1951 words essay on Poetry

Definition of poetry has always been a ticklish job, ‘just as life escapes the scalpels of the anatomist’; similarly poetry escapes the scope of definition. It is as difficult to cram ‘poetry’ within the limits of a definition as difficult as to capture the essence of a flower.

Some would connect poetry with the emotions and passions; others with the imagination; others with speech intoning itself in rhythm and music; others, again, with a sort of mysterious but irrepressible creative urge. Some places greater emphasis on the formal aspect; others on the inner content. But all this merely touches the fringe of the issue without striking at the centre. The process of getting to the heart of the, matter by analysis has always been a fascinating exercise.

Poetry is one of the branches of the arts. It is coeval with music, painting, sculpture etc. It has, therefore, to be made and to be formed. That is why the Greeks called the poet ‘the maker’. There is first the reception of impressions by the senses and then passing them on to the ‘purer mind’; and secondly, the transformation of impressions so received into formal expression. The first concerns the poet alone, and is, therefore, the formative stage. It is the second that concerns the world—the communication,—the outer expression that we call the art of poetry.

Impressions are the effects produced on the mind by external objects. The process is continuous but of varying intensity, according to the degree of mental sensitivity. The strength of impressions depends upon the intensity of the emotions that goes with it. Wordsworth claims a special privilege for the poet; he says that the poet’s mind is more sensitive than that of an ordinary man.

Perhaps it is this greater sensibility that urges the poet to have creative expression. It is this that makes him eager to communicate his impression to others, to externalize them in form that may be enjoyed by others, the poet, having received an impression of something striking or stirring, is moved to the task of communicating that to others. The emotion is so powerful that it overflows almost instinc­tively into expression.

The poet’s reception of experience is, of course, conditioned by the social set-up in which he lives and from which he draws his sentence. His mind reacts to his age and environment. He is not an isolated being but a social entity, and so is his reaction. The cultured person is ultimately social, i.e., concerns other people round about him. That is why Arnold called poetry ‘a criticism of life’. Poetry is a continuous record of the critical reactions produced on the poet by his epoch or environment.

In giving expression to his varied experiences, the poet has to give it a form. An image or an idea may be defined as a unified series of continuous impressions received by the mind. To organize these into forms is the function of the artist. Here comes the role of imagination, which Coleridge has rightly called ‘the esemplastic power’—the power to mould and shape Imagination integrates and compacts the detached impressions and fuses them and gives them a definite embodiment. To quote Shakespeare: it is

As imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shape and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

It is a creative power; out of the fleeting impressions received by the mind and the senses from the external world, it creates original forms, — ‘forms of things unknown’. It organises ideas and impres­sions into original forms by means of which they are communicated to others. Croche of the Aesthetic school thinks that conception through imagination and expression belong to the same process of externalisation.

Thus this process of mental creation may be said to be common to all the arts. The poet receives his impressions through his sense and they affect his mind in a peculiar way.

For the poet, this mental excitement is so intense that it transcends its immediate limits and assumes a certain character or quality, which is really the urge for verbal communication. It must somehow formulate itself in speech symbols for his proper satisfaction as well as for conveying itself to others; to make others feel its quality in the precise manner that the poet had felt it.

The poet does not merely seek to paraphrase his experience, but to convey it in its totality, as it is, in its original flavour experienced by himself. And since the experience must, in its nature, be always intensely personal and distinctive in character, the medium of communication must also preserve this personal quality or flavour. Hence, though the poet uses the words of ordinary speech, his language can never be the abstract generalised language of that speech. It must be so shaped and moulded as to approximate to his own personal experience.

In this act of Communication, the poet becomes an artist. The poet has to be selective in his vocabulary, choosing those speech-forms consecrated by usage. This selection is controlled by the character or class of experience that is to be communicated. This accounts for the stylistic variations in the poetry of different epochs or cases. The style is further individualised by the use of rhetorical figures of speech as well as by subtle adjustment of sound to sense.

Every emotion has a rhythm, a sonic or tunal quality and it is not completely expressed unless this rhythm is reproduced in language. Hence, poetic speech naturally adopts a rhythmic quality to harmonise with the experiences sought to be expressed. In. achieving this totality of words, symbols, rhymes and rhythm conforming to his experience, the poet becomes a craftsman.

Of course, the poetic expression is a complex process. All the ideas and images and emotions fused and integrated into an organic whole become the thing that we call poetry. It achieves this final shape not mechanically, but as the result of a vital emotional process in which the senses, intuition, memory and imagination—act together and in spontaneous co-operation.