Poetry

Poetry is easy to recognize, yet hard to define, kind of like the "syllable." Well, maybe poetry in your own language is easy to recognize, anyway. I remember studying Hebrew poetry before, probably when I was in Bible college, and it seemed a bit circular when they said that poetry is identified by poetic language. You know, English poetry has rhyme and meter, and in European languages, meter is a characteristic of poetry, but the Bible scholars say, meter is not a characteristic of Hebrew poetry: that leaves only that elusive concept, poetic language.

Now that I've gone to school for so many more years, I begin to understand what poetic language is, and I would rather say "figures of speech." Then you avoid that circular reasoning. But as I reflected on what to tell my own students, I thought that a contrast is the best way to describe poetry. I told them:

You use ordinary language to appeal to the mind.
You use poetic language to appeal to both the mind and the ear.

In other words, poetry is language that has been fashioned to be beautiful. And beauty is something that is very culture-specific; that means that utterances that are beautiful in one language may not be so beautiful in some other language.

Then, just the last few days, I also thought of another contrast:

You use ordinary language to make your listener know something he/she doesn't know yet.
You use poetry to make your listener feel something he/she doesn't feel yet.

Of course, neither of these contrasts is truly a definition, because they are not precise enough to define poetry and differentiate it from all prose. But I find that definitions are not always useful in helping students understand a concept.