Definition of Poetry Essay

According to W.H.Hudson we all piss a sense of what metrical composition constitutes. There are innumer adapted definitions of poetry given by poets and critics of poetry and out of which Hudson chooses some famous definitions.They are given below * Johnson Metrical composition , it is the artwork of fall in pleasure with truth by calling resource to the help of reason * Macaulay we mean the art of employing voice communication in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination, the art of doing by means of words what the painter does by means of colours * Carlyle We will call Musical melodic theme* Shelley In a general sense may be defined as the expression of the imagination * Hazlitt It is the voice communication of the imagination and the passions * Leigh Hunt The utterance of a passion for truth, beauty, and power, embodying and illustrating its conceptions by imagination and fancy, and modulating its language on the principle of mix in unity * Coleridge Po etry is the antithesis of light, having for its immediate object pleasure, not truth * WordsworthIt is the tinge and finer spirit of all knowledge and the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science * Edgar Allan Poe It is the rhythmic creation of beauty * Keble A vent for overcharged feeling or a full imagination * Doyle It expresses our dissatisfaction with what is present and close at hand * Ruskin The suggestion by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions * Prof.Courthope The art of producing pleasure by the just expression of imaginative thought and feeling in metrical language * Mr. Watts-Dunton The concrete and artistic expression of the human mind in emotional and rhythmical language * Matthew Arnold* It is alone the most delightful and perfect form of utterance that human words can reach * It is vigour less than the most perfect speech of man that in which he comes nearest to being able to utter the truth * It is a unfavorable jud gment of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beautyAs Hudson state when we look at them critically, and comparison them with one another, certain disturbing facts about them become clear. Commenting on these definitions Hudson concludes they are almost distracting in their variety because the subject is approached from many different points of view. Some, strictly speaking, fail to define, because they express rather what is poetical in general, wherever it may be found, than what is specifically poetry.Some, on the other hand, are too narrow and exclusive, because they recognize notwithstanding the particular kind of poetry in which the writer happened to be personally interested.