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  #31  
Unread 10-03-2014, 12:36 PM
Barb Hawes Barb Hawes is offline
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I am surprised that in this long thread, the word 'craft' did not appear more often.

Here is my pebble thrown into the lake:

The poet is concerned with the craft of poetry.
The critic and, often, the educator is concerned with the science of poetry.
The audience is concerned with the art of poetry.

Let me clarify that the audience is there because they love the form, not because it is required by school or society. The groups are not exclusive.

As for a definition of poetry, I am content to live in the indefinable. It is a place where I am continuously delighted by the conversation. Let me add two quotes from Edith Franklin Wyatt's essay from Poetry Magazine, October 1912:

"[Poetry is] the infinite music of words meant to speak the little and the great tongues of the earth."

"It does not occur to them [educated people] simply to listen to the nightingale. But poetry, I believe, never speaks her beauty—certainly never her scope and variety, except on the condition that in her presence one sits down quietly with folded hands, and truly listens to her singing voice."

Last edited by Barb Hawes; 10-04-2014 at 12:30 AM.
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  #32  
Unread 10-03-2014, 02:54 PM
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Wintaka Wintaka is offline
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The simplest definition, "poetry is verbatim", works for me. No other encompasses all subjects, forms, genres, applications, cultures and languages.

-o-
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  #33  
Unread 10-04-2014, 09:35 AM
Richard Epstein Richard Epstein is offline
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Michael's right about the poet/critics. After Aristotle (whose bawdy limericks have not survived), the great critics who are not at least highly accomplished poets are few. Cleanth Brooks was a master explicator, and there's Northrup Frye, which suggests that there are other academics. But think of the roll call in English -- Sidney, Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, Eliot, Ransom, Auden, Jarrell, Empson, to list only the most obvious. Even Yvor Winters wrote poetry which his acolytes thought was good.

RHE
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  #34  
Unread 10-05-2014, 01:32 AM
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Ann Drysdale Ann Drysdale is offline
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In the film The Baby of Mācon, the most memorable scene (for me) is the moment when the spoilt child, Cosimo de Medici, unable to come to terms with the fact that he is both in and outside the action, is consoled by his courtiers, who tell him that it is only a play, with music.

Cosimo stamps his foot and asks if, when he dies, people will say that his life was “only a play, with music”. A young woman tells him, in a voice full of compassion, “Sir, be grateful for the music; most of us die in silence.”

For me, poetry is the music. For what it’s worth.

Editing back to say - "and vice versa". In case it wasn't obvious.

Last edited by Ann Drysdale; 10-05-2014 at 02:00 AM.
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