I have been wondering, lately, about the position of poetry relative to that of literature. Specifically, I am curious as to whether I would be right to separate the two forms as distinct or to include poetry as a form of literature. The Greeks seemed to do the latter; poetry, drama, rhetoric, could all be subsumed, in some dialects, under the term literature. (Strictly, philologia translates to 'love of discourse' but was one term used to describe ficitonalized writings of all types.)
My precritical intuition was, though, to do the former. To classify poetry as its own art distinct from literature, distinct from drama. While attempting to define literature in my previous post, a post I suggest looking at, I could find, despite myself, no reason to exclude poetry or drama (the script rather than the production of course). They both satisfied all the conditions I had reason to enumerate for literature. I do not deny the possibility that a poem may not satisfy my last criterion, but generally, I think, they do.
Where does poetry and drama fall in relation to literature?
I outlined my own definition of literature, not attempting to include drama or poetry. I then decided to attempt to determine where speech text, poetry, and drama fit in. I, too, could not find any reason or way to exclude the two and keep a satisfactory definition of literature. For me, this was because I was working with the idea of a novel as the embodiment of literature, that those two were synonymous. I was using literature as a subcategory, sort of speak. It was a bit silly, but I think I fixed that.
ReplyDeleteI can see the difficulty in trying to contain poetry and drama within the realm of literature. Seeing as both could also be considered a performance art also, perhaps there is an overlap between the two. Perhaps reading a certain drama or poem would be literature and seeing it performed would be acting, but that would make literature dependent on the medium it is in (i.e text or oral presentation) and as you know I am not in agreement with such a categorization of literature. I will think more on this and see what I come up with.
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