What is Poetry?

After seeing all that poetry could be, I can honestly say I still do not know what it is. It sounds ilogical, but this art, usually in the form of words, I cannot describe with them. It would be defining it with itself. I could say poetry is the art of putting words together and creating images, feelings and experiences... but that is Literature in general. Maybe a definition to me would be "Poetry is how we put words together to form everything but them". Quite unclear, but maybe I could make something out of there. I also liked the definition seen in class about the third level of how to say things. 

It is said that poetry in life does not have to be exactly what poetry as a literary genre is. And then I say, why not? Somehow they have to relate from each other, otherwise, they would not be called the same. A poetic life, is it a life full of exaggerations? (And I am not meaning only the bad exaggerations) Maybe. But can it also be the way a person feels and tells their life? Yes, but that anyone can do. So poetry is nothing? Nothing but a mere nice arrangement of words put together so that a situation, an image, or whatever it describes sounds nicer, more powerful, and so on? Yes, maybe. So what I can say is that poetry is not staying in the middle, it is not being in where the water is liquid. It is choosing a side, a side in which either the water will boil or will freeze. It means not to be in the steady part of whatever situation, but going deeper into it, telling it, giving meaning to it, put the situation in the right place so that it can fit many others in its meaning. It means not only to describe, but to put a layer of words that can tell better and at the same time worse what we want to say.

 I believe it has to be that unclear, that it comes out together completely clear. Maybe I am not making myself clear trying to define poetry, but I guess that is the trick. And as I said, I just cannot describe precisely what poetry is. Dictionaries, who wants a static thing to define another thing that is not at all static? They do not understand each other. 

Maybe with another example. What happens when you mix dirt, water and a seed? Many things, but then the perspective in which a poet sees it, can change the whole context and not only make a plant grow. 

As in cooking, poetry can have many recipies. And I have my favorite poetry dish. It can be baked in endless combinations, but still, the ingredients are what make the dish special to me. I rather prefer poetry that has a lot of figurative language, metaphors, similes... I like it to be like a code, a code that can be desciphered, not only by imagining it, but also by living it as you read it. "To read between lines", I do not like it. I prefer to read under lines in poetry, because there is a hidden meaning, and then when you can feel the meaning and know the feeling, that is when you get a poem and say "Wow". That is what I like. 


And form. I believe poetry can be found in so many ways, that a line in the middle of a novel can be poetry. It can also have the traditional form of lines, but then again, we have examples of poems making shapes or drawings. Everything but steadiness. So as a conclusion, I do not know what poetry is. 

What is Literature?

After having used the term for more than half of my life, it was not but until these past few days that I, along with my teacher and classmates, took the time to build and analyze a convincent definition of what literature is. This recquired our experience with it and a lot of brainstorming about it to finally reach our precious definition.

So, what is Literature? There are as many definitions for literature as opinions exist. We usually think about words like reading, writing, novels, books, stories, poetry, library, words, art, written language, feelings, thoughts... the list can be endless. The challenge now is putting all this together to build the definition. We can build our definition like this:

"Literature is the art of writing, reading or analyzing written thoughts, ideas or feelings that are put into paper with written words, or better said, language; and this forms a book with stories, poems, etc."

I think the definition itself is clear, and convincing. But I loved that, by erasing some words, we could tell everything, but with less words. So our final definition was: "Literature is the art of language."

That is it! With that definition we could tell all about it. 

I still thought about it for a minute, as it was the first time I had truly analyzed the concept, and I didn't want to buy it without self-analyzing it.

But thinking about it, what did I think Literature was? I can honestly say that I related the term with thick books, long-plotted stories or a long-developed thesis statement. But I also related it to short stories, (like Poe's) or theatre plays (Shakespeare). And also poems. For me, Literature meant the text had to have a certain level of difficulty to read, and the ideas had to be very well organized and written in a way that would not resemble an ordinary person talking. With all this, I could not have had a very concrete definition, could I? And even though I like reading and I really enjoy writing, I could not know what literature was.

So back to the final definition, it finally convinced me. (And I learnt new things, like storytelling was part of Literature.) "Literature is the art of language".

• For Literature to be called an art, it has to have a certain level of quality and beauty.
• And it definitely tells us about language, not only written but talked.

So I cannot think of a better definition than that, gifting language with beauty, and making it not the common use of it. 

I guess I wasn't that lost. 

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