What is Poetry? | Close Reading Poetry for Beginners

now before we discuss close reading we have to first answer the question what is poetry because what we believe about poetry will determine how we engage with it so there are three main truths that I wish to outline here in this video about poetry the first is that poetry is a special mode of literature that's different from prose it operates differently we're talking about verse poetry and we'll get into that that's the first one it's a special mode of literature which of course requires a special kind of reading secondly a poem is the shape of sound incense so in poetry sound and sense are inextricable what this means is that you can't translate a poem into a paragraph and think you've understood it um so the encounter with the prose meaning of a poem is not the same thing as understanding the poem itself so there's an intellectual what the poem is saying and there's really how the poem is saying and those two are interlinks you can't take them apart and the third is that a poem oftentimes it's especially true for lyric poetry a poem is not just a description of something it also enacts something it is an experience and this one will explore a little bit more with an example but to ask the overwhelming question what is poetry is really to Traverse a c in which many ships have sunk but critics and Poets have found surest Harbor in generalizations now they don't all agree with each other but they do have something in common which we'll see Giovanni boccaccio the Italian poet said that for whatever is composed as under a veil and thus exquisitely wrought is poetry and poetry alone what's key about this passage is that it a poem is something exquisitely wrought for Picacho meaning that there's some special Artistry involved sir Philip Sydney the English poet said that poetry was among other things a speaking picture so it's it's imagistic it's visual it's sensorial in a way Samuel Johnson talking about books said that they teach us the Art of Living I think the same thing could be said about poetry there's something practical but there's something also very Humane that meets us in our experience there Wordsworth and his famous preface to lyrical ballads said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings ...