THE STUDY OF POETRY POETRY DEFINED "If not asked, I know ; if you ask me I know not." When challenged to answer the question What is poetry? most of us would like to evade it with the above quoted words of St. Augustine. We all have a certain instinctive sense of what constitutes poetry but it is difficult to translate this into exact language. Innumerable definitions have been offered from time to time by critics and by poet themselves. According to Samuel Johnson "poetry is metrical composition; it is the art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the help of reason." Alexander Mill asks "what is poetry but the thought and words in which emotion spontaneously embodies itself?" Lord Macaulay says "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." Poetry, declares Carlyle, "we will call Mu
Posts
Showing posts from August, 2010