What Is Poetry: C. The Initial Definition (Column 109)

With God’s help

I ended the previous column by outlining the (relatively short) course of argument we are now about to take. Fine, one more short methodological introduction and we will get there.

Definition by way of negation

In light of the perplexity described in the first column (107), I thought it worthwhile to look at the opposite pole: what is the opposite of poetry? If we understand that, logical negation may lead us to a definition of poetry.

Thus, for example, people wonder: what is spirit, or soul? It is hard to give a good and clear answer to such questions. I think we do have some intuitive understanding of the essence of spirit, even though the concept is rather elusive, and the question is how it can be made clearer. If we look at the opposite pole, matter, the definition there (or at least the clarification) sounds easier. It is very familiar to us, because matter is tangible.[1] But once we have understood what matter is, we can define spirit by negation: spirit is a kind of existent that is not material (not tangible). Someone who continues to claim that he still does not understand what spirit is (sometimes saying that such a definition is an evasion) probably does not really understand what matter is either. In fact, if you think about it, he identifies materiality with being or with existence. Many fall into this error, and from it arrive at materialism. When you speak about matter, and even if you are a materialist who accepts only the existence of matter, some implicit understanding of what spirit is already underlies your words. In many cases, even an atheist who says something about God (namely, that He does not exist) has some implicit understanding of the concept, of what it is that is being discussed.[2]

Now another question arises. If indeed the characterization of matter rests on an implicit conception of spirit, what is the point of moving to matter in order to clarify the meaning of spirit? Why does this move make spirit easier for us to understand? Here we return to circularity and to Quine’s web conception, mentioned in the previous column. The process described here is more clarification than definition. We place matter over against spirit, and in this way clarify the meaning of both together. In such a process, we bring intuitive, unarticulated insights that already exist within us implicitly, in the dark, out into the light by placing them before our consciousness and our thought. In such a process, definition is really the clarification of conceptions that are already within us. And that is exactly what I said above: here we are looking for a definition that tries to capture a concept that exists even without it, and independently of it; that is, to clarify and conceptualize for ourselves something we already understand implicitly.

An example: the doctrine of negative attributes

These remarks recall, and not by accident, the doctrine of negative attributes with regard to God. Maimonides, in the Guide of the Perplexed, writes that we have no way to know God’s positive attributes and describe them in human terms, and therefore all that we can say about Him is only by way of negation (what He is not, not what He is). On its face, this is a very problematic thesis. If one cannot say of God that He is merciful—meaning, if the significance of saying that He is merciful is only that it is not true that He is not merciful (as Maimonides explains)—then with equal justice we could say of Him that He is cruel and wicked. The meaning of this would be that it is not true that He is non-cruel (= merciful), and it is not true that He is non-wicked (= good). In effect, what we are saying is that God lies outside the scale of good and evil, or merciful and cruel. Outside the scale of human concepts and attributes altogether.

But here a double question arises: 1. If so, why prefer saying that He is merciful to saying that He is cruel? Both are equally mistaken, since He is neither this nor that. These two concepts, and indeed the entire axis on which they are placed, are irrelevant to Him. 2. Is something possible that is neither of two opposites? At first glance this contradicts the law of the excluded middle (that everything is either X or “not X,” and hence nothing can be both not X and not “not X”).

The second question is easy to answer. There certainly is something that is neither white nor non-white (in the sense of some other color). For example, virtue. It does not belong at all to the axis of color. Nor can one speak about the shape of virtue (whether it is triangular). By the same token, there may be something that is neither good nor evil, neither merciful nor cruel—for example, the hill opposite my house. But if we wish to apply this to God and say that human scales are irrelevant to Him, thus solving the second question, we immediately run into the first one: after all, the Torah says of Him that He is merciful, and apparently not for nothing does it choose specifically that pole. From this it would seem that there is, after all, some relation between God and the axis of merciful versus cruel. The Torah apparently wishes to say that He is, in some sense, closer to one pole (the merciful) than to the other (the cruel). Therefore, this axis is in fact relevant to Him in some way, contrary to Maimonides’ claim that the whole axis is irrelevant to Him. So what, then, does this analysis leave of the doctrine of negative attributes? In my humble opinion—not much, but that is not our topic.

In any event, we learn from here that if we want to say something about some object and locate it on a certain axis running between two poles, then the measure that defines the axis must be relevant to the object under discussion. In the example above, God must be measurable in terms of mercy and cruelty; otherwise (if He has no qualities at all in the familiar human sense), all this discourse is pointless. Placing opposites over against one another allows us to conceptualize the abstract measure whose differing quantities move us from one side of the axis to the other. The axis of color takes us from white to other colors. The axis of goodness takes us from the good to the cruel. Then we can more easily ask what amount of that measure is present in the object with which we are dealing.

Let us now return to our topic. When we seek the pole opposed to poetry, our aim is to create a framework that places the two opposed poles over against one another, and thus enables us to discern and clarify the abstract measure that defines this axis. We may be able to understand what kind of quality moves us along the axis and places us somewhere between these two poles. Within such a conceptual framework, we can better understand the different points on the axis we have created and define a variety of manifestations of this quality in different degrees.

Pure prose

At first glance, the opposite of poetry is prose. Seemingly, this is the opposite pole we were looking for. But is literature the opposite of poetry? It is certainly different from poetry, but the two also have quite a bit in common. The intermediate shades testify to this (epics and plays, for example). The Psalms, too, are some kind of poetry, though perhaps not entirely. Good literature possesses poetic qualities, and hence both literature and poetry have poetics; that is, both stand on the same pole of the axis we are seeking.[3] The conclusion is that the complete opposite of poetry is a text without poetics (if such a thing exists at all; see below).

What stands at the wholly opposite pole is a text of pure, dry information: an encyclopedia entry, instructions for operating some machine, a grocery list, a telephone book, and the like. This is a very particular kind of prose, one that contains no shade or modulation beyond the information it expresses. Unlike literature and poetry alike, these are texts devoid of poetics. This is, of course, an abstraction. Structural and poetic dimensions can be found in any text, as a result of thought about editing and form, the use of special words—in short, dimensions that go beyond the presentation of bare information and nothing more. Even so, for the purpose of the present discussion I will define such texts as pure prose, although this is probably a fictional creature that no one has ever encountered. Pure prose is a text written in such a way that its sole purpose is to convey a given, specific piece of information to the reader in the most efficient and precise way possible, without poetic considerations. For our purposes, this will be the pole opposite poetry.

Pure poetry

And now that we have come to this, we can think about what stands at the opposite end of the scale: what is pure poetry? The required conclusion is that pure poetry is a text that has nothing whatsoever to do with information. The words that appear in it do not serve to convey information, but some sort of added value, which I will call artistic catharsis, or the poetic value of the text. Again, I assume that none of us has ever encountered such a text, nor ever will. But for the purpose of our theoretical analysis, this is what stands at the far opposite end of the axis.

An example: blowing the shofar

On Rosh Hashanah we sound the shofar in several forms of blasts: a teki’ah, shevarim, and teru’ah. One can see here a process of abstraction. A song is words with a melody. When the words are stripped away, the melody remains. The melody does indeed reach us through sound, but in principle it can also be written with notes. The melody is not the sound but the structure clothed in it (just as a wave is the field that passes through the physical medium—a wave of sound or of light in water or air). If we remove the melody from the sound, we are left with sounds that are sonic prose, but still not pure. At this point we have reached shevarim and teru’ah. These are not melodies, but there are still certain modulations here imposed on the sound (music experts would certainly know how to define this better than I can). According to the Sages, these modulations of the sound express sighing and wailing (see Rosh Hashanah 33b–34a). At the next stage, these modulations too are stripped from the sound, and we are left with a teki’ah. This is a simple sound without melody, without variations, and without any modulations. This is pure sonic prose. These are sounds devoid of sonic poetics. We have described a movement, in the auditory medium, along the axis from poetics to prose. This is an analogical illustration of the movement of verbal text along the axis from pure prose in the direction of poetics. As we shall see later, here too there are different degrees of poetics that define different points on this axis.

Just by way of conclusion, there is one further abstraction that can be made on the axis of vocal poetics, namely complete silence. In I Kings 19:11–12 we find a similar series of abstractions:

And He said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord; and behold, the Lord is passing by. A great and mighty wind was rending mountains and shattering rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind, an earthquake; the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake, fire; the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire, a still, small voice.”:

There is a great noise: wind, earthquake, fire, and in the end a still small voice. And about this Rashi writes his poem (the sound of silence):

A still, small voice — […] and I heard a voice coming from within the silence, called tintishmant in the vernacular, though the voice itself is not actually heard.:

For the connection between this and blowing the shofar, see my article here (at the end, a link is made to these verses).

 

An example: what is kitsch?

To clarify further the meaning of the distinction I have made, I will draw here on an illuminating example that I encountered many years ago in several articles by a man named Thomas Kulka.[4] Kulka deals with the question of what kitsch is. We all know kitsch works: “classical” porcelain figurines, lovers against the backdrop of a setting sun, the picture of the crying child, a tiny ballerina in a miniature music box dancing to Beethoven’s Für Elise, and more. Most of the pictures you see sold on the street are kitsch pictures. Kitsch is considered inferior art, an expression of bad taste. The word kitsch is used as a synonym for lack of artistic taste. But these are judgments. The question is how one can define it itself. What, in essence, is kitsch?

In the Encyclopedia of Ideas you can find the following characteristics:

(a) excessive density, lack of measure and proportion; (b) saturated communicativeness and flattery toward prevailing popular taste (MacDonald, [1953] 1964); (c) saturated representation of the object: the object is described without attending to the problematic aspects involved in it; (d) aesthetic pretension and masquerading as “real” art; (e) striving for effect while ignoring the artistic process embodied in the work; (f) conformism and the absence of a critical stance toward the world depicted and toward the ways of depicting it; (g) distancing oneself from a stance liable to arouse dissonance or cause a change in the recipient’s attitudes and worldview. Kitsch is something whose inside is like its outside: it is identical with itself. There is no mystery in it, no doubts, no otherness. It contains heaping measures of uncritical happiness.

In Wikipedia, under the entry “kitsch,” you will find the following characteristics:

• Mass character:
  • Works loved only by simple people or by the newly rich
  • Art objects produced in mass production with coarse details
• Crude imitation:
  • An inferior copy of a style of art already in existence
  • A work laden with clichés and artistic thefts
  • Copying something considered beautiful while removing it from its context
  • Art lacking innovation and lacking a message, or that does not stimulate thought
• Cloying sweetness:
  • Art that presents only the most pleasant, most radiant, and most beautiful sides of life
  • Art that suffers from excessive sentimentality – “ultra melodrama“
• Pretentious art with little financial investment, or art with great financial investment but little intellectual investment

But when we look at a particular kitsch painting, we cannot always see why it contains disregard for the artistic process, conformism, excess, and the like. Almost all of these characteristics are more judgments than definitions. In other words, they describe our feelings rather than the work itself. In his articles, Kulka shows that by all the accepted standards for evaluating works of art, there will be kitsch works that count as excellent art. Some kitsch works are very moving (kitsch is accused of excessive sentimentality), and many of them possess excellent technical quality. Kulka constructs there a mathematical metric for evaluating the artistic value of a work, one that aggregates all the relevant criteria, and he argues that many kitsch works meet it quite respectably.

So what, really, is kitsch? Kulka asks. Are our harsh judgments of it nothing more than prejudice? Kulka proposes the following definition: kitsch art is characterized by the fact that the emotion/pleasure (the catharsis) it arouses in us stems from the situation depicted in the painting, not from the painting itself. When we see a crying child in the light of the sunset, we are moved by the situation, not by the painting. The painting has no added value beyond the situation it depicts. A work of art is supposed to add something beyond the situation depicted in it; that is the added value of the painter/artist, the poetic added value, without which we are dealing with a reflection of reality and nothing more. One might say that in kitsch the artist is God, who created the situation, not the painter who painted it. But of course the same is true even of a painting whose situation is fictional. Still, if what moves us is the situation and not the painting, this is kitsch.

What is art, and what is poetry?

I am not sure Kulka’s definition really hits the mark and/or is exhaustive, but it contains something very fundamental for understanding art in general. A painting or photograph can convey a situation to us as it is, but then it is not a work of art. It is a faithful transmission of information (visual information, in the case of painting or photography). The artistic added value of a work of art lies in what goes beyond the information. A painting presents visual information, just as a poem uses words and just as a melody uses sounds. But the painting is not meant to convey that visual information to us in and of itself; rather, it is meant to convey to us something else that passes through the information (the image). This is the poetic value in the painting. So too, a poem contains words that have meaning, but the art in it is everything beyond the literal meaning of the words. Its poetics.

When the poet writes “There was a lone lamp at the edge of a neighborhood,” he does not mean to describe for us a situation of a lamp at the edge of a neighborhood, but to arouse in us feelings/experiences/insights/moods through the situation described by those words. This is, in fact, the poetic value in the text, and it is what defines it as poetry. In pure prose text, the words carry the information embedded in their meaning. By contrast, the words in a poem are not carriers of information but only a medium through which the poem’s poetic added value reaches us. In the case of a poem, a translation or commentary that proceeds through the poem word by word and sentence by sentence misses the very essence of the poem as a poem.

In this connection it is interesting to cite what Avraham G. wrote in his comment on column 107:

Recently I was thinking about a similar issue—the difference between a painting and a caricature, or what a caricature is needed for at all. The answer is simple (for those inclined to synthetic thinking): painting deals with copying reality (this too is overgeneralized, but for the sake of the discussion it is enough), whereas caricature is really about distortions. Through his work, the artist has constructed a moral or lesson that underlies the picture itself. Of course, one can also glean information from a painting, but that comes at a second stage.

And again, poets on poetry

It seems to me that this conception is described in an interesting poem by Hezi Leskly:[5]

When the word becomes a body
and the body opens its mouth
and says the word from which
it was made –
I will embrace that body
and let it sleep by my side.

Perhaps this is also what Bialik means in his well-known essay, Revelation and Concealment in Language:

From all that has been said there emerges a great difference between the language of prose writers and the language of poets. The former, masters of the plain sense, rely on the common denominator and on what is shared in sights and in words, on what is fixed and stable in language, on the accepted formula—and therefore they pass through language with confidence. What are they like? Like someone crossing a river over solid ice, made of one unbroken block. He may and can entirely divert his attention from the covered abyss streaming beneath his feet. But their opposites, the men of hint, exposition, and mystery, are hounded all their lives by the “distinctive side” of things, by that solitary something, by that point which makes the appearances—and the combinations of language directed toward them—into one unit in the world; by the fleeting moment that will never again recur; by the singular soul and the intrinsic quality of things as these were absorbed, at a given moment, in the soul of those who saw them. Therefore, these are compelled to flee from what is fixed and inert in language, which opposes their purpose, toward what is living and moving within it. Indeed, they themselves are obliged to introduce into it at every moment—by means of keys handed down into their hands—unceasing motion, new combinations and new compounds. The words flutter beneath their hands: dying out and flaring up, sinking and shining like seal-engravings on the stones of the breastplate, emptying and filling, shedding one soul and putting on another. In the material of language there thereby occur changes of watch and shifts of place. One tag, the tip of a yod—and the old word shines with a new light. The secular is sanctified and the sacred is desecrated. The fixed words seem, moment by moment, to wrench themselves free of their settings and exchange places with one another. And meanwhile, between one covering and another, the abyss flashes. This is the secret of the great power of poetic language. There is in it the titillation of responsibility, the sweet dread of being put to the test. And what are these like? Like someone crossing the river at the thaw over wobbling, floating ice-floes. Heaven forbid he should keep his foot on one floe for longer than the blink of an eye, for longer than the time it takes to spring from one floe to the next adjacent one, and from that one to another. Between the gaps the abyss flashes, the foot gives way, the danger is near – – –

Implications: the role of poetic writing

We can now understand why it is customary to write poems differently from prose. All the characteristics of poetry—lineation, rhyme, melody, meter, wordplay, and the like—have a double purpose. The primary function is simply to hint to the reader that this is a poem and not prose, that is, that he should look for meanings in it beyond the literal meaning of the words. The second function is to participate in conveying the message that lies beyond the literal meaning of the words. If there is something here beyond the words, then the words are not always enough to convey it. Additional means are required to take part in conveying that message, and these are the poetic means that turn words into poetry.

With respect to the first function of the poetic means, sometimes all this can be dispensed with. For example, if the text appears in a book of poetry or under a title that tells us it is a poem, then this hint is superfluous. Even without the special form of writing, we all know that this is a poem. Moreover, with respect to the first function, even if these means are necessary, other means could also have been chosen. The chosen line breaks and meter have no significance, since their whole purpose is only to hint to us that this is a poem. That could have been done in other ways as well. By contrast, with the second function of the poetic means—taking part in creating the message (the catharsis) itself—they are of course necessary to the poem (they cannot be dispensed with), and in principle other means cannot be chosen either. The particular lineation that was chosen is part of the poem and could not have been otherwise. In fact, different lineation or meter would create a different poem. I assume that there are poems in which these means are part of the message, and others in which they are not. In poems of the second type, these means can be omitted or replaced by others, but in the first type—they cannot.

By now it is already clear that all these means, which people take to define poetry (see the beginning of column 107), are not really such. At most, they are expressions of its more fundamental definition. The definition of a poem is a text that comes to express something beyond the meaning of the words that appear in it. All these techniques are not its definition, and as we have seen, they are not always necessary either.

Applying this to Leskly’s poem

The interesting question is how one should relate to Leskly’s above poem. Is it a poem? At first glance it is really only telling us what the definition of poetry is, or what the role of the word in a poem is, and therefore, even if it is written in fragmented lines, it is not a poem but prose, since its words come to convey information.

But if we look at it again, we see that it does not really tell us the thing itself. It uses the description of a fictional-fantastic situation in which a word becomes a body that utters the word from which it was made. The meaning I attributed to his poem is some message that passes through the words, but it is not contained in the meaning of the words themselves. One cannot reach it by means of a literal interpretation of the words themselves. This is an indication that we really do have a poem here.[6] Assuming I am right, the text I wrote here says the same thing that Leskly says, and nevertheless my text is prose, because the message passes literally in the simple meaning of the words, whereas in his case the message is awakened in the reader. It has no direct connection to the literal meaning of the sentences in the poem. Therefore, at least for me, his text is in fact an ars poetica poem.

This can be sharpened if we perform on Leskly the opposite exercise to the one they performed on me in the thread I described in column 107. Let us write Leskly’s poem in the form of prose:

When the word becomes a body and the body opens its mouth and says the word from which it was made – I will embrace that body and let it sleep by my side.

Had it been written this way, I am not sure any of us would have related to it as a poem. Even though, when one examines this text by the criteria I gave above, it is clear that it is a poem. When one reads it, one clearly sees that these sentences are not meant to convey the simple literal meaning of the words, but to express something through them. Therefore it is clear that this is a poem. In this case, the fragmented writing serves only to draw our attention and tell us that this is a poem.

An interesting question is whether the line breaks here also have the second significance. Do the line breaks take part in conveying the message/creating the catharsis? To hint to us that it is a poem, one could have done this in various other forms. One could, for example, have broken the poem up like this:

When the word becomes a body and the body opens its mouth
and says the word from which it was made –
I will embrace that body and let it sleep by my side.

And if you really want to go wild:

When the word becomes

a body
and the body opens its mouth and says

the word from which
it was made –
I will embrace that body and let it sleep by my side.

This is the difference between seeing poetic writing as a hint that this is a poem—in which case it does not really matter in what way one chooses to do so—and seeing the form of writing as part of the means by which the message itself is conveyed. If the particular lineation chosen has significance, then clearly it is not only a hint to the poeticity of the text, but has a role in its own right. It is part of the poem itself. I think there are poems in which the poetic value lies in the words and the lineation has no significance (as with Leskly), but there are poems in which the lineation was chosen for substantive reasons (even if those reasons are not always clear even to the poet. But he feels that it is right to break the lines specifically this way and not another).

The analogy to the poetics of sounds (= melody) is self-evident. The visual form in which we write poetry is a kind of melody, a modulation laid over the words. The modulation conveys the catharsis to us through the words. The combination of words + form, just like sound + modulation, is a poetic entity: a poem or a melody.

Different relations between information and poetics

In Leskly’s poem we found a meaning that can be conceptualized and presented in prose. There are, of course, many such poems, but there are also many poems that are not like this. What I called above the poem’s “message”—that which is not contained in the meaning of the words but passes through them as a medium—is not necessarily a set of insights that can be translated into prose and written down as such. Sometimes it is a matter of creating a mood or conveying one kind or another of subjective feeling, and in such cases it is even more likely that something different will be produced in each hearer. In such cases the term “message” may be misleading, and perhaps it would be better instead to speak of the poem’s added poetic value. A poem of quality arouses interesting feelings (catharsis) in its readers, and these can certainly differ from one person to another. Indeed, there are those for whom the word “message,” in the context of poetry and of works of art in general, is a vulgar term. In my terminology here, I treat such poems too as carrying added poetic value. Without it, they are not poems.

A closing remark: comparison to previous definitions and the added value of the analysis

In the next column I will continue to sketch the map whose roots were planted here. But in closing this column, I will only note that in the previous columns we encountered various definitions of poetry. Some were given by poets (in ars poetica poems or in prose), or by scholars of poetry. There were also definitions given by readers here on the site. Some of them, in my opinion, miss the whole point. But not a few of them certainly connect to what I described here. Even so, it seems to me that a sharp sentence, however apt, cannot count as a definition. Many of these definitions use poetic expressions, and even if their implicit message is the one presented here, they still cannot be regarded as a definition. A definition is prose. Its role is to express the content, the information, precisely. A poem or an aphorism that arouses in us feelings of understanding with regard to poetry is not a definition.

Let us take a few examples. In a comment on column 107, Etz cites Frost’s definition: poetry is everything that cannot be translated. This is very close to what we have seen here. Poetry is everything beyond the verbal content. But it is only close, not the thing itself. The fact is that poems are translated. And the assumption is that in this way one succeeds in conveying at least some of the added poetic value, not only the information. Incidentally, even entirely prosaic words are not always translatable from one language to another. Therefore, this definition may be close in spirit to what is meant, but it is hard to see in it genuine theoretical progress. Not for nothing, in his comment there Etz cited Avidan’s provocative definition: poetry is precisely what can be translated. Beyond what I already noted there—that two contradictory definitions show that we do not have a real definition here—it seems to me that Avidan was not really offering a definition, but trying to express a protest against Frost’s definition (for reasons similar to those I have described here).

Etz also brought Ezra Pound’s definition: poetry is words at the edge of meaning. Again, there is something close here. But it seems to me that this is an aphorism, not a definition. When the reader sees this sentence, he must give it an expansive interpretation in order to arrive at some definition. After the analysis I have suggested here, one could argue that this is Pound’s intention: that the words in a poem do not convey meaning, but serve as a medium for conveying something beyond their literal meaning. But again, in such a formulation we do not have a definition one can actually work with.[7]

One can find further examples in the poets’ remarks quoted in column 107, all of which touch, in one way or another, on the point presented here, and yet their words should not be regarded as an actual definition. These are metaphors, or poems, or maxims whose purpose is to arouse some insight in us, but not a definition. As stated, a definition is prose. The same applies to the words of various commenters on column 107.

For example, Avraham G. wrote:

In my opinion, the difference between poetry and prose is a very significant difference. Prose deals with the contents themselves, with the substance of the matter. Poetry, by contrast, deals with itself; that is, its purpose is not to convey some message, but it itself—and the form of its sentences—is the message itself.

And Moshe likewise wrote there:

If I need to elaborate, the intention of both statements is that poetry does not aim to convey information, but to sharpen feelings that accompany the content (of course, it now still requires examination whether these statements belong to the first category or the second). The sharpening of the feelings is created by the accompaniment of music, rhymes, rhythm, the embedding of familiar expressions, or the use of expressions out of context (which borders on other kinds of artistic text).

Nadav wrote there:

For example, a text written with the aim of arousing emotion in the reader (as opposed to expressing an opinion or conveying new information).

I think the closest was Arie, who wrote:

Perhaps like this:

Poetry is a text that expresses its message not only through the simple meaning of its words.
I am aware of several problems in this definition, and one can “muddy” it with sub-definitions, interpretations, and various reservations, but as a start it seems to me not bad.

Now you can understand why I wrote to him that it was not bad at all.

I think that after the analysis I have given here, the definition I arrived at is quite similar to those presented here, but it is broader, more defined, and more fully conceptualized. In my opinion it is more precise, and its fit with these intuitive definitions actually encourages me to think that it probably has real substance. Later we shall see that the definition I proposed here makes it possible to answer questions that remained unanswered in column 107. It thus appears that the methodology, too, is important and not only the final definition, because it clarifies the definition and enables us to use it. In that sense, I think there is certainly added value to systematic analysis over various intuitions, despite the similarity between the results. In the next column I will try to sketch a fuller poetic map, and that will make clearer the value of the analysis I have offered. In fact, only after this analysis will we be able to obtain the two benefits described in the previous column (108): the ability to answer questions that could not be answered without the definition, and the possibility of clarifying the concepts and perhaps thereby changing the answers that were given earlier.

In the above-mentioned comment, Etz wrote that everything is a poem, except that it can be done better or worse. I replied to him that this empties the concept of poetry of content. If everything is poetry, then there is no such thing as poetry. In the next column I will show that the analysis developed here nevertheless gives these remarks some meaning, and that this does not completely empty the concept of poetry of its content. This itself is another illustration of the importance of methodology and systematic thinking (and in that lies an answer to some of his questions there).

[1] This raises the question of how one should relate to light. It is not tangible, yet it plays an active role (and is acted upon) in the laws of physics, that is, it is part of the physical world. On the matter-spirit axis, light belongs with matter and not with spirit (although in Kabbalah, for understandable reasons, light is used as a metaphor for spiritual reality). Therefore, the criterion of tangibility is not exact, but it suffices for me in order to illustrate (= make tangible) the point.

[2] He can of course claim that the concept is empty or undefined, and therefore obviously does not exist. This claim (which infers nonexistence from lack of understanding) is open to discussion, and I deal with it somewhat at the beginning of the first notebook and also in what follows (the fundamental discussion there concerns what is grasped by the scoundrel who says in his heart, “There is no God”).

[3] Nor is it correct to say that the quantity of poetics determines whether we are closer to poetry or to literature. Therefore my conclusion above is that poetry and literature stand on the same pole of the axis.

[4] One of them is: What Is Kitsch, Iyyun, vol. 30, issues 1-2 (Tevet-Nisan 5742 [1982]). He has other articles on this subject as well. See also his book: On Kitsch and Art, Bialik Institute, Jerusalem 2001.

[5] Hezi Leskly, “Hebrew Lesson Heh,” from “The Mice and Leah Goldberg” (it also appears as the motto to David Grossman’s book, Be My Knife).

[6] Incidentally, literature contains metaphors, and at first glance they too are not interpreted literally. But there is still a difference between a metaphor and a poem. A metaphor receives a literal meaning different from the usual one. When I speak of a stomachache in the sense of pangs of conscience, that is already a literal interpretation of the expression “stomachache” in that context. That is a metaphor. But Leskly’s poem is not a metaphor. This interpretation is not based on the meaning of the words—even if a different one—but on a sense or insight produced in the reader as a result of the reading. Incidentally, someone else who reads the poem, or who does so in a different context (not within a discussion of poetry), will interpret it differently; that is, different insights and feelings will be awakened in him. The catharsis will take a different form in his case.

[7] Of course, I have not seen Pound’s actual words inside, and perhaps he offers an analysis that clarifies his intention.