Poetry

What is POETRY?


Like all other literary types, poetry presents a "heightened awareness of reality," but it is poetry that features "language charged to the nth degree."  By that Paul Engle meant that poetry maximizes the power of language and transmits an intensified artistic experience--chiefly through suggestion, figurative language, imagery, condensation, and sound.

To Robert Frost, poetry is the "only permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another."  Whatever the poem wants to say, it expresses in a manner that appears to be "the only right way of saying it in the context of the realities it has started with" (Cirilo Bautista). In poetry the words are so well-arranged such that one delights in repeating the lines--there appears to be no other way of saying them. Just by the sound alone, one derives pleasure from a poem. Apart from the idea one derives from poetry, one then also goes through an experience wrought by  the language, music, and imagery that interlock in a poem, such that one recites the lines over and over to savor the poetic experience.  The content (what the poem says)and form (how the poem expresses its main idea) of the poem have become one.


GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF POETRY:

1. Poetry does not state; it suggests.
2.Poetry draws mental pictures.
3.In a poem there should be tension.
4. Poetry has to be heard.