Art forms change over time; poetry has done that too. A work of art is
identifiable as poetry if it follows the same rules as something
already acknowledged to be poetry, but also - and this is one of the
ways in which change happens - if it breaks some of the rules but
maintains a resemblance in other respects to what went before.
Even if things were simple to start out with, and I'm not sure that
they were in the case of poetry, after a long history of that kind of
change what you end up with is a broad family of related things that
can be called poetry. This family will be a rather odd shape - there
will be no simple set of fundamental rules that applies to everything
in it, and yet everything in it will be related in some way to some
other thing in the same family. What's more, the family of forms and
procedures that make up poetry today does not exhaust the total range
of entities that could conceivably be called poetry tomorrow.
But the definition of poetry isn't altogether subjective, or
honorific, or arbitrary. It's still possible to look at a washing
machine manual and say, with a reasonable degree of certainty, "that
isn't poetry" (although the description of the energy-saving features
on page 31 may have some poetic qualities). It's certainly possible to
look at instances of free verse and say "that is poetry", and to trace
the family resemblance back through previous poetries until you arrive
at something that is not free verse, but is also poetry. That makes it
sound a bit like a sort of apostolic succession, which isn't quite
right - the roots branch out into a manifold, rather than tracing back
to a single pure source - but I would say that there is no poetry
without a genealogy of some sort.
Dominic
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