What do you think is poetry?

Poetry is one of the most common arts, which falls in every corner of human society like sunshine. Our ancestors, primitive humans, could not understand many natural phenomena such as wind, electricity, thunder and rain, so they all came down to the gods. Primitive humans sang and danced to the gods out of awe, expressing people's expectations-good weather, abundant crops and so on. This is the origin of poetry. It originated from religion. There is another form, which comes from labor. Primitive people made simple and rhythmic cries while working, so as to forget the temporary pain and spirit brought by labor and coordinate their actions. Gradually, this simple and rhythmic cry has developed into a poem that imitates the voice of labor itself and expresses the feelings of workers themselves. Mr. Lu Xun once said: "Poetry is verse, which occurs during labor; Fiction is prose, which happens from rest. " Therefore, we say that poetry is a universal art and the oldest literary style. The most essential feature of poetry is lyrical beauty. No matter novels, essays, plays and the most beautiful places, the aura of poetry is shining. Therefore, poetry is literature in literature. Poetry is everywhere in the art field, and the beauty of poetry is the highest embodiment of the universal factors of artistic beauty. The beauty of poetry also appears in the non-literary field from time to time. Exquisite fragments in scientific works, even in people's life and work, exude wisdom and brilliance, with traces of poetry. Poetry is not only poetry, but also lyrical beauty, which is the common quality of all literary styles and artistic types. Therefore, poetry is a universal art, even beyond the boundaries of art. There are two famous definitions of the essence of poetry in Chinese and foreign poetics: one is poetic, and the other is that poetry is homogeneous in music. These two definitions were reasonable under the historical conditions at that time, so they had great influence at that time. But in fact, both definitions are unscientific. First of all, talk about the essence of poetry and painting; The similarities between poetry and painting are phenomena that express the objective world, but the differences are heterogeneous in nature. Poetry and painting are very different in content, image and media. In content, the main content of painting is the artistic representation of the external image, which tends to retain the appearance of objective things. The main content of poetry is the direct expression of the poet's inner feelings, avoiding accurate description, and the expression of objective things is implied by the feelings expressed in the poem. Painting creates the visual image of objective things, while poetry creates the image of the poet himself, relying on imagination rather than vision. On the other hand, poetry sometimes shapes the image of scenery and forms a picture in poetry. But this picture is uncertain and changes with the imagination of poets or readers. And painting is a static image, the image of things at a certain moment. On the contrary, the picture of poetry is flowing with the passage of time, not static. From the media of image-shaping, the media of painting is lines and colors, and the media of poetry is language. Colors and lines can only accurately reproduce the objective world, and are greatly limited in expressing the complex subjective world. Language, as a medium, is unrestricted. Good at expressing complex and subtle spiritual world, so poetry and painting are heterogeneous. Similarly, poetry and music are essentially different. Although their formal characteristics are the same, that is, both poetry and music have a sense of rhythm and pitch fluctuation. Although music has more freedom in expressing the subjective world than painting, it goes further. It uses two abstract symbols, rhythm and tone, to express social life, which is too uncertain and random. The artist's feelings are only expressed symbolically in the tone. The emotion expressed by music lacks the clarity and concreteness of painting content. It went to the other extreme of painting. Although poetry pursues the beauty of music, it is not only rhythm and tone, it is not a simple sound art. The main medium of poetry is pronunciation rather than sound. The expression of sound in language is only an intonation, so the language of poetry is a "special language" produced by the blending of meaning and sound, which we can realize from reading articles and reciting poems. It can be seen that the emotional content expressed by poetry is far more certain than that expressed by music. Poetry, on the other hand, breaks the limitations of music and endows the emotional world with deeper and more substantial content and a clear and clear face, which is the "promotion" of music. So poetry and music are heterogeneous. From the perspective of exploring the possibility of poetry style, we can grasp the essential connotation of poetry more clearly. Viewpoint is the unique relationship between creative subject and object. Views are divided into external views and internal views, and different views bring different stylistic possibilities. Prose is similar to painting. Prose takes time-consuming artificial symbols-language as the medium, and painting takes space-consuming natural symbols-colors and lines as the medium. Both of them have an outward tendency of nostalgia for the objects they care about. Whether expressed in words or symbols, both views are external views and concrete views. Poetry is alienated from painting and close to music. Music belongs to pure inner activity. It denies the space of visual art and its own voice, which gives music the greatest possibility of expressing its inner activities without objects. Musical views are internal views and abstract views. But there are obvious differences between poetry and music: poetry is completed once, music is completed twice, and the medium of poetry is not just sound, but the sound of music directly becomes the purpose; Poetry makes emotions concrete (music is abstract); Wait, but poetry and music are direct expressions of the inner world. Both views are internal and abstract. Here, we can divide literature into two categories according to the aesthetic point of view: first, foreign literature (that is, non-poetic literature). Foreign literature narrates the world, which has a strong historical reflection function and shows the richness of the objective world. Second, literature with internal views (that is, poetry and other lyric styles). Internal viewpoint literature experiences the world, proves its advantages by its emotional response to the world, and reveals the subtlety of the spiritual world. Inner view is spiritual view, spiritual view. The internal viewpoint takes people to an unexpected place and to the world of poetry. Poetry is a typical literature of introspection, the external world is decomposed and reorganized in the process of spiritualization, and physical time and physical space are meaningless. Restricted by the aesthetic point of view, poetry does not need, is not allowed, and is not longer than a broad description of reality. Poetry is not prose. Prose is a typical literature from an external perspective, attached to the object it cares about, observing the general laws of objective things and looking at the world from the perspective of prose. Poetry is to experience the outside world. From the viewpoint, the internal viewpoint of poetry shows six characteristics of poetry:-the subjective experience product of poetry. The process of poetry creation is the process of transforming object into experience and objective into subjective. Or the process of transforming the material world into the spiritual world, that is, everything in the external world has gained the life of poetry through the poet's subjective experience. Second, poetry has a dreamy color. The main feature of fantasy is that it comes from reality but is insulated from reality. It is a variant in real life, coming from an imaginary space. The main feature of dreamers is that they are not limited by physical time and space. Poetry and dreams, poets and dreamers are very similar in this respect, and they are full of dreaminess because they are subjective experiences. Thirdly, poetry is a kind of illogical structure. Since poetry is a subjective experience, it is a natural law and logical concept that refuses to follow the objective laws of things. Poetry shows deeper and stronger normality in the abnormal feeling, abnormal thinking and abnormal formation of routine; It's so beautiful. The ancients called it "unreasonable and wonderful", and "unreasonable" means excluding conventional logic. Fourth, the art of direct expression of the mind is the result of the mind seeking liberation and expression. Soul is the direct content of poetry, and poetry is the direct externalization of inner experience. The direct expression of the mind makes poetry a universal art. Architectural art is the most imperfect art. Due to the limitation of the media, the soul of an architectural artist can only be expressed symbolically. On the other hand, poetry is the art of expressing opinions in time and space. In directness, music similar to time art, in concreteness, painting similar to space art. 5. The anonymity of poetry has no concreteness, and the lyric hero of poetry has no specific direction. The anonymity of poetry brings a high degree of universality and generality. Sixth, the reciprocating swing of poetry, the spectral tone of spirit and emotion are mostly reciprocating and lingering. The internal viewpoint of poetry is not as linear as the external viewpoint. Poetry's eyes are flowing, up and down, left and right, freely pitching, spinning back and forth in the inner world. About what is poetry? It can't be defined in a few simple words. Historically, Guo Moruo and He Qifang have successively defined "poetry". Although their definitions have certain scientific value, they do not comprehensively summarize the formal characteristics and contents of poetry. Today, Professor Lv Jin, director of the Institute of Chinese New Poetry of Southwest Normal University, accurately, comprehensively and scientifically summarized the essential features of poetry. His definition of poetry is that poetry is the highest art of singing life, and it is usually the direct writing of the poet's feelings. Poetry does not directly reflect life, but seeks human emotions from life. Poetry is not good at describing objective reality in detail, but good at describing emotional waves in detail. The essence of poetry lies in lyricism, and the singing life of poetry emphasizes the lyrical beauty of poetry. "Singing" is not only "singing", but also the feelings of poetry singing life are infinitely rich, either love or hate, or sadness or joy. Poetry is the art of singing life, which determines that poetry is usually written directly by poets. Poetry is inseparable from the poet's experience, encounter, personality, temperament, ideal, pursuit and so on. In most poems, the poet's personality is revealed explicitly or implicitly, the poet's mind is publicly displayed, and the poet's inner feelings are directly written. Among all the language arts, poetry is the highest language art, and the language of poetry comes from the language of life. The language of life must be treated by poetry before it can get a visa to enter the kingdom of poetry. Teacher Lu's definition brilliantly covers the essential characteristics of poetry, so this definition can briefly answer the question of what poetry is.