I was attempting today to explain to my daughter what poetry is. I went digging for a great C.S. Lewis quote I thought summarized it well:

I begin with three sentences (1) It was very cold (2) There were 13 degrees of frost (3) ‘Ah, bitter chill it was! The owl, for all his feathers was a-cold; The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass, And silent was the flock in woolly fold: Numb’d were the Beadsman’s fingers.’ I should describe the first as Ordinary language, the second as Scientific language, and the third as Poetic language…Two and three are improved uses of the same language used in one. Scientific and Poetic language are two different artificial perfections of Ordinary: artificial, because they depend on skills; different, because they improve the ordinary in two different directions.

He continues,

The superiority of the Scientific description clearly consists in giving for the coldness of the night a precise quantitative estimate which can be tested by an instrument. The test ends all disputes…On the other hand it does not, of itself, give us any information about the quality of a cold night, does not tell us what we shall be feeling if we go out of doors.

On the superiority of poetic language, he adds,

This is the most remarkable of the powers of Poetic language: to convey to us the quality of experiences which we have not had, or perhaps can never have, to use factors within our experience so that they become pointers to something outside our experience.

He is adamant that poetic language does more than convey emotion:

…Such language is by no means merely an expression, nor a stimulant, of emotion, but a real medium of information. Which information may, like any other, be true or false…but it suffers from two disabilities in comparison with Scientific: (1) It is verifiable or falsifiable only to a limited degree and with a certain fringe of vagueness…(2) Such information as Poetic language has to give can be received only if you are ready to meet it half-way. It is no good holding a dialectical pistol to the poet’s head and demanding how the deuce a river could have hair, or a thought be green, or a woman a read rose.

The first quote above is a gem for explaining in non-poetic terms what poetry is. With my daughter I like to use the three categories of Ordinary, Scientific, and Poetic language as an exercise. We take random objects and try to speak of them in each of those three ways. It’s a great exercise in language, and very enjoyable as well.

Quotations are from the essay The Language of Religion, in Christian Reflections