> The notion that a view of poetry as rhetoric is "thinks so little of
> poetry" is simply wrong. What poetry is is presentation -- the ideas
> you find in poems are almost universally trite, cliched, banal. It is
> the presentation of them that makes them significant, important,
> powerful, funny, whatever.
> Marcus

On 10 Apr 2004 at 8:53, Gary Blankenship wrote:
> So poetry is only the look of it?

What does "the look of it" have to do with it? How did you get "the
look of it"? out of what I said?  Presentation in words, grammar,
syntax, language!

> Perhaps say the Declaration of Independence is also trite and cliché
> and it is only Jefferson's words that make them powerful.<

First, the Declaration doesn't purport to be a poem. Second, the
ideas in it were stolen outright from Locke, Hobbes, Mill, and that
crowd -- if you're going to take the view that only "honest
originality" counts in any literary endeavor then you're going to
have to convict Jefferson of plagiarism -- and where did Locke and
the rest get them? From others.

> Or the Psalms.

You read Greek?

> Sorry, you are not convincing me.  The vessel is the words, so if the
> words are trite, then isn't the vessel?<

It is the use of the words, how the words are arranged, in grammar
and syntax, how they are arranged to make a greater meaning than the
mere denotative meaning of the prose ideas, that makes poetry. Poetry
is the presentation in language, not the ideas. Poetry is not
philosophy.

Marcus