What did the Lilliputians think of Gulliver? "Gulliver's Travels" as a satirical and philosophical work

Terminology

Rhythm(Greek rhythmos, from rheo teku) in poetry is the general orderliness of the sound structure of poetic speech.

“Poetry and prose are the phenomena of language,” says Wilhelm Humboldt, which is the starting point of the theory of poetry. The general course of human thought is the explanation of the new, the unknown through the means of what has already been known, known, named.

The creation of language continues unceasingly and in our time there is a constant systematization of the external world through the introduction of new phenomena to already named impressions. The child sees an unknown object - a ball on a lamp - and, adding it to the known impression, calls the ball “watermelon”. The poet sees a special movement of the treetops and, finding in his stock of impressions one that is most suitable for this movement, says: “The treetops are falling asleep.” The people, seeing a new method of transportation, create a name for it based on its most outstanding feature: “cast iron”. This is how each new word is created; every word is a “figurative expression”; there are no “own” expressions and words; all words - from the point of view of their origin - are “the essence of the path” (Gerber), that is, poetic works. “The ability to systematically designate objects and phenomena (with articulate sounds - words) poses a problem for knowledge that can only be resolved on the basis of poetic abilities” (Borinsky). In accordance with this, poetry is recognized as a special type of thinking, opposed to prose and science; poetry is thinking in verbal images, while prose is thinking through abstractions, diagrams, and formulas. “Science and art equally strive for knowledge of the truth,” notes Carrier, “but the first moves from fact to concept and to the idea and expresses the thought of being in its universality, strictly distinguishing between an individual case and a general rule - the law, while the second embodies the idea in a separate phenomenon and merges the idea and its visual manifestation (image) into the ideal.

Poetry does not say in the abstract: the place of this new phenomenon in the system is such and such; it seems to identify it with another phenomenon, which is an image of the first, and thereby outlines its place in the system - roughly and clearly, but sometimes surprisingly deeply. What is an image? This is a reproduction of a single, specific, individual case, which has the property of being a sign, a substitute for a whole series of diverse phenomena. For human thought, burdened by the fragmentation of the world and seeking generalizing forms in order to satisfy its eternal “thirst for causality” (German. Causalitätsbedürfniss), the poetic image is precisely such a generalizing principle, the basis on which the ununited phenomena of life are grouped by organized masses.

Poetry can be called the knowledge of the world with the help of images, symbols, and this figurative way of thinking is characteristic of everyone - children, adults, primitive savages, and educated people. Therefore, poetry is not only where great works are (like electricity, not only where there is a thunderstorm), but, as can be seen from its embryonic form, words are everywhere, every hour and every minute, where people speak and think. “Poetry is everywhere where behind the few features of a certain closed image there is a variety of meanings” (Potebnya). In its content, a poetic image may be no different from the prosaic thought itself, from an indication of the simplest everyday fact, such as the fact that “The sun is reflected in a puddle.” If for the listener this indication is only a message about a physical fact, then we have not left the limits of prose; but since the opportunity has been given to use a fact as an allegory, we are in the realm of poetry. In a prosaic sense, a particular case would remain a private case; poeticized, it becomes a generalization. A message about an insignificant perception - “The sun is reflected in a puddle” - gains the ability to talk about something completely different, for example, about “the spark of God in the soul of a corrupt person.” A single incident in the hands of a poet becomes suggestive, says modern aesthetics; he “prompts”, as Alexander Veselovsky translates this term; it acquires the property of being allegorical and is suitable for countless applications, says Potebnya.

What place poetic thinking occupies in the development of human thought in general and what properties of the mind determine the origin of this method of explaining phenomena is best seen from its comparison with a similar type of thought - the so-called mythological thinking. Therefore, the mental foundations of mythology are a necessary component of modern poetics. The basis of the mythical mindset is, as in poetic thinking, the analogy of the phenomenon being explained with an invented image; but poetic thinking clearly sees fiction in this image, mythical thinking takes it for reality. Saying: “Cholera is coming,” poetic thinking has no claims to the anthropomorphic reality of this image; the mythical, on the contrary, is so imbued with its real character that it finds it possible to fight it by plowing, drawing a boundary over which the personified “Cholera” cannot cross. Having noticed a common feature between an epidemic and a living being, primitive thought, in which one sign of a phenomenon occupies the entire breadth of consciousness, hastened to transfer into the phenomenon being explained (epidemic) the entire complex of signs of the explanatory image (man, woman); you can not let him into the house by locking the doors; he can be appeased by giving him a sheep. Primitive animism and anthropomorphism are only a special case of this complete identification of the knowable with the known. Therefore, such cases of a mythical view of an object where there is no anthropomorphism are also possible. “A hot, flammable, hot-tempered heart” for us is a poetic image, a metaphor, infinitely far from the idea of ​​the real, physical height of temperature: the mythical view transfers to a hot-tempered heart all the properties of an easily flammable object and therefore freely reaches the conclusion that such a heart is suitable for arson. This was the case in Moscow under Ivan IV the Terrible, when the Glinskys were accused of sprinkling houses with infusion from human hearts and thereby starting a fire. This view is similar in origin and in the form of concrete representation to the poetic one; but there is no allegory in it, there is no main element of poetic thinking - it is completely prosaic. To explain the origin of the black and white coloring of the pelican, Australians tell how the black pelican painted itself white for fighting, just as the savages themselves paint themselves - but did not have time, etc. “This story,” notes Grosse (“Die Aufange der Kunst” ), - of course, is very fantastic, but despite this, it is not at all poetic, but scientific in nature... This is simply a primitive zoological theory.”

From this point of view, it is necessary to introduce some reservations into the generally accepted position that poetry is older than prose: in the complex course of development of human thought, prosaic and poetic elements are inextricably linked, and only theory separates them. In any case, the use of an image as a poetic work requires some power of analysis and presupposes a higher stage of development compared to that at which “ideal ideas had in the eyes of adult men and women the reality that they still have in the eyes of children” (Taylor ). Poetic and prosaic elements are inextricably intertwined in myth: myth lives along with poetry for a long time and influences it. There are, however, facts that indisputably testify to the movement of thought in the direction from myth to poetry. We have such facts in the history of poetic language. The phenomenon of parallelism, which characterizes its earlier stages, bears a strong imprint of mythical thinking: two images - nature and human life - are placed side by side as equivalent and unambiguous.

The green yalinochka moved into the yar, the young girl ran into the Cossack.

There is no longer a direct identification of man with nature in this Cossack song, but the thought has just come out of him. She goes further and begins to insist on the absence of such an identity: simple parallelism turns into negative (“negative comparison”):

It’s not like swallows or killer whales are hovering around the warmth of their nests. Our dear mother is hovering here.

Here it is already directly indicated that the explanatory image should not be identified with the explained one. Even further follows an ordinary poetic comparison, where there is no hint of mixing the objects being compared.

This transition from the mythical method of thinking to the poetic one occurs so slowly that for a long time both systems of thought do not exclude each other. A poetic expression, being a simple metaphor in origin (spring has come), can, due to the so-called “illness of the tongue” (M. Müller), turn into a myth and force a person to attribute to spring the properties of a material image. On the other hand, the proximity of myth makes the ancient poetic language extremely vivid and expressive. “The comparisons of the ancient bards and orators were meaningful, because they, apparently, saw, heard, and felt them; what we call poetry was real life for them.”

Over time, this property of the young language - its imagery, poetry - is violated; words, so to speak, “wear out” from use; their visual meaning and their figurative character are forgotten. To the characteristics of the phenomenon that served as the starting point for its name, the study adds new, more significant ones. When saying: daughter, no one thinks that this actually means “milking”, a bull - “roaring”, a mouse - “thief”, a month - “measurer”, etc., because the phenomenon has received a different place in thought. The word from concrete becomes abstract, from a living image - an abstract sign of an idea, from poetic - prosaic. However, the former need of thought for concrete ideas does not die. She tries to fill the abstraction with content again, sometimes with the old one; it replaces “old words” with new ones, sometimes identical with the old ones in essence, but which have not yet lost the power to give birth to living images: for example, the word “magnanimous” fades, and a new expression, “a man with a big heart”, tautological with the first, more cumbersome and the inconvenient, however, seems to be more vivid and arouses mental movements in a person that the first, which has lost its clarity, is unable to arouse. On this path, more complex, compared to the word, forms of poetry are born. - so called trails.

Trails- this is a consequence of the ineradicable need of human thought “to restore the sensual, stimulating fantasy side of words”; trope- not the material of poetry, but poetry itself. In this sense, the poetic techniques characteristic of folk poetry are extremely curious, and above all the so-called “epic formulas” - constant epithets and so on.

Epic formula, for example, in its common form (epitheton ornans) - only renews, refreshes the meaning of words, “restores its internal form in consciousness,” either repeating it (“doing the deed,” “thinking the thought”), or denoting it with a word of a different root, but of the same meaning (“clear dawn”). Sometimes the epithet has nothing to do with the “own” meaning of the word, but is added to it in order to revive it, to make it more specific (“burning tears”). In subsequent existence, the epithet becomes so fused with the word that its meaning is forgotten - and hence the contradictory combinations arise (in the Serbian folk song the head is certainly fair-haired, and therefore the hero, having killed an arapin (black man), cut off his “brown-haired head”).

Concretization (Versinlichung - y Career) can be achieved by more complex means: first of all, by comparison, where the poet tries to make an image visual through another, more familiar to the listener, more vivid and expressive. Sometimes the poet’s thirst for concrete thinking is so great that he dwells on an explanatory image longer than necessary for the purposes of explanation: tertium comparisonis has already been exhausted, but a new picture is growing; These are the comparisons in Homer (Odysseus) and N.V. Gogol.

So, the activity of elementary poetic forms is broader than the simple revival of the clarity of the word: restoring its meaning, thought introduces new content into it; the allegorical element complicates it, and it becomes not only a reflection, but also an instrument for the movement of thought. “Figures” of speech do not have this meaning at all, the whole role of which is that they give expressiveness to speech. “The image,” defines Gottschall, “follows from the poet’s intuition, the figure - from his pathos; this is a scheme into which a ready-made thought fits.”

Theories of the origin of poetry

Already the simplest form of poetry - the word - is inextricably linked with the musical element. Not only at the so-called pathognomic stage of speech formation, when the word almost merges with the interjection, but also in further stages “the first poetic words were probably shouted or sung.” Gesticulation is also necessarily associated with the sound expressions of primitive man. These three elements are combined in that proto-art, from which its individual types are subsequently distinguished. In this aesthetic aggregate, articulate speech sometimes takes a secondary place, giving way to modulated exclamations; samples of songs without words, songs of interjections were found among various primitive peoples. Thus, the first form of poetry, in which the rudiments of its three main types can already be discerned, is choral action accompanied by dancing. The content of such an “action” is facts from the everyday life of the community, which is both the author and performer of this work, dramatic in form, epic in content and sometimes lyrical in mood. Here there are already elements for further highlighting of poetic genera, originally combined - as Spencer first pointed out - in one work.

Some remarks were also made against this theory of the original “syncretism”, boiling down to the fact that even in a primitive poetic work one or another element can outweigh, and in the poetry of a cultural warehouse the elements of the three main poetic genera are mixed. These objections do not eliminate the theory, especially since it asserts “not confusion, but the absence of distinction between certain poetic genera, poetry and other arts” (Veselovsky). Grosse disagrees with the majority of literary historians and aestheticians who consider drama to be the latest form of poetry, when in fact it is the oldest. In fact, primitive “dramatic action without drama” is drama only from a formal point of view; it acquires the character of drama only later, with the development of personality.

Primitive man, one might say, is subject not so much to individual psychology as to “group psychology” (Völkerpsychologie). The personality feels like an indeterminate part of an amorphous, monotonous whole; she lives, acts and thinks only in an inviolable connection with the community, the world, the earth; her entire spiritual life, all her creative power, all her poetry is imprinted by this “indifference of collectivism.” With such a personality, there is no room for individual literature; in collective performances, choral, general dances, operas and ballets, all members of the clan “alternately play the roles of either actors or spectators” (Letourneau). The subjects of these choral dances are mythical, military, funeral, marriage scenes, etc. Roles are distributed between choir groups; choral groups have lead singers and choreographers; the action is sometimes focused on them, on their dialogue, and here the seeds of the future development of personal creativity are already contained. From this purely epic material regarding the bright events of the day that excite society, poetic works stand out, imbued with general pathos, and not with the personal lyricism of an isolated singer; this is the so-called lyric epic song (Homeric hymns, medieval cantilena, Serbian and Little Russian historical songs). Among them there are songs (for example, the French “historical chanson”) with content not from social, but also from personal history; the lyrical mood in them is expressed very strongly, but not on behalf of the singer himself.

Little by little, however, active sympathy for the events depicted in the song fades away in society; it loses its exciting, topical character and is passed on like an old memory. From the mouth of the singer, weeping along with his listeners, the story passes into the mouth of the epic storyteller; from a lyric-epic song an epic is made, over which they no longer cry. From the formless environment of performers, professional speakers and performers of poetic tales stand out - singers, first communal, singing only among their relatives, then wandering, spreading their song treasures to strangers. This - mimi, histriones, joculatores in Ancient Rome, bards, druids, phyla among the Celts, tulir, then skalds in Scandinavia, trouvères in Provence, etc. Their environment does not remain invariably monotonous: some of them descend down into the public jesters, some rise to written literature, not only performing old songs, but also composing new ones; So, in medieval Germany there were shpilmans on the street (German. Gaukler), at the courts - scribes (German. Schriber) replace old singers. These keepers of the epic tradition sometimes knew several songs about the same heroes, about the same events; It is natural to try to connect different tales about the same thing - at first mechanically, with the help of commonplaces. The vague material of folk songs is consolidated, grouping around a hero popular among the people - for example, Sid, Ilya Muromets. Sometimes epic creativity, like ours, does not go further than these cycles and arches; sometimes its development ends in epic proportions.

Epic stands on the border between group and personal creativity; like other works of art, during this period of personality awakening it is still anonymous or bears a fictitious name of the author, is not individual in style, but already “reveals the integrity of personal design and composition.” A. N. Veselovsky considers three facts of historical life to be the conditions for the emergence of great folk epics: “a personal poetic act, without consciousness of personal creativity; the rise of popular political self-awareness, which required expression in poetry; continuity of the previous song tradition, with types capable of changing meaningfully, in accordance with the requirements of social growth.” The consciousness of personal initiative would lead to an individual assessment of events and to discord between the poet and the people, and therefore to the impossibility of the epic. It is difficult to determine, in general terms, how the consciousness of personal creativity arises; In different cases this issue is resolved differently. The question of the appearance of a poet is immeasurably more difficult than the question of the origin of poetry. It is only possible and important to note that, no matter how great the difference between the impersonal creativity of a primitive community and the most individual creation of personal art, it can be reduced to a difference in the degrees of one phenomenon - the dependence of every poet on a number of conditions, which will be indicated below.

A new system of worldview coincides with the disintegration of the primitive communal way of life; a person begins to feel not like a “toe” of some large organism, but a self-sufficient whole, a personality. He has his own sorrows and joys that are not shared by anyone, obstacles that no one helps him to overcome; the social system no longer fully embraces his life and thoughts, and sometimes he comes into conflict with it. These lyrical elements have previously been found in the epic; Now these expressions of personal life stand out as an independent whole, in a poetic form prepared by previous development. A lyrical song is sung with the accompaniment of a musical instrument; this is indicated by the term itself (lyrics, from Greek. Λίρα ).

The complication of social forms, which has led to opposition in the consciousness of the individual and society, gives rise to a new look at tradition. The center of gravity of interest in the ancient legend moves from the event to the person, to his inner life, to his struggle with others, to the tragic situations in which the contradiction of personal motives and social demands puts him. This prepares the conditions for the emergence of drama. Its external structure is ready - this is an ancient form of choral rite; Little by little, only a few changes are made - the characters are more sharply differentiated from the chorus, the dialogue becomes more passionate, the action is more lively. At first, the material is drawn only from tradition, from myth; then creativity finds poetic content outside the life of gods and heroes, in the life of ordinary people. The extent to which it is rare to turn to fiction at the beginning is evident from the fact that in Greek dramatic literature only one drama is known that is not based on epic material. But the transitional moment necessarily comes with the further decomposition of everyday life, the decline of national self-awareness, the break with the historical past, in its poeticized forms. The poet withdraws into himself and responds to the changing spiritual needs of the surrounding masses with new images, sometimes directly opposed to tradition. A typical example of this new form is the Greek novella of the Decline era. There is no longer any talk about social content here: the subject of the story is the vicissitudes of personal destinies, determined primarily by love. The form also departed from tradition; Everything here is personal - both the individual creator and the plot.

So, the forms of epic, lyric, and drama emerge with sufficient clarity; at the same time, poetry is created by a different author - an individual poet of modern times, according to the view of old poetics, obeying only the impulses of his free inspiration, creating from nothing, infinitely free in choosing the subject for his chants.

This “triple” theory, which separates the former passive exponent of the communal soul from the new, personal poet, is largely rejected by modern poetics. She points out a number of conditions by which the greatest poet, the most unbridled science fiction writer, is bound in his work. The very fact that he uses a ready-made language, having only a comparatively insignificant opportunity to modify it, indicates the role of obligatory categories in poetic thinking. Just as “to speak means to join one’s individual thinking to the general” (Humboldt), so to create means to reckon with its obligatory forms in creativity. The impersonality of the epic poet turns out to be exaggerated, but the freedom of the personal creator is even more exaggerated. He starts from ready-made material and puts it into the form for which there is a demand; he is a product of the conditions of the time. This is especially clearly expressed in the fate of poetic subjects, which live, as it were, their own life, being updated with new content invested in them by a new creator; The germs of some favorite plots of completely modern poetic works are found - thanks to that new branch of knowledge that is called folklore - in the distant past. “A talented poet can attack one or another motive by chance, lead him to imitation, create a school that will follow his track. But if you look at these phenomena from afar, from a historical perspective, all the small touches, fashion and school, and personal trends, fade away in the wide alternation of socio-poetic demands and offers” (Veselovsky).

The difference between the poet and the reader is not in type, but in degree: the process of poetic thinking continues in perception - and the reader processes the finished scheme in the same way as the poet. This scheme (plot, type, image, trope) lives as long as it lends itself to poetic renewal, as long as it can serve as a “constant predicate with a variable subject” - and is forgotten when it ceases to be an instrument of apperception, when it loses the power to generalize and explain something from the stock of impressions .

In the past, research into the origin of poetry was carried out in this direction. Of course, there is no reason to see it as a historical law; this is not a mandatory formula of continuity, but an empirical generalization. Classical poetry went through this history separately, separately and anew, under the dual influence of its primordial principles and the Greco-Roman tradition, the European West went through it separately, and the Slavic world went through it separately. The scheme was always approximately the same, but the exact and general folk-psychological prerequisites for it were not determined; under new social conditions, other poetic forms may emerge, which are apparently impossible to predict.

Therefore, it is unlikely that those deductive principles for the division of poetic genera that theory has long proposed in such diversity can be justified from a scientific point of view. Epic, lyric and drama succeeded each other in the history of poetry; These three forms, without much of a stretch, exhaust the poetic material we have and are therefore suitable as a didactic device for educational purposes - but we should not see them as once and for all forms of poetic creativity. One can see in the epic the predominance of objective elements, in the lyrics - a predominance of subjective ones; but it is no longer possible to define drama as a synthesis of both, if only because there is another form of combining these elements, in a lyric-epic song.

The meaning of poetry in the modern world

Neither the growing predominance of prosaic elements in language, nor the powerful flourishing of science, nor possible transformations of the social structure threaten the existence of poetry, although they can decisively influence its forms. Its role is still enormous; its task is similar to the task of science - to reduce the infinite variety of reality to the smallest possible number of generalizations - but its means are sometimes broader. Her emotional element (see Aesthetics) gives her the opportunity to influence where the dry formulas of science are powerless. Moreover: without the need for precise constructions, generalizing in an unproven but convincing image the endless variety of nuances that elude “

I had never asked this question before, until I saw a question in the “essays and articles” section of one of the authors of stihi.ru, “Poetry - what is it?”, which he asked other authors, readers of stihi.ru and asked not to confuse the definition of poetry and its purpose in your answer; you were encouraged to write your opinions in reviews. I wrote a review, the author of the article was not satisfied with my answer, however, neither was I. I was faced with an even more pressing question about what poetry is after all. Many have written that poetry is life, it is a state of mind, a way to express one’s thoughts and feelings. After reading several answers from other authors (and there was a lot of interesting stuff), the question still remained open. The author who asked a question about poetry asked to answer it in prose, and not in verse, so there were many answers in prose, but still there were a large number of answers in verse, since it is impossible not to talk about poetry in poetry if the lines themselves are born in the depths souls. This seemingly simple question turned out to be complex.
The definition I read in Dahl’s dictionary did not bring me any closer to answering the question: “Poetry is grace in writing; everything artistic, spiritually and morally beautiful, expressed in words, and, moreover, in more measured speech. Poetry, in the abstract, is called grace, beauty, as a property, a quality not expressed in words, and creativity itself, the ability, the gift to renounce the essential, to ascend by dream, imagination to the highest limits, creating prototypes of beauty; finally, the very works called poetry, writings of this kind and rules invented for this: poems, poems and science poetry. Some considered poetry a slavish imitation of nature; others - visions from the spiritual World; others see in it a combination of goodness (love) and truth. A poet is a male piita, a person gifted by nature with the ability to feel, recognize poetry and convey it in words, to create graceful things; poet. Poetic, poetic, relating to poetry, containing it; elegant. Poem of a woman. poetic narrative, poetic story of holistic content."
Dahl's Explanatory Dictionary - (Dal V.I. Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language. St. Petersburg, 1863-1909.)
Other sources also did not provide a satisfactory explanation.

In my opinion, a very good explanation of what poetry is is given in Nadezhda Trubnikova’s poem “Poetry,” written on March 20, 2002:
Nakedness of the soul
Frankness - almost to the point of shamelessness...
Nerves are strings
on them
guides memory with an invisible bow.
Letters-notes, chords-words and running stanzas
written down on white paper
cantata poems

I was lucky enough to get acquainted with the work of Nadezhda Trubnikova quite recently. (Nadezhda Trubnikova was born in Moscow in 1933. She graduated from the Moscow Architectural Institute in 1957. Candidate of Sciences, member of the Union of Architects of Russia since 1960. The first collection of her selected lyrics, “Life in Verse,” was published in 1999, the second collection, “Fate,” in 2001).
One friend gave me a collection of her poems to read, which she gave him as a gift on November 23, 2009, with her autograph. Currently, the author is no longer with us. It is in this collection, called “Nakedness of the Soul,” published in 2004, that the above poem is found, which helped me clarify the question of what poetry is. People, readers, as far as I know, love sincerity, therefore, for me now poetry is, first of all, the sincerity of the soul.

17.09.2017

Reviews

How your thoughts resonate with mine, and mine with yours!

Marina! I sincerely congratulate you on the upcoming 2019 Slavic Year of the EAGLE! May this year bring you and your family prosperity and success, give you new strength to achieve the most fabulous goals, and justify all your hopes. And your determination will help you realize your wildest dreams! Always and everywhere remain yourself!
With deep respect, Vladimir.

Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language (Alabugina)

Poetry

AND, and.

1. Artistic verbal creativity (mainly poetry), as well as works written in verse.

* Poetry and prose. Russian poetry. *

2. trans. Beauty, deep impact on the senses and imagination.

* Poetry of Russian landscape. *

Philosophical Dictionary (Comte-Sponville)

Poetry

Poetry

♦Poesie

An inextricable and almost always mysterious union of music, meaning and truth in the same text, as a result of which a feeling is born. Poetry is truth in song that touches hearts. Poetry should not be confused with versification or even with a poem. It is not very often that a poem is imbued with the spirit of poetry from beginning to end, but prose is quite often poetic.

Aesthetics. encyclopedic Dictionary

Poetry

the art of words with the characteristic rhythmic organization of artistic speech. Taking various poetic forms, the poet’s speech falls out of the context of everyday speech, acquires additional communicative and suggestive properties, and turns into an object of increased attention. If a poetic work meets the highest artistic and aesthetic criteria of beauty and perfection, then it is elevated to the status of a masterpiece and takes a place in the system of universal values ​​of world culture.

Culturology. Dictionary-reference book

Poetry

1) all fiction as opposed to non-fiction;

2) poetic works in their compatibility with literary prose (for example, lyric poetry, drama or novel in verse, poem, folk epic). Poetry and prose are two main types of verbal art, differing in the ways of organizing artistic speech, and above all in rhythm. The rhythm of poetic speech is created by a distinct division into verses, commensurate segments, which in principle do not coincide with syntactic division. Poetry is predominantly monologue. The boundary between poetry and prose is relative.

Ozhegov's Dictionary

BY E ZIA, And, and.

1. Verbal artistic creativity, preferably poetic.

2. Poems, works written in verse. P. and prose. Classical Russian p. Modern p.

3. trans., what. The beauty and charm of something, arousing a sense of enchantment. P. summer morning.

| adj. poetic, oh, oh. Poetic creativity. P. landscape.

Efremova's Dictionary

Poetry

1. and.
   1. :
      1. The art of figuratively expressing thoughts in words; verbal artistic creativity.
      2. Creative artistic genius, creative talent.
      3. Artistic, poetic.
   2. :
      1. Poems, poetic, rhythmic speech (opposite: prose).
      2. A collection of poetic works. people, some era, social group, etc.
      3. Artistic creativity of some kind. a poet, a group of poets from the point of view of his characteristics, distinctive features.
   3. :
      1. trans. Grace, charm of something, deeply affecting the feelings and imagination.
      2. What? sublime, full of meaning.
   4. :
      1. outdated The realm of the imaginary, the world of fantasy.
      2. Something that affects the imagination.

Gasparov. Records and extracts

Poetry

♦ “The newest poetry is divided into two types: poems that are impossible to read, and poems that don’t need to be read” (Alm. “First notebook of the Hell’s Mostovaya circle,” I think 1923, GPU printing house. The poems there were: “In the evenings in a small coffee shop, Matte lights glow. Leafing through a volume of Heine, Turn the thin page") And Veidle, “On Poets,” 124, quoted Luntz: “There are good poems, bad poems and poems as poems; the latter are the most terrible of all.”

♦ according to Shchedrin: “Anyone who is capable of expressing in a non-reprehensible way the vagueness of the feelings that fill him can be a free skimmer.”

♦ Yesenin with a cab driver: which poets do you know? "Pushkin". - And from the living? - “We only make cast iron” (Marienhof).

♦ Poetry - “the confession of an aquatic animal that lives on land, but would like to be in the air.” - K. Sandberg, op. in Roger's dictionary.

Terminological dictionary-thesaurus on literary criticism

Poetry

(Greek poiesis, from poieo - I do, I create) - works in verse, as opposed to works in prose. Sometimes all fiction is called poetry, as opposed to non-fiction. Poetry and prose are two main types of verbal art, differing in the ways of organizing artistic speech; What distinguishes poetry from prose is, first of all, a correctly organized rhythm, which is created by a distinct division of speech into proportionate segments, which often do not coincide with the syntactic division.

RB: types and genres of literature

Corr: prose

Ass: rhythm, verse

* “Poetry has the same special language as music and painting” (A.N. Veselovsky).

“True poetry is not a body into which a soul has been breathed, but a soul that has accepted the evidence of the body” (I.V. Kireevsky). *

encyclopedic Dictionary

Poetry

(Greek: poiesis),

1. to midday 19th century all fiction as opposed to non-fiction.
2. Poetic works, as opposed to literary prose (for example, lyric poetry, drama or novel in verse, poem, folk epic of antiquity and the Middle Ages). Poetry and prose are two main types of verbal art, differing in the ways of organizing artistic speech and, above all, in rhythmic structure. The rhythm of poetic speech is created by a distinct division into verses. In poetry, the interaction of verse form with words (comparison of words in terms of rhythm and rhyme, clear identification of the sound side of speech, the relationship of rhythmic and syntactic structures) creates the subtlest shades and shifts of artistic meaning that cannot be embodied in any other way. Poetry is predominantly monologue: the character’s word is the same type as the author’s. The boundary between poetry and prose is relative; There are intermediate forms: rhythmic prose and free verse.

Ushakov's Dictionary

Poetry

poetry zia[by], poetry, pl. No, wives (Greek poiesis).

1. The art of figurative expression of thoughts in words, verbal artistic creativity. “Pushkin was called upon to be the first poet-artist of Rus', to give her poetry as art, as a beautiful language of feelings.” Belinsky. “All poetry must be an expression of life, in the broad sense of this word, embracing the entire physical and moral world.” Belinsky.

| Creative artistic genius, element of artistic creativity ( poet.). “And poetry awakens in me.” Pushkin.

2. Poems, poetic, rhythmically organized speech; ant.. Poetry and prose. Love poetry. Poetry department (in the magazine).

3. The totality of poetic works of a social group, people, era and so on. (lit.). Proletarian poetry. Poetry of the French Revolution. Romantic poetry. History of Russian poetry.

| The artistic creativity of a poet, a group of poets from the point of view of its features, distinctive features ( lit.). Study Mayakovsky's poetry. Characteristic features of Pushkin's poetry.

4. trans. Grace, charm, amazing imagination and sense of beauty ( books). Poetry of an early summer morning. “It’s fun for me to remember this poetry in hops, grace of mind and heart.” Pushkin.

5. trans. The area of ​​imaginary existence, the world of fantasy ( outdated, often iron.). “(Dolinsky) seems to have a limp in poetry! she suspected him... By the word “poetry” we mean exactly what practical people mean by this word.” Leskov.

Encyclopedia of Brockhaus and Efron

Poetry

Among other arts, poetry occupies a very special place, depending on the element that is usually called its material - words. The word is an instrument of human communication, a means for expressing thoughts; the poet uses it to embody his formless abstract thought into an image. This is an erroneous idea that still persists in everyday life, but has already been destroyed in science, thanks to the successes of philosophical linguistics created by the school of W. Humboldt. “P. and prose are the essence of the phenomenon of language,” says Humboldt’s saying, which should become the starting point of the theory of P. The general course of human thought is the explanation of the new, the unknown through the means of what is already known, known, named. The creation of language, which continues unceasingly in our time (not έργον, but ενέργεια) is a constant systematization of the external world through the addition of new phenomena to impressions that already have a name. The child sees an unknown object - a ball on a lamp - and, adding it to the known impression, calls the ball “watermelon”. The poet sees a special movement of the treetops and, finding in his stock of impressions one that is most suitable for this movement, says: “The treetops fall asleep." The people, seeing a new method of transportation, created a name for it based on its most outstanding feature: “cast iron”. This is how each new word is created; every word is a “figurative expression”; there are no “own” expressions and words; all words- from the point of view of their origin - the essence of the trail(Gerber), i.e. poetic works. “The ability to systematically designate objects and phenomena (with articulate sounds - words) poses a problem for knowledge that can only be resolved on the basis of poetic abilities” (Borinsky). In accordance with this, P. is recognized as a special type of thinking, opposed to prose and science; P. is thinking in words images, while prose is thinking through abstractions, diagrams, formulas. “Science and art equally strive for knowledge of truth,” notes Carriere, “but the first moves from fact to concept and to idea and expresses the thought of being in its universality, strictly distinguishing between an individual case and a general rule - the law, while the second embodies the idea in separate phenomenon and merges the idea and its visual manifestation (image) into the ideal. P. does not say abstractly: the place of this new phenomenon in the system is such and such; she, as it were, identifies it with another phenomenon, which is the image of the first, and thereby outlines its place in a system - roughly and clearly, but sometimes surprisingly deeply. What is an image? It is a reproduction of a single, concrete, individual case, which has the property of being a sign, a substitute for a whole series of diverse phenomena. For human thought, burdened by the fragmentation of the world and looking for generalizing forms, so that to satisfy one’s eternal “thirst for causality” (Causalit ätsbedü rfniss), the poetic image is precisely such a generalizing principle, the basis on which ununited phenomena of life are grouped in organized masses. P. can be called the knowledge of the world with the help of images, symbols, and this figurative way of thinking is characteristic of everyone - children, adults, primitive savages, and educated people. Therefore, P. - not only where great works are (like electricity, not only where there is a thunderstorm), but, as can be seen from its embryonic form - words - everywhere, every hour and every minute, where people speak and think. “P. - wherever behind the few features of a certain closed image there is a variety of meanings” (Potebnya). In its content, a poetic image may be no different from the prosaic thought itself, from an indication of the simplest everyday fact, such as the fact that “The sun is reflected in a puddle.” If for the listener this indication is only a message about a physical fact, then we have not left the limits of prose; but once given the opportunity to use the fact, how allegory , we are in the area of ​​P. In a prosaic understanding, a particular case would remain private; “raised to the pearl of creation”, poeticized, it becomes a generalization. A message about an insignificant perception - “The sun is reflected in a puddle” - gains the ability to talk about something completely different, for example, about the spark of God in the soul of a corrupt person. A special case is made in the hands of the poet suggestive , says modern aesthetics; He prompts , Alexander Veselovsky successfully translates this term; it acquires the property of being allegorical, fits into countless applications - says Potebnya. What place poetic thinking occupies in the development of human thought in general and what properties of the mind determine the origin of this method of explaining phenomena is best seen from its comparison with a similar type of thought - the so-called mythological thinking. Therefore, the chapter on myth (more precisely, on its psychological foundations) is a necessary component of modern poetics (Carri è re, III, 39 - 58; Borinsky, II, 2). The basis of the mythical mindset is, as in poetic thinking, the analogy of the phenomenon being explained with an invented image; but poetic thinking clearly sees fiction in this image, mythical thinking takes it for reality. Saying: “Cholera is coming,” poetic thinking has no claims to the anthropomorphic reality of this image; the mythical, on the contrary, is so imbued with its real character that it finds it possible to fight it by plowing, by drawing a boundary over which the personified cholera cannot cross. Having noticed a common feature between an epidemic and a living being, primitive thought, in which one sign of a phenomenon occupies the entire breadth of consciousness, hastened to transfer into the phenomenon being explained (epidemic) the entire complex of signs of the explanatory image (man, woman); you can not let him into the house by locking the doors; he can be appeased by giving him a sheep. Primitive animism and anthropomorphism are only a special case of this complete identification of the knowable with the known. Therefore, such cases of a mythical view of an object where there is no anthropomorphism are also possible. “A hot, flammable, hot-tempered heart” for us is a poetic image, a metaphor, infinitely far from the idea of ​​the real, physical height of temperature: the mythical view transfers to the hot-tempered heart all the properties of an easily flammable object and therefore freely reaches the conclusion that such a heart is suitable for arson. This was the case in Moscow under John IV, when the Glinskys were accused of sprinkling houses with infusion from human hearts and thereby starting a fire. This view is similar in origin and in the form of concrete representation to the poetic one; but there is no allegory in it, there is no main element of poetic thinking - it is completely prosaic. To explain the origin of the black and white coloring of the pelican, Australians tell how the black pelican painted itself white for fighting, just as the savages themselves paint themselves - but did not succeed, etc. “This story,” notes Grosse (“Die Aufange der Kunst” ), - of course, is very fantastic, but despite this, it is not at all poetic, but scientific in nature. .. This is simply a primitive zoological theory." From this point of view, it is necessary to introduce some reservations into the generally accepted position that poetry is older than prose: in the complex course of development of human thought, prosaic and poetic elements are inextricably linked, and only theory separates them. In any case the use of an image as a poetic work requires some power of analysis and presupposes a higher stage of development compared to that at which “ideal ideas had in the eyes of grown men and women the reality which they still have in the eyes of children” (Taylor). and prosaic elements are inextricably intertwined in myth: myth lives for a long time along with poetry and influences it. There are, however, facts that indisputably testify to the movement of thought in the direction from myth to poetry. We have such facts in the history of poetic language. The phenomenon of parallelism characterizing its earlier stages bear a strong imprint of mythical thinking: two images - nature and human life - are placed side by side, as equivalent and unambiguous.

“Oh, a white web has hung over the mud;

The young girl fell into a Cossack."

There is no longer a direct identification of man with nature, but the thought has just come out of him. She goes further - and begins to insist on the absence of such an identity: simple parallelism turns into negative ("negative comparison"):

"It's not like swallows or killer whales hover their nests around the warmth

My dear mother hangs out here."

Here it is already directly indicated that the explanatory image should not be identified with the explained one. Even further follows an ordinary poetic comparison, where there is no hint of mixing the objects being compared. This transition from the mythical method of thinking to the poetic one occurs so slowly that for a long time both systems of thought do not exclude each other. A poetic expression, being in origin a simple metaphor (spring has come), can, due to the so-called “illness of the language” (see M. Müller), turn into a myth and force a person to attribute to spring the properties of a material image. On the other hand, the proximity of myth makes the ancient poetic. the language is extremely bright and expressive. “The analogies of the ancient bards and orators were meaningful, because they, apparently, saw, heard, and felt them; what we call poetry was real life for them.” Over time, this property of the young language - its imagery, poetry - is violated; words, so to speak, are erased from use; their visual meaning, their “portable” character is forgotten. To the characteristics of the phenomenon that served as the starting point for its name, the study adds new, more significant ones. Speaking: daughter, no one thinks anymore that this actually means “milking”, bull- "roaring" mouse- "thief", month - “meter”, etc., because the phenomenon has received a different place in thought. The word goes from concrete to abstract, from a living image to an abstract sign of an idea, from poetic to prosaic. However, the former need of thought for concrete ideas does not die. She tries to fill the abstraction with content again, sometimes with the old one; it replaces “old words” with new ones, sometimes identical with the old ones in essence, but which have not yet lost the power to give birth to living images: for example, the word “magnanimous” fades, and a new expression, “a man with a big heart”, tautological with the first, more the cumbersome and inconvenient, however, seems more vivid and arouses in us spiritual movements that the first, which has lost its clarity, cannot arouse. On this path, more complex, compared to the word, forms of P. are born - the so-called paths (see). To look at paths as an external embellishment of poetic speech - as old rhetoric looked at them and school theory still looks at them, placing them on a par with “figures” - is obviously impossible: this is not an aesthetic addition - this is a consequence of the ineradicable need of thought to “restore the sensual , the side of words that excites fantasy activity"; the trope is not the material of poetry, but poetry itself. In this sense, the poetic techniques characteristic of folk poetry are extremely curious, and above all the so-called “epic formulas” - constant epithets, etc. The epic formula - for example, in its widespread form (epitheton ornans) - only renews, refreshes the meaning of words, “restores its internal form in consciousness,” either repeating it (“doing the deed,” “thinking the thought”), or denoting it with a word of a different root, but the same meaning (“ clear dawn"), Sometimes the epithet has nothing to do with the “own” meaning of the word, but is added to it in order to revive it, to make it more specific (“burning tears”). In subsequent existence, the epithet becomes so fused with the word that its meaning is forgotten - and hence the contradictory combinations arise (in Serbian folk P. the head is certainly fair-haired, and therefore the hero, having killed an arapin, cut off his “fair-haired head”). Concretization (Versinlichung - y Career) can be achieved by more complex means: first of all, by comparison (see), where the poet tries to make the image visual through another, more familiar to the listener, more vivid and expressive. Sometimes the poet’s thirst for concrete thinking is so great that he dwells on an explanatory image longer than is necessary for the purposes of explanation: the tertium comparationis has already been exhausted, and a new picture is growing; These are the comparisons in Homer (Odysseus) and Gogol. So, the activity of elementary poetic forms is broader than the simple revival of the clarity of the word: restoring its meaning, thought introduces new content into it; the allegorical element complicates it, and it becomes not only a reflection, but also an instrument for the movement of thought. “Figures” of speech do not have this meaning at all, the whole role of which is that they give expressiveness to speech. “The image,” defines Gottschall, “follows from the poet’s intuition, the figure - from his pathos; this is a scheme into which a ready-made thought fits.” Therefore, the place of the theory of figures - if their classification can be called a theory - is not in poetics, but in rhetoric (for other details about the basic data concerning the origin and role of elementary poetic forms - see Language).

Let us move on to the history of those three genera into which theory has long divided poetry. Thanks to the historical-comparative method and the general premises of the theory of evolution, the question of the origin and development of those complex literary forms that we now call poetic is largely clarified; there are still many dark and complex points here, but there is no longer room for those arbitrary statements that the metaphysical theory of literature so boldly lavished. Already the simplest form of P. - the word - is inextricably linked with the musical element. Not only at the so-called pathognomic stage of speech formation, when the word almost merges with the interjection, but also in further stages “the first words were probably shouted or sung.” Gesticulation is also necessarily associated with the sound expressions of primitive man. These three elements are combined in that proto-art, from which its individual types are subsequently distinguished. In this aesthetic aggregate, articulate speech sometimes takes a secondary place, giving way to modulated exclamations; samples of songs without words and interjections were found among various primitive peoples. Thus, the first form of P., in which one can already discern the beginnings of its three main types, is a choral action accompanied by dancing. The content of such an “action” is facts from the everyday life of the community, which is both the author and performer of this work, dramatic in form, epic in content and sometimes lyrical in mood. Here there are already elements for further identification of poetic genera, originally united - as Spencer first pointed out - in one work. In recent years (Grosse, "Anfange der Kunst", 1893), remarks have been made against this theory of initial "syncretism", boiling down to the fact that in a primitive poetic work one or another element can outweigh, and in a poetic culture the elements of the three main poetic genera are mixed. These objections do not eliminate the theory, especially since it asserts “not confusion, but the absence of distinction between certain poetic genera, poetry and other arts” (Veselovsky). Grosse does not agree with the majority of literary historians and aestheticians, who consider drama to be the latest form of literature, when in fact it is the oldest. In fact, primitive “dramatic action without drama” is drama only from a formal point of view; it acquires the character of drama only later, with the development of personality. Primitive man, one might say, is subject not so much to individual psychology as to “group psychology” (Vö lkerpsychologie). The personality feels like an indefinite part of an amorphous, monotonous whole; she lives, acts and thinks only in an inviolable connection with the community, the world, the earth; her entire spiritual life, all her creative power, all her life is imprinted by this “indifference of collectivism.” With such a personality, there is no room for individual literature; in collective performances, choral, general dances, operas and ballets, all members of the clan “alternately play the roles of either actors or spectators” (Letourneau). The subjects of these choral dances are mythical, military, funeral, marriage scenes, etc. Roles are distributed between choir groups; choral groups have lead singers and choreographers; the action is sometimes focused on them, on their dialogue, and here the seeds of the future development of personal creativity are already contained. From this purely epic material regarding the bright events of the day that excite society, poetic works stand out, imbued with general pathos, and not with the personal lyricism of an isolated singer; this is the so-called lyric epic song (Homeric hymns, medieval cantilena, Serbian and Little Russian historical songs). There are songs among them (for example, French chansons d'histoire) with content not from social, but also from personal history; the lyrical mood in them is expressed very strongly, but not on behalf of the singer himself. Little by little, however, active sympathy for the events depicted in the song, fades away in society; it loses its exciting, topical character and is passed on like an ancient memory. From the lips of the singer, crying along with his listeners, the story passes into the mouth of the epic storyteller; from the lyric-epic song an epic is made, over which they no longer cry From the formless environment of performers, professional bearers and performers of poetic tales stand out - singers, at first communal, singing only among their relatives, then wandering, spreading their song treasures to strangers. These are mimi, histriones, joculatores in Rome, bards, druids, phyles among the Celts, Thulirs, then skalds in Scandinavia, Trouvères in Provence, etc. Their environment does not remain invariably monotonous: some of them descend down into public jesters, some rise to written literature, not only performing old songs, but also composing new; Thus, in medieval Germany, on the streets there were shpilmans (Gaukler), at courts - scribes (Schriber) replaced the old singers. These keepers of the epic tradition sometimes knew several songs about the same heroes, about the same events; It is natural to try to connect different tales about the same thing - at first mechanically, with the help of commonplaces. The vague material of folk songs is consolidated, grouping around a hero popular among the people - for example. Sid, Ilya-Muromets. Sometimes epic creativity, like ours, does not go further than these cycles and arches; sometimes its development ends in epic proportions. Epic stands on the border between group and personal creativity; like other works of art, during this period of personal awakening, it is still anonymous or bears a fictitious name of the author, is not individual in style, but already “reveals the integrity of personal design and composition.” A. N. Veselovsky considers three facts of historical life to be the conditions for the emergence of great folk epics: “a personal poetic act, without the consciousness of personal creativity; the raising of folk-political self-awareness, which required expression in poetry; the continuity of the previous song tradition, with types capable of changing meaningfully, in accordance with the requirements of social growth." The consciousness of personal initiative would lead to an individual assessment of events and to discord between the poet and the people, and therefore to the impossibility of the epic. It is difficult to determine, in general terms, how the consciousness of personal creativity arises; In different cases this issue is resolved differently. The question of the poet's appearance is immeasurably more difficult than the question of P.'s origin; as long as group psychology is in its infancy, it can hardly be solved completely. It is only possible and important to note that, no matter how great the difference between the impersonal creativity of a primitive community and the most individual creation of personal art, it can be reduced to a difference in the degrees of one phenomenon - dependence all sorts of things the poet from a number of conditions, which will be indicated below. A new system of worldview coincides with the disintegration of the primitive communal way of life; a person begins to feel not like a “toe” of some large organism, but a self-sufficient whole, a personality. He has his own sorrows and joys that are not shared by anyone, obstacles that no one helps him to overcome; the social system no longer fully embraces his life and thoughts, and sometimes he comes into conflict with it. We have already seen lyrical elements in the epic; Now these expressions of personal life stand out as an independent whole, in a poetic form prepared by previous development. A lyrical song is sung with the accompaniment of a musical instrument; this is indicated by the term itself (lyrics, from Λίρα). The complication of social forms, which has led to opposition in the consciousness of the individual and society, gives rise to a new look at tradition. The center of gravity of interest in the ancient legend moves from the event to the person, to his inner life, to his struggle with others, to the tragic situations in which the contradiction of personal motives and social demands puts him. This sets the stage for drama to emerge. Its external structure is ready - this is an ancient form of choral rite; Little by little, only a few changes are made - the characters are more sharply differentiated from the chorus, the dialogue becomes more passionate, the action is more lively. At first, the material is drawn only from tradition, from myth; then creativity finds poetic content outside the life of gods and heroes, in the life of ordinary people. The extent to which it is rare to turn to fiction at the beginning is evident from the fact that in Greek dramatic literature only one drama is known that is not based on epic material. But the transitional moment necessarily comes with the further decomposition of everyday life, the decline of national self-awareness, the break with the historical past, in its poeticized forms. The poet withdraws into himself and responds to the changing spiritual needs of the surrounding masses with new images, sometimes directly opposed to tradition. A typical example of this new form is the Greek novella of the Decline era. There is no longer any talk about social content here: the subject of the story is the vicissitudes of personal destinies, determined primarily by love. The form also departed from tradition; Everything here is personal - both the individual creator and the plot. So, before us are the forms of epic, lyric, and drama that stand out with sufficient clarity; at the same time, before us is already a different author - an individual poet of the new time, according to the view of old poetics, obeying only the impulses of his free inspiration, creating from nothing, infinitely free in choosing the subject for his chants. This theory, which separates the former passive exponent of the communal soul from the new, personal poet, is largely rejected by modern poetics. She points out a number of conditions by which the greatest poet, the most unbridled science fiction writer, is bound in his work. The very fact that he uses a ready-made language, having only a comparatively insignificant opportunity to modify it, indicates the role of obligatory categories in poetic thinking. Just as “to speak means to join one’s individual thinking to the general” (Humboldt), so to create means to take into account in creativity its obligatory forms. The impersonality of the epic poet turns out to be exaggerated, but the freedom of the personal creator is even more exaggerated. He starts from ready-made material and puts it into the form for which there is a demand; he is a product of the conditions of the time. This is especially clearly expressed in the fate of poetic subjects, which live, as it were, their own life, being updated with new content invested in them by a new creator; The germs of some favorite plots of completely modern poetic works are found - thanks to that new branch of knowledge that is called folklore - in the distant past. “A talented poet can attack this or that motive by chance, entice him to imitate, create a school that will follow his rut. But if you look at these phenomena from afar, in a historical perspective, all the small touches, fashion and school, and personal trends, are lost in the wide alternation of socio-poetic demands and offers" (Veselovsky). The difference between the poet and the reader is not in type, but in degree: the process of poetic thinking continues in perception - and the reader processes the finished scheme in the same way as the poet. This scheme (plot, type, image, trope) lives as long as it lends itself to poetic renewal, as long as it can serve as a “constant predicate with a variable subject” - and is forgotten when it ceases to be an instrument of apperception, when it loses the power to generalize and explain something from the stock of impressions . - The development of poetic genera has taken place in this direction until now. There is, of course, no reason to see it as a historical law; this is not a mandatory formula of continuity, but an empirical generalization. Classical history went through this history separately, separately and anew, under the dual influence of its primordial principles and the Greco-Roman tradition, the European West went through it separately, and the Slavic world went through it separately. The scheme was always approximately the same, but the exact and general folk-psychological prerequisites for it were not determined; under new social conditions, other poetic forms may emerge, which, given your current knowledge, are impossible to predict. Therefore, it is unlikely that those deductive principles for the division of poetic genera that theory has long proposed in such diversity can be justified from a scientific point of view. Epic, lyricism and drama replaced each other in the history of P.; These three forms, without much of a stretch, exhaust the poetic material we have and are therefore suitable as a didactic device for educational purposes - but we should not see them as once and for all given forms of poetic creativity. One can see in the epic the predominance of objective elements, in the lyrics - a predominance of subjective ones; but it is no longer possible to define drama as a synthesis of both, if only because there is another form of combining these elements, in a lyric-epic song. Neither the growing predominance of prosaic elements in the language, nor the powerful flourishing of science, nor possible transformations of the social structure threaten the existence of literature, although they can decisively influence its forms. Its role is still enormous; its task is similar to the task of science - to reduce the infinite variety of reality to the smallest possible number of generalizations - but its means are sometimes broader. Its emotional element (see Aesthetics) gives it the opportunity to influence where the dry formulas of science are powerless. Moreover: without the need for precise constructions, generalizing in an unproven but convincing image the endless variety of nuances that elude the Procrustean bed of logical analysis, P. anticipates the conclusions of science. Generating common feelings, giving the most subtle and at the same time generally understandable expression of mental life, it brings people together, complicates their thoughts and simplifies their relationships. This is its primary significance, this is the reason for its gift status, among other arts. Literature - see Poetics.

Poetry is a genre of literature that is based on poetic masterpieces with ideal imagery achieved through a harmonious combination of original form and new content with a sensual coloring.
All other experiments with poetry are failures of masters, areas of apprenticeship, or attempts by graphomaniacs.

Formal features of poetic speech (rhyme, rhythm, imagery, clarity, capacity, depth, conciseness, construction techniques) do not yet guarantee the high quality of the work.
That is, they are necessary, but still clearly insufficient conditions for relating an essay to poetry. Its creators and true connoisseurs are most often one person. The trouble is that the overwhelming number of writing authors do not know how to use even these well-known signs and methods of poetic language. They do not have a vocabulary due to poor reading, or even illiteracy.

Poetry is a world created for the spiritual development and enrichment of a creative personality. This is the only treasury of the literary language that allows, through tradition, to most fully and multifacetedly preserve the individuality of a nation and people.

Surprisingly, even in the time of Plato (four hundred years before Christ), education and training consisted of: gymnastics, music, POETRY and mathematics.

*** I wanted to add (2014) Pushkin’s statement that poetry is not
is. “There are two kinds of nonsense: one comes from a lack of feelings
and thoughts replaced by words; the other - from the fullness of feelings and thoughts and
lack of words to express them."

I dare to add Pushkin. 200 years after his birth, a third kind appeared: it comes from lack of education and illiteracy. Apparently in those days such people did not take up writing; their common sense prevailed; and the poets were numbered in just a few, not thousands. However, true poets can still be counted on the fingers of one hand... But not one of Pushkin’s caliber!

L I T E R A T U R A

1. Vladimir Yudenko. Contemporary Russian poetry.

2. Vladimir Yudenko. Contemporary poetry in the almanac Stikhi.ru

3. Vladimir Yudenko. Modern Russian prose.
http://www.stihi.ru/2011/05/05/8385
4. Vladimir Yudenko. Why is poetry needed?
http://www.stihi.ru/2009/10/14/63
5. Vladimir Yudenko. Ivan Bunin. Our spiritual heritage.

6. Vladimir Yudenko. The main ways to influence speech culture.

7. Vladimir Yudenko. A poetry evening took place in Riga.

8. Vladimir Yudenko. A selection of philosophical lyrics on VIDEO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
9. Vladimir Yudenko. How to evaluate a poem?

10. Vladimir Yudenko. Notes on poetic cuisine and inspiration.
Essay.
11. Vladimir Yudenko. Poet of the Year 2011. Literary review.

12. Vladimir Yudenko. What is inspiration?

13. Vladimir Yudenko. Which poem is considered successful?

V=C98Z1QIkBQE&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
*** This footnote opens in the review (below).

*** Only one reader has spoken about this article so far - Margarita Rothko:
"Wow
I would like to see “ideal imagery”.
or get a definition of “ideal imagery”..."

There is nothing simpler - just open a literary dictionary.
We watch and record.

IDEAL IMAGERY is the highest degree of real embodiment in a work of mental literary artistic images, striving for an aesthetic ideal, with a harmonious combination of form and content.

Masters (as opposed to apprentices) sometimes achieve perfect imagery in their creations.

November
2011

Almost a decade later, I am adding a poem to the article that fully answers the question posed in the title.

Fragility

Petr LYUKSHIN

And he kept repeating to himself like a robot:
- last time,
last time -
and this anger, and this timidity,
and the happiness of the lips and the greed of the eyes.

AND,
like ghostly guests
gone like hedgehogs into the fog...
and there is no greed. no anger...
and you can collapse on the sofa.

Everything dissolved in a echoing haze,
fell into a black hole...
only happiness
fragile figurine
trembles without melting
in the wind...

© Copyright: Petr Lyukshin, 2020

*** In the photo: giving an interview to Igor Maiden
(newspaper "Vesti Segodnya").

**Only on the Book Review website this is my essay
read by 3401 people.

* On one of the sites is my VIDEO “What is poetry?”
watched by so many viewers that only those who
liked it, received 48196 as of June 14, 2012.

*** And my article about Pasternak’s work was read by 2,730 people.
This is only on the Literary Council website.

Reviews

What about poetry without rhyme? Or do you not recognize the existence of such a thing?
What’s also interesting is your assessment of the work, which has a banal form, but the content is extremely outstanding.

1. I don’t mention rhyme in the definition, but only among the distinctive features.
2. The content of Shakespeare's lines does not require sophisticated forms; it is quite accurate
line-by-line translation.

Poetry and prose are two main types of organization of artistic speech, externally differing primarily in the structure of rhythm. The rhythm of poetic speech is created by a distinct division into commensurate segments, which in principle do not coincide with syntactic division (see,).

Prosaic artistic speech is divided into paragraphs, periods, sentences and columns, which are also inherent in ordinary speech, but have a certain orderliness; the rhythm of prose, however, is a complex and elusive phenomenon that has not been sufficiently studied. Initially, the art of words in general was called poetry, since, until the modern era, poetic and rhythmic-intonation forms that were close to it sharply predominated in it.

Prose was the name given to all non-fiction verbal works: philosophical, scientific, journalistic, informational, oratorical (in Russia, such word usage prevailed in the 18th - early 19th centuries).

Poetry

The art of the word in its own sense (that is, already delimited from folklore) first appears as poetry, in poetic form. Verse is an integral form of the main genres of antiquity, the Middle Ages and even the Renaissance and classicism - epic poems, tragedies, comedies and various types of lyrics. The poetic form, right up to the creation of literary prose itself in modern times, was a unique, indispensable tool for transforming words into art. The unusual organization of speech inherent in the verse revealed and certified the special significance and specific nature of the utterance. She seemed to testify that a poetic statement is not just a message or a theoretical judgment, but a kind of original verbal “act.”

Poetry, compared to prose, has an increased capacity of all its constituent elements(cm. ). The very poetic form of poetic speech, which arose as an isolation from the language of reality, seems to signal the “removal” of the artistic world from the framework of everyday authenticity, from the framework of prose (in the original meaning of the word), although, of course, turning to verse in itself is not a guarantee "artistic"

The verse comprehensively organizes the sounding matter of speech, gives it rhythmic roundness and completeness, which in the aesthetics of the past were inseparably associated with perfection and beauty. In the literature of past eras, verse appears as such a “pre-established limitation” that creates the sublimity and beauty of the word.

The need for verse at the early stages of the development of the art of speech was dictated, in particular, by the fact that it initially existed as a sounding, pronouncing, performing thing. Even G.W.F. Hegel is still convinced that all literary works of art must be pronounced, sung, and recited. In prose, although the living voices of the author and characters are heard, they are heard by the “inner” hearing of the reader.

The awareness and final approval of prose as a legitimate form of the art of speech occurs only in the 18th and early 19th centuries. In the era of the dominance of prose, the reasons that gave birth to poetry lose their exclusive significance: the art of words is now capable of creating a truly artistic world even without verse, and the “aesthetics of completeness” ceases to be an unshakable canon for the literature of modern times.

Poetry in the Age of Prose

Poetry does not die out in the era of prose(and in Russia in the 1910s it even comes to the fore again); however, it is undergoing profound changes. The features of completeness weaken in it; Particularly strict strophic structures fade into the background: sonnet, rondo, gazelle, tanka, freer forms of rhythm develop - dolnik, taktovik, accented verse, conversational intonations are introduced. In modern poetry, new meaningful qualities and possibilities of poetic form have been revealed. In the Poetry of the 20th century, A.A. Blok, V.V. Mayakovsky, R.M. Rilke, P. Valery and others saw the complication of artistic meaning, the possibility of which has always been inherent in the nature of poetic speech.

The very movement of words in verse, their interaction and comparison in terms of rhythm and rhyme, the clear identification of the sound side of speech given by the poetic form, the relationship of rhythmic and syntactic structure - all this is fraught with inexhaustible semantic possibilities, which prose, in essence, is deprived of.

Many beautiful poems, if translated into prose, will turn out to mean almost nothing, for their meaning is created mainly by the very interaction of the poetic form with the words. The elusiveness - in the direct verbal content - of the special poetic world created by the artist, his perception and vision, remains a general law for both ancient and modern poetry: “I would like to live for many years in my dear homeland, to love its bright waters and to love its dark waters "(Vl. N. Sokolov).

The specific, often inexplicable impact of poetry on the reader, which makes it possible to talk about its mystery, is largely determined by this elusiveness of artistic meaning. Poetry is capable of recreating a living poetic voice in this way and the personal intonation of the author, that they are “objectified” in the very construction of the verse - in the rhythmic movement and its “bends”, the pattern of phrasal stresses, word sections, pauses, etc. It is quite natural that the poetry of the New Age is primarily lyrical.

In modern lyric poetry, verse accomplishes a dual task. In accordance with its eternal role, it elevates some message about the author’s real life experience to the sphere of art, that is, it transforms an empirical fact into an artistic fact; and at the same time, it is verse that allows one to recreate in lyrical intonation the immediate truth of personal experience, the true and unique human voice of the poet.

Prose

Until modern times, prose developed on the periphery of the art of speech, forming mixed, semi-artistic phenomena of writing (historical chronicles, philosophical dialogues, memoirs, sermons, religious works, etc.) or “low” genres (farces, mimes and other types of satire) .

Prose in the proper sense, developing since the Renaissance, is fundamentally different from all those previous phenomena of the word that in one way or another fall out of the system of poetry. Modern prose, the origins of which are the Italian short story of the Renaissance, the work of M. Cervantes, D. Defoe, A. Prevost, is deliberately delimited and pushed away from verse as a full-fledged, sovereign form of the art of words. It is significant that modern prose is a written (more precisely, printed) phenomenon, in contrast to the early forms of poetry and prose itself, which originated from the oral existence of speech.

At its inception, prosaic speech, like poetic speech, strived for emphatic separation from ordinary colloquial speech, for stylistic decoration. And only with the establishment of realistic art, which gravitates towards the “forms of life itself”, such properties of prose as “naturalness”, “simplicity” become aesthetic criteria, which are no less difficult to follow than when creating the most complex forms of poetic speech (Guy de Maupassant, N.V. Gogol, A.P. Chekhov). The simplicity of prose, therefore, not only genetically, but also from the point of view of the typological hierarchy, does not precede, as was commonly thought, poetic complexity, but is a later conscious reaction to it.

In general, the formation and development of prose occurs in constant correlation with prose (in particular, in the bringing together of some and the repulsion of other genres and forms). Thus, the authenticity of life, the “ordinariness” of language and prose style, up to the introduction of vernaculars, prosaisms and dialectisms, are still perceived as artistically significant precisely against the backdrop of the lofty poetic word.

Exploring the nature of fiction

The study of the nature of literary prose began only in the 19th century and developed in the 20th century. In general terms, some essential principles are identified that distinguish prosaic words from poetic ones. The word in prose, compared to poetry, has a fundamentally figurative character; it focuses attention on itself to a lesser extent, yet in it, especially lyrical, one cannot be distracted from the words. The word in prose directly unfolds the plot before us (the entire sequence of individual actions, movements, from which the characters and the artistic world of the novel or story as a whole are created). In prose, the word becomes the subject of the image, as “alien,” which in principle does not coincide with the author’s. It is characterized by a single author's word and a character's word, of the same type as the author's;

Poetry is monologue. Meanwhile, prose is predominantly dialogical; it absorbs diverse, mutually incompatible “voices” (see: Bakhtin M.M. Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics). In literary prose, the complex interaction of the “voices” of the author, narrator, and characters often endows the word with “multi-directionality,” polysemy, which by its nature differs from the polysemy of a poetic word. Prose, like poetry, transforms real objects and creates its own artistic world, but it does this primarily through a special mutual position of objects and actions, striving for individualized concreteness of the designated meaning.

Forms between poetry and prose

There are intermediate forms between poetry and prose: a prose poem is a form close to lyric poetry in stylistic, thematic and compositional (but not metric) characteristics; on the other hand, rhythmic prose, close to verse precisely in metrical characteristics. Sometimes poetry and prose interpenetrate each other (see) or include pieces of “foreign” text - prosaic or poetic, respectively, on behalf of the author or hero. The history of the formation and change of prose styles, the rhythm of prose, its specific pictorial nature and the release of artistic energy as a result of the collision of various speech plans are cardinal moments in the creation of a scientific theory of prose.

The word poetry comes from Greek poiesis, from poieo, which in translation means - I do, I create;

The word prose comes from Latin prosa (oratio), which translated means direct, simple speech.