II.

The Nature of Poetry

Poetry is one of the most ancient and widespread of the arts. Originally fused with music in song, it gained independent existence in ancient times—in the Western world, at least as early as the classical era. Where poetry exists apart from music, it has substituted for lost musical rhythms its own purely linguistic one. It is this rhythmic use of language that most easily distinguishes poetry from imaginative prose, the other great division of literature, and that forms the basis of the dictionary definition of poetry as “metrical writings”. This definition does not, however, include cadenced poetry (as in the Bible) or modern free verse; both types of verse are rhythmic but not strictly metrical. Nor does it take into account the unwritten songs of many cultures past and present. It is, however, a useful starting point for considering what is now commonly meant by the word poetry.

Poetry generally projects emotionally and sensuously charged human experience in metrical language. Metre, the highly regular component of verse rhythm, depends basically on the relative strength and weakness of adjacent syllables and monosyllabic words. Whether a syllable is strong or weak, stressed or unstressed, may be a matter of length—longer or shorter, as in Arabic verse or classical Greek and Latin verse; and, in Greek verse at least, pitch as well as syllable length played a role in determining stress. It may also be a matter of intensity—louder or softer, as in medieval Latin verse and English and Germanic verse generally. Not all languages have such marked differences in syllabic emphasis, however; nor do all poets choose to exploit these differences to create rhythmic patterns. In many languages, poetic rhythm depends less on differences between syllables than on line length. This is traditionally determined by the total number of syllables in a line (syllabic verse), as in French, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Welsh poetry; or by the number of stressed syllables in a line (accentual verse), as in Old English alliterative poetry; or by some combination of number and stress, as in the foot verse that has been characteristic of English poetry since the time of the medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer. See Versification.