In my opinion, the essence of poetry is to use the simplest language to achieve the most infectious word combination according to experience and intuition.
Based on this understanding, the characteristics that distinguish poetry from other styles are that poetry emphasizes intuition, appeal and conciseness, and the following seven characteristics are derived: 1, the empirical intuition of poetry semantics. The empirical intuition here refers to the experience that people produce according to their own experience when words appear in front of them, and endow words with meaning through intuition. The author endows poetry with meaning through experience intuition, and the reader understands poetry and blank through his own experience intuition. In this way, poetry has become the carrier of intuitive exchange of experience.
2. Effect of infection expression. This is a basic feature of poetry, that is to say, poetry should have the characteristics that can most infect readers. From ancient times to the present, only poems that move and infect people are good poems. The appeal of poetry may only need emotional infection at the earliest. After the appearance of philosophical poetry, the infection of poetry is also the infection of beauty. But infection is not only unique to poetry, but also needs novels and essays, only poetry emphasizes it more. Therefore, poetry opposes unnecessary obscure poetry with symbols and metaphors after obscure poetry, and also opposes the use of invisible feelings that ordinary people can't see, let alone infectious images. Of course, if poetry is only written for yourself, that is another matter.
3. Objectivity of thinking symbols. Iconicity here means that the thinking of poetry creation pays special attention to using the shapes or characteristics of specific objects such as trees and grasslands as thinking symbols. Here, the word "image" is used instead of the word "image", mainly to highlight the characteristics of poetry taking image as a symbol of thinking. Because, the most lasting memory and impression of people is mainly the image of the object and its emotion or reason. Therefore, poetry opposes abstract thinking and so-called complete spoken poetry without image.
4. Innovation of text combination. Because poetry thinks with images, but there may be no suitable ready-made words or sentences when it is described with experience and intuition, and the language should be concise and most infectious, so poetry allows and even encourages the emergence of new word combinations, including new words and sentences, to undertake the task of language revolution. However, poetry opposes unnecessary coinage and new words without image characteristics.
5. Concise written expression. This is another basic feature of poetry, that is to say, poetry should achieve the expected effect with the simplest language and the least words. Therefore, in principle, poetry opposes verbosity, unnecessary embellishment, overlapping embellishment of synonymous words, and the accumulation of images that are common in the current poetry world and considered by many people to be good poems.
6. Jump of sentence connection. This means that in order to be concise and rhythmic, poems often save unnecessary explanations sentence by sentence, which leads to the leap of their connection and thinking feeling. In order to keep up with the thinking of poetry when reading, the space left by branches replaces the blank of thinking jump, giving readers time to think. Therefore, poetry is not against prose language, but against prose-style sentence connection and poetry becoming a branch prose.
7. Arrange the branches of the format. The arrangement of lines has become the only feature that distinguishes modern poetry from other styles in appearance. But in my opinion, the branch has three purposes. One is to replace the thinking blank left by skipping sentences with spaces; Second, the interruption of sentences deliberately creates the illusion of thinking in order to achieve better expression effect; The third is the beauty of the picture in arrangement.
Besides, the poetic language is rhythmic. This is particularly evident in ancient poetry. Modern poetry has gradually broken this rule, and the newly proposed emotional rhythm has only been well practiced in Rain Lane, and other successful works are rare. This is one of the reasons why poetry has lost the majority of ordinary readers.