(Why is this, when symphony concerts are not obliged to offer karaoke afterwards?) The main function of poetry is to elevate human mind. Poet Daisy Fried expands upon the idea: “But politically-alert poetry is no more intrinsically useful than any other poetry…the kind of poetry written to make us feel better, for example” along with poet and professor Major Jackson: “The function of poetry is that it does not have any function beyond its own construction and being-in-the-world.” Rhyme most often occurs at the ends of poetic lines. It is used as a figure of speech and as a form of analogy. The evidence of history or of the senses is left far behind and never thought of ; the evidence of the heart, the value of the idea, are alone regarded. This means that the poetry is created and presented with no written record. Poetry is not at its best when it depicts a further possible experience, but when it initiates us, by feigning something which as an experience is impossible, into the meaning of the experience which we have actually had. Within his model, this function is oriented towards the message or focused on the message for its own sake (see also message-oriented communication). Because the poetry of a period has typical subjects and favored styles, it can serve as a marker of the tastes of its era. So that the art of singing is now in the same plight as that of sculpture—an abstract and conventional thing surviving by force of tradition and of an innate but now impotent impulse, which under simpler conditions would work itself out into the proper forms of those arts. If it is good to be reassured that one is on familiar ground, it is still better to know that that ground is beyond the reach of most others—that one is in an intellectual gated community, at home but set apart. How does it help us in our lives? Not the character, but its effects and causes, is the truly interesting thing. Wordsworth Defence of a metre in Poetry This idealization is, of course, partial and merely relative to the particular adventure in which we imagine ourselves engaged. Well, then, at somewhat higher levels there are poetry slams and innumerable readings in bookstores and coffeehouses. Function is thus an instrumental concept. The ancients found poetry not so much in sensible accidents as in essential forms and noble associations; and this fact marks very clearly their superior education. What are the functions of literature? Poetry matters because life, tears, people, birth, human experience matter. The tongue will choose those forms of utterance which have a natural grace as mere sound and sensation; the memory will retain these catches, and they will pass and repass through the mind until they become types of instinctive speech and standards of pleasing expression. Viewing poetry as an instrument in a dialogue between writer and reader takes some of the mystery out of this process. The judgment of Plato has been generally condemned by philosophers, although it is eminently rational, and justified by the simplest principles of morals. Entertaining pleasure suggests mirth and relaxation, while the pleasure of value indicates information and learning. If poetry in its higher reaches is more philosophical than history, because it presents the memorable types of men and things apart from unmeaning circumstances, so in its primary substance and texture poetry is more philosophical than prose because it is nearer to our immediate experience. Entertaining pleasure suggests mirth and relaxation, while the pleasure of value indicates information and learning. The distinction of a poet—the dignity and humanity of his thought—can be measured by nothing, perhaps, so well as by the diameter of the world in which he lives; if he is supreme, his vision, like Dante's, always stretches to the stars. Its significance was beautiful, its composition eloquent and its words excellent. Coleridge the nature and function of poetry Name- Vaishali H Jasoliya Roll no. Such inconceivability, of course, need not seem a great objection to a man of impassioned inspiration; he may even claim a certain consistency in positing, on the strength of his preference, the inconceivable to be a truth. And yet these contrasts, strong when we compare extreme cases, fade from our consciousness in the actual use of a mother-tongue. Such poetry is not great; it has, in fact, a tedious vacuity, and is unworthy of a mature mind; but it is poetical, and could be produced only by a legitimate child of the Muse. The function of poetry; Identity area. By this union of disparate things having a common overtone of feeling, the feeling is itself evoked in all its strength; nay, it is often created for the first time, much as by a new mixture of old pigments Perugino could produce the unprecedented limpidity of his colour, or Titian the unprecedented glow of his. A metaphor here is the basis of a dogma, because the dogma rises to the same subtle region as the metaphor, and gathers its sap from the same soil of emotion. We fondly acknowledge the positivefunctions. But psychologists have discovered, what laymen generally will confess, that we hurry by the procession of our mental images as we do by the traffic of the street, intent on business, gladly forgetting the noise and movement of the scene, and looking only for the corner we would turn or the door we would enter. This idea must be furnished by the senses, by outward experience, else the hunger of the soul will gnaw its own emptiness for ever. The highest poetry, then, is not that of versifiers but that of the prophets, or of such poets as interpret verbally the visions which the prophets have rendered in action ad sentiment rather than in adequate words. Virgil uses Aeneas, the protagonist, to show the great strengths of Roman Emperor Augustus. Poetry is no different. If the function of poetry, however, did not go beyond this recovery of sensuous and imaginative freedom, at the expense of disrupting our useful habits of thought, we might be grateful to it for occasionally relieving our numbness, but we should have to admit that it was nothing but a relaxation; that spiritual discipline was not to be gained from it in any degree, but must be sought wholly in that intellectual system that builds the science of Nature with the categories of prose. Moreover, preferred functions change, depending on the readers of poems and the times. Entertaining pleasure suggests mirth and relaxation, while the pleasure of value indicates information and learning. Consider the response of Czeslaw Milosz to “Aubade,” Philip Larkin’s appalled contemplation of inevitable death and one of the icons of twentieth-century English poetry: “[T]he poem leaves me not only dissatisfied but indignant,” Milosz wrote, “and I wonder why myself.” Seamus Heaney cites this objection and expands: “Aubade” does not go over to the side of the adversary. The poet can put only a part of himself into any of his heroes, but the must put the whole into his noblest work. In our time people who regard a poem primarily as a performance piece, a script for declamation, will respond enthusiastically to compositions that would cause a professor of literature, sitting alone under his reading lamp, to turn the page in haste. The Phatic Function can be observed in greetings and casual discussions of the weather, particularly with strangers. Its elements, and especially the emotional stimulation which it gives, may be suggested or expressed in verse; but landscape is not thereby represented in its proper form: it appears only as an element and associate of moral unities. Notes. As no one understands better than an editor who has waded through thousands of discouraging submissions, this is an invaluable service, no less so even though, in their inevitable bias toward the known and their numbness induced by repeated encounters with the strange and the dull, they can hardly help rejecting some worthy work and accepting some that is unworthy. The function of poetry Date(s) Level of description. Poetry is a unique probe and mirror of humanity—encompassing the humorous and the serious, the ideal and the real, the feeling and the meaning and the understanding of life. Match. It is a situation we must learn to live with. Poetry definition is - metrical writing : verse. We feel instinctively that it would be insulting to speak of any man to his face as we should speak of him in his absence, even if what we say is in the way of praise: for absent he is a character understood, but present he is a force respected. But without such a glimpse of the goal of a passion the passion has not been adequately read, and the fiction has served to amuse us without really enlarging the frontiers of our ideal experience. Out of the neglected riches of this dream the poet fetches his wares. Poetry; Prose; Drama; Site Map; Language Journal; Others; Link Exchange; Students Corner; Home » literature » The Functions of Literature The Functions of Literature . Why, we may ask, these apparent inconsistencies? “Poetry, like all art, has a trinitarian function: creative, redemptive, and sanctifying,” Vassar Miller asserted. Several circumstances, however, might suggest to us the possibility that the greatest function of poetry may be still to find. In various forms—popular song including “folk” and rap, limericks and other light verse, rallying cries of street demonstrations, naïve compositions for birthdays and other special occasions—rhythmic language thrives. The main functions of allegory in poetry are to glorify or flatter like Virgil or to critique like Dryden and Spenser. Poetry is a window on the world, our pathway to the color and the sound and the emotion, the sorrow and the joy, the pain and the exaltation of our existence. Because he has added to the word sun, in itself sufficient and unequivocal, other words, unnecessary for practical clearness, but serving to restore the individuality of his perception and its associations in his mind. c) To convey messages in the briefest way possible. Sanctifying because it gives the… Poetry raised to its highest power is then identical with religion grasped in its inmost truth; at their point of union both reach their utmost purity and beneficence, for then poetry loses its frivolity and ceases to demoralize, while religion surrenders its illusions and ceases to deceive. In its purest sense oral poetry is 100% oral. Thus the picture of an unmeaning passion, of a crime without an issue, does not appear to our romantic apprehension as the sorry farce it is, but rather as a true tragedy. But not all the functions are positive, even in poems acknowledged to be excellent. Poetry can entertain or amuse, we say. Create. Looked at as an empirical phenomenon, not an ideal concept, poetry reveals functions that are various and overlapping. Why? It is a device that we use in our day-to-day speech. He also examines the ways in which poetry differs from other kinds of artistic activity, and the role and significance of metre as an essential and significant part of a poem.. Oral poetry can be loosely defined or purely defined. (But neither is the inverse true: a minuscule audience is not a sign of anointment.) Poetry can entertain or amuse, we say. If a poem ought to move, and it moves you but does not move me (or, worse, moves you to tears but moves me to laughter), and if this happens repeatedly, then it is likely that you and I will not choose the same anthologies, and if we have some regard for each other we will avoid the subject of poetry in our conversation. Leibnitz lighted in his speculations upon a conception of organic nature which may be false as a fact, but which is excellent as an ideal; he tells us that the difference between living and dead matter, between animals and machines, is that the former are composed of parts that are themselves organic, every portion of the body being itself a machine, and every portion of that machine still a machine, and so ad infinitum; whereas, in artificial bodies the organization is not in this manner infinitely deep. For every art looks to the building up of something. There is no square sun with which the sun he is speaking of could be confused; to stop and call it round is a luxury, a halting in the sensation of the love of its form. The carnal temptations of youth are incidents of the same maladaptation, when passions assert themselves before the conventional order of society can allow them physical satisfaction, and long before philosophy or religion can hope to transform them into fuel for its own sacrificial flames. The substance of poetry is, after all, emotion; and if the intellectual emotion of comprehension and the mimetic one of impersonation are massive, they are not so intense as the appetites and other transitive emotions of life; the passions are the chief basis of all interests, even the most ideal, and the passions are seldom brought into play except by the contact of man with man. A crude and superficial theology may confuse God with the thunder, the mountains, the heavenly bodies, or the whole universe; but when we pass from these easy identifications to a religion that has taken root in history and in the hearts of men, and has come to flower, we find its objects and its dogmas purely ideal, transparent expressions of moral experience and perfect counterparts of human needs. Accordingly Aristophanes, remembering the original religious and political functions of tragedy, blushes to see upon the boards a woman in love. The description of an alien character can serve this purpose only very imperfectly; but the presentation of the circumstances in which that character manifests itself will make description unnecessary, since our instinct will supply all that is requisite for the impersonation. Yet in our alertest moment the depths of the soul are still dreaming; the real world stands drawn in bare outline against a background of chaos and unrest. Learn with flashcards, games, and more — for free. Poetry thus brings a freshness into the familiar, and engages an unusual state of emotion. Posted by awin wijaya Posted on 12:54 AM with 17 comments. What is that but to treat facts as an appearance, and their ideal import as a reality? We have, in a sense, an infinite will; but we have a limited experience, an experience sadly inadequate to exercise that will either in its purity or its strength. It is also a tool to be used to teach morals and virtues, to make parodies of contemporary figures or to mask emotions. A doll will be loved instead of a child, a child instead of a lover, God instead of everything. The truest kind of euphony is thus denied to our poetry. Resembling the naturalist in all this, he differs from him in the balance of his interests; the poet has the concreter mind; his visible world wears all its colours and retains its indwelling passion and life. of the functions which, as I am trying to argue, characterises Old English poetry as a whole. If great poet are like architects and sculptors, the euphuists are like goldsmiths and jewellers; their work is filigree in precious metals, encrusted with glowing stones. SandyLWilliams. Search. It can move. If we ask of any of poetry’s functions, “For whom does it serve this function?” the futility of much critical debate becomes evident. If we abstract, however, from our personal tastes and look at the matter in its human and logical relations, we shall see, I think, that the construction of characters is not the ultimate task of poetic fiction. The visible landscape is not a proper object for poetry. Poems prized today (in some circles at least) for their distortion of syntax or their resistance to rational understanding would have been universally condemned for those same qualities at other times in history, because such functions were considered illegitimate. At moments of crisis or loss, or at times of rejoicing, it can offer consola- So the charm which a poet, by his art of combining images and shades of emotion, casts over a scene or an action, is attached to the principal actor in it, who gets the benefit of the setting furnished him by a well-stocked mind. However, the sequence of words in poetry is different from that of prose. Gravity. And to do this is the very essence of poetry, for which everything visible is a sacrament—and outward sign of what inward grace for which the soul is thirsting. On the contrary, vision and feeling, when most abundant and original, most easily present themselves in this undivided form. But there is a sort of landscape larger than the visible, which escapes the synthesis of the eye; it is present to that topographical sense by which we always live in the consciousness that there is a sea, that there are mountains, that the sky is above us, even when we do not see it, and that the tribes of men, with their different degrees of blamelessness, and scattered over the broad-backed earth. Under the accidents of bread and wine lies, says the dogma, the substance of Christ's body, blood, and divinity. It can move. This discovery need not be an ethical gain—Macbeth and Othello attain it as much as Brutus and Hamlet—it may serve to accentuate despair, or cruelty, or indifference, or merely to fill the imagination for a moment without much affecting the permanent tone of the mind. 1) William Wordsworth Defence of Metre in Poetry. The function of poetry is that it does not have any function beyond its own construction and being-in-the-world. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! James Merrill’s poetry has a social function in the sense of “social event”: it tries to produce—often, in the face of mortality, or dejection, or bodily ills—a sense that the poet has friends who get his jokes, who share his sense of things, who respond in kind. We have been made to halt at the sensation, and to penetrate for a moment into its background of dream. A physical and historical background, however, is of little moment to the poet in comparison with that other environment of his characters—the dramatic situations in which they are involved. Metonymy can accomplish this, often by abstracting an underlying idea or making it larger than life. Therein is her vitality, for she pierces to the quick and shakes us out of our servile speech and imaginative poverty; she reminds us of all we have felt, she invited us even to dream a little, to nurse the wonderful spontaneous creations which at every waking moment we are snuffing out in our brain. Now euphuism contributes not a little to the poetic effect of the tirades of Keats and Shelley; if we wish to see the power of versification without euphuism we may turn to the tirades of Pope, where metre and euphony are displayed alone, and we have the outline of skeleton or poetry without the filling. For instance, when you meet a friend after a lengthy time, you say, “ It ’s been ages since I last saw you. Poetry … This cosmic landscape poetry alone can render, and it is no small part of the art to awaken the sense of it at the right moment, so that the object that occupies the centre of vision may be seen in its true lights, coloured by its wider associations, and dignified by its felt affinities to things permanent and great. For the first element which the intellect rejects in forming its ideas of things is the emotion which accompanies of perception; and this emotion is the first thing the poet restores. It can move. And we should readily agree with him, but for two reasons,--one, that we abstract too much, in our demands upon art, from nobility of mind, and from the thought of totality and proportion; the other, that we have learned to look for a symbolic meaning in detached episodes, and to accept the incidental emotions they cause, because of their violence and our absorption in them, as in some sense sacramental and representative of the whole. Yet, even as it is , a scientific and mathematical vision has a higher beauty than the irrational poetry of sensation and impulse, which merely tickles the brain, like liquor, and plays upon our random, imaginative lusts. We must place them in that indispensable environment which the landscape furnishes to the eye and the social medium to the emotions. The thrilling adventures which he craves demand an appropriate theatre; the glorious emotions with which he bubbles over must at all hazards find or feign their correlative objects. He will read himself through and almost gather a meaning from his experience; at least he will half believe that all he has been dealing with was a dream and a symbol, and raise his eyes toward the truth beyond. Culled from: http://www.webdelsol.com/CPR/Schreiber/poetry.htm. It consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is felt by its user and audience to differ from ordinary prose.