What is poetry? Definition. Exploring the Nature of Fiction

Poetry and prose

Poetry and prose

POETRY and PROSE are correlative concepts used in the sense of poetry and prose, that is, poetic and non-lyric works of fiction, or in the sense of opposing fiction in general (poetry) to scientific, journalistic literature, mostly standing outside of art (prose).
The word "poetry" comes from the Greek. poieo = create, create, build, create; poiesis (poetry) = creation, creation, work. When applied to verbal works, this original meaning of the word emphasizes the creative moment, the moment of verbal processing, skill. Hence the term "poetry" should be called works of art. So it became in the future, when the word "poetry" received a broader meaning of artistic literature in general. This broad meaning coincides with the literal, etymological meaning of the word, and therefore one should consider the original understanding of poetry as poetic works too narrow. However, the meaning of words is historically peculiar and historically changeable. The ancient Greeks of the classical era understood the word "poetry" mainly as poetic works; therefore they called the person who composed poetry a poet. With the concept of artistic creativity in the word, they inseparably connected the idea of ​​rhythmically organized speech, of a work that has a commensurate duration of its elements. Later, the Greeks advanced the concept of verse (stixos = initially a row, a system, then a line, a verse), opposing it to speech, rhythmically unorganized. The ancient Romans, heirs and successors of Greek culture, later began to call it prose.
The word "prose" comes from the Latin adjective "prosus" = free, free, moving straight (from prorsus = straight ahead). Quintelian has the expression "oratio prosa", Seneca - just "prosa" to denote free speech, not bound by rhythmic repetitions. In contrast to prose, the Romans called poetry - versus - speech, which broke up into commensurate intonation rows, which, as it were, returned to the starting point (versus = initial turn, appeal, then - series, line, verse), from the verb vertere - twirl, rotate; from here in the future French. le vers - verse, Polish - virsh, a word common in our country in the 17th-18th centuries. But intonational free irreversibility was distinguished not only by works of art that did not break up into verses, but also by oratorical, political, and then scientific works. In the minds of the ancient Romans, a clear distinction between poetry and rhetoric, journalism was just emerging. Hence the term "prose" and later received a broader meaning of any rhythmically unorganized literature, and in comparison with the term "poetry", in its later and also broader sense, the meaning of non-fiction literature, which is not part of art. At the same time, the original narrow meaning of these terms, which was given to them in the ancient Greco-Roman cultural world, has also been preserved.
The emergence among the ancient Greeks of the narrow concept of poetry as a rhythmic verbal art was not accidental or arbitrary, but historically conditioned. It was determined by the stage of development of artistic literature (poetry), at which the latter was in the ancient Greek historical era. In those days, poetry, although it had long since emerged from its original direct connection with labor processes, with other arts and other ideologies, nevertheless retained the remnants and vestiges of this connection. In the era of primitive syncretism, the artistic word arose on the basis of production actions and movements and developed in close unity with music and dance. A poetic work arose directly in the process of primitive labor assignments and was then performed in the ritual, song and dance action of a primitive tribe on the occasion of certain events of economic life (hunting, war, harvest, spring release of the herd, etc.). This labor or ritual action was usually elevated, expressive, emotionally saturated and, by its very essence, rhythmic; it was accompanied by exclamations, cries, rhythmic body movements. Hence, the verbal fabric of the song had an inevitable rhythmic proportion. In its former unity with labor, with dance and music, poetry acquired a songlike rhythm, consisting in a commensurate duration of sounds and measures. Gradually separating historically into a special independent art, poetry for a long time revealed traces of this former connection, for a long time retained a tendency towards rhythm, which was supported and renewed by other social conditions of its historical life.
When the heroic epic arose, which was especially developed in ancient Greece (Homer), the poems were usually performed to musical accompaniment and included a kind of fairy tale melody with elements of rhythm. The ideological content of all these original genres of poetry gave her great expressiveness, which supported her attraction to rhythm. It was poetry sublime, pathetic, full of heroic feelings. The oral existence of poetry also had a rather significant significance here, caused in ancient times, and to a large extent in the Middle Ages, by the weak development of writing (the same is true in the folklore of modern times). In its oral existence and oral transmission from generation to generation, poetry gravitated towards a certain verbal completeness, resorted to complete and well-remembered lyrical and narrative formulas - beginnings, refrains, endings, monophonies, syntactic loci communis of all kinds, which emphasized and supported the rhythmic structure of the work. .
When Greek, and then at one time medieval poets began to write down their songs, tragedies and poems, began to compose their elegies, odes and eclogues, they retained their inclination to rhythm, writing down the text of their works in intonation rows - verses. Poetry turned out to be a synonym for a poem, a poet - a poet, and the ancient Greek term "poetry" retained this narrow historically natural meaning. Along with this, in Greek literature (oral literature) there was also artistic prose, there were myths, legends, fairy tales, comedies. But the remnants of primitive syncretism had the opposite meaning for these genres: for the ancient Greeks, myth was not so much a poetic phenomenon as a religious one, tradition and a fairy tale were historical or everyday; and if a fairy tale or a comedy were perceived poetically, then they were not considered large and significant genres, they were not called poetry.
By the second half of the Middle Ages, the situation began to gradually change. Along with the decay of the ancient, and then the feudal society, the poem, tragedy, and ode are gradually decomposing. In connection with the development of the commercial bourgeoisie, its cultural and ideological growth, on the basis of the culture of large cities, prose genres are growing and developing more and more, which once played a secondary role and merged in ancient consciousness with non-fiction literature, with legends, journalism, oratory . A story, a short story arise, followed by a novel, which was destined to become the leading genre of modern times. The old poetic genres, which played the main role in the literature of feudalism and slave-owning society, are gradually losing their main, leading significance, although they by no means disappear from literature. However, the new genres, which play a major role first in bourgeois styles, and then in all the literature of capitalist society, clearly gravitate towards prose. Artistic prose begins to challenge the leading place of poetry, becomes close to it, and even later, by the heyday of capitalism, even pushes it aside. By the 19th century prose writers, novelists and novelists, become the most prominent figures in fiction, giving society those great typical generalizations, which, in the era of the triumph of poetry, were given by the creators of poems and tragedies.
But this dominance of narrative genres gravitating towards prose in the era of the triumph of bourgeois styles is historically relative and limited. In addition to the fact that even in the epochs of the leading significance of prose, poetry continues to dominate the lyrical genres, at certain historical moments it is the poetic genres (both lyrical and epic and dramatic) that begin to dominate in the artistic styles and literary trends of various class groups. This happens mainly when one or another style or direction is distinguished by tension, sublimity, pathos, in general, this or that emotional richness of its ideological content. This was almost always the case in the era of the dominance of literary classicism with its verbal pathos and moralistic tendentiousness. Representatives of classicism of the 17th century. in France (Cornel, Racine, Boileau, etc.) and in Russia (Lomonosov, Sumarokov, Kheraskov, Knyazhnin, etc.) they wrote their high tragedies, poems, satires in verse, affirming the absolute monarchy of the nobility, the principles of power, rank and estate honor .
An even greater attraction to poetry we meet among the representatives of romanticism. So it was, for example. in Russia at the beginning of the 19th century, when the sentimental-romantic poetry of Zhukovsky became the center of an entire school and caused many imitations. So it was in England in the age of Byron and Shelley, and in Germany in the age of Sturm und Drang. On the contrary, artistic realism reveals a great desire for prose. This does not mean, of course, that there are no verse poetic works in the work of realist writers. Realistic poetry is being created. So, at the beginning of the XIX century. Pushkin, Lermontov and other poets, experiencing periods of romance, created a number of brilliant poems (“Gypsies”, “Demon”, “Voynarovsky”, etc.), and then, moving to realism, clothed their dramatic works in poetic form, even his first short stories and novels - the tradition of poetic creativity affected here as well ("Count Nulin", "House in Kolomna", "Eugene Onegin" by Pushkin, "Treasurer", "Sashka" by Lermontov). We see the same thing in the work of Nekrasov and some other revolutionary poets of the 60s, who, along with civil lyrics, created a number of poems and poetic stories full of intense civil pathos. We should also recall the work of G. Heine, a number of plays by G. Ibsen, poems by Vl. Mayakovsky, D. Poor, etc.
However, the emotional richness of the content does not always lead the writer to create poetic poetry in the literal and narrow sense of the word. Sometimes elation turns out to be the lot of a prose writer, and then he clearly goes beyond the boundaries of prose, without resorting, however, to poetry, creating what is usually called rhythmic prose, or "a poem in prose." Examples are the romantic pages from Gogol's Evenings, Turgenev's Senilia, Heine's Journey to the Harz, Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Bely's Symphony, some of Babel's stories, etc. All these phenomena show that the boundaries of poetry and proses are not absolute and that there are gradual transitions between them. However, in most cases, there is a distinct predominance of poetry or prose in literary styles and trends. And if this applies to the dominant literary styles of a given epoch, then the entire literature of the epoch turns out to be either under the sign of poetry or under the sign of prose. For example, the entire history of Russian literature from the beginning of the 18th century. and to this day contains a very pronounced change of poetic and prose eras.
So, the difference between poetry and prose is not only an external, narrowly formal moment, introducing along with the features of the form - poetic or prose - a certain originality into the expression of the ideological content. Romantic elation, civic pathos, lyrical enthusiasm, moralistic pathos, in a word, the emotional richness of the content, constitute an essential property of poetry that distinguishes it from prose. A special group of poetic genres are the forms of the so-called. "entertaining", "light" poetry (joking poems, drinking songs, epigrams, etc.), where the emotional coloring is expressed in moods of fun, playful humor, etc. The predominant value associated with the emotional coloring of the content in poetry is to-roe receive means of expression in poetry. And one of the most powerful and essential means of expression, actively influencing the mind of the listener, is rhythm. Hence, rhythmic organization turns out to be a constant and essential property of poetry. “To speak in verse,” Guyot remarks, “means to express, as it were, with the very dimension of one’s speech: I am suffering too much or too happy to express what I feel in ordinary language». In this regard, the language of poetry is more distant from ordinary speech than the language of artistic prose.
Poetic rhythm generally consists in the presence and repetitive correlation of any elements of speech intonation. Such elements of rhythm can be: the length of the reference sounds in the syllables of the word, both in song style and in early Greek versification; or an emphasis on the reference sound of a syllable, as in syllabic verse; or an emphasis on the stressed sounds of the word, as in syllabo-tonic and "free" verse. The ratio of rhythmic units is expressed by their quantitative combination into certain groups, which thus turn out to be larger units of rhythm. Both verse and rhythmic prose are distinguished by the presence of such large and small units. Non-rhythmic prose does not have them. In verse, a large rhythmic unit is a poetic line, which is separated from the previous and subsequent pauses, stress, and often the repetition of sounds (rhyme) and edges may not coincide within their boundaries with the phonetic sentences of speech, limited by syntactic pauses. The case of such a mismatch is called "transfer" (enjambement): for example, when Onegin appears, Tatyana “Flies, flies; look back Do not dare; instantly ran around the Curtains, the bridges, the meadow. The constant obligatory pause at the end of a line, which has a rhythmic meaning completely independent of the articulation of the phrase, is called a "constant" and is the main distinguishing feature of verse compared to rhythmic prose. There is no such independent pause in rhythmic prose; there, a large rhythmic unit is usually a phonetic sentence, i.e., the semantic part of the phrase, limited by semantic pauses. Therefore, poetic lines are precisely commensurate units that contain a strictly defined number of syllables (in syllabic verse - see the satires of Cantemir), or stops (in syllabic-tonic - see the poetry of Pushkin, Nekrasov, Bryusov), or stresses (in tonic - see Mayakovsky's poetry). In prose, phonetic sentences are only approximately the same length; the sentence may contain a different number of verbal stresses, the number of which usually varies (for example, “Wonderful is the Dnieper / in calm weather, / when freely and smoothly / rushes through forests and mountains / its full waters”).
Rhythmic organization in verse is consequently much higher than in prose. The high emotional richness of poetry inevitably determines its attraction to verse. The expressiveness of a poetic work is achieved, however, not only by means of rhythm, but also by other intonational-syntactic means. The emotionally rich, expressive language of poetry is usually replete with such intonational figures and such phrases that are relatively rare in the language of prose. Such are the figures of exclamation, conversion, enumeration, repetition, inversion, monotony, gradation, etc., and all these intonation-syntactic means have a special meaning in poetry, they express not so much the course of narrative thought as the elation of the author's ideological mood. Due to the peculiar organization of his artistic speech, which claims primarily to be expression, the poet gives a more concise and conditional pictorial drawing, in which only individual, most striking and essential features are outlined, as if replacing the fullness of the reality of the depicted, which the listener reproduces. and complements in his artistic imagination. From this follows Flaubert's well-known question: "Why, trying to express our thought as concisely as possible, we inevitably come to the fact that we compose poetry?" However, the pictorial conciseness of poetic images does not make them any less embossed or less vivid. Permeated with the emotional richness of the poet, they actively, effectively give the perception of life, not inferior in this prose, and sometimes even surpassing it.
The predominance of poetry and prose in the work of different class groups and different eras is determined by the historically established originality of the artistic ideology of the class. But the general predominance of prose in the literature of modern times, for all its historical conditioning, is not, however, a law for the subsequent stages in the development of fiction. Bibliography:
Potebnya A. A., From notes on the theory of literature, Kharkov, 1905; Tomashevsky B., On verse, Articles, (L.), 1929; Tynyanov Yu. N., The problem of poetic language, L., 1924; Jakobson R., On Czech Verse, Predominantly in Comparison with Russian, (Berlin), 1923; Timofeev L., Theory of Literature, M.-L., 1934, ch. V; Him, Literary image and poetic language, Literary Critic, 1934, No. 4; Vinogradov V., About artistic prose, M.-L., 1930; Larin B.A., On the varieties of artistic speech, Sat. "Russian speech", new series, No. 1, P., 1923.

Literary encyclopedia. - In 11 tons; M .: publishing house of the Communist Academy, Soviet Encyclopedia, Fiction. Edited by V. M. Friche, A. V. Lunacharsky. 1929-1939 .

Poetry and prose

POETRY AND PROSE. There is an external, formal difference between poetry and prose, and there is an internal, essential difference between them. The first is that poetry is opposed to prose; the last is that prose, as thinking and rational presentation, is opposed to poetry, as thinking and figurative presentation, designed not so much for the mind and logic, but for feeling and imagination. Hence it is clear that not every verse is poetry and not every prose form of speech is internal prose. Once upon a time, even grammatical rules (for example, Latin exceptions) or arithmetic operations were stated in the verses. On the other hand, we know "poems in prose" and, in general, such works written in prose that are the purest poetry: it is enough to name the names of Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov. If we keep in mind the external difference just mentioned, it will be interesting to point out that the word prose comes from the Latin prorsa, which in turn is an abbreviated proversa: oratio (speech) proversa denoted by the Romans continuous speech, filling the entire page and freely rushing forward, while the verse occupies only part of each line on the pages and, moreover, in the circulation its rhythm constantly returns back, back (in Latin - versus). It should, however, be noted that one can speak of the freedom of prose speech only conditionally: in fact, prose also has its own laws and requirements. Let, unlike poetry (in the sense of poetry), artistic prose does not know rhyme and rhythmic regularity of feet, nevertheless it must be musical, and it must cater to what Nietzsche called "the conscience of the ear." No wonder the same Nietzsche advised to work on two lines of prose like on a statue; he likened a writer to a sculptor. Yes, the creator of artistic prose should be a sculptor and musician: in its best examples, it is plastic, convex, sculptural, and it also captivates with the harmony of its sound; a prose writer, if only he is a poet, hears the word as a manifestation of world rhythm, as a note of "God's music" (as Polonsky puts it). When prose blindly imitates poetry and becomes what is irreverently but correctly characterized as "chopped prose", then this is aesthetically unbearable, and in this way it dresses itself, as it were, in peacock feathers; but some kind of special harmony and symmetry, a special sequence of words, is undoubtedly characteristic of prose, and a delicate ear senses this. The poet of prose perceives words as individuals, and he feels the nervous and quivering, hot and flexible body of words; that is why his phrase has its own physiognomy, its own drawing, and its own living soul. Turning to a more important - the internal difference between prose and poetry, let's pay attention to the fact that prose serves science and practice, while poetry satisfies our aesthetic need. Here is a school example that explains this difference: the description of the Dnieper in a geography textbook and the description of the Dnieper by Gogol (“Wonderful Dnieper” ...). Prose needs abstractions, schemes, formulas, and it moves along the channel of logic; on the contrary, poetry requires picturesqueness, and it transforms the content of the world into living colors, and words for it are carriers not of concepts, but of images. Prose talks, poetry draws. Prose is dry, poetry is agitated and excites. Prose analyzes, poetry synthesizes, i.e. the first divides the phenomenon into its constituent elements, while the second takes the phenomenon in its integrity and unity. In this regard, poetry personifies, inspires, gives life; prose, sober prose, is akin to a mechanistic worldview. Only a poet, Tyutchev precisely, could feel and say: “Not what you think, nature; not a cast, not a soulless face: it has a soul, it has freedom, it has love, it has a language. Prose writers are those to whom Tyutchev addresses, those who imagine that nature is a soulless mechanism. And not only to Goethe, but also to any poet, these bright and expressive verses of Baratynsky can be attributed: the starry book was clear to him, and the wave of the sea spoke to him. AT the highest degree characteristic of poetry is such a perception of the world as some kind of living being, and the corresponding way of depicting the latter. In general, it is very important to learn that poetry is more than a style: it is a worldview; the same must be said of prose. If poetry is divided - approximately and generally - into epic, lyrics and drama, then in prose modern textbooks on the theory of literature distinguish between the following genera and types: narration(chronicle, history, memoirs, geography, characteristics, obituary), description(travel, for example) reasoning(literary criticism, for example), oratory; It goes without saying that this classification cannot be strictly maintained, does not exhaust the subject, and the enumerated genera and species are intertwined in various ways. In the same work there may be elements of both poetry and prose; and if the penetration into the prose of poetry, inner poetry, is always desirable, then the opposite case has a cooling effect on us and causes aesthetic resentment and annoyance in the reader; we then convict the author of prosaism. Of course, if the author consciously and intentionally retreats into the realm of prose in poetic creation, then this is another matter, and there is no artistic error here: philosophical reasoning or historical digressions of Tolstoy's War and Peace cannot be blamed on the great writer for aesthetic guilt. And the purely literary fact of the interpenetration of prose and poetry has its deeper roots in the fact that it is impossible to divide reality itself into prose and poetry. One of two things: either everything in the world is prose, or everything in the world is poetry. And the best artists embrace the latter. For them, where there is life, there is poetry. Such realist writers are able to find the golden sparkles of poetry in the most rude and everyday, in the sands and deserts of worldly prose. They transform prose, and it begins to glow with their inner light of beauty. It is known how Pushkin was able to turn everything into the gold of poetry with his touch, some kind of alchemy of talent. Isn't poetry the justification of prose? This is not superfluous to think about when the theory of literature offers its own distinction between prose and poetry.

Poetry and prose from a purely rhythmic point of view, they have no fundamental differences; rhythm is carried out in both cases by the equal size of the time intervals into which speech is divided, both in verse and in prose. The difference is observed in the structure of the very intervals of the verse; if any correct and precisely limited, in accordance with the general rhythmic tendency of the poem, rhythmic interval is precisely a metric interval, then it must be said that the difference between poetry and prose is observed precisely in meter, and not in rhythm. Prose does not have an exact meter, its isochronism is very approximate and refers to rhythm, a subjective rather than an objective phenomenon. Verse is more metric than prose, prose is more metric than oratory, oratory is more metric than colloquial speech, but in the end they come from the same source, and Spencer, of course, was right when he said that rhythm is an emotional idealization of ordinary speech. A survey of word divisions (see) prose and verse (see Rhythm) shows that prose uses significantly large quantity words rather than verse, while choosing as fairly common ones precisely those that the verse avoids, i.e. slory with a very large number of non-percussions between two percussions. A bipartite verse almost exclusively uses words with three unstressed accents, and much less frequently with five, i.e.:

- ⌣ ⌣ ⌣ ⌣ ⌣ -

and choriambic lor, such as:

is used almost exclusively in the case of an anacrus stress with a special type, namely with a slór immediately after the first stress, while prose uses slórs of all conceivable types, and in particular the choriambic ones, or with four syllables between stresses (approximately the same is given by the tribrachoid pause in a paused tripartite). Here are the numbers:

"The Bronze Horseman" Dostoevsky ("Demons")

Metric words 65.10 20.13

Pyrrhichich. , 33.83 20.21

Horiyambich. , 1.07 34.69

Other , 0.00 10.10

That is, prose uses almost two times less metrical words, while horiambic words are more than 30 times more. The freer the metrical basis of the verse, as, for example, in the paused three-part (“Songs of the Western Slavs”, “The Song of the Merchant Kalashnikov”, etc.), the closer such a verse is to prose, but in the absence of rhyme, such a freely rhythmized verse differs from prose sometimes just a rhyming pause and a weakly outlined dipodium. But this is an extreme case, in general, the further the verse departs from the metrical basis, the stronger and sharper the rhythm, mainly dipodic, is indicated in it. For example, in Aseev, in a verse composed of macros (monosyllabic foot), we find:

Under the hooves of a Cossack

Cry, scold, gin, lie,

Throw yourself, eyebrows, at sunset,

Yang, Yang, Yang, Yang.

The omission of unstressed syllables in even lines gives the impression of a much more intense rhythm. The boundary where verse unity begins to collapse, i.e., where the meter begins to completely disappear, is not easily traced, but it is very common in white verse, especially where there are frequent oversteps - the semantic transfer of a phrase to another line (the so-called enjambement ), Verrier points out that if the steps were straightened and the typographic unity destroyed in the first scenes of Hamlet or at the beginning of Milton's Paradise Lost, then something like W. Whitman's free verse would be obtained. In addition to these specially rhythmic features, there is no rhythmic association of time units (stops) in prose, i.e. no dipodia or colon. Units of prose (words) are combined on a semantic basis, avoiding only the unpleasant repetition of the same expressions and the comparison of several similar grammatical units in a row (several nouns in the same case, etc.). The language of poetry is always more archaic than the language of prose, but ancient verses are easier to read precisely for this reason, since while the language of prose has already completely changed since the time of Zhukovsky, the language of verse has undergone relatively small changes. Lomonosov's prose is almost difficult to understand; his poems are only reminiscent of antiquity. Prose is also linked by a plot, i.e., a novel, a story, a story are united in themselves by a coherent story about an incident or a series of incidents, one way or another united by a common meaning. Verse, generally speaking, avoids plot, and the farther it stands from it, the more clearly its meter is expressed. Verse constantly plays with homophony, which in prose has an extremely limited use, and in the case of, so to speak, an internal need for playing sounds, many prose writers prefer to quote a poem or quote a specially composed one for this case. Intrigue, i.e. the development of the action, constructed in such a way that the true meaning of what is described is revealed to the reader only in a certain gradualness, so that each next page promises something new and supposedly final, is almost completely absent in the verse; even in poems and poetic novels, like "Eugene Onegin", there is no intrigue; the ballad sometimes uses an anecdotal juxtaposition of extremes, but there the idea of ​​the plot is so compressed and schematized that the plot often comes down to just a red word. Verse generally uses emotions as material for its content, while prose takes emotions rather as a form of presentation. The thought of poetry is either emotional or philosophically abstract, while prose deals with experience and the so-called worldly wisdom of the environment. Poetry, even in the most impressionistic things, is reduced to a statement of the type "es is pe", while prose develops a reasoning with a dialectical series of incidents, which usually ends with a statement of an incident or a question. The idea of ​​tragedy, fate is highly characteristic of prose, while verse is more idyllic and dreamy. Verse is closer to the pathos of the individual, while prose is the tragedy of the collective. All this affects the formal aspects of the matter. The verse with great diligence reveals its own separate content (more distinct phonemes), the strongly emphasized rhythm captures the reader and makes him believe emotions and details of moods, which are often almost impossible or false from the point of view of practical experience, since the verse likes to indulge in absolute feelings like “ love forever, etc., the verse ornaments its content in every possible way; prose leaves all this aside and is content with an approximate and indefinite rhythmization, just as the fate of the one is indeterminate in the fate of the mass. There are, of course, transitional forms, such as, so to speak, semi-poetry: "poems in prose" (a rare and difficult form), jokes, fairy tales, trinkets, etc.; such, of course, may lean either more towards prose or more towards poetry, depending on the mood of the author.

Yu. Aikhenvald., S. P. Bobrov. Literary encyclopedia: Dictionary of literary terms: In 2 volumes / Edited by N. Brodsky, A. Lavretsky, E. Lunin, V. Lvov-Rogachevsky, M. Rozanov, V. Cheshikhin-Vetrinsky. - M.; L.: Publishing house L. D. Frenkel, 1925

I've been writing poetry all my life, at least I think it's poetry. And all my life they say to me: “Is this poetry? There is not an ounce of poetry in them."
Then I take the dictionary of the Russian language by S.I. Ozhegov, find the right word and read:
Poetry is verbal artistic creativity, mainly poetic. The grace and beauty of something that excites a sense of charm.
So, following this definition, poetry should arouse a sense of charm? Wonderful! But what about Yevtushenko's "Babi Yar" then? What kind of charm can we talk about if, when reading this poem, my throat intercepts with excitement. Perhaps S.I. Ozhegov did not give a completely accurate definition and we need to look for it in other sources?
In many articles about poetry, a lot of definitions are given and no two are completely alike. And from the definitions I found, only two of them are closest to me personally.
In the first, poetry is creativity, which is the language of the soul of the poet. The poet is able to express in words the state of his soul in such a way that it is transmitted to us, the readers.
In the second, poetry is rhythm. But after all, rhythm is music, so music in verbal expression, conveying the state of the poet's soul, is poetry?
I realized that you can search for a definition ad infinitum. And apparently I.F. Annensky was right when he wrote:
“But if I knew what poetry is, I would not be able to express my knowledge, or, finally, even having chosen and put together suitable words, no one would still be understood.”
Given all that has been said, and in order not to introduce the reader into a state of deep sleep, I will give an example that is not entirely appropriate in terms of the severity of the article itself.
Let's examine and analyze the following lines:
Fly green, impudent, large
She sat down on a heap of smelly manure.
The food she said is very tasty,
I have never eaten better.
Is this work poetry? The question, of course, is interesting and somewhat philosophical.
From the point of view of the green fly - no doubt! From the point of view of the horse that left this pile, it is unlikely that he will have any objections, for in this way the horse also got into poetry. But there are other points of view as well. And then let's make a small edit to our creation, in just one line:
“I sat down on a very smelly pile.”
Just one word, but how much it contains a lot of unexpected information, I'm not talking about expression.
We used to deal with horses. The co-author is currently unknown. There was intrigue. And the poem made us think: so what is the meaning of life?
And tell me after all this: is this poem poetry or not?
Thank you for attention.
The author draws attention to the fact that he did not mean any of the authors who posted their poems on the website of the Society

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, it was proposed to write your opinions in reviews. I wrote a review, the author of the article was not satisfied with my answer, however, like myself, too. An even more acute question arose before me about what poetry is all the same. Many wrote that poetry is life, it is a state of mind, a way to express one's thoughts and feelings. After reading several answers of other authors (and there were a lot of interesting things), the question still remained open. The author who asked a question about poetry asked to answer it in prose, not in verse, so there were many answers in prose, but still a large number of answers were observed in verse, since it is impossible not to say poetry about poetry if the lines themselves are born in depth souls. This seemingly simple question actually turned out to be a complex one.
The definition read in Dahl's dictionary did not bring me closer to answering the question: "Poetry is elegance in writing; everything artistic, spiritually and morally beautiful, expressed in words, and moreover, in a more measured speech. Poetry, abstractly, is grace, beauty, as a property, a quality that is not expressed in words, and creativity itself, the ability, the gift to renounce the essential, to ascend with a dream, imagination to the highest limits, creating prototypes of beauty; finally, the very compositions, writings of this kind and the rules invented for this are called poetry: 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.Poet male piita, a man endowed by nature with the ability to feel, recognize poetry and convey it in words, to create grace; poet Poetic, poetic, pertaining to poetry, containing it, graceful from a holistic content."
Dictionary Dahl - (Dal V.I. Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language. St. Petersburg, 1863-1909.)
Other sources also did not give a satisfactory explanation.

In my opinion, a very good explanation of what poetry is is given in the poem by Nadezhda Trubnikova "Poetry", written on March 20, 2002:
naked soul,
Frankness - almost to shamelessness ...
Nerves are strings
on them
leads the memory with an invisible bow.
Letters-notes, chords-words and running stanzas
written down on white paper
cantatas of 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 Institute of Architecture in 1957. Candidate of Sciences, member of the Union of Architects of Russia since 1960. The first collection of her selected lyrics, Life in Poetry, was released in 1999, the second collection, Fate, - in 2001).
One friend gave to read a collection of her poems, which she gave him on November 23, 2009 with her autograph. The author is no longer with us. It is in this collection, which is called "The Nakedness of the Soul", published in 2004, that the above poem is located, 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

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

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

Poetry and prose- two main types of organization of artistic speech.

Prose - oral or written speech, which is not divided into commensurate segments - poetry. Unlike poetry, prose fiction is divided into paragraphs, sentences and periods. Artistic prose (story, story, novel) is mostly epic, striving for objectivity, unlike lyrical and emotional poetry.

Poetry - poems.

Poetry and prose- two main types of art of the word, differing in the ways of organizing speech and, above all, in rhythm construction. The rhythm of poetic speech is created by a distinct division into verses, which is expressed graphically: the writing of verses in the form of short segments (lines) that are symmetrically located one below the other. It is the graphic design that determines, first of all, our perception of the verse as poetic form. In poetry, the interaction of verse form with words (the juxtaposition of words in terms of rhythm and rhyme, a clear identification of the sound side of speech, the relationship of rhythmic and syntactic structures) creates the subtlest shades and shifts in artistic meaning. Poetry is basically a monologue, unlike prose. At the same time, the boundary between poetry and prose is rather conventional; there are intermediate forms: rhythmic prose and free verse.

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

Prose artistic speech is divided into paragraphs, periods, sentences and columns, inherent in ordinary speech, but having a certain order; the rhythm of prose, however, is a complex and elusive phenomenon that has not been studied enough. Initially, the art of the word in general was called poetry, since, until the New Age, poetic and rhythmic-intonational forms, close to it, sharply prevailed in it.

All non-fiction verbal works were called prose: philosophical, scientific, journalistic, informational, oratory (in Russia, such word usage dominated in the 18th and early 19th centuries).

Poetry

The art of the word in its proper 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 different types lyrics. The poetic form, right up to the creation of artistic prose proper in modern times, was a unique, indispensable tool for turning the word into art. The unusual organization of speech inherent in verse revealed and confirmed the special significance and specific nature of the utterance. She, as it were, testified that a poetic statement is not just a message or a theoretical judgment, but some kind of original verbal “act”.

Poetry, in comparison with prose, has an increased capacity of all its constituent elements.(cm. ). The very poetic form of poetic speech, which arose as a separation from the language of reality, as if signals the "bringing" of the artistic world out of the framework of everyday authenticity, from the framework of prose (in the original meaning of the word), although, of course, referring to verse in itself is not a guarantee "Artistic".

Verse comprehensively organizes the sounding matter of speech, gives it a rhythmic roundness, 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 the word was dictated, in particular, by the fact that it originally existed as a sounding, pronounced, performing. Even G. W. F. Hegel is still convinced that all artistic verbal works must be pronounced, sung, recited. In prose, although the living voices of the author and characters are heard, they are heard by the "inner" ear of the reader.

Awareness and the final approval of prose as a legitimate form of art of the word occurs only in the 18th - early 19th centuries. In the era of prose dominance, the reasons that gave birth to poetry lose their exceptional significance: the art of the word is now able to create 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. It weakens the features of completeness; especially strict strophic constructions fade into the background: sonnet, rondo, gazelle, tanka, more free forms of rhythm develop - dolnik, taktovik, accent verse, colloquial intonations are introduced. In the latest 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 showed that 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 under the conditions 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 verses, if transcribed into prose, will turn out to mean almost nothing, because their meaning is created mainly by the very interaction of poetic form with words. The elusiveness - in the direct verbal content - of the special poetic world created by the artist, his perception and vision, remains common law for both ancient and modern poetry: “I would like to live for many years In my dear homeland, Love its bright waters And love its dark waters” (Vl. N. Sokolov).

The specific, often inexplicable effect on the reader of poetry, which makes it possible to talk about its secret, is largely determined by this elusiveness of artistic meaning. Poetry is able to recreate 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, the task is twofold. In accordance with his age-old role, he elevates a certain message about the real life experience of the author to the sphere of art, that is, he turns an empirical fact into an artistic fact; and at the same time, it is the verse that makes it possible to recreate in lyrical intonation the immediate truth of personal experience, the authentic and unique human voice of the poet.

Prose

Until the New Age, prose developed on the periphery of the art of the word, shaping mixed, semi-artistic phenomena of writing (historical chronicles, philosophical dialogues, memoirs, sermons, religious writings, etc.) or "low" genres (farces, mimes and other types of satire) .

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

At its inception, prose speech, like poetic speech, strove for emphasized isolation from ordinary colloquial speech, for stylistic embellishment. And only with the approval 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 it was customary to think, poetic complexity, but is a later conscious reaction to it.

In general, the formation and development of prose takes place in constant correlation with prose (in particular, in the convergence of some and the repulsion of other genres and forms). Thus, the authenticity of life, the "commonness" of the language and style of prose, up to the introduction of vernacular, prosaic and dialectic, are still perceived as artistically significant precisely against the background of a high poetic word.

Exploring the Nature of Fiction

The study of the nature of artistic prose began only in the 19th century and unfolded in the 20th century. AT in general terms some essential principles that distinguish prose words from poetic ones are revealed. The word in prose has, in comparison with the poetic, a fundamentally pictorial character; it focuses attention on itself to a lesser extent, meanwhile, in it, especially lyrical, one cannot be distracted from 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 "foreign", in principle, not coinciding with the author's. It is characterized by a single author's word and the character's word, the same type as the author's;

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

Forms between poetry and prose

There are intermediate forms between poetry and prose: a poem in prose is a form close to lyric poetry in terms of stylistic, thematic and compositional (but not metrical) features; on the other hand, rhythmic prose, close to verse precisely in terms of metrical features. Sometimes poetry and prose interpenetrate each other (see) or include pieces of a "foreign" text - respectively prose or poetry, 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 means direct, simple speech.

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