All real
poetry produces an aesthetic effect by appealing to our aesthetic sense;
that is, to our love of the beautiful.
In making this appeal to our love of the beautiful, poetry depends both
upon the ideas it contains and upon the forms it uses. Like prose, it
may increase its aesthetic effect by appropriate phrasing, effective
arrangement, and subtle suggestiveness, but it also makes use of certain
devices of language such as rhythm, rhyme, etc., which, though they may
occur in writings that would be classed as prose, are characteristic of
poetry. Much depends upon the ideas that poetry contains; for mere
nonsense, though in perfect rhyme and rhythm, is not poetry. But it is not
the idea alone which makes a poem beautiful; it is the form as well. The
merely trivial cannot be made beautiful by giving it poetical form, but
there are many poems containing ideas of small importance which please us
because of the perfection of form. We enjoy them as we do the singing of
the birds or the murmuring of the brooks. In fact, poetry is inseparable
from its characteristic forms. To sort out, re-arrange, and paraphrase
into second-class prose the ideas which a poem contains is a profitless
and harmful exercise, because it emphasizes the intellectual side of a
work which was created for the purpose of appealing to our aesthetic
sense.
+108. Rhythm.+--There are several forms characteristic of poetry, by the
use of which its beauty and effectiveness are enhanced.
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