THE NATURE OF POETRY This is the nature of the material of the verbal arts. It is no different from the nature of the material of the painter or composer, excepting that it deals more directly and intimately with life than do colors or tones. But for that very reason poetry, drama, and fiction are also the richest of the arts. Now what does the poet do with this commonplace material? How do art works arise from it? Let us ask of poetry itself. We will take two poems and agree for the purpose of our inquiry that they are both beau- tiful. We will ask the poems to tell us wherein lies their beauty. Our first sample is the famous lyric that forms the opening lines of Byron The Bride of Abydos. Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime, Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle, Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime? Know ye the land of the cedar and vine Where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine; Where the light wings of Zephyr, oppress'd with perfume, Wax faint o'er the gardens of Gul in their bloom; Where the citron and olive are fairest of fruit And the voice of the nightingale never is mute-- . . . . . . . . . . . Where the virgins are soft as the roses they twine, And all, save the spirit of man is divine? 'Tis the land of the East; 'tis the clime of the Sun-- Can he smile on such deeds as his children have done? Oh! wild as the accents of lovers' farewell Are the hearts that they bear, and the tales that they tell Wherein lies the beauty of these lines? What does it do to us? Does it tell us anything? Does it convey any meaning to us? Does it communicate any ideas? If we tried to tell some one about it what could we say? Woyciech Fangor The answer is, we could say extremely little about its ideational meaning. But it does have a meaning in that it grips us, it affects us. In what way does it affect us? It informs us of nothing. It does not lead us to think. We carry no idea away from it. There is nothing in it we could translate into our own words. It could not be translated into another language without ruining it. But what then does it do, for it does grip us? It plays on our ears, eyes, tastes, and odors. We hear it, taste it, see it, and smell it. It is a melody, a painting of a landscape, an odor, a flavor. It ravishes us like a melody, a pastoral scene, a perfume, a delicate wine. In the ordinary sense of telling, it tells nothing. It just rouses us to a heightened consciousness of living. And it does so principally through its melodic quality, its meter, rhyme, and rhythm. If its melodic quality were eliminated, all its visual, olfactory, and gustatory effects would vanish. In a word, then, its aesthetic quality, its beauty, is its music. It is no more nor less than the music of verbal sounds. There is then poetry whose aesthetic substance lies predominantly in the musical potentialities of the pure rhythmic sound of words. This is the lyric. Our second example is from Browning: All that I know Of a certain star, Is, it can throw (Like the angled spar) Now a dart of red, Now a dart of blue, Till my friends have said They would fain see, too, My star that dartles the red and the blue! Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled: They must solace themselves with the saturn above it. What matter to me if their star is a world? Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it. These lines are also musical, and we may find their aesthetic quality in their music. But they are more than that. We are impressed with something more than the meter, rhyme, and rhythm of the language. The language conveys something to us, and the poet is giving expression through the musical lines to an idea, an experience. We can talk about this poem. We can discuss its idea in words of our own. The idea could be translated into a different language, and perfectly so. The beauty of the lines might be lost, but the idea would remain. The poet tells us of a great, vital personal experience. He tells us of an ineffable, life-transforming vision that is entirely his own, that is uniquely significant. The words are the medium for the idea. The idea is the matter of which the words are the form, the two blending into one whole. The substance of the poem is the idea. This is poetry as dramatic, epic, narrative. Poetry, as art, is then either predominantly verbal melody or predominantly poetic idea.		Home The Nature and Objective of Aesthetics Art and the Artist The Art Work The Art Work in the Making The Creative Mind  Art and the Artist Art and the Layman The Experience of Beauty Beauty in Music Painting Poetry The Nature of Language The Nature of Poetry Poetry As Verbal Music Poetry As Poetic Idea The Poetic Idea