1. A Definition of Poetry from The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
Language sung, chanted, spoken, or written according to some
pattern of recurrence that emphasizes the relationships between words
on the basis of sound as well as sense: this pattern is almost always a
rhythm or *METRE, which maybe supplemented by *RHYME or
*ALLITERATION or both. The demands of verbal patterning usually make
poetry a more condensed medium than *PROSE or everyday speech,
often involving variations in *SYNTAX, the use of special words and
phrases (*POETIC DICTION) peculiar to poets, and a more frequent and
more elaborate use of *FIGURES OF SPEECH, principally *METAPHOR and
*SIMILE. All cultures have their poetry, using it for various purposes from
sacred ritual to obscene insult, but it is generally employed in those
utterances and writings that call for heightened intensity of emotion,
dignity of expression, or subtlety of meditation. Poetry is valued for
combining pleasures of sound with freshness of ideas, whether these be
solemn or comical. Some critics make an evaluative distinction between
poetry, which is elevated or inspired, and *VERSE, which is merely clever
or mechanical. The three major categories of poetry are *NARRATIVE,
dramatic, and *LYRIC, the last being the most extensive.
2. Poetic Diction from The Glossary of Literary Terms by M. H. Abrams
The term diction signifies the types of words, phrases, and
sentence structures, and sometimes also of figurative language, that constitute
any work of literature. A writer's diction can be analyzed under a great variety
of categories, such as the degree to which the vocabulary and phrasing is
abstract or concrete, Latin or Anglo-Saxon in origin, colloquial or formal,
technical or common. See style and poetic license.
Many poets in all ages have used a distinctive language, a "poetic diction,"
which includes words, phrasing, and figures not current in the ordinary
discourse of the time. In modern discussion, however, the term poetic
diction is applied especially to poets who, like Edmund Spenser in the Elizabethan
age or G. M. Hopkins in the Victorian age, deliberately employed a
diction that deviated markedly not only from common speech, but even
from the writings of other poets of their era. And in a frequent use, "poetic
diction" denotes the special style developed by neoclassic writers of the eighteenth
century who, like Thomas Gray, believed that "the language of the
age is never the language of poetry" (letter to Richard West, 1742). This neoclassic
poetic diction was in large part derived from the characteristic usage
of admired earlier poets such as the Roman Virgil, Edmund Spenser, and
John Milton, and was based on the reigning principle of decorum, according
to which a poet must adapt the "level" and type of his diction to the mode
and status of a particular genre (see style). Formal satire, such as Alexander
Pope's Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735), because it represented a poet's direct
commentary on everyday matters, permitted—-indeed required—-the use of
language really spoken by urbane and cultivated people of the time. But
what were ranked as the higher genres, such as epic, tragedy, and ode, required
a refined and elevated poetic diction to raise the style to the level of
the form, while pastoral and descriptive poems, which necessitated reference
to what were considered lowly materials, used a special diction to invest
these materials with a dignity and elegance appropriate to poetry.
Prominent characteristics of eighteenth-century poetic diction were its
archaism and its use of recurrent epithets; its preference for resounding words
derived from Latin ("refulgent," "irriguous," "umbrageous"); the frequent invocations to, and personifications of, abstractions and inanimate objects; and
the persistent use of periphrasis (a roundabout, elaborate way of saying
something) to avoid what were perceived as low, technical, or commonplace
terms by means of a substitute phrase that was thought to be of higher dignity
and decorum.
In William Wordsworth's famed attack on the neoclassic doctrine of a special
language for poetry, in his preface of 1800 to Lyrical Ballads, he claimed
that there is no "essential difference between the language of prose and metrical
composition"; decried the poetic diction of eighteenth-century writers as
"artificial," "vicious," and "unnatural"; set up as the criterion for a valid poetic
language that it be, not a matter of artful contrivance, but the "spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings"; and, by a drastic reversal of the class-hierarchy
of linguistic decorum, claimed that the best model for the natural expression
of feeling is not upper-class speech, but the speech of "humble and rustic life."