POETRY

A.   DEFINITION OF POERY

1.    Percy Bysshe Shelley

 “Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odor and the color of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendor of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption.”

2.    Salvatore Quasimodo

“Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.”

3.    T.S. Eliot

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

4.    William Wordsworth

“ Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.”

5.    Bahrul Fajrih

“ Poetry is the arrange of the word that make a sentence or phrase where there is a beautifulness with rhyme in it.”

A.   THE EXAMPLE OF POETRY

Title     : Because I could not stop for Death

Writer  : Emily Dickinson

     He kindly stopped for me
     The Carriage held but just Ourselves
     And Immortality.

     We slowly drove—He knew no haste
     And I had put away
     My labor and my leisure too,
     For His Civility

     We passed the School, where Children strove
     At Recess—in the Ring
     We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain
     We passed the Setting Sun

     Or rather—He passed Us
     The Dews drew quivering and chill
     For only Gossamer, my Gown
     My Tippet—only Tulle

     We paused before a House that seemed
     A Swelling of the Ground
     The Roof was scarcely visible
     The Cornice—in the Ground

     Since then—'tis Centuries—and yet
     Feels shorter than the Day
     I first surmised the Horses' Heads
     Were toward Eternity

Commentar   :

The poetry exemplifies better than anything else Dickinson wrote the special quality of her mind . If the word great means anything in poetry, this poem is one of the greatest in the English language; it is flawless to the last detail. The rhythm charges with movement the pattern of suspended action back of the poem. Every image is precise and, moreover, not merely beautiful, but inextricably fused with the central idea. Every image extends and intensifies every other . No poet could have invented the elements of this poem; only a great poet could have used them so perfectly. She was a deep mind writing from a deep culture, and when she came to poetry, she came infallibly.