Poetry… is the utterance of a passion for truth, beauty, and power, embodying and illustrating its conceptions by imagination and fancy, and modulating its language on the principle of variety in uniformity. Its means are whatever the universe contains; and its ends, pleasure and exaltation.

- Imagination and Fancy, Leigh Hunt¹

A professor of rhetoric wrote in 1855 that the “aim of Poetry is to please, by addressing the imagination, the taste, the sensibilities.”⁸

But what is poetry? The body of works that huddle under the umbrella of poetry is so diverse that it may demand a very general and overarching definition, one that many authors have attempted to pen.

A variety of definitions of poetry

Attempts at defining poetry seem split between whether or not poetry is to be defined by its purpose, in addition to its characteristics. Those who define poetry by its characteristics alone may be grouped with such luminaries as Aristotle and Plato, who thought poetry to “consist in fiction”², and with Bishop Davenport, who defined poetry as having only two characteristics: that (1) it is a type of literary work, and (2) is made according to a certain form.³ William Mitford wrote that poetry is anything that has “an obvious regularity of measure”.⁷

Blair’s definition, while still focused on the characteristics of poety, takes a different approach, asserting that the essence of poetry is that it is the “language of passion, or of the enlightened imagination”, in addition to its possessing a regular form.²

Other authors attempt to define poetry also by its purpose. Merton, for example, after criticizing Blair’s definitions, offers that poetry is “that which produces… consciousness of existence, or excitement, or sensation, or effervescence”⁴; Wilson explains that poetry simply “a living, a thrilling, an exciting something”, and “a grasping of the heart”.⁵

Defining poetry by its purpose seems, however, quite unhelpful because it does not make the crucial distinction between poetry and prose. One can certainly feels excitement and other sensations from reading a novel.

Versification distinguishes poetry from prose?

Crucially, Merton identifies versification as what distinguishes poetry from prose: “versification is the only difference between prose and poetry”.⁴ This is probably true with the exception of “prose poetry”, a literary work in the form of prose, but that has an expression of thought and a movement that allude to poetry.⁶

If we are to consider prose poetry as a type of poetry, we are then forced to expand our definition of poetry to encompass any literary work that uses devices commonly associated with poetry.

A conclusion on the definition…

I submit to the reader, then, that poetry should broadly be defined as encompassing literary works that employ versification, adherence to a metrical form, or devices associate with poetry. This may seem like a cyclical definition at first glance, but it encompasses the fact that poetry is an evolving field.

As societies change, so will art and our definition of poetry and what constitutes a poem; already we see examples of the boundaries of poetry being blurred, such as with the recognition of prose poems. But perhaps that is the true power of poetry as an art form: that it alludes to formal structure but is flexible enough to change with societies.

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