What Is Poetry: V. Between Poetry and Literature (Column 111)

With God’s help

In the previous column I presented a fairly complex picture of poetry in its various forms. But it is easy to see that even this picture is far from sufficient. The indication of this is that if you try to use it to distinguish poetry from literature, or even to distinguish among the different varieties of poetry (ballads, sonnets, lyric poetry, long poems, dramas, hymns of praise, poems describing nature or historical events, modern and postmodern poetry, and the like), you probably will not succeed. Beyond the difference in contents, which of course is less important for our purposes, there are different kinds of poetry here. Why is it really so difficult to distinguish among them? One might have thought that one reason is that we lack measures of poetic quality, but in my assessment that is not correct. The differences do not lie in the quality of the poetry but in the genre. Beyond that, I already clarified in the previous column that here I am not looking for criteria of poetic quality, but rather trying to touch on its very definition as poetry. My goal here is to make a diagnosis and define what a poem is, what kind it is, and to what extent it is a poem and not a story, and not to discuss its qualities and the criteria that determine them.

Yishai wrote in a comment on Column 109:

If I understand correctly, then according to you the difference between fiction and poetry is their distance from instruction manuals or a telephone book. It seems to me that everyone’s intuition understands that this is not correct, so the definition of poetry is lacking.

I replied there to Yishai that he is right, and as I have already written here several times, both poetry and literature lie at the poetic pole of the picture. The difference between them is not in the degree of poetics, or in their distance from the telephone book (pure prose). In the terminology of our model, literature and poetry can both belong to pole (1,1), or to any other point on the two-dimensional spectrum of the type-three metamorphosis. Therefore the picture described up to this point gave us no tools for examining the relation between poetry and literature. Eilon wrote similar things as well. He argued that in order to complete the picture it is important to pay attention to the distinction between literature and poetry, and as we shall see below, this will also illuminate the difference between various kinds of poetry. That is what I intend to do in this column, which will summarize and complete the picture I have presented in this series of columns.

The similarity between literature and poetry

The point of departure is to ask ourselves what exactly distinguishes literature from poetry within the poetic pole. As we saw in the previous column, the value of p plays no role at all in defining a text as poetry or prose. Pure prose has a high value of p, but if one adds form and poetics to it (some value of q) it can become an excellent poem (though not a pure one, because it is mixed with information). In such a case the text is entirely a poem, except that it also has a dimension of information (pure prose), but this does not necessarily interfere with its poetic quality and force. We saw that the existence of p in the model is intended only to explain why it is sometimes difficult to identify that this is indeed poetry, because it is mixed with information and therefore looks similar to prose. Essentially, it has no role at all in the definition of poetry. We also saw there that poetic quality has no role in the very definition of poetry either (only in evaluating its quality). q represents the intensity of poeticity and not its quality, and this is what determines the degree of the text’s poetic character.

With regard to literature, one could repeat the process we have gone through so far and arrive at a model of the same form that describes it. It too is not meant to convey information to us. Literature is usually fictional, and therefore the facts and situations described in it are not intended to convey information of any kind. It too has poetic qualities that do not pass directly through the factual content of the sentences, but are generated in us through reading them. Even if one writes a historical novel whose plot is true, its literary value is still not judged by its fidelity to the facts or by the amount of information it contains. At most, one may say that it contains more information (its value of p is higher), but the degree of literariness in it (not its worth as literature, but the extent to which it is literature rather than prose) is determined only by the poetic dimension superimposed on those facts. The conclusion is that formula (3), which I proposed in the previous column to describe poetry, can also describe literature:

G_Pq = p X I + q X F

(I represents information and F represents form or added poetic value), and here too only q determines the literary value of the text, while p is meant to remove the information from the picture so that we are left with the pure literary-poetic dimension.

The differences between literature and poetry, and between both of them and pure prose

So much for the similarities, but our concern here is mainly with the differences. First, the role of words in literature is different from their role in a poem. The words and sentences describe some world (usually an imaginary one). In literature, unlike in a poem, something happens. There is a story. Again, there are poems in which something also happens, such as ballads that describe a military victory (certain parts of the Song of Deborah), but my claim is that such texts should be treated as an intermediate shade between literature and poetry, and not as pure poetry. My methodological assumption here, exactly as in Column 109, is that we must begin by identifying the pure pole of literature, and from within it we will be able to discern intermediate shades. The pure pole of story is a description of fictional reality. But that is not enough. A dry description of fictional reality is not literature. There are various formal qualities in the way it is written. A story is not distinguished from a history book only by the truth of the facts described in it (for a historical novel can be faithful, and in principle even completely faithful, to the facts). A history book is not literature unless its author is careful to present the facts with those same literary qualities. But in that case he is simply writing a historical novel and not a history book.

True, we have seen here that in literature, unlike in a poem and similarly to prose, the purpose of the words is to describe situations. But it is important to clarify that the situation itself is not a fact, since it is fictional. And even if it is real, it is still clear that the purpose of the literary text is not to convey factual or any other information to the reader. Here too, in essence, the goal is to arouse feelings and insights in him through the facts described in the text. In that sense, despite the differences, literature resembles poetry. Its purpose is poetic and not informative.

If we summarize what we have achieved so far, literature resembles poetry in that its purpose is to arouse insights and feelings in the reader, not to convey information to him. It resembles poetry also in that this is done through poetic qualities that accompany the words and sentences, and not through the words and sentences themselves as such. A change in the structure of the sentences will turn the book into a different one, whereas in an encyclopedia entry this is certainly not true (so long as the meaning is preserved). The added value of literature is not necessarily connected to the specific words chosen. Unlike pure prose, where the content completely dictates the words, in poetry and literature there is a degree of arbitrariness in the choice of words.

These are probably the reasons why literature and poetry both belong to the poetic pole, standing together opposite pure prose. What distinguishes the two? What lays out the additional axis that lies wholly within the poetic pole? Literature uses words and sentences as pure prose does. The role of the words is to describe situations and facts (including, of course, psychological facts about the thoughts and feelings of the characters). In a poem, a sentence need not describe anything at all. A poem can present a sentence that describes nothing whatsoever. Even a refrain like “From foaming wave and cloud I built myself a white city” does not really describe anything factual, or even a fictional reality. The poet places words side by side, but the sentence does not describe an event or a reality external to it, not even a fictional reality. In literature, by contrast, the sentences do describe reality (usually fictional), and in that sense it resembles pure prose. But as I explained, it differs from pure prose in that its purpose is not the conveyance of factual information.

From here one can derive the main differences between literature and poetry. Literature uses situations in order to achieve its purpose, whereas the poem does not. If in poetry there is only a two-stage route that leads from the writer and his text to the reader: text → insights/feelings, then in literature there is a three-stage route: text → facts/events → insights/feelings. Pure prose, of course, is also described by a two-stage route: text → facts/events.

It follows that the poem can use only formal structures and wordplay in order to arouse feelings and insights, whereas literature can also play with the situations themselves (adding or removing various components from them), and of course also with the order of description and development. The structure used by the writer is a structure of content and less of the formal shape of the text. The poet does not have this element. In that sense his toolbox is more limited, and therefore obligates him to reach higher levels of abstraction. On the other hand, the poet can also use formal devices such as fragmentation, rhyme, and meter, which the writer of literature is not supposed to use (and if he does, he is really creating a text that is not pure literature but some shade between literature and poem).

Graphic description

This map can be described in the form of a triangle with three poles: text, facts, and feelings. In terms of the movement from the text to the reader, the map is as follows:

Legend: the broken arrow from the text to the facts (real facts) is pure prose. The solid downward arrow from the text to feelings is pure poetry. And the dash-dot-dash arrow from the text to facts (usually fictional) and from there to feelings is pure literature.

The relation between the process of creation and the process of reading/decoding/interpretation

In the work of the creator of the text, the route from the creator to the text is of course reversed. In pure prose he begins from the facts and creates from them a text (whose purpose is to return and create those same facts in the reader). In pure poetry he begins from feelings and creates from them a text whose purpose is to create feelings (not necessarily the same ones he had) in the reader. And in literature he begins from feelings and creates situations that express them, and from those he creates a text that describes those situations (this stage is an almost prosaic process, though it contains formal-poetic elements), and all this in order that the opposite route should occur in the reader (from the text to facts to feelings). One can reverse the directions of the arrows in the diagram above and obtain the routes on the side of the creator instead of those on the side of the reader.

As I already wrote in one of the comments, the definition of a given text as literature or poetry depends also on the creator’s intention and not only on the text itself. One can now see why. In all these texts something passes, however abstract, between the creator and the reader. The complete route is really a combination of the diagram above with the complementary diagram that describes the creator’s work. Thus feelings or facts that are present in the creator pass through the text to the reader (even if the creator is not aware of this at all). If the first part of the route is missing, for example when a person derives certain insights from contemplating a telephone pole, a cloud, or a housecat, this cannot be seen as an artistic experience. This is certainly not reading poetry and not reading fiction. Human agency is essential to the definition of art. My assumption here is that, contrary to the radical conceptions of deconstruction, there must be some connection, sometimes a very abstract one, between the author’s intention and what is created in the reader. Otherwise there is no difference between a text created intentionally and a natural landscape. These points will return to us in the next column when we return to the discussion of Torah study and Hasidism (yes indeed, you heard correctly: I am not done with this yet).

Implications: intermediate shades

From the picture described so far, it follows that there are three pure poles: pure prose, pure poetry, and pure literature. We must now give thought to the intermediate shades, and see why the picture of poetry and literature appears to so many of us so complex and confusing. As I explained in Column 109, the reason is that we relate to all shades of poetry as one block, and the variability and diversity do not allow us to define poetry. The same is true of literature. Once we have defined pure poles, the way is opened to understand that the full range of diverse phenomena before us is nothing but a collection of intermediate shades combining pure poetry and pure literature, pure literature and pure prose, or pure poetry and pure prose, in different proportions. This is how the complete map is spread out before us, and once we understand this, the picture becomes more intelligible.

Thus, for example, the Song of Deborah is really a composite of literature and poetry. Certain parts do not describe situations or facts at all, while other parts do describe facts (including emotional facts), but do so in a poetic way. Some parts have a poetic formal structure, and others merely use pathos that is closer to literature than to poetry. The same is true of the Song of the Sea.

Let us look for a moment at the Iliad and the Odyssey. They describe events (probably not historical), and therefore they are closer to literature than to poetry. In their external form there are poetic elements, but there is a significant literary component here. Yishai wrote in his comment on Column 107:

An interesting test case — there is a Hebrew translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey into prose (Aroeti’s), and there are translations that preserve the poetry. The noticeable difference is that the poetic translations preserve the meter and Aroeti does not, and this is also the reason Aroeti shifted to prose — he thought that preserving the meter while also translating accurately was too difficult a task. Even so, it seems to me that the reader feels there is a great difference between the two translations (even if one were to divide Aroeti’s lines in an ostensibly poetic way). Of course the content is identical, so that is not what creates the difference.

I am not familiar with those translations, but the move from poetry to prose indicates that what we really have here is literature and not poetry. It may be that one of the translations chooses to leave a more significant poetic flavor in the text, but fundamentally this is literature and not poetry. The reader’s feeling that there is a difference between the translations stems from the built-in difficulty of identifying and understanding poetry, a difficulty that leads the human creature to present a poem differently from literature or prose. And now our habit is activated, and therefore when we see poetic form we tend to decide that this is a poem. Since the meaning of poetry is not conveyed through the meaning of the words and sentences, the fragmentation into lines creates a sense of poetry and perhaps also arouses poetic feelings in us (catharsis). But with regard to works like the Odyssey, it seems to me that this classification is not precise. In the background of these remarks lies, of course, another important question, namely what the creator intended: literature or poetry. Was his intention to tell a story or to arouse feelings not connected to the content of the words and sentences? It seems to me that from this perspective too, the Odyssey is a story and not a poem (see the historical note below).

Yishai adds there in his next comment the following:

Two more interesting cases I thought of:

1. Joshua 12. Here we have a grocery list (well, not grocery, but a list) that received line breaks and became poetry (unless we understand that the lineation really does not reflect poetry). True, Homer too has lists (the Catalogue of Ships is especially well known), but there it is part of an epic and not an independent poetic passage consisting entirely of a list.

It seems to me that the author was not joking, as in Muad’Dib’s example above, but that he really did see this as poetry. It seems to me that one can learn from this about the subjectivity of poetry: at that time something like this was considered poetry, but we need not go so far as to empty the concept and say that poetry is whatever I decide. Apparently the author’s contemporaries saw this as poetry because it aroused something in them. If we define poetry (also) by what it arouses in the reader (let us suppose for the sake of the argument a definition like: a passage that uses some stylistic means to arouse strong emotions), then of course the definition will be reader-dependent, but it is still a definition with content.

The breaking into lines of the list of kings in the book of Joshua is, at first glance, quite similar to the lineation that Muad’Dib applied to my remarks (see Column 107). Here too we have prose with some poetic dash, but it is still difficult to call it a poem. However, on second thought it seems that the matter depends on how we interpret why the Bible chooses to write this list in poetic form. It seems to me that the intention was to turn it into a victory song. There is a song of praise here for the victory we won over those 31 kings. In fact, this is a monument, and the difference between a monument and a list of people lies in the connotation that accompanies the list (glorification or humiliation, thanksgiving or lament). If indeed the purpose of the book of Joshua is also to convey the list of kings itself, then there is a high value of p here, but this does not detract from the text’s poetic value (q). By contrast, the lineation that Muad’Dib applied to my remarks does not add any significant value of q, while its value of p remains what it was. There this is indeed nothing but a gimmick.[1]

In that same comment Yishai brings another example:

2. Rabbi Kook’s Poem on the Laws of Hanukkah (and others like it). Here it seems to me that most readers, both then and now, would not really see this as a poem. It makes use of stylistic devices found in poetry, but is not itself a poem. It seems that poets invent all kinds of techniques that help them write something worthy of being called poetry, so that these techniques indeed become an important characteristic of poetry and something that contributes greatly to poeticity, but these techniques can also be taken over into the writing of other things, something one might call ‘a poem by virtue of its external appearance.

In this case too, the poem is composed of information (the laws of Hanukkah), upon which a poetic structure is superimposed that presents it in the form of a poem. Therefore there is a text here with a significant value of p. Yet from looking at the poem itself (there is a link above) it emerges that unlike the list of kings in the book of Joshua, here the informational component is much less significant. The wording is plainly poetic, which cannot be said of the list in the book of Joshua (which is nothing but a completely prosaic list of names). It may therefore be assumed that the author’s intention (Rabbi Kook’s) was not to convey information to us, since the laws of Hanukkah can be written in a simpler and clearer way. His purpose here was probably entirely poetic, and therefore although he uses true facts, what we have here is a poem. The fact that we are dealing with true information admittedly makes the diagnosis more difficult, because the text G is composed of two components and not only a poetic component (q), but this does not detract in any way from the text’s poetic value. In the list in the book of Joshua, the value of p is very high. This is essentially pure information with a fragmentary formal structure superimposed on it, and no more (similar to Muad’Dib’s gimmick in my remarks). In Rabbi Kook’s case, by contrast, the wording too is poetic and the information is very indirect and unclear. Therefore there the value of p is lower. As I explained, the value of p, whether high or low, does not make the text less poetic, but at most makes it harder for us to determine that it is a poem, since it is hidden behind the information or mixed into it. The fact that there is information mixed into the poem does not change anything essential, but perhaps conceals its true nature somewhat. That is precisely why the analysis we have done here is useful: to expose these hidden characteristics. The list in the book of Joshua is mixed with a more significant informational component, and therefore its poetic character is more concealed. But that does not mean that it is necessarily a less poetic text. That will be determined by the value of q and not by the values of p.

The historical development of the genres under discussion

In note 6 to Column 107 I cited Aristotle’s definition (Poetics, pp. 49-50) of poetry:

It is clear that it is not the poet’s task to recount what actually happened, but what could happen, that is, what might occur according to probability or necessity – for the historian and the poet differ from one another not in that one tells his story in measured language and the other not in measured language, but in this they differ: one recounts the events as they were, whereas the other – as they might be. Therefore poetry is more philosophical and loftier than history, for poetry speaks chiefly of the universal, whereas history of the particular.

And I wrote about this:

It seems highly implausible to me that the difference between prose and poetry lies on the axis of fiction versus reality. There are poems that describe reality (like parts of the Song of Deborah), and there is prose that deals with fiction (almost all literary fiction). It seems to me that in Aristotle’s time these genres as we know them today did not yet exist.

Now I can say this more precisely: Aristotle defined literature, not poetry. He was referring to ballads and mythic stories like the Odyssey and the Iliad, for in those days there was no modern poetry and also no fiction in its contemporary sense (both of these are fairly new phenomena. The modern novel was born deep within the modern era). Above I pointed out that these texts lie in the space between literature and poetry, and in fact are closer to literature. The distinction between poetry and literature did not really exist for Aristotle, and when he speaks about poetics he includes literature and poetry together. Therefore, from his point of view, fiction is a central poetic criterion. In our period these genres have developed, and now it is possible to distinguish between them in a sharper and clearer way, and today we understand that fiction characterizes literature (and not necessarily even all of it), and not necessarily poetry. The question whether this development is invention or discovery is an interesting philosophical question. Here I will only say that in my view it is discovery, that is, not merely change but progress. We brought into actuality a distinction that was hidden from the eyes of the ancients, or at least more blurred for them.

Implications: similar phenomena — jokes, metaphors, and codes

After Column 110, a discussion arose about codes, metaphors, and jokes. In all these cases the text does not convey to us the information embedded in its literal meaning, and the question was whether we should view them as different kinds of poetry.

With regard to a joke, I was asked there:

Is there a place for ‘joke’ on this complex map?

And I replied:

I think a joke is pure prose, isn’t it? True, the ‘information’ it conveys is a bit different, but then this is simply a subdivision within the pole of pure prose. But this really does require discussion, because the goal is to make one laugh and not necessarily in this way. That is, the goal is not the information contained in the joke. And this requires further consideration.

That was halfway through the process, and so I really did not know how to answer. Now we can answer more clearly. A joke is meant to arouse feelings in us through a situation (usually fictional, though not necessarily), but clearly not merely to report what happened. Therefore we can now determine that a joke is indeed not poetry, but it is also not prose. It is a certain kind of literature (which can of course be good or bad).

As for a metaphor (not necessarily a dead one, that is, one whose meanings have already become fixed and become part of the language. A new metaphor too works in principle in the same way), I argued there that this is pure prose, not even literature (or at least almost not literary. q is very small). When one says something metaphorically, one intends to use a word the way words are used in ordinary language. The only difference is that we are dealing with a word that usually serves in one meaning, and the metaphorical use gives it a different meaning. Still, so long as it is understood that this is the meaning of the word, there is no literature here and no poem, but rather the conveyance of information through the plain meaning of the word, except that this is done in a language slightly different from what is customary. It is as though I conveyed information to you in English within a Hebrew text. I illustrated this there by means of the metaphor “heartache.” It is clear that the intention is not to physical pain that a person feels in his heart (like pain in the leg). This is a metaphor meant to express a mental state, and yet it is clear to the reader that this is the meaning of the term in this context, and therefore from his point of view this is an entirely prosaic text (except that it is not written in ordinary Hebrew). I added there that in cases where there is an ordinary word to describe what I wish to convey to the reader/listener, and I nevertheless choose a metaphor (not because of shifts in meaning, however subtle), then perhaps one can speak here of a poetic, literary, or lyrical aspect. But that is not the usual use of metaphors.

The same is true of a code. There too we are dealing with a move to a different language, but every expression and word in the text still has a perfectly ordinary meaning. It is an esoteric language, but entirely prosaic (“perazit,” in Rabbi Kook’s terminology).

Another example: Flight 3525 and the art of photography

With all due distinctions, and with apologies to the connoisseurs among us, I would like to return here to the above-mentioned song by Avi Ohayon, which was brought in Column 110 (near note 7). On the map I have now sketched, one can determine that it is really more literature than poetry. The text does indeed describe facts that are apparently entirely prosaic, actual events from everyday life, but of course this is a fictional reality. Ohayon uses this fictional reality in order to convey feelings to us and not information (for there is no information here. The events did not happen). In that sense it is closer to literature set to music than to poetry.

Therefore there is a certain justice in what Hevroner wrote in the comment in which he brought this song with undisguised irony. He compared it to the poem made from my opening paragraph (Muad’Dib, see Column 107). But at least on the principled level he was mistaken. This song may resemble literature more than poetry, but it has no pretension whatsoever of conveying information. It describes factual situations, but it does so with the aim of arousing feelings. So true, it is not really a poem, but neither is it prose of pure information (a grocery list). By contrast, my opening paragraph was intended to convey information, except that it was presented in fragmented form as though there were a poem here.

If we take a song that in my eyes has far higher qualities, such as A Lone Lantern by Yosef Dar and Haim Gouri (with a wonderful melody by Sasha Argov and a marvelous performance by Hatarnegolim), one can say the same things about it as well. Almost all of it describes situations from life, admittedly fictional but situations that could have been and whose like indeed existed in the world. Its purpose is of course not prosaic, because it is not intended to convey information to us, but neither is it pure poetry; rather, it is something closer to literature. Its purpose is to arouse poetic catharsis in us, to convey feelings and moods and not facts.

Here is the place to remark something about the art of photography. In fact I should have brought this up in Column 109, when I discussed the relation between information and added poetic or artistic value. The art of photography too is very confusing, and in light of the picture described here it should be clear to us why. Unlike painting, photography uses true information. The situation in the photograph existed in reality, and the photograph merely conveys it to us. Therefore, apparently, this is prose and not art. And yet, it seems to me that it is correct to see artistic photography as art. The photographer’s choice of which situation to convey and in what way to do so adds the artistic dimension (q) on top of the information (p). A press photographer, by contrast, aims to convey visual information to us, and therefore he is not an artist but a kind of reporting journalist.[2]

In this terminology, Avi Ohayon’s “poem” or A Lone Lantern are in fact photography. They photograph a concrete and realistic situation (though fictional, of course), but this is literature and not prose, since their intention is not to convey the situation to us but to say something through it. He is not a press photographer but an artistic photographer (again, without addressing the artistic quality. Here I am concerned only with classification and categorical analysis).

Methodological note

We reached the conclusion that Avi Ohayon’s text is really literature and not poetry. One could raise here a principled difficulty regarding my entire move. After all, from the outset we defined this as a poem, and after the analysis that is meant to clarify the intuitive concepts of poem and story, we arrived at the conclusion that this is a story and not a poem. Seemingly, this means that the analysis and the picture proposed here missed the very thing I was trying to define.

Here is the place to return to the discussion in Column 108, where I discussed the usefulness of a clarificatory definition (as opposed to a constitutive definition). I explained there that what concerns us here is a definition whose purpose is to conceptualize and elucidate concepts that we understand intuitively, and not to constitute new concepts. And nevertheless, I explained there that conceptualization can change our answers to various questions. If at the intuitive stage we would have answered that this is a poem, now after the analysis the conclusion is that this is a story. This is in fact the second benefit that was mentioned there for the clarificatory definition, which can sometimes bring about a change in diagnosis as a result of the definition, as compared with the intuitive diagnosis.

The only criterion that can be proposed in order to examine this process is whether we have a sense of self-evidence, that is, whether we have become convinced that this change better hits our original intuition than what we thought before. If so, then apparently we have nonetheless succeeded in capturing the meaning of the intuitive concept, and that capture brought a clarity that changed its meaning for us, or at least our understanding of its meaning. And certainly there is here a marked improvement in our ability to use the concepts under discussion explicitly and systematically. If at the beginning the questions embarrassed us, now we can answer them. As I wrote above, this does not entirely remove our subjective evaluations (how does one determine poetic value), but it helps us place and direct them, and use them in order to make decisions.

Summary: definition and elucidation

I pointed out that although in this series I am looking for a definition, what I mainly mean is elucidation. There is no chance of arriving in these fields at definitions with mathematical sharpness, and therefore the heart of the move is the clarification of the picture. I did this through the understanding that what we have here is a collection of phenomena that are different expressions of one fundamental phenomenon that appears in different proportions, and this is why it confuses us. From here the need to identify the pure poles that lay out this picture is clear (its mathematical basis, in the sense of mathematical spaces).

I explained that these poles are mere abstractions (or at most Platonic ideas). There is no actual text that is pure poetry, pure literature, or pure prose. All these are abstractions that I created here in order to clarify the complex picture. Therefore the “identification” of the poles is really an intellectual identification and not an empirical search. One may say that we create these poles and do not locate them. In actual phenomena, that is, in texts we encounter in life, there is in each one some poetic dimension and perhaps also something quasi-factual. Every actual text is a combination of these two (as formula (3) that I proposed above shows), and nevertheless it is important to conceptualize and define them, because the construction of these poles enables us to present the whole range of phenomena as different mixtures of the poles we have created, and thus to clarify the confusing picture before us.

We saw here that once we did this, we can answer all sorts of questions that we could not answer before we set out. We now have tools to define and classify the phenomena and understand the meaning of the intermixture among them and the confusion it creates in us.

A closing note

As the reader rightly understands, the picture described here does not make our intuitive and subjective evaluations superfluous. When we come to determine an author’s aims, as well as the poetic or informational value of a text, there is no avoiding the exercise of intuitive judgment. My remarks contain no criteria or measures that will determine all this. The picture here is intended only to direct us and to give us a conceptual framework within which the discussion can be conducted in a more systematic way. A computer presumably will not be able to make do with this picture and, by means of it, produce an output containing a diagnosis of where every text stands on the poetic map. And yet it has theoretical value.

But there is another aspect that gives meaning and importance to this move, and I will note it briefly here. Freud’s psychoanalysis was the first to propose a system of concepts and principles within which psychological discourse, discussion, and research could be conducted. In my amateur assessment there is not much connection between the psychoanalytic picture he proposed and reality. As Karl Popper already determined, there is certainly no science here. What we have is a collection of speculations and creative inventions for which there are no clear indications of any connection whatsoever to reality. And yet, despite all the criticisms that have continued to intensify down to our own day, it is important to understand that the value of the Freudian map and conceptual system is enormous. Before that framework was proposed, we had no lexicon at all within which a discussion could be conducted. Think what you would do if you had to begin the discipline of psychology now. Without any system of concepts and without categories and a mental structure (invented), we have no way to classify the phenomena, judge them and find dependencies and relations among them, determine parameters for quantitative measurements, and propose theses that can be discussed and subjected to tests of confirmation and refutation. Even someone who does not accept the Freudian picture can conduct a discussion within it. Even in order to disagree with Freud, one can formulate a claim in his terminology and thereby subject it to empirical test. Without that terminology, it would not have been possible to conduct a discussion at all.

At least in this sense, the proposal of a conceptual map and systematic principles is important. Even if someone should dare disagree with what I said here (woe to him), he must admit that now we have a way to formulate the dispute between us and examine it on different examples. Moreover, the map described here also enables us to propose lines for the continuation of the discussion, the analysis, and the research. It is now possible to classify the kinds of poetic feelings (catharsis), the different aims of creators, the different formal components that can be used (this, of course, is often done, and the kinds of poetry are classified by them), and so on. A systematic picture, even if one does not accept it, opens the door to further systematic discussion, and of course also brings the discussion that has already taken place into an overall framework.

[1] As I noted there, if the purpose of the lineation was to demonstrate the built-in ambiguity of the concept of poetry, then perhaps one can see this lineation as turning the prosaic text into a poem (adding q), precisely as I explained here regarding the list of kings in the book of Joshua.

[2] Of course here too there are poles and intermediate shades. A press photographer may do his work in an artistic way, and then there will be in him a mixture of artist and journalist. A journalist who writes prose can also do so by means of various literary and artistic devices, and then he creates a mixture. Still, the poles help clarify the meaning of the mixture and therefore to address the complex picture and analyze it.