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Essay on Poetry - Example Papers

Essay on Poetry

According to the Judeo-Christian Bible, God created the world by means of words, by divine fiat. He said "Let there be," and there was. So it was words that brought the world into existence in the first place, and it is words (by means of human fiat, if you will) that create our own worlds as well. For it is by means of words that we apprehend, categorize, and even think and feel and know our world. We even interpret our most important experiences (like falling in love) in terms of the words our culture uses to talk about them.

When I taught my composition courses in college, I presented my classes with two theories about the relationship between language and reality. I called the one ...

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given rise to meaning, it seems to most of us that meaning came before words. That's just how "creative" of our realities words actually are.

Poetry is art by means of words. The word itself is of Greek origin and its etymological meaning is "making" (to say that someone is a poet is to call him or her a "maker"). This oldest of the human arts was born in song (and dance). Rhythm and rhyme (and reason) go hand-in-hand when it comes to poetry. Though the language of poetry is the language of emotions, it is not devoid of rationality either. In a good poem the head is the head of the heart, even as it is the heart that gives life to the head. And this is true even if we accept Pascal's famous dictum about the heart having reasons that reason will not understand.

Trying to define poetry is probably a useless enterprise. The literature on it is vast. Most famous poets have written about it. For Alexander Pope, for example, the essence of it came from what "oft was thought but ...

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Essay on Poetry. (2011, May 27). Retrieved November 23, 2024, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Essay-on-Poetry/99445

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 5/27/2011 04:44:01 AM
Submitted By: bhalu
Category: Poetry & Poets
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 1094
Pages: 4

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