06-24-2019, 01:01 AM
(This post was last modified: 06-24-2019, 01:08 AM by RiverNotch.)
Pt. II
The question is only at a dead end when people stop trying evaluate or reevaluate their own answers and stop trying to learn because they think they already know the answers.
Not for this question. The problem is people ask questions to figure things out, and those with things to figure out leap over this question easily. Rowens was right in saying it was heightened language that distinguished between poetry and prose, and duke was right in saying that a measure of consciousness was involved in distinguishing between poetry and prose.
Language is never, ever, ever objective on its own. Words do not exist in a vacuum. Everything must be read with the context taken into account. Those three statements are incredibly loaded, and multiple resources have already been devoted to them, which is why, in lieu of a more methodical dissection, I'll just relate two illustrative anecdotes.
---Humans are made extinct. An alien civilization stumbles upon our remains. They have languages like us and writing like us; they conceive of art and poetry in a similar fashion. They recognize our writing as writing, but otherwise have absolutely no tools to interpret them with.Meanwhile, art for them is treated with an absurd level of reverence. Because of how well-kept surviving collections of statistical records are, they consider those as poetry. Because of how commonly found the likes of Emily Dickinson and Louise Gluck are, they consider those as vulgar, apoetic writing.
---Someone takes a copy of Hitler's birth certificate, and posts it in the poetry section of a Holocaust archive.
Hence, it takes a certain level of consciousness that what one is reading is poetry -- even the writer must read his or her own works, whether on paper or in his mind -- for the work to be poetry.
As for "heightened language", I return to the problem that questions, especially questions posed to a community, require a certain level of mechanical thinking. Northrop Frye, in attempting to formulate a systematic method for the analysis of literature, disposes of the common distinction between "poetry" and "prose" immediately. Poetry, for his work in Anatomy of Criticism, is anything that employs a general sense of rhetoric -- heightened language -- in communicating feelings, ideas, and the like. What this general sense of rhetoric is, exactly, takes him the rest of the book to explain. Prose, on the other hand, does not really take the form of the work into consideration: what it communicates is what its words directly signify.
He disposes of the distinctions between the intention of the author and the interpretation of the audience, for this definition, instead using a more abstracted apprehension of consciousness. Functionally, he excluded works like scientific reports from being "poetry", because nuances in form are not, for those kinds of papers, taken into account by either their authors or their intended audiences.
Later in the book, however, he develops a theory of genres, defining the more commonly understood divisions between poetry and prose. His divisions considered, in greater detail, the relationship between the audience and the author -- the two consciousnesses involved in the apprehension of language -- with what sort of rhythmic tools the author may use, or how the author may represent what he is trying to communicate. His theory of genres, however, produces nothing definitive: there is the explicit admission that the fundamental "genres" he considered (fiction, lyric poetry, epic poetry, and drama -- note that what most would consider as poetry is divided into three genres, while drama is normally a mix of poetry and prose) overlapped more often than not.
The problem in this discussion is that it is often confused, not only in its general framework, but in the individual responses of its members. It does not know what sort of answer it is seeking, or, at least, what sort of method it seeks to pursue the question's non-answer. This confusion is propagated, I think, by the OP, who jumps from integrating the more general "poetry....is meant to be felt" answers to the discussion into his supposed method, while at the same time implying, through his emphasis on versification, that his method was concerned mostly with "the mundane topic of craft". And when there is no method, no theory, no general framework for the members of the discussion to follow, then the ideas and sentiments exchanged will only have been stated, not communicated. With the implicitly insulting first post comes the suspicion that such was the goal of the OP, whether consciously or not, hence my rather abrasive first response.
Some people have answered with attempts to discuss the nature of art in general -- poetry as a vehicle for epiphany, rather than ideas, and hence what "epiphany", "beauty", etc., actually entail. Those attempts were quickly shot down. Some have answered by giving a similar definition to that Frye posed in the beginning of his Anatomy -- again, heightened language -- but to the seemingly impatient dissatisfaction of the third category of responders.
Some, including, I suspect, OP, have tried to distinguish poetry as a genre separate from prose, only, instead of systematically considering the elements of what makes a genre first -- again, the chosen rhythm of the author, or the author's means of representation -- there is already the judgement that prosaic poetry somehow stops being poetry, while poetic prose somehow starts being also poetry. There is the start to Frye's conclusion that genres more often than not overlap, but the conclusion is reached too early, since such a conclusion requires there being an actual definition for what is poetry and what is prose.
What's worse is that the judgment of poetry being prosaic is *qualitative*: "prose" and "prosaic" do not refer to the same things, in this discussion, when having the supposedly antithetical quality of being "prosaic" in a poem stops it from being a poem, rather than actually complicating the discussion. In stopping to consider that a poem which is explicitly a poem might be prosaic and still be a poem, one stops trying to learn and falls back to one's original biases over what a poem actually is.
The question is not, in fact, one question, but *four*, with OP and the rest of the members of the discussion ignoring that distinction. Trying to shut down the discussion was a slight overreaction, on my part -- again, the insult in the first post may have been subconscious -- but, hopefully, this second response prompts clarifications from *all* members of the discussion on what it is they are actually pursuing.
The question is only at a dead end when people stop trying evaluate or reevaluate their own answers and stop trying to learn because they think they already know the answers.
Not for this question. The problem is people ask questions to figure things out, and those with things to figure out leap over this question easily. Rowens was right in saying it was heightened language that distinguished between poetry and prose, and duke was right in saying that a measure of consciousness was involved in distinguishing between poetry and prose.
Language is never, ever, ever objective on its own. Words do not exist in a vacuum. Everything must be read with the context taken into account. Those three statements are incredibly loaded, and multiple resources have already been devoted to them, which is why, in lieu of a more methodical dissection, I'll just relate two illustrative anecdotes.
---Humans are made extinct. An alien civilization stumbles upon our remains. They have languages like us and writing like us; they conceive of art and poetry in a similar fashion. They recognize our writing as writing, but otherwise have absolutely no tools to interpret them with.Meanwhile, art for them is treated with an absurd level of reverence. Because of how well-kept surviving collections of statistical records are, they consider those as poetry. Because of how commonly found the likes of Emily Dickinson and Louise Gluck are, they consider those as vulgar, apoetic writing.
---Someone takes a copy of Hitler's birth certificate, and posts it in the poetry section of a Holocaust archive.
Hence, it takes a certain level of consciousness that what one is reading is poetry -- even the writer must read his or her own works, whether on paper or in his mind -- for the work to be poetry.
As for "heightened language", I return to the problem that questions, especially questions posed to a community, require a certain level of mechanical thinking. Northrop Frye, in attempting to formulate a systematic method for the analysis of literature, disposes of the common distinction between "poetry" and "prose" immediately. Poetry, for his work in Anatomy of Criticism, is anything that employs a general sense of rhetoric -- heightened language -- in communicating feelings, ideas, and the like. What this general sense of rhetoric is, exactly, takes him the rest of the book to explain. Prose, on the other hand, does not really take the form of the work into consideration: what it communicates is what its words directly signify.
He disposes of the distinctions between the intention of the author and the interpretation of the audience, for this definition, instead using a more abstracted apprehension of consciousness. Functionally, he excluded works like scientific reports from being "poetry", because nuances in form are not, for those kinds of papers, taken into account by either their authors or their intended audiences.
Later in the book, however, he develops a theory of genres, defining the more commonly understood divisions between poetry and prose. His divisions considered, in greater detail, the relationship between the audience and the author -- the two consciousnesses involved in the apprehension of language -- with what sort of rhythmic tools the author may use, or how the author may represent what he is trying to communicate. His theory of genres, however, produces nothing definitive: there is the explicit admission that the fundamental "genres" he considered (fiction, lyric poetry, epic poetry, and drama -- note that what most would consider as poetry is divided into three genres, while drama is normally a mix of poetry and prose) overlapped more often than not.
The problem in this discussion is that it is often confused, not only in its general framework, but in the individual responses of its members. It does not know what sort of answer it is seeking, or, at least, what sort of method it seeks to pursue the question's non-answer. This confusion is propagated, I think, by the OP, who jumps from integrating the more general "poetry....is meant to be felt" answers to the discussion into his supposed method, while at the same time implying, through his emphasis on versification, that his method was concerned mostly with "the mundane topic of craft". And when there is no method, no theory, no general framework for the members of the discussion to follow, then the ideas and sentiments exchanged will only have been stated, not communicated. With the implicitly insulting first post comes the suspicion that such was the goal of the OP, whether consciously or not, hence my rather abrasive first response.
Some people have answered with attempts to discuss the nature of art in general -- poetry as a vehicle for epiphany, rather than ideas, and hence what "epiphany", "beauty", etc., actually entail. Those attempts were quickly shot down. Some have answered by giving a similar definition to that Frye posed in the beginning of his Anatomy -- again, heightened language -- but to the seemingly impatient dissatisfaction of the third category of responders.
Some, including, I suspect, OP, have tried to distinguish poetry as a genre separate from prose, only, instead of systematically considering the elements of what makes a genre first -- again, the chosen rhythm of the author, or the author's means of representation -- there is already the judgement that prosaic poetry somehow stops being poetry, while poetic prose somehow starts being also poetry. There is the start to Frye's conclusion that genres more often than not overlap, but the conclusion is reached too early, since such a conclusion requires there being an actual definition for what is poetry and what is prose.
What's worse is that the judgment of poetry being prosaic is *qualitative*: "prose" and "prosaic" do not refer to the same things, in this discussion, when having the supposedly antithetical quality of being "prosaic" in a poem stops it from being a poem, rather than actually complicating the discussion. In stopping to consider that a poem which is explicitly a poem might be prosaic and still be a poem, one stops trying to learn and falls back to one's original biases over what a poem actually is.
The question is not, in fact, one question, but *four*, with OP and the rest of the members of the discussion ignoring that distinction. Trying to shut down the discussion was a slight overreaction, on my part -- again, the insult in the first post may have been subconscious -- but, hopefully, this second response prompts clarifications from *all* members of the discussion on what it is they are actually pursuing.