If a critic, in despair of giving a serious definition of poetry, should be satisfied with saying that poetry is metrical discourse, he would no doubt be giving an inadequate account of the matter, yet not one of which he need be ashamed or which he should regard as superficial. Music at the same time has become complex also, and when united with words, at one time disfigures them in the elaboration of its melody, and at another overpowers them in the volume of its sound. In this language function, the main element is the way a message is communicated, and not just the message itself. Moreover, preferred functions change, depending on the readers of poems and the times. Because the abstraction by which the world of science and of practice is drawn out of our experience is too violent to satisfy even the thoughtless and vulgar; the ideality of the machine we call Nature, the conventionality of the drama we call the world, are too glaring not to be somehow perceived by all. I love the language, that soft bastard Latin     Which melts like kisses from a female mouth     And sounds as if it should be writ on satin     With syllables which breathe of the sweet South,     And gentle liquids gliding all so pat in     That not a single accent seems uncouth,     Like our harsh Northern whistling, grunting guttural     Which we're obliged to hiss and split and sputter all. We may observe this process in the simplest cases. But in some single direction our will finds self-expression, and understands itself; runs through the career which it ignorantly covered, and gathers the fruits and the lesson of that enterprise. When Ossian, mentioning the sun, says it is round as the shield of his fathers, the expression is poetical. Labels. If he seems sometimes to obscure a fact, it is only because he is restoring an experience. Poetry: Poetry And The Functions Of Poetry; Poetry: Poetry And The Functions Of Poetry. If poetry in its higher reaches is more philosophical than history, because it presents the memorable types of men and things apart from unmeaning circumstances, so in its primary substance and texture poetry is more philosophical than prose because it is nearer to our immediate experience. Poetry is a lot of things to a lot of people. It can move. The elementary sounds are prescribed by the language we use, and the selection we may make among those sounds is limited; but he arrangement of words is still undetermined, and by casting our speech into the moulds of metre and rhyme we can give it a heightened power, apart from its significance. Our intelligence has become complex, and language, to express our thoughts, must commonly be more rapid, copious, and abstract than is compatible with singing. So that even if the difference between verse and prose consisted only in measure, that difference would already be analogous to that between jewels and clay. Looked at as an empirical phenomenon rather than an ideal concept, poetry reveals functions that are various and overlapping. 1 file of textual records. Entertaining pleasure suggests mirth and relaxation, while the pleasure of value indicates information and learning. Seeing a poem as having a function is not likely to make poems any easier to write, though it may help to explain why a particular poem was anthologized while another was not, why one reputation rose while another fell, why a style is embraced that a few years before was shunned—or vice versa. It is, therefore, not by characterization as such that the ultimate message can be rendered. It belongs to an apprenticeship, but in this case the apprenticeship of genius. It is easier for words to be poetical without any thought, when they are felt merely as sensuous and musical, than for them to remain so when they convey an abstract notion—especially if that notion be a tart and frigid sophism, like that of the couplet just quoted. Poetry can entertain or amuse, we say. (But neither is the inverse true: a minuscule audience is not a sign of anointment.) Such insensibility to the highest poetry is no more extraordinary than the corresponding indifference to the highest religion; nobility and excellence, however, are not dependent on the suffrage of half-baked men, but on the original disposition of the clay and the potter; I mean on the conditions of the art and the ideal capacities of human nature. Poetry Structure and Its Usage in Poems. Indeed, at any moment in history, certain poems, and the communal response to them, can be taken as a social definition of a sane and desirable attitude toward experience. Context area. And he is not a complete poet if his whole imagination is not attuned and his whole experience composed into a single symphony. Posted by awin wijaya Posted on 12:54 AM with 17 comments. Poet Daisy Fried expands upon the idea: “But politically-alert poetry is no more intrinsically useful than any other poetry…the kind of poetry written to make us feel better, for example” along with poet and professor Major Jackson: “The function of poetry is that it does not have any function beyond its own construction and being-in-the-world.” Indeed, in such works as "The Revolt of Islam" or "Endymion" there is already more than mere metre and sound; there is the colour and choice of words, the fanciful, rich, or exquisite juxtaposition of phrases. 00066--What is the function of Poetry according to Wordsworth? If he is short-sighted, they are blind, and his poetic world may seem to them sublime in its significance, because it may suggest some partial lifting of their daily burdens and some partial idealization of their incoherent thoughts. In this same manner, where poetry rises from its elementary and detached expressions in rhythm, euphuism, characterization, and story-telling, and comes to the consciousness of its highest function, that of portraying the ideals of experience and destiny, then the poet becomes aware that he is essentially a prophet, and either devotes himself, like Homer and Dante, to the loving expression of the religion that exists, or like Lucretius or Wordsworth, to the heralding of one which he believes to be possible. The main function of poetry is to elevate human mind. Our descent into the elements of our being is then justified by our subsequent freer ascent toward its goal; we revert to sense only to find food for reason; we destroy conventions only to construct ideals. But when the poet enlarges this theatre and puts into his rhapsodies the true visions of his people and of his soul, his poetry is the consecration of his deepest convictions, and contains the whole truth of his religion. e) To enable the growth of language and vocabulary. Thus the picture of an unmeaning passion, of a crime without an issue, does not appear to our romantic apprehension as the sorry farce it is, but rather as a true tragedy. Functions of Poetry a) To help in the expression of emotions. c) To convey messages in the briefest way possible. A slight change in word choice can cause big changes in the way that the reader perceives a concept within a poem. One simple way to use metonymy in poetry is to call something by a name that makes it less technical or specific, and more abstract or “archetypal.” For example, if a poet writes a line to include someone bleeding, but instead of the word “blood” uses the word “life,” it creates a different impression for many readers. b) To widen our perception, imaginations, and ideas as human beings. This quality, which is that almost exclusively exploited by the Symbolist, we may call euphuism—the choice of coloured words and rare and elliptical phrases. When the veil of convention is once removed from our eyes by the poet, we are better able to dominate any particular experience and, as it were, to change its scale, now losing ourselves in its infinitesimal texture, now in its infinite ramifications. The analysis of this definition gives us the sense that the function of poetry is to ennoble the reader. Let us now dwell a little on this higher function of poetry and try to distinguish some of its phases. Gravity. It is a situation we must learn to live with. Why? This aberration, as we see in the case of Wordsworth, is not inconsistent with a high development of both the faculties which it confuses—I mean vision and feeling. Poetry With Hyperboles: Hyperbole is the need for over-exaggeration to create the significance of humor. Expression is a misleading term which suggests that something previously known is rendered or imitated; whereas the expression is itself an original fact, the values of which are then referred to the thing expressed, much as the honours of the Chinese mandarin are attributed retroactively to his parents. He also examines the ways in which poetry differs from other kinds of artistic activity, and the role and significance of metre as an essential and significant part of a poem.. “Poetry, like all art, has a trinitarian function: creative, redemptive, and sanctifying,” Vassar Miller asserted. But even if saliva is not the whole essence of poetry, there is an unmistakable and fundamental diversity of effect in the various vocalization of different poets, which becomes all the more evident when we compare those who use different languages. The thrilling adventures which he craves demand an appropriate theatre; the glorious emotions with which he bubbles over must at all hazards find or feign their correlative objects. Instead of rising to imagination, we sink into mysticism. Out of these battles, protracted, messy, inconclusive, emerges something that for lack of a better term we call our civilization. We must place them in that indispensable environment which the landscape furnishes to the eye and the social medium to the emotions. Poetry then is one of the three major branches of literature. We may deride their practice as conventional, but they could far more justly deride ours as insignificant. Such poetry is not great; it has, in fact, a tedious vacuity, and is unworthy of a mature mind; but it is poetical, and could be produced only by a legitimate child of the Muse. The differentiation of the passions, as far as consciousness is concerned, depends on the variety of the objects of experience—that is, on the differentiation of the senses and of the environment which stimulates them. What are the functions of literature? 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