The Institutional Definition of Poetry: Some Heretical Thoughts
A few contemporary theories of poetry (e.g., Culler, 1975; Fish, 1980) claim that texts do not have any poetic qualities prior to, and independently of, the institutional context in which they are presented. When a text, any text, is printed in verse form, in a book whose subtitle is “Poems,” then we start looking for poetic qualities. And what we look for, we are bound to find. In order to challenge this approach, and to argue for a more objective, text-oriented approach to the categorization of texts (Hanaor, 1996; Miall & Kuiken, 1996), I have conducted a test. My test was based on two types of questionnaires, the one in prose form, the other in verse, in which students were asked to identify those texts that were “originally” poems or prose. The results obtained corroborate the assumption that readers have quite definite intuitions about the poetic qualities of texts prior to and independently of the way they are institutionally presented.