1. Introduction
This essay seeks to answer two questions as simply and deeply as possible: “what is poetry?” and “why is poetry?” What features identify a text as belonging to the genre? And what is poetry’s meaning, its ontology, its purpose? This latter question is not subjective (why does any individual write poetry?) but objective: what is the purpose of poetry itself? This is the same category of question as asking the purpose of the human eye, a car, or beauty.
The question of purpose is particularly pressing because every culture’s first literary works are poetry. The Bible hints at this primordial and natural character. In Genesis, there is a pattern: for many cultural artifacts, the wicked line discovers or adopts them first. Music and metallurgy are both first practiced by the Cainite line (Gen 4:16–22). One might expect poetry to follow this pattern, but it is first used by the narrator in Genesis 1, and the first character to speak poetry is Adam (Gen 2:23). Poetry is protological, pre-political, pre-cultural, and deeply natural.
There is some hiddenness to human nature that naturally produces poetry, a hiddenness we must unhide. When we do, it will “[reveal] to us the mysteries of our existence, or perhaps [reveal] to us for the first time that there are mysteries at all.”[1]
2. What is Poetry? Form and Content Features
2.1 The Form Feature: Repetition
A text is poetry if it has two features, one related to form and one related to content. Writers have long struggled to identify what formal feature makes something a poem, but the typically‑listed features are nearly always types of a more fundamental category: repetition. Typically, repetition is of rhyme or meter (or both). These are repetitions in sound: rhyme repeats qualitative sounds like “ah” or “ay,” while meter repeats either dynamic patterns (sequences of stressed and unstressed syllables) or numerical patterns (the number of syllables or beats in a line).
This holds across cultures at the earliest inceptions of writing: Greece, China, India, and Israel. As Edward Hirsch observes, “Poetry is a human fundamental, like music. It predates literacy and precedes prose in all literatures. There has probably never been a culture without it, yet no one knows precisely what it is.”[2]
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey use dactylic hexameter: lines composed of six metrical feet, each foot following a long-short-short pattern of vocalic length. Multiple mechanisms of repetition operate simultaneously. Each line repeats the same number of feet; each foot repeats the same structure of long and short syllables.
In India, the two great epic poems, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa, use the shloka meter: four pādas of eight syllables each, with specific patterns of light and heavy syllables governing the cadence. Once again, multiple layers of repetition: the number of pādas, the number of syllables per pāda, and the rhythmic pattern at each line’s close.
The Shijing, or Classic of Poetry, is the oldest collection of Chinese poetry; its 305 poems date from the 11–7th centuries BC. Its formal structure combines tetrasyllabic meter (four syllables per line) with end rhyme.
In Hebrew poetry, the dominant formal feature is not meter but parallelism, a repetition of ideas. James Kugel famously summarizes its essential form as, “A relatively short sentence-form that consists of two brief clauses…A is so, and what’s more, B.”[3] Robert Alter, quoting Benjamin Hrushovski, builds on this insight: ““In most cases,” he observes, “there is an overlapping of several such heterogeneous parallelisms [that is, semantic, syntactic, prosodic, morphological, phonetic, and so on] with a mutual reinforcement so that no single element—meaning, syntax, or stress—may be considered as purely dominant or as purely concomitant.”[4] Repetition in Hebrew poetry is constituted primarily by the couplet line and in that couplet the repetition of ideas.
While the mechanisms vary widely across cultures, they are all forms of repetition: repeating a sound, a line length, a pattern of long and short (or stressed and unstressed) syllables, or ideas.
2.2 The Purpose of Repetition
Repetition serves multiple purposes. The first and most obvious is memorization. Patterns of repetition make memorizing a poem easier, more enjoyable, and to some degree inevitable. But memorization is not cold storage; it is a person ingesting something into himself, incorporating it into his life. A meal of meat and milk that makes him. Repetition encourages ingestion..
Repetition is also a sign of value. We repeat only good things. We do not repeat the ugly or ignoble but the delightful. As Chesterton mused,
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.[5]
Repetition is also a means of elevation and glorification. Most poetry in the Bible is song and prophecy. Both the words of God and the elevated words of man require an elevated form, and this includes repetition. This pattern extends across the arts of poiesis, of making: architecture repeats motifs (pillars, colonnades, windows), liturgy repeats prayers, songs, and actions, music is the repetition of rhythms and notes, theme and variation.
The most fundamental way to bring something out of the ordinary is through repetition. Normal speech is not repeated. To turn sound into music, you give it a beat; you incorporate repetition. In architecture, you create corners and columns. In graphic design, you make a grid. This is how God constructed the world. He began with a dark, formless mass and divided it into repeated segments of time and space, all ordered by a complex and repetitious formal structure we call mathematics. Christians have divided time liturgically, and the liturgy is an ordering of worship.
Repetition is also the fundamental force of conservation, tradition, creation, and building. For something to endure from yesterday to today, it must temporally repeat itself. My house must exist tomorrow as it exists today. No repetition means no history.
The repetition of poetry is thus both a mark of glory and a mechanism for working that glory into the soul.
2.3 The Content Feature: Compression and Concealment
“It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out” (Prov 25:2).
The second necessary feature of poetry relates to content and is characterized by compression, concealment, or what Peter Leithart calls “concentrated excess.” Or again, Jan Fokkelaman: “What a poet undertakes does have a lot to do with creating ‘density.’ Poetry is the most compact and concentrated form of speech possible. By making the most of his or her linguistic tools, the poet creates an immense richness of meaning, and this richness becomes available if we as readers know how to handle the density: how we can cautiously tackle complexity, probe the various layers one by one and unfold them. The poet creates this abundance of meanings by visiting all the nooks and crannies of the language, and by being an expert at it.”[6] Through innumerable literary tools, the poet compresses and conceals meaning. These tools include:
- Figurative language, such as metaphor, simile, personification, allegory, synecdoche, metonymy, hyperbole, litotes, oxymoron, and paradox;
- Imagery and symbolism;
- Structural devices, such as juxtaposition, parallelism, chiasmus, anaphora, epistrophe, refrain, and acrostic;
- Rhetorical devices, such as irony, apostrophe, rhetorical question, ellipsis, synesthesia, zeugma, polysyndeton, and asyndeton;
- And other techniques, such as ekphrasis, enjambment, volta, intertextuality, fragmentation, ambiguity, and double entendre.
All these diverse tools share one feature: they make meaning more difficult to access. They require additional work to unfold. If you want to communicate your love, you could state the proposition “I love you,” or you could use the words of Robert Burns: “O my Luve is like a red, red rose.” In the poetic form, the meaning is hidden and compressed. Does he mean that his love is passionate? fresh? perfect? Whatever it means, it requires labor to unfold. The literary tools hide the proposition, erecting a riddle that must be solved before she gives up her gold.
A metaphor hides meaning in an image. Parallel lines or strophes require the reader to labor over comparing and contrasting them in order to understand why the author has parallelized them. The repeated use of the image of a hand may hide something about strength or grasping or holding that is only disclosed through extended deliberation. As Shelley observed, “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world.”[7]
But compression’s purpose is not simply to increase difficulty. Its goal is the opening of a world of meaning greater than what a simple, transparent proposition can contain. “I love you” has a tighter semantic enclosure than “O my Luve is like a red, red rose.” The meaning is more confined in the former than the latter.
The clearest way to understand compression is through Lakoff and Johnson’s definition of metaphor: “The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.”[8] In Burns’ poem, you understand love in terms of botany. This requires knowledge of both domains. The lover must open himself beyond love in order to understand love. This is the compression of poetry: making meaning harder in order to open it wider.
2.4 Compression and the Structure of the World
Compression is not unique to poetry; it is one of the most fundamental features of the world. As you move from the smallest layers of reality through higher layers, creation becomes increasingly compressed. At the smallest level of subatomic particles, things contain only their properties and nature. Move up one level to the atomic, and you find additional properties and structures, yet the atomic also contains the subatomic. Because creation is well designed, however, the addition of more information does not clutter the surface. The surface remains simple while containing the depths. When you look at your finger, it looks simple: skin. But it contains multitudes: cells, molecules, atoms, subatomic particles. The surface is accessible to a child; the depth is inaccessible to the genius. The surface draws you into the compressed layers.
This means that the compressed nature of poetry not only mirrors the fundamental structure of the world but also indicates its home in the higher orders of reality. The higher the compression, the higher the layer and order of reality.
3. Why is Poetry?
Poetry has two features: repetition and compression. One relates to form, the other to content. One makes understanding easier, the other more difficult. But how do these relate to the essential nature and purpose of poetry?
Many of the greatest poets suggested that emotion was the purpose of poetry. Wordsworth wrote, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”[9] Similarly, Robert Frost said, “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”[10]
While definitions circulating around emotion move in an accurate direction, they do not provide a sufficient ontological foundation. That is, emotions are an effect of poetry but are an insufficient explanation for the existence and expansiveness of poetry in history, culture, and the Bible. For ontology, we must turn to the original poems in Genesis 1 and 2 because they provide the first poem. After God speaks his decision to create man, this poem is composed (Gen 1:27): וַיִּבְרָא אֱלֹהִים אֶת־הָאָדָם בְּצַלְמוֹ בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים בָּרָא אֹתוֹ זָכָר וּנְקֵבָה בָּרָא אֹתָם
So God created man in his own image,
In the image of God he created him;
Male and female he created them.
Both form and content of this text provide the beginnings of an ontology of poetry. Moses, our narrator, devotes significantly more words to the sixth day than to any other. This is because the sixth day is the day God creates his image, the climax of creation. It is thus fitting that the sixth day is adorned with the first poem, celebrating the enfleshing of the image. This repetitive and compressed poem glorifies God’s creation of an icon and his permutation of that theme in male and female form.
A hint to the purpose of this first poem is hiding in its strange numerology. Genesis 1 is perhaps the most numerologically concentrated text in the Bible, as Cassuto and Wenham have separately demonstrated.[11] Significant words are repeated 7, 10, and 14 times. We would thus expect at the climax of creation to find a resounding 7, 14, or 21 words. Surprisingly, the first poem is 13 words. Were this any other verse in any other location, it would not raise suspicion. But the author has prepared us through pattern to expect a multiple of 7. But alas, we are off by one.
Then we arrive at the second poem in history, after the creation of Eve (Gen 2:23): זֹאת הַפַּעַם עֶצֶם מֵעֲצָמַי וּבָשָׂר מִבְּשָׂרִי לְזֹאת יִקָּרֵא אִשָּׁה כִּי מֵאִישׁ לֻקֳחָה־זֹּאת
This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.
The man, following the pattern of the first poem, adorns the creation of woman with these poetic lines. But with the same surprise and suspicion we count 13 words. The two climactic moments, glorified by the first and second poems, are each incomplete. Together, however, they comprise 26 words, which is the gematria[12] of YHWH, perhaps the most frequently used symbolic number in the entire Old Testament. God allows man to complete the poem, opening space for poetic completion.
The creation of humans in God’s image (Gen 1:27) and the creation of woman (Gen 2:23) are each incomplete poems which are completed in combination. God’s complete divine image in creation is consummated when the vertical and horizontal creative acts are unified. The greatest creation from God and the greatest creation from man form a complete poem. God and man together are the first and greatest poem.
But this first poem pushes further. The poetic form is not simply appropriate for such a glorious event; the poetic form, in both its repetition and compression, is an image of the content of the poetry. God and man are the original poetry. They are repetition as man is the image of God and compression (as we will unfold). Man and woman are a poem. You do not have poetry until you have the image of God. Poetry is a literary form that requires a second line, just as the image of God does. The form matches the content.
As Chesterton observed, “Every Artist knows that the form is not superficial but fundamental, that the form is the foundation. Every sculptor knows that the form of the statue is not the outside of the statue, but rather the inside of the statue, even in the sense of the inside of the sculptor. Every poet knows that the sonnet-form of the poem is not only the form, but the poem.”[13]
This protological poetry in its numerological form provides the ontological founding of the purpose of poetry. In short, poetry exists because we are made in God’s image. God’s name is stamped on the first poem, whose topic is the repetition of God in man.
4. The Poetry of God & Man
4.1 God is Poetry
God’s essential identity is poetic and contains both repetition and compression. God the Father is repeated in God the Son. Jesus is “the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15) and “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (Heb 1:3).
Recall that the tools of compression make comprehension more difficult, or perhaps more accurately, more delightful. This provides a backdoor into answering the problem of divine hiddenness. The “problem” states that God could have made his presence much clearer, but to some degree he hides himself. Rendered in the poetic idiom, he compresses himself. But this compression, this hiding, is a feature, not a defect. It is central to the poetic and thus divine nature, or the divine and thus poetic nature. Poetry is an image of God, and God is repetition and compression in himself; therefore, the divine nature is poetic.
Ontologically, compression is revealed in the divine trinitarian names. Father, Son, and Spirit are “compressed” because they are intrinsically referential and dense. To understand the essential nature of a Father, you are immediately referred to another. So also Son refers you back to the Father. And a Spirit is always the Spirit of someone; the Spirit refers you to the one whose Spirit it is. The names are dense because to understand divinity, the persons and the divine attributes, it is necessary to unfold them as triune attributes. Furthermore, the nature of God’s Fatherhood, Sonship, and Spiration is underdisclosed. All of revelation and creation are necessary for understanding the meaning of God’s Fatherhood and Sonship. The meaning of Fatherhood is not contained in the term. It is compressed into the term.
4.2 Man is Poetry
Man is a repetition of God as woman is a repetition of man. Paul tells us that woman is the glory of man (1 Cor 11:7). Traditionally, this repetition is rendered as “image.” These repetitions, however, are never identical; they are always variations on a theme.
God-and-man and man-and-woman are also compressions: thick and deep diptychs containing almost unfathomable density. So dense are these diptychs that they are fruitful, generating generations of poetic variation. In a literal sense, the man-woman poetry creates repetitions in the generation of children who are poetic variations on their parents. And this compression could be unfolded in all the various dimensions of the man-woman union: psychologically, spiritually, economically, and so on. Psychologically, the man and woman are able to interpenetrate, gaining insight and love into the interior of another. Spiritually and economically, they bring in their individual gifts to the construction and beautification of the home and church. These are the unfoldings of the compressed life.
God’s image as man is obviously a repetition: man is made in the “image” and “likeness” of God, two nouns circling the fundamental concept of repetition. But God’s compression, by its very nature, is much harder to grasp. Compression requires prayer, contemplation, and action to unfold. This first poem, the combination of Genesis 1:27 and 2:23, contains or compresses the two great mysteries of creation: Christ’s incarnation and his bridal union with the Church.
4.3 The Poetic Mysteries of Creation
Genesis 1:27 compresses the incarnation of Jesus into a single, 13-word poem. What happens at the climax of creation’s beginning culminates in the climax of creation’s end. The image of God is man in his fullness: the God-man Jesus. He is the divine Word made flesh, the “image of the invisible God” and the perfected eschatological poem. The first poem in Genesis 1 expounds the enfleshing of the image in man. The last poem, Jesus, is the final and perfected enfleshing of the image. The first poem contains hints that we see in hindsight of the poetry of the God-man.
Genesis 2:23 compresses Christ’s bridal union with the Church into a single, 13-word poem. Each compression is generative like a chemical compound. The union produces something not reducible to its parts. The compression of any great mystery can be explored theologically, morally, and psychologically. But the compression of man and woman is centrally and literally generative. The combination of man and woman is drawn together by the strongest fire (Song 8:6) and is the poem that literally recreates the world in the generation of children. Man, as the highest creation of God, would not continue save for this poetic union.
But this compression contains a deeper mystery. Paul reads Genesis 2, about a man leaving his father and mother and cleaving to his wife, and says that it is a profound mystery: “it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph 5:32). The deep mystery of the poem of man and woman is that it prefigures its destiny in the union of the God-man and his bride.
The first incomplete poem is about God and his greatest repetition. The second incomplete poem is about man and his greatest repetition. And it is this God-man diptych that resolves the world’s first poem, enclosed and defined by the divine name in numerological form.
5. Conclusion
Poetry is the enigma at the beginning of every history and culture. And it stands just as enigmatically at the beginning of biblical revelation: pre-lapsarian, pre-cultural, natural. This enigma, appropriate to her nature, unveils her secrets as repeat her lines and meditate on her meaning. The two protological poems are both about repetition: the repetition of God in the image of man and the repetition of man in woman. But this repetition is our entrance in, our liturgy to memorize but not master the mysteries, the compressions.
These compressions begin to unfold when we connect these two poems through the hints the author hides. The 13 words of the first poem combined with the 13 of the second make 26, the gematria of the divine name. The divine name is disclosed when the first two poems are unified. That is, something divine is disclosed with the union of God and man and woman. But the fullness of this disclosure is only revealed at the end of revelation.
The foundational and final purpose of poetry is that it mirrors the story and substance of the heart of the world: God in man, and God with man. God’s image is repeated perfectly in the incarnation, and the incarnation is gloriously repeated in the bride. This is why poetry was created and where it culminates. Poetry is not a mnemonic. It is a metaphysic.
John Higgins is the producer of The Bible is Art website and YouTube channel.
NOTES
[1] Anthony Esolen, The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2019), 34.
[2] Edward Hirsch, A Poet’s Glossary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), s. v. “poetry.”
[3] James L. Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 1, 51.
[4] Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 7–8.
[5] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, n.d.), 39, https://www.ccel.org/ccel/c/chesterton/orthodoxy/cache/orthodoxy.pdf.
[6] Jan Fokkelman, Reading Biblical Poetry (Leiden: John Knox Press, 2001), 15.
[7] Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” Poetry Foundation, published October 13, 2009, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69388/a-defence-of-poetry.
[8] George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 5.
[9] William Wordsworth, Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. William Angus Knight, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1896), 68.
[10] Robert Frost, “The Figure a Poem Makes,” in Collected Poems of Robert Frost (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1939), i.
[11] See Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, trans. Israel Abrahams (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1961); Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, Word Biblical Commentary (Waco: Word Books, 1987).
[12] Gematria is ancient Jewish and Christian the practice of assigning values to letters and words and connecting those to other word for symbolic connection.
[13] G. K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas (Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, n.d.), 77, https://www.ccel.org/ccel/c/chesterton/aquinas/cache/aquinas.pdf.