Our ancestors, primitive humans, could not understand many natural phenomena such as wind, electricity, thunder and rain, so they all came down to the gods. Primitive humans sang and danced to the gods out of awe, expressing people's expectations-good weather, abundant crops and so on. This is the origin of poetry.
It originated from religion. There is another form, which comes from labor. Primitive people made simple and rhythmic cries while working, so as to forget the temporary pain and spirit brought by labor and coordinate their actions. Gradually, this simple and rhythmic cry has developed into a poem that imitates the voice of labor itself and expresses the feelings of workers themselves. Mr. Lu Xun once said: "Poetry is verse, which occurs during labor; Fiction is prose, which happens from rest. " Therefore, we say that poetry is a universal art and the oldest literary style.
The most essential feature of poetry is lyrical beauty. No matter novels, essays, plays and the most beautiful places, the aura of poetry is shining. Therefore, poetry is literature in literature. Poetry is everywhere in the art field, and the beauty of poetry is the highest embodiment of the universal factors of artistic beauty. The beauty of poetry also appears in the non-literary field from time to time. Exquisite fragments in scientific works, even in people's life and work, exude wisdom and brilliance, with traces of poetry.
Poetry is a literary genre, which expresses social life and people's spiritual world with concise language, rich emotions and rich phenomena according to the requirements of certain syllables, tones and rhythms. In ancient China, unhappy people were called poems, and happy people became songs.
Poetics is about poetry, just as aesthetics is about beauty, it is difficult to have an accepted definition. If you ask a poet "what is poetry", just like you ask an aesthete "what is beauty", it is difficult to get your satisfactory answer. Poetry is difficult to define, probably because "it belongs to the spiritual world too much, and it is spiritual in space" [1]. Poetry can be divided into broad sense and narrow sense. When poems in broad sense and narrow sense are mixed together, "what is poetry" becomes more complicated. Heidegger is not satisfied with "classifying poetry into literature" and disagrees that "poetry must find its existing form in literature". This is inevitably a biased theory. Poetry is a kind of language art, and it certainly belongs to literature, which includes poetry, prose and novels. Is there any doubt about this? However, the so-called poems here are only poems in a narrow sense. There is also a kind of poem in a broad sense. Poetry in a broad sense no longer belongs to literature, nor is it a branch and part of literature.
When we distinguish poetry in a broad sense from poetry in a narrow sense, we can avoid a lot of confusion and the definition of poetry begins to be clear.
Poetry in a broad sense
Poetry in a broad sense is the general name of all arts (including literature as a language art), synonymous with natural beauty, artistic beauty and life beauty, a way for human beings to observe the world, and a way for human souls to inhabit after escaping from reality.
Poetry in a narrow sense
From the heroic epic "The Forgotten One" in Babylon, especially China's The Book of Songs and Homer's epic in ancient Greece, poetry in a narrow sense was created, spread and appreciated for thousands of years, and was regarded as an authentic literary style before modern times in China.
On the definition of poetry in a narrow sense, there are also different opinions at home and abroad. Yang Honglie's Outline of China's Poetics, published by the Commercial Press 1928, lists as many as 40 definitions of poetry in ancient and modern China. American poet carl sandburg's Definition of Poetry (Original Form) lists 38 kinds [7]. In fact, the definitions of poets and scholars in past dynasties are definitely more than these. "Preface to Mao Poetry" said: "Poets have ambition. Have ambition in your heart and speak like a poem. " Yan Yu's Cang Lang Shi Hua said: "Poets chant their temperament." Zhang Shunmin said in "Hundred Poems and Paintings": "Poetry is an invisible painting, and painting is a tangible poem." Jiang Kui's Poems of Taoist White Stone holds that "obeying the law is poetry". Zhang Taiyan's answer to Cao Juren's vernacular poems even thinks: "In a broad sense, whoever has rhyme is the stream of poetry. ...... "Hundreds of surnames", of course, "Song of Medical Prescriptions" is the same. Works are clumsy, poets may not do it, and they may not be called non-poetic. The ancient Greek poet Simonidade said, "Poetry is a picture with sound, and painting is a silent poem." Dante's Proverbs said: "Poetry is just a fictional story written in rhythm and rhetoric." Boccaccio's genealogy of pagan gods said: "Poetry comes from an ancient Greek word Poetes, which means the so-called exquisite language in Latin." "Poetry is a practical art, which originates from God's thoughts." Shelley's Debate on Poetry said: "Poetry is the record of the happiest and kindest moments in the happiest and kindest mind." Wordsworth said in the preface of Lyric Ballads: "Poetry is the essence of all knowledge and a strong expression of the whole scientific outlook." Coleridge said, "Poetry is the best arrangement of the best words." Belinsky's Classification and Division of Poetry said: "Poetry is the highest artistic genre. ..... Poetry is expressed in fluent human language. It is not only a sound, but also a picture, a clear statement concept. Therefore, poetry contains all the elements of other arts, as if all the means possessed by other arts were put into practice. Poetry is all of art and all institutions of art, and all the directions of its network art clearly and clearly contain all the differences of art. Eliot's The Role of Poetry says: "Poetry is the highest point of life consciousness, with great vitality and the most acute feeling for life."
Regarding "what is poetry", each school has its own uniqueness and incisiveness: it emphasizes that poetry is "the place of aspiration", "chanting temperament" or "life consciousness", and it focuses on the content of poetry; Emphasize that poetry is "invisible painting", "sound painting" or "both sound and picture", and pay attention to the image characteristics of poetry; Emphasize that poetry is "statutes", "exquisite words" and "the best arrangement of words", or simply take rhyme as poetry and pay attention to the form of poetry; It is emphasized that poetry originates from God's mind, the essence of all knowledge, scientific facial expressions and the highest artistic genre, which embodies the essence of poetry. Even if the blind touch the elephant, the sum of the conclusions of many opinionated "blind people" is not far from the "holographic image" [8].
Various popular poetic theories of "ism" also have their own definitions of poetry:
Realistic poetics holds that poetry is the reflection of real life in the poet's mind. Only real life is the source of poetry and all arts. Poets are singers of life, and poetry is the singing of life.
Romantic poetics holds that a poet is a kind of love, and the emotions in the poet's heart are projected into the world, and everything in the world will be poetic. Therefore, poetry should be the self-expression of the poet, the direct expression of the poet's feelings, and the call of the poet's soul to the ideal world.
Formalist poetics holds that poetry is only a meaningful language art form. Any kind of "content" can only become art after "formalization". Form will not yield to content. Poets' pursuit of beauty is often an independent creation of form. The independent quality of form means that poets have the independent power to criticize social reality and open up a better world. In extreme formalism poetics, poetry is just a language craft.
Psychoanalytic poetics holds that writing poetry is like dreaming, and poetry is a poet's "daydream". Ordinary people dream because people's instinctive desires are not satisfied under the suppression of social morality and rational consciousness, and they are transferred to dreams to vent. When a poet writes poetry, he transfers his instinctive lust that he can't satisfy in the real world to the fantasy world to vent. The difference between the two is that poetry has an artistic form for aesthetics, which is a disguise to beautify instinctive lust (in this sense, the saying that "love poetry is a man's show off his own things" is not pure ridicule). At the same time, transferring lust to the art world is also a sublimation of instinctive lust. The similarity between the two is that both poetry and dreaming are mental activities that use image thinking instead of logical thinking [9].
Each school has its own emphasis on the definition of poetry, and each school has its own extreme and profound points.
What was popular in the 1950s and 1960s was He Qifang's definition: "Poetry is a literary genre that most intensively reflects social life. Full of imagination and emotion, it is often expressed in a direct lyrical way, with refined language, harmonious tone and clear rhythm. " [10] This should be said to be a popular definition of poetry combining realism and romanticism at that time, which included He Qifang's emphasis on the beauty of form and rhythm of poetry.
In the early 1980s, Lv Jin put forward a more concise definition of poetry: "Poetry is the highest language art in singing life, and it is usually the direct writing of the poet's feelings." [1 1] This definition is not only different from He Qifang's definition of poetry, but also different from the new avant-garde definition of poetry.
If we put aside all doctrines and genres and give a concise definition of poetry in one sentence on a purely technical level, I wonder if we can say that poetry is an art that expresses emotion and beauty with the help of images and a language with a sense of music. Poetry is art, poetry is language art, poetry is the art of expressing feelings, poetry can also be the art of beauty, poetry is expressed through images, and the language of poetry is musical. Music sense is musicality, including rhythm and prosody, which is an important feature that distinguishes poetic language from prose language.
Image is an extremely important concept in poetics. Poetry, as a language art, generally does not express abstract feelings directly with abstract language, but with the help of images. What is an image? Simply put, image is an objective image that combines the poet's subjective feelings. For example, when writing love poems, the poet will not only say "I miss you so much!" " ""I miss you so much! " "My love for you will never change!" "I will miss you one day when I am alive! On the contrary, I will euphemistically express it with affectionate images, such as "the silkworm in spring weaves until death, and the candle will drain the wick every night"-I think you are like a silkworm spinning until death, separating us! Because I can't get your love, I shed tears like a burning candle. As long as my life is alive, my tears will not stop! Silkworms with endless emotions and candles with endless tears are the images of emotional sustenance in the poem.
Poetry expresses the poet's subjective world and the objective world that the poet faces. In the subjective world, poetry mainly expresses emotion and beauty, that is, the poet's emotional experience, ideological understanding and aesthetic feeling of the world and life. The objective world requires poetry to be narrative and concrete, social and natural. What it looks like and what it tells are often used as images to convey subjective feelings and aesthetics.