose of this essay, must be here attempted; and, using the phrase absolute poetry as the musical critics use the phrase absolute music, we may, perhaps, without too great presumption submit the following: Absolute poetry is the concrete and artistic expression of the human mind in emotional and rhythmical language.

This at least will be granted, that no literary expression can, properly speaking, be called poetry that is not in a certain deep sense emotional, whatever may be its subject-matter, concrete in its method and its diction, rhythmical in movement, and artistic in form.

(from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica)