The purpose of this sentence was not, as has been supposed, to give a
definition of poetry. To define poetry as something that goes on in us
when we read poetically would be absurd indeed. My object was to suggest
to my hearers in passing that it is futile to ask questions about the
end, or substance, or form of poetry, if we forget that a poem is
neither a mere number of black marks on a white page, nor such
experience as is evoked in us when we read these marks as we read, let
us say, a newspaper article; and I suppose my hearers to know,
sufficiently for the purpose of the lecture, how that sort of reading
differs from poetical reading.
The truths thus suggested are so obvious, when stated, that I thought a
bare reminder of them would be enough. But in fact the mistakes we make
about 'subject,' 'substance,' 'form,' and the like, are due not solely
to misapprehension of our poetic experience, but to our examining what
is not this experience. The whole lecture may be called an expansion of
this statement.
The passage to which the present note refers raises difficult questions
which any attempt at a 'Poetics' ought to discuss. I will mention three.
(1) If the experience called a poem varies 'with every reader and every
time of reading' and 'exists in innumerable degrees,' what is the poem
itself, if there is such a thing? (2) How does a series of successive
experiences form _one_ poem? (3) If the object in the case of poetry and
music ('arts of hearing') is a succession somehow and to some extent
unified, how does it differ in this respect from the object in 'arts of
sight'--a building, a statue, a picture?