It could also depend on a willingness to live without any full definition of what "poetic" might imply:
"Brown and Dilke walked with me and back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, and at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously -- I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration."
[John Keats: Letter to George and Tom Keats, 22 December 1818.]
At least within my own limited perspective, I can say this much: verse is not always poetic.
This, for me, is prosaic:
PURPLE,
by Glenn Ward Dresbach.
Purple grapes hung in the purpling gloom.
Frail purple flowers swayed in the musky grass.
I caught a breath of passionate perfume,
And saw you pass
(A shadow in motion, a drifting purple hue)
And I reached out my arms and called to you --
Only to lose you in purpling shadows that between us came.
Nothing I heard but the autumn winds whispering your name.
Maddened I rushed to find you, to hold you in my caress,
But my open arms closed only on purple emptiness.
I called... No answer came.
Nothing I heard but the autumn winds whispering your name.
[From In The Paths of the Wind. The Four Seas Company, Boston, 1917.]
This is poetic:
CLAUDIO:
Death is a fearful thing.
ISABELLA:
And shamèd life a hateful.
CLAUDIO:
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where,
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world, or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling: 'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathèd worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
[Measure For Measure, Act 3, Scene 1.]
The Dresbach offers nothing I have not felt or thought before. It never shocks me with a sense of recognition, with a sudden awareness that I have always known such things but have never been able to think about them. Neither verbs nor adjectives nor images catch me off guard, and the one fantastic device, "Nothing I heard but the autumn winds whispering your name," is nonsense unless the woman's name is OOooOOooOOoo, or perhaps Whooooosh; this might be a trope for lazy poets, but it has nothing to do with poetry.
The lines from Shakespeare take up hardly more space than the Dresbach, but they are concentrated. They say more, by combining concrete verbs with abstractions ("to lie in cold obstruction, and to rot"), by tumbling images together with concepts like the coloured shapes in kaleidoscopes. If one image does nothing for you, the next three might hit you in the bones.
I suspect that for many readers, "poetic" means a cloudy jumble of imprecise imagery, or a loose, windy tone. I see "poetic" as intensity, as a sudden bringing into view of what was felt but not yet specified. And so, when Dickinson talks about "Zero at the bone," when Herrick praises "that liquefaction" of Julia's clothes, when Keats describes "warmed jewels," when Sterling calls a friend "sun-sincere," I feel a jolt of surprise along with a conviction of just how right these words have been.
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