[转载]《英诗理解指南》》【II】1.1 What Is Poetry?

《英诗理解指南》

A Guide to the Understanding

of English Poetry

1. POETRY AND POETRY READING

1.1 What Is Poetry?

     The word "poetry" comes from a Greek verb that means to make. Poetry is not like ordinary speech or writing, it is an object specially made in words. But what poetry is eludes simple definition. Robert Frost was once pressed for an answer to the question "what is poetry" and he replied, "Poetry is the kind of thing poets write". The answer seems certainly unsatisfactory, yet, most probably Frost was not merely trying to evade the question but to urge his questioner to think and form the idea for himself. 

    There are varied definitions, or better to say, descriptions of poetry. Following are some of the descriptions by poets and critics about what poetry is:

♦ Poetry is the honey of all flowers, the quintessence of all science, the marrow of wit, and the very phrase of angels. —Thomas Nashe

♦  The imaginative expression of strong feeling … the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility.  — William Wordsworth

♦ The clear expression of mixed feelings.  — W. H. Auden

♦   Musical … combined with a pleasurable idea.  — Edgar Allan Poe

♦   Musical thought   — Thomas Carlyle

♦   Speech framed … to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its interest of meaning.    — Gerard Hopkins

♦    Not the assertion that something is true, but the making of that truth more fully real to us. —T. S. Eliot

♦    A poem is an idea caught in the act of dawning.  — Robert Frost

♦   The best words in the best order  — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

♦   The art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the help of reason. —Samuel Johnson

♦    The record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

♦    At bottom a criticism of life.  — Matthew Arnold

♦    Poetry is what evaporates from all translations. — Robert Frost

♦    If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know it is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?  — Emily Dickinson

 

    We can cite much more descriptions of what poetry is, and some poets even describe poetry by means of writing poems. Here are two poems on poetry:

 

      Poetry

Eleanor Farjeon

What is poetry? Who knows?

Not a rose, but the scent of the rose;

Not the sky, but the light in the sky;

Not the fly, but the gleam of the fly;

Not the sea, but what makes me

See, hear, and feel something that prose

Cannot: and what it is, who knows?

 

    Ars Poetica

Archibald MacLeish

A poem should be palpable and mute

As a globed fruit,

 

Dumb

As old medallions to the thumb,

 

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone

Of casement ledges where the moss has grown--

 

A poem should be wordless

As the flight of birds.

 

A poem should be motionless in time

As the moon climbs,

 

Leaving, as the moon releases

Twig by twig the night -entangled trees,

 

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,

Memory by memory the mind­

 

A poem should be motionless in time

As the moon climbs.

 

A poem should be equal to:

Not true.

 

For all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

 

For love

The leaning grass and two lights above the sea—

 

A poem should not mean

But be.

    Poetry differs from common prose in a number of aspects. Each description about poetry cited above touches upon only one or some of the aspects of poetry, but anyhow those descriptions are helpful for us to have some ideas of what poetry is. A poem is the dawning ideas, the marrow of wit，spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling, framed speech, musical thought, and the art of putting the best words in best order. In the poems by MacLeish and Farjeon, an abstract poem has been made concrete and perceptible as a physical object. Their poems on poetry also suggest that in reading a poem, our five sense organs as well as our minds should all take part. So what is a poem? A poem involves several elements that work together. The dictionary definition might be taken as a terse answer: poetry is “a type of discourse which achieves its effects by rhythm, sound patterns and imagery. Most characteristically, the poetic form evokes emotions or sensations, but it may also serve to convey loftiness of tone or to lend force to ideas.”(1)

    Here we have to point out that it is pointless to become obsessed merely with definitions of poetry. The descriptions cited above are worth our attention simply because they are helpful in our reading and appreciating a poem. To know what poetry is at all, the best way is to experience poems, that is, to live and acquaint us with poems, and let them grow in our mind. (To be continued)