Definition of Poetry

What is Poetry? agree to W. H. Hudson we all have a sense of what poetry constitutes. There are innumerable definitions of poetry addicted by poets and critics of poetry and out of which Hudson chooses some famous definitions. They are given below * Johnson Metrical part , it is the art of uniting pleasure with truth by watchwording fancy to the help of reason * Macaulay we lowly the art of employing words in such(prenominal) a manner as to produce an illusion 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 may be defined as the expression of the imagination * Hazlitt It is the language of the imagination and the passions * Leigh Hunt The utterance of a passion for truth, beauty, and power, embodying and illustrating its conceptions by imagination and fancy, and modulating its language on the principle of variety in unity * Coleridge Poetry is the antithesis of sc ience, having for its immediate object pleasure, non truth * Wordsworth It is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge and the impassioned expression which is in the instigate 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 thou 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 singsong language * Matthew Arnold It is simply the most delightful and perfect form of utterance that human words canful reach * It is nothing less than the most perfect speech of man that in which he comes nearest to being able to utter the truth * It is a criticism of life under the conditions fi xed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty As Hudson state when we sense of smell at them critically, and compare them with one another, certain disturbing facts about them become clear. Commenting on these definitions Hudson concludes they are around distracting in their variety because the subject is approached from many different points of view. Some, strictly speaking, fail to define, because they express rather what is poetic in general, wherever it may be found, than what is specifically poetry. Some, on the other hand, are too concentrate and exclusive, because they recognize only the particular kind of poetry in which the writer happened to be personally interested.