The Definition of Poetry

Rizka Elfira : The Moral Values In Some Of Robert Frost’s Poems, 2010.

CHAPTER III A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF POETRY IN ENGLISH

LITERATURE

3.1 The Definition of Poetry

Etymologically, the word “poetry” derived from the Greek word poiein means to make or to construct. Poietis means the maker, and then we have the work poet and poetess, the writer. Poietis means the making and it becomes poetry, the art of a poet. Poem is a piece of writing in verse form. Verse is a regular metric line. Defining poetry is difficult because the meaning has varied from one place to another. The great philosopher Aristotle defines poetry as an imitation of life. Wordsworth states that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. Poetry becomes less frightening if we realize that it is always concerned with ordinary human concerns, with the daily matters of everybody life. Below are some definitions of poetry by some well known writer: S.T. Coleridge: Poetry is the product of the poet’s imagination and the best words in the best order. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Poetry is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of thing, to pass the brute body and search the life and reason which cause it to be existed. For it isn’t meter, but a meter making argument idea that, make a poem. The Rizka Elfira : The Moral Values In Some Of Robert Frost’s Poems, 2010. poet has a new thought. He has a whole new experience to unfold. He will be the richest in his fortune. Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty. Its sole arbiter is with intellectual or with the conscious it has only collateral relation. Unless incidentally it has no concern with truth and beauty. William Wordsworth: Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. A.E. Housman: Poetry s not the thing said but the way of saying it in other word meaning is of important, form is all important. Samuel Johnson: Poetry is the art of writing pleasure with truth by calling imagination to help reason. L. Byron: Poetry is the lava of imagination whose eruption prevents the earthquake. Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poetry is the record of the best and the happiest moment and the best mind. Lucelles Ubercombie: Poetry is the expression of imaginative experience, valid, simply, such as communicable given by language which employ every available and appropriate device. And according to Robert Frost, poetry is a rhythmical composition of words expressing attitude, designed to surprise and delight and to arouse an emotional response Kennedy, 1978:5.

3.2 The Kinds of Poetry