Plenty of mystery remains. In addition to what we might call artistic functions, there are also social ones. And just because the world built up by common sense and natural science is an inadequate world (a skeleton which needs the filling of sensation before it can live), therefore the moment when we realize its inadequacy is the moment when the higher arts find their opportunity. If examined closely, the poems on poetry are as revealing as the critical prose of the author when it comes to understanding their approach to the artistic creation process and function of poetry. The ancients found poetry not so much in sensible accidents as in essential forms and noble associations; and this fact marks very clearly their superior education. However, the sequence of words in poetry is different from that of prose. In various forms—popular song including “folk” and rap, limericks and other light verse, rallying cries of street demonstrations, naïve compositions for birthdays and other special occasions—rhythmic language thrives. Only we still observe (as in the child, in dreams, and in the poetry of ignorant or mystical poets) that the intensity of inwardly generated visions does not involve any real increase in their scope or dignity. Measure is a condition of perfection, for perfection requires that order should be pervasive, that not only the whole before us should have a form, but that every part in turn should have a form of its own, and that those parts should be coordinated among themselves as the whole is coordinated with the other parts of some greater cosmos. For this reason, poetry makes everything (and, yes, nothing) happen, especially in a consumer society prone to assessing and dispensing value to everything from lap dances to teachers' salaries. The six functions of language. This dynamic model seems useful from a descriptive standpoint. Painting, architecture, and gardening, with the art of stage setting, have the visible landscape for their object, and to those arts we may leave it. The imagination of a great poet, on the contrary, is as orderly as that of an astronomer, and as large; he has the naturalist's patience, the naturalist's love of detail and eye trained to see fine gradations and essential lines; he knows no hurry; he has no pose, no sense of originality; he finds his effects in his subject, and his subject in his inevitable world. Write. If Whitman’s work evokes widespread approval, then culture and civilization are nudged in a certain direction. This discovery need not be an ethical gain—Macbeth and Othello attain it as much as Brutus and Hamlet—it may serve to accentuate despair, or cruelty, or indifference, or merely to fill the imagination for a moment without much affecting the permanent tone of the mind. Rhyme most often occurs at the ends of poetic lines. Functions of Poetry a) To help in the expression of emotions. He dips into the chaos that underlies the rational shell of the world and brings up some superfluous image, some emotion dropped by the way, and reattaches it to the present object; he reinstates things unnecessary, he emphasizes things ignored, be paints in again into the landscape the tints which the intellect has allowed to fade from it. Poetry must blend the natural with the artificial as it subordinates art to nature. 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. It must find them or else be blown back among the ghosts. Email This BlogThis! At first, the two may appear close for both of them actually work with words. Thus it seems that Aristotle was justified in making the plot the chief element in fiction: for it is by virtue of the plot that the characters live, or, rather, that we live in them, and by virtue of the plot accordingly that our soul rises to that imaginative activity by which we tend at once to escape from the personal life and to realize its ideal. Learn with flashcards, games, and more — for free. They dominated the world as we no longer dominate it, and lives, as we are too distracted to live, in the presence if the rational and the important. If it evokes yawns, derision, or disdain, they are nudged in another. Our intelligence has become complex, and language, to express our thoughts, must commonly be more rapid, copious, and abstract than is compatible with singing. For instance, when you meet a friend after a lengthy time, you say, “ It ’s been ages since I last saw you. They have been willing to leave their world ugly as a whole, after stuffing it with a sufficient profusion of beauties. So that the art of singing is now in the same plight as that of sculpture—an abstract and conventional thing surviving by force of tradition and of an innate but now impotent impulse, which under simpler conditions would work itself out into the proper forms of those arts. We feel instinctively that it would be insulting to speak of any man to his face as we should speak of him in his absence, even if what we say is in the way of praise: for absent he is a character understood, but present he is a force respected. How does it help us in our lives? If we may then define poetry, not in the formal sense of giving the minimum of what may be called by that name, but in the ideal sense of determining the goal which it approaches and the achievement in which all its principles would be fulfilled, we may say that poetry is metrical and euphuistic discourse, expressing thought which is both sensuous and ideal. 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. Coleridge poses numerous questions regarding the nature and function of poetry and then answers them. He will read himself through and almost gather a meaning from his experience; at least he will half believe that all he has been dealing with was a dream and a symbol, and raise his eyes toward the truth beyond. Poetry raised to its highest power is then identical with religion grasped in its inmost truth; at their point of union both reach their utmost purity and beneficence, for then poetry loses its frivolity and ceases to demoralize, while religion surrenders its illusions and ceases to deceive. 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.” One man's speech, or one nation's, is compact, crowded with consonants, rugged, broken with emphatic beats; another man's, or nation's, is open, tripping, rapid, and even. Under the accidents of bread and wine lies, says the dogma, the substance of Christ's body, blood, and divinity. He stops at the image, because he stops to enjoy. 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