Poetry 3-Differentiae of Poetry

So, now comes the hard part.

First, let me restate (in order to make very clear) that every individual thing has many characteristics. The task of identifying a differentiae consists of identifying the causal (defining) characteristic (or combination of characteristics, as the case may be), i.e. that (those) which make the individual a part of this concept and not that.

The class and the professor named a few characteristics which seem to follow poetry; emotion, structure (form), metaphors or any image (a metaphor being an image which means something other than it's literal definition), to name a few. While considering which one defines poetry I asked myself: which one is in all poetry, which one can poetry not do without. Of course, I came to the conclusion of emotion. But later it occurred to me that all art is created from emotion. It must be, because an emotion is experienced in response to a value and art is idealized values. So an artist would have an emotional response to his art because it is his values which are being idealized. So, not emotion, that is already implicit in that poetry is an art.

The professor gave some examples of experimental forms of 'poetry' in class which were confusing in that they had some of the characteristics of poetry, yet still did not seem like poetry. The first was a paragraph of prose that was very beautiful, elaborate, and eloquent in it's use of metaphor. The second, a sentence vividly describing an image. While they were emotional and descriptive, they were not poetry in a strict sense, though unnervingly alike to poetry. They were examples of art with characteristics of poetry, undefining characteristics. An example of an undefining characteristic is a human hand. Humans generally have two hands; hands (with 8 fingers and 2 opposable thumbs) are considered to be human. But losing a hand or not being born with any does not preclude one from being human. Conversely, by randomly attaching a human hand to a dog a la Frankenstein or through genetic modification does not create a human, only a weird dog. Similarly, poetry has characteristics which, though common, are not causal in defining poetry. Such things that have some of the undefining characteristics of poetry are called poetic. The examples of experimental 'poetry' were poetic, but not actually poetry in nature. The one thing that neither contained was a structure of poetry, they were both written in the form of prose rather than poetry.

The definition of poetry is art with a repetitive structure. A repeating structure is the one thing poetry can claim that no other language art can. Not, I should point out, simply repetition; anything redundant can accomplish that. No, poetry must be repetitious in it's form, in how it is produced rather than the content that is produced.