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NATURE AND ELEMENTS OF POETRY
Various critics and poets have given definition for poetry
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In Coleridge’s view, poetry is the
antithesis of science, having for its immediate object pleasure, not
truth
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Literature is an interpretation of life as life shapes itself in the mind of
the interpreter
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By
poetical interpretation of life, therefore, we mean a treatment of its
facts, experiences, problems in which emotional and imaginative
elements predominate
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The full significance of poetry as an interpretation of life through
imagination and feeling will be made apparent when we come,
presently, to deal with the relation of poetry and science, and with the
properties of poetic truth
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But we do not mean to say that their
presence, even in the highest degree, is itself sufficient to constitute
because they may exist in what we should agree to call poetic proses

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which is not the least to be dominated prose because it possesses these
poetic attributes
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It arises only when the poetic qualities
of imagination and feeling are embodied in a certain form of
expression
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Without this, we may have the spirit of poetry without its externals
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The reason why verse is necessary to the form of poetry is that the
perfection of the poetical spirit demands it that circle of its enthusiasm,
beauty and power, is incomplete without it
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So, poetry as regards its substance and spirit is the antithesis
of science, or matter of fact, as Wordsworth and Coleridge insisted, it is
nonetheless to be distinguished from prose, as regards its form, by the
systematically rhythmical character of its language
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Mathew Arnold, despite his pre-occupation with the idea of poetry as a
‘Criticism of Life’ lays stress upon “the essential difference between
imaginative production in verse, and imaginative production in prose
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We may lay it down as a principle that meter
always has been and still is the most general and constant feature of

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poetry on the side of form
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Of the significance of rhythm in poetry much might be said, but the
subject is too large and too intricately entangled with questions of
psychology to be dealt with in detail
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A part of perfection of poetry in a much more important sense than is
implied if we rest in the assumption that it is nothing but a mere
accessory
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It was noted by Hegel that the use of verse in a given piece of literature
serves in itself to lift into a world quite different from that of prose or
everyday life
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Schiller writes to Goethe,
“Since I have begun to transform my prosaic language into a poetic
rhythmical one, I find myself under a totally different jurisdiction
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While verse is, of course, often used as a vehicle of purely prosaic
thought, it ought not to be so used
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Thus it is that in all true poetry that union of substance and form, of
which Schiller speaks, is so organic and complete that it impresses with
a conviction of its absolute inevitability
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It is
a powerful aid in emotionalisation of thought
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