| 单词 | poetry |
| 例句 | poetry noun •Walt Whitman's poetry:poems, verse, versification, metrical composition, rhymes, balladry | archaic poesy.WORD NOTE poetry Poetry and prose are supposed to be opposites. Poetry is to dancing as prose is to walking, wrote Paul Valéry. Poetry is gratuitously beautiful, prose is functional, utilitarian. Or poetry is patrician and prose plebeian, pedestrian. Poetry is special, prose is ordinary, with the proviso that poetry can, like the word special, itself become commonplace, as in the mass-produced verse on a birthday card. Yet it is in the prosaic walks of life that the word poetic has done much of its duty, complimenting the oratory of a politician, the grace of an athlete, the drama of a big game or a fabled competition. On the eve of the decisive seventh game of the 2003 American League Championship Series, which pitted the Boston Red Sox against their bitter rivals the New York Yankees, Theo Epstein, the Boston team's general manager, said, “It's definitely appropriate, definitely meant to be, and certainly poetic.” Poetry in this sense is a quality that exists independent of the art form that it names. And just to make things a little more complicated, the field of poetry itself comprises two categories, verse and prose. Most poems are in verse, but the prose poem, a seeming oxymoron, has flourished in France since Charles Baudelaire initiated it in 1862 and has more recently caught on in the United States. There is really only one salient difference between prose and verse. Verse is in lines—the lengths and endings of which are determined by the author. Prose is in sentences, the print running to the end of the page. Prose proceeds; verse reverses. Now, with the general recognition of the validity of the prose poem, the turn at the end of the line that is definitive of verse has turned out to be an adjunct of poetry, no more indispensable than rhyme and meter had been. Is that a good or a bad thing? In a permissive age, the prose poem becomes just one more option for the poet. But rhyme, meter, and verse forms retain their appeal and will continue to do so, in some periods with great force. How can I be so sure? I think of U.S. Poet Laureate Louise Glück's admirably terse reply when asked why she felt confident that poetry would survive the age of electronic media. “It has lasted this long,” she said. — DLConversational, opinionated, and idiomatic, these Word Notes are an opportunity to see a working writer's perspective on a particular word or usage. |
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