What is poetry?
Emily Dickinson answered, in a letter:
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?
I sure hope so! Dickinson’s tests are difficult to operationalize. They are dangerous. And they do little to illuminate the murky oppositions that spark the quest for a definition: poetry vs. prose, poetry vs. philosophy.
Robert Frost is, if anything, less helpful:
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
This could apply to fiction or essay as much as verse.
We are better served by a philosopher not well-known for poetic appreciation. “Pleasure for pleasure,” he once proclaimed, “push-pin is as good as poetry.” (Push-pin was a trivial parlour game.) As reported by Michael St.John Packe, in The Life of John Stuart Mill (1954), Jeremy Bentham pitched the following criterion:
Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.
This we can use. It struggles with the prose poem—but arguably, we all should struggle with that. And while Bentham may be easy to mock, he is on to something deep. It is expounded, more poetically, by Elisa Gabbert, in an essay in the New York Times that does not reference him:
poetry leaves something out. All texts leave something out, of course—otherwise they’d be infinite—but most of the time, more is left out of a poem. Verse, by forcing more white space on the page, is constantly reminding you of what’s not there. This absence of something, this hyper-present absence, is why prose poems take up less space than other prose forms; the longer they get, the less they feel like poems. It’s why fragments are automatically poetic: Erasure turns prose into poems. … The missingness of poetry slows readers down, making them search for what can’t be found. The encounter is almost inherently frustrating, as though one could not possibly pay enough attention. This is useful: Frustration is erotic.
Poetry elicits, and works with, absence or omission. It eludes us. Gabbert states in the formal mode what Ben Lerner says, in The Hatred of Poetry, about its matter:
Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine. You’re moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. … Poetry isn’t hard, it’s impossible.
Poetry concerns what is not there: the words in the blank beyond the end of the enjambment, saying what cannot be said.
Prose can do this, too. Lerner writes about Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, which is not presented as verse:
In the excerpts of Citizen that appeared in magazines and in the prepublication galleys circulated to reviewers, Rankine’s poems were often preceded by, followed by, or broken up by slashes. The “ / ”—the technical term is “virgule”—is the conventional way of indicating a line break when verse is quoted in prose.
Take that, Bentham! Poetry can be interpolated into prose: the end of the line is not the end of line. But Rankine struck the virgules from the published version of Citizen, a poetic act of omission: “What I encounter in Rankine,” Lerner writes, “is the felt unavailability of traditional lyric categories; the instruction to read her writing as poetry—and especially as lyric poetry—catalyzes an experience of their loss, like a sensation in a phantom limb.”
So much for poetry vs. prose—what about philosophy? Lerner repeats the old canard:
Plato … concluded that there was no place for poetry in the Republic because poets are rhetoricians who pass off imaginative projections as the truth and risk corrupting the citizens of the just city, especially the impressionable youth.
To which I oppose the opening line of Iris Murdoch’s The Fire and the Sun:
To begin with, of course, Plato did not banish all the artists or always suggest banishing any.
Dramatic poetry is absent from the Republic, but lyric poetry is allowed. The ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry ends in compromise.
Before Plato, philosophers like Thales and Parmenides wrote verse—as Plato is said to have done in his youth—and Heraclitus survives in fragments that, as Gabbert predicts, assume the character of poetry.
Why should there be a clash between philosophy and poetry, anyway? Why should the lines of philosophy go on to the end, and not fall short?
Again, I think Gabbert’s essay sheds light. For one dream of philosophy—not the only dream—is to permit no empty space. Analytic philosophers resonate, at times, to the words of Quintilian, the first century Roman orator:
Do not write so that you can be understood; write so that you cannot be misunderstood.
The ideal is to leave nothing unsaid: no room for interpretation. The reader’s every question has been answered.
Of course, like poetry, such philosophy is doomed to fail. It strains against the problem—which is to say, the truth—of other minds, and the open-endedness of the world. There are other ways to approach philosophy, some of which I prefer. But, as with poetry, the fact that a project is not difficult, but impossible, does not mean that we should give it up.
This is great, Kieran. I especially appreciated the idea that "Poetry elicits, and works with, absence or omission." This feels very true to my experience. And this: "The missingness of poetry slows readers down, making them search for what can’t be found. The encounter is almost inherently frustrating, as though one could not possibly pay enough attention." The paying attention part seems crucial, as poetry elicits (and maybe highlights) the quest or longing that seems very central to what is most true about being human—that sense that there is always more than we can know. It makes me think of the end of the play "Our Town," realizing life as we live it, which the saints and poets do some.
I too like this defintion of poetry as a vehicle of absence. I wonder if this absence functions, semantically, to breathe vagueness and ambiguity into the intermittent words.
I tend to think of poetry and prose on a continuum. As we move to the poetic end of that continuum, we pay more attention to the music of our words, and allow in multivalency and free associative connotations. toward the prose side, we prioritize clear unambiguous expression.