228 chapter six
able language, to create things that intensify language and yet defy
it. These things may be supremely personal and yet experienced as
intersubjective, even if we cannot account for everything we feel about
them by mobilizing yet more words.
The undefinability of poetry is illustrated by the number of its defi-
nitions through the ages. Depending on context—literary, scholarly,
aphoristic—divergent criteria are brought to bear. To name a few ar-
chetypes, in addition to what we have seen so far:
(A) Definitions through bootstrapping, in abstractions, such as “po-
etry is (the expression in words of) the ineffable,” “poetry is saying the
unsayable,” or couched in imagery and thus mere examples of what is
to be defined: “poetry is a mirror.”^7
(B) Definitions that beg the question, such as “poetry is the literary
expression of beauty,” or Coleridge’s “poetry = the best words in the
best order,” or Shelley’s extraordinary claim that “poetry is a record
of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.”
(C) Canonical, abstract definitions such as the traditional Chinese
“poetry articulates what is on the mind intently” or “poetry verbal-
izes emotion,” or Wordsworth’s “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings.” Without wanting to misconstrue their meaning and
disregard the cultural context and the connotations of either phrase, it
is easy to produce doubtful instances of poetry thus defined.
(D) Definitions based on the text’s visual qualities, such as “poetry is
literary texts whose lines don’t cover the full width of the page,” or “for
poetry, the author determines where on the page the words end up,
not the typesetter.”^8 While statements such as these can be useful to
make widespread assumptions about poetry explicit, their limitations
are obvious. They focus on what the text looks like and pay no atten-
tion to its sound. This problem may to some extent be remedied: for
instance, by saying that poetry has rhyme. But that is an unsatisfactory
solution, for there can clearly be such a thing as musicality in prose,
meaning rhyme and rhythm in their broadest sense. Also, these state-
ments attach disproportional importance to line breaks, which are but
one feature of certain kinds of poetry from certain times and places.
Significantly, there has always been much less ado about definitions
of prose. This makes sense if we bear in mind that, generally, prose
(^7) Preminger 1965: 640, 644.
(^8) Krol 1982: 3-4.