DEFINITION OF POETRY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 84, 31 January 1941, Page 4

DEFINITION OF POETRY

Sir,-Those correspondents and readers who have been trying to arrive at a definition of poetry may be interested in this extract from a BBC discussion between Walter de la Mare, Stephen Spender, and Desmond Hawkins. De la Mare, as most readers will know, is one of England’s older living minor poets; Spender is one of the younger poets; and Desmond Hawkins has written both poems and novels. ia 2. ~ a

LOOKER-ON

(Wellington).

HAWKINS: You know. you’re teasing me into asking you again for a definition. What are the qualities that make a man a poet, that make his writing poetry? What makes the Muses "willing"? Must he have some fineness of moral perception, or some special power of intellect? Or is it a peculiarly sensitive emotional sensibility, or some technical skill-a flair for word and rhythm? DE LA MARE: A poet in mind, no doubt, may be deficient in sense, in -cleverness, in moral fibre, in good nature, in goodness, in any of the virtues. The best method, the richest effect-and it has been proved by every poetis secured by the use of verse, of metre and rhythm. For one reason because metre and rhythm most clearly and fully reveal the mainspring and wellspring of every living creature. For another, because since what is being said may lie a shade or two beside or beyond mere reason, because it springs out of the deeper mind, between wake and dream, this metre and the cbedience it implies, keeps it in freedom but within bounds. The poem itself then resembles a happy child in a garden, a boy with a Heaven-sent teacher, a Mozart at his harpsichord, a Saint in Paradise. Not a bird in a cage. And yet, I wonder. SPENDER: ‘You said that you thought neither of us would attempt a definition of poetry, De la Mare. All the same, one remark of yours suggests as good a definition as I have seen. You talked about ‘‘the intrinsic harmony and accord between the thing said (whatsoever that may be), and the self that says it."" A prose statement means, or should mean, precisely what it says. Therefore it can be parsed, the meaning can be separated from one particular arrangement of words and stated by another set of words. But what it says is only one element of a poetic . statement which besides its prose meaning, means its imagery, its music, its mood of emotional tension, its ambiguities, and every effect which it produces. ; HAWKINS: Would you say that is impossible in prose? SPENDER: No, not impossible, because’ prose, especially much modern fiction, such as D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, tends towards the uses of poetry, just as poetry always contains a thread of meaning separable into prose. HAWKINS: If I understand you properly, you mean that you can exhaust the meaning of prose-but not of poetry. SPENDER: Yes, poetry is like a language of life within certain conditions where people are experiencing a sense © the wholeness of life, whereas prose is specialised and dealing with separate branches of activities within life. Poetry is the language of the whole soul within a given situation. What it says, the rational part of it is only one part of what it expresses.