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Originally Posted by
MorpheusSandman
It doesn’t matter who calls anything what. They called Pluto a planet before I was born; now they don’t. What they call it is all in how they define “planet,” but whatever you call it changes nothing about the actual object. That was my point about Baudelaire’s “prose poems,” calling them “poems” doesn’t make them any closer to other objects called “poems” than calling 4’33” “music” makes it any closer to other objects called “music.”
I don’t think I’m “dismissing” or “shrugging off” Baudelaire, I just strongly disagree with his (or anyone’s) attempt to redefine things that don’t need redefining.
Funny how you just wrote the Pluto and planet history where people attepted to redefine something and when it is baudelaire or anything shattering your definition of poetry.
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One thing Baudelaire certainly wasn’t was an expert on cognitive linguistics, and being that that’s an area I’ve studied as well, I know how the human brain processes words and why artists are prone to “messing” with denotative limits. It’s all well and good that some artists can provoke us to really think about definitions and limits rather than blindly accepting them, but there comes a point where you can mess with a term so much and include so many objects that the term becomes absolutely useless as a means of fruitful communication.
Newsflash: the term Prose Poem is stabilished for 200 years. It is a bit too late for you to rebel against it. By now, the vast majority of literary students can communicate pretty well with each other using it. So, your claim that "a mess with a term" is null. Come back, stopping dismissing it and deal with.
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I never said everyone agreed with my definitions, what I said was that most every dictionary, textbook, and authoritative reference (eg, Princeton) does. Princeton may be THE reference book for such terms, and let’s see what it says:
You said almost every single, which is obviously ridiculous. And you can throw a list of your references here and it will not deny the list of people who defined poetry differently... but lets deal with Princeton.
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POETRY
I. Means and Ends. A poem is an instance of verbal art, a text set in verse, bound speech… Traditionally these have been taken as the ones offered by pros., i.e. verse form: lineation, meter, sound-pattering, syntactic deployment, and stanza forms… p. has traditionally been distinguished from prose by virtue of being set in verse. What most readers understand as p. was, up until 1850, set in lines which were metrical, and even the several forms of vers libre and free verse produced since 1850 have been built largely on one or another concept of the line. Lineation is therefore central to the traditional conception of p. Prose is cast in sentences; p. is cast in sentences cast into lines. Prose syntax has the shape of meaning, but poetic syntax is stretched across the frame of meter or the poem’s visual space, so that it has this shape as well as meaning. Whether the pros. of the poem is primarily aural, visual, or mixed it creates design. (p. 938-939)
I could also cite Furniss/Bath’s textbook, and many others that mention “line” as the unifying element of all objects we call poetry.
Yes, they define poem and are careful to say it is a "traditional" view. They even mention the view that poetry was view until the middle of XIX century. But the most notable thing is what they say in the whole book. (they are talking about two different approaches on metric and prosody).
"It was reportedly Jeremy Bentham who said that he knew poetry when he saw it: the words did not run all the way to the right-hand side of the page. But this seems a little confused: surely Bentham was not talking about poetry but rather verse. Verseform is the mode of presentation of lang. which segments speech into lines, which on the printed page do not fill all the space to the right, or in recitation are marked at their ends for aural recognition (see LINE). Poetry, most of us would say, is something else, something less definite. Poetry is memorable..." (pg.1024)....
So, The give , sorry, THE given book actually proposes that Poetry is something else. As I said, the distinction between prose and poetry is quite more complex than you are pretending it to be. To deal with this complexity, they add after listing a handful of poetry defintions which do not deal with verses:
"We have, then, not two terms, poetry and prose, but three—poetry, prose, and verse." (and of course, Poem is what they defined by the use of verse. So in the end they are pretty close to say we have 3 things, poetry, prose and poems, just like I said). But one can claim they still think Poetry must have verses. Oh, but no. They do claim otherwise.
"It is possible there could be poetry not set in lines., if one defines poetry in terms of content or compression of content; and certainly there are hybrid forms such as rhythmical prose (see PROSE RHYTHM) and the prose poem (q.v.)." pg.737
Lines here more or less like verses (they work with verses being metrical, not just lines however), They do acknowledge other forms to define poetry (hence why they as encyclopedia do not end the definition in poetry in a few lines), suggest there will be poetry without the line break and of course, consider prose -poetry as a hybrid, you know, something that unify both things and not negate each other. They go on, mentioning they are working with those unities because of their importance and because the majority (not all) poetry takes advantage of the verse organization.
They do not stop of course. They know it is not as simple and add:
"Essentialists—"affectivists" might be a better term—do not consider verseform essential to the definition of poetry and view poets as more and sometimes other than versifiers. For centuries, from Quintilian (Istc. A.D.) to romanticism, it was a critical commonplace that Lucan was a rhetorician or historian who wrote in v. and that Plato, Xenophon (Cyropaedia), and Heliodorus (Ethiopian History) were poets. The major Western proponents of this view incl. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, Sidney, Wordsworth, Shelley, Arnold, and Croce."... pg, 1390.
Oops, so they even add there is an entire critical group that oppose to the definition? Of course, THE encyclopedia cannot ignore their object. One page before, when they mention the confusion that it is all this therminology, they mention
"We must first recognize that the two modes, verses.and prose., intersect the concept "poetry" and its opposite, nonpoetry.". They certainly think you cannot dismiss prose so easily while defining poetry. And that it is not just verse use, rather one of the concepts in the definition. Of course, the new edition of the ecyclopedia changed a bit the definition, ending with the claim that the very defnition of poetry is not stable and there always someone denying an poetic form in a culture. Exactly what you do. (They aslo say Zulu poetry does not have verse, so they again, do not seems to be limited to your definition).
So, can we move on with the idea that Princenton just agrees with you?
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Besides, this is rather beside the point whether or not we can actually find any common link between all objects we call “poems/poetry” and then distinguish them from those we call “prose.”
Well, maybe besides for us, but for the topic starter, that was the point, recall? :D
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Ok, I’ll challenge you: how do we know it is an epic poem? What makes it epic and what makes it a poem?
Sorry, you do not challenge me as I do not need to present anything except contest the previous Eagleton defintion. It's (not the only example) poetry. How the definition that is minimalist can ignore this poem? It cann't.
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Right, she expressed what poetry meant to her; Baudelaire took elements that constituted poetry FOR HIM, put them in prose, and called it a prose poem. You keep using the term “poetic devices” but what makes those devices strictly poetic and not, you know, prosaic?
Baudelaire did no such thing. He opted for an already existing form, so he could stretch the boundaires of prose with poetry. Nothing of "definition what is poetry". Those devices are usually related to poetry due to tradition, that is all.
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IF we define poetry as “lineated literature” and prose as “non-lineated literature” then it is absolutely impossible to combine them at the same time, the same way something can’t be both alive and dead (barring Shrodinger’s Cat), or fat and thin, or tall and short, or whatever. Of course, that’s IF we define them that way; I’m arguing we should, you’re arguing that we shouldn’t. I would challenge that if you don’t, the distinction between them becomes impossible to delineate (no pun intended). Now, one might could combine lineated literature and non-lineated literature in a single work, and perhaps THEN you’d have a prose poem, but even then the prose and the poetry would be separate from each other within the work.
Of course, people already combined it. Basho for example. But the problem is: a definition that is not satisfactory must be challenged.
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LOL, what a terrible example! What’s written down are the “written” words, and what’s spoken are the “spoken” words. There’s nothing diametrically oppositional about them at all!
you must be joking, tell me you are joking. Oral Literature does not deal with any written word, or you are unaware of this? Oral Literature is a famous oxymoron, something quite discussed among oral literature students. Because you know, Oral Word and Writen word are exactly two oposites that do not exist together at all.
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To use a better example: you can pour water into a cup. You can take that same water and freeze it to make ice. That water can never be both water and ice at the same time. However, you could freeze that water, and pour another glass of different water, so you could have the same molecules in two different forms. The first example (same water both frozen/liquid) is what I mean about prose/poetry. The exact same text can’t exist in two diametrically opposed states (lineated VS non-lineated) simultaneously; what you’re talking about is the second example, having two different forms of the same general substance (frozen/liquid, spoken/written)
Verse, not verse. Two forms.
See your both Eaglaton put a Lawrence poem in the freezer and removes, changing it from Ice (verse) to water (prose).
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What I’m calling a fallacy is the notion that those things that Baudelaire transposed from poetry to prose were what made the poetry poetry in the first place.
Good for him.
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Well, if you agree Baudelaire agrees with Eagleton about poetry being founded on the notion of “verse,” then what are we arguing about?! All I’m saying is that Baudelaire’s “prose poems” weren’t actual poems.
You, I dunno. You went to argue and then we certainly advanced over the theme. Go and check my first post on this thread.
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Poetic means things associated with poetry, not things that denote/define poetry; THAT’S where the difference lies. It’s like saying that there’s the act of sex, and then there are “sexy” things that we associate with the act of sex, but which are not the act itself. That’s the difference I’ve been talking about all along. That you can have “sexy” things outside of sex doesn’t make those sexy things sex; that you can have “poetic” things outside of poetry doesn’t make those poetic things poetry. Associations, connotations, intensions, etc. ARE NOT denotative definitions.
The word is sexual, not sexy. Sexy is more close to sensuality than sexuality. And Poetic means things related to poetry and with the traits of poetry (so if you say this text is poetic is because it has poetry traits, this prose is poetic, it is because it has poetry traits) and you know, what define us right? Our traits.
