Still, it’s interesting to ponder how one would explain to an alien visitor from a galaxy far, far away what we earthlings mean by “poetry”. Your answer is poetry, and our alien visitor looking for a rudimentary answer in prose.
I made the point in our other discussion that the purpose of all languge is communication, and not only is this true, but it gives us insight into the essential difference between poetry and prose. Both communicate ideas. The difference is that poetry speaks to us at a higher level of abstraction – it’s more concerned with the aesthetics of words than their ordinary meanings, and with the aesthetics of the structures that can be built with them (stanzas, rhymes, rhymths), and ultimately in communicating feelings and ideas through the aesthetic structure of the whole. Prose uses language, poetry plays with language. I think the Horace Walpole quote probably comes closest to expressing this: “Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony”.
And needless to say, there is no implication here that a poem must serious, momentous, or lengthy, as in this gem from Ogden Nash which is none of those things…
*The Fly
The Lord in His wisdom made the fly,
And then forgot to tell us why. *
The problem is that of boundaries. Most of what you say about language would be as true about Joyce as it would about much formal poetry. Light versifiers, though, usually use wit in the same way jokes do and jokes are normally considered prose. Although I’ve seen Lord Buckley routines written out as poetry and they work magnificently.
If I had a loaded pen to my head, I’d say that the best distinction is intention. Did the writer intend the words as poetry or prose? Please don’t ask how we are supposed to know the writer’s intentions. We don’t, since they are unimportant, as the semioticians have shown. The definition is immaculate and unassailable.
I agree that there’s a great deal of overlap. If I quoted a random paragraph that looked like prose, but used language in creative and unusual ways that was deeply evocative in its imagery or emotion, yet lacked the structural elements we expect in poetry, it might be hard to say whether it should be regarded as poetry or prose. It’s indeed a matter of boundaries, and I’m suggesting that the distinction is one of degree – that the distinction between prose and poetry is the degree to which those aesthetic elements I mentioned are predominant.
I think you’re on the right track in saying that the best distinction is intention, but that’s not quite it. Whatever distinction one makes, it has to be made on the basis of the final product and not on presumptions about the author’s mindset. In the example I gave of some random evocative paragraph, if it’s a paragraph from a novel, then it’s prose. The larger context establishes what it is. If it’s something that has no other context, then one is left with looking at where those aesthetic boundaries are, and it may well be judged poetry.
Your “intent” argument is interesting but it’s uncomfortably reminiscent of someone splashing a bunch of paint onto a canvas and declaring “this is art”, which we’re supposed to believe because he says so. I know that many well-regarded artists like Jackson Pollock have done just that, to great acclaim, but as with poetry, I’d rather judge the result and not the process, including the determination of whether it’s poetry (or art) at all.
I agree, mostly, because in daily life we do distinguish poetry from prose by presentation. Though presentation is presumably a function of the author’s intention - except when it is the editor’s.
Why poetry is presented in a certain form and not as in conventional prose therefore becomes the next question. Poets deconstructed the form before the French got involved: they eliminated rhyme and then meter and then punctuation and then placement of words on the page and then came out the other side. How is this Philip Levine poem not prose with returns?
There are many interesting things to say about words. Boundaries and definitions are not among them.
Just from curiosity, I’d like to know your paraphrase of what you think you’ve learned here. It’s taken me decades to come up with that paraphrase of my own, and that’s after a period of attempting to write poetry, predominantly haiku, and reading treatments of the variants of poetry.
[QUOTE=Vladimir Nabokov]
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
[/QUOTE]
Zeldar, I think wolfpup’s comment in his exchange with Exapno Mapcase is quite persuasive. I’ve always felt there was a lot of overlap between prose and poetry and I was happy to see it articulated very well here.
“I agree that there’s a great deal of overlap. If I quoted a random paragraph that looked like prose, but used language in creative and unusual ways that was deeply evocative in its imagery or emotion, yet lacked the structural elements we expect in poetry, it might be hard to say whether it should be regarded as poetry or prose. It’s indeed a matter of boundaries, and I’m suggesting that the distinction is one of degree – that the distinction between prose and poetry is the degree to which those aesthetic elements I mentioned are predominant.”
davidmich
I don’t think you can use Nabokov as an example. The man was Russian and wrote English better than anyone since Shakespeare. Clearly he was playing life in god mode.
Except that woldpup’s distinction works better at the extremes than at the fuzzy middle. You cannot define “poetry” by the most literary variations of it, the ones that everybody already agrees are pure poetry. Your definition needs to accounts for prose poetry of Nabokov and the poetry prose of Levine. And it needs to account for why the stripped down prose of a Hemingway could easily be parsed to read as poetry. And why Shakespeare sometimes wrote poetry and sometimes wrote prose, and sometimes both in the same play. And it needs to account for why doggerel, limericks, and stuff that’s written with returns like this unaesthetic gem from Jennifer Aniston:
Or aesthetically-stuffed stuff without returns like this gem from Rose Kerr:
I’m emphatically not saying that the distinction made is wrong, but that it’s perilously close to what I said about needing to divine intent. Indeed, that boundary is itself too fuzzy to be seen. Why not just make it clear and simple and say that poetry and prose are intents, not results?
It’s one of those annoying questions, because you think you know the answer, and it should be simple, but then, the more you think about it, the answer seems to be “I know the difference when I when I see it, except when I don’t”.
Still, we agree that there is a difference. Some texts clearly belong to the class of poetry, others to the class of prose. The problem is that middle, which is as big and fuzzy as a polar bear’s belly.
It’s probably more useful to simply think about it on the level of functions of language, rather than on that of individual texts. If you want to be fancy about it, you could make use of the fuctions defined by the linguist Roman Jakobson. Jakobson identifies six functions of language, and two of those are the referential and the poetic functions. You could say that these correspond to the “prose” and “poetry” parts of a text. Any text or utterance can of course display elements of the other functions as well.
I can tell you how I taught my eighth graders to analyze poetry in comparison to prose:
F - form (is it a sonnet, a clerihew, a limerick, a haiku, free verse, or something else?)
I - imagery (simile, metaphor, onomatopoeia, personification, et cetera)
R - rhyme (not just end rhyme, but also alliterations, assonance, and consonance)
M - meter (aka rhythm. Iambs, trochees, anapests, and dactyls make my head ache.)
Prose may contain any of the above, but it rarely contains all four.
