"What is poetry?"
To me, the question is not nearly so interesting as the fact that it's
asked and that no one's surprised that it's asked.
"What is music?" The question would only occur to a few cloistered
aestheticians. It would never occur to most people, even most
musicians and composers, to spend much time worrying about it. And if
anyone does ask it, it usually doesn't really mean "What is music?"
-- that is, what is its concrete definition, how does it differ from
speech or noise -- but is shorthand for more general questions like
"What does music mean? What is its role in life? What are the
reasons it affects us?" Whereas the question "What is poetry?" is
almost always a way of asking for the concrete definition -- "Exactly
how is poetry different from things that aren't poetry?" "What are the
criteria by which we call one thing poetry and something else not
poetry?" -- which must precede those more general questions. In other
words, "everyone knows" what music is, but nobody knows what poetry
is.
"What is cinema?" The question is famous, but only among a small
coterie of theorists. The average movie goer would find it quite
irrelevant, if not absurd, to try to define what a movie is.
"What is art?" A question made much of in the art world, I suspect
mostly because public attempts by artists to raise it are an effective
way of getting media attention.
"What is the significance that the question 'What is poetry?" is so
often asked and never really answered?"
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Jon Corelis www.geocities.com/jgcorelis/
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