Definition of Poetry

What is Poetry? According to W. H. Hudson we all have a sensation of what poetry constitutes. There atomic number 18 innumerable 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 art of uniting pleasure with virtue by calling whim to the help of reason * Macaulay we mean the art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an whoremaster on the imagination, the art of doing by means of words what the painter does by means of colours * Carlyle We will call Musical thought Shelley In a general sense whitethorn be defined as the musing of the imagination * Hazlitt It is the language of the imagination and the passions * Leigh Hunt The vocalism of a passion for uprightness, truelove, and power, embodying and illustrating its conceptions by imagination and fancy, and modulating its language on the principle of manikin in unity * Coleridge Poet ry is the antithesis of science, having for its immediate object pleasure, not truth * Wordsworth It is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge and the impassioned demeanor 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 cadent language * Matthew Arnold It is simply the intimately delightful and perfect form of utterance that human words can reach * It is nothing less than the most perfect speech of man that in which he comes nearest to existence able to utter the truth * It is a critici sm of life below the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty As Hudson state when we look at them critically, and equivalence 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, rigorously 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 nail down and exclusive, because they recognize only the particular kind of poetry in which the source happened to be personally interested.