Definition of Poetry Essay Example for Free

Definition of Poetry EssayAccording to W.H.Hudson we all have a sniff out of what poetry constitutes. There are innumerable definitions of poetry given by poets and critics of poetry and out of which Hudson chooses some famous definitions.They are given below * Johnson deliberate composition , it is the art of uniting pleasure with rectitude by calling sight to the help of reason * Macaulay we mean the art of employing wrangle in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination, the art of doing by means of words what the painter does by means of colours * Carlyle We volition call Musical thought* Shelley In a general sense may be defined as the expression of the imagination * Hazlitt It is the language of the imagination and the passions * Leigh Hunt 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 unity * Coleridge Poetry is the a ntithesis of science, having for its immediate prey pleasure, not truth * WordsworthIt is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge and the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science * Edgar Allan Poe It is the rhythmic entry of beauty * Keble A vent for overcharged feeling or a full imagination * Doyle It expresses our dissatisfaction with what is present and close at hand * Ruskin The suggestion by the imagination, of overlord grounds for the noble emotions * Prof. Courthope The art of producing pleasure by the just expression of imaginative thought and feeling in metrical language * Mr. Watts-Dunton The concrete and aesthetical expression of the human mind in emotional and rhythmical language * Matthew Arnold* It is simply the most delightful and perfect form of utterance that human words can reach * It is nothing less than the most perfect speech of man that in which he comes nearest to being able to utter the truth * It is a criticism of life u nder the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beautyAs Hudson postulate when we look at them critically, and compare them with one another, certain disturbing facts about them become clear. Commenting on these definitions Hudson concludes they are almost distracting in their variety because the subject is approached from many another(prenominal) different points of view. Some, strictly speaking, fail to define, because they express rather what is poetical in general, wherever it may be found, than what is specifically poetry.Some, on the other hand, are likewise narrow and exclusive, because they recognize only the particular kind of poetry in which the writer happened to be personally interested.