ABSTRACT
‘Poetry is’ statements suggest that a consensus exists; that we know, or agree, about what ‘poetic language’ is. The poetic ‘speech act’ initiated by the pupil’s offer need not terminate in the teacher’s disposition to say tut this is not a poem’; recognizing that there is more to poeticality than the intrinsic features of particular poems, the teacher will contribute to the ‘speech act’ initiated, not completed, by the pupil. The notion of social agreement helps the teacher to make sense of the familiar experience of the ‘poetic received as prosaic’. One sometimes feels that ‘cheating’ is involved in the presentation as poems of language which might be recast as prose without loss of conviction. In one sense the question ‘Is it poetry?’ is about products, and that is the sense it would most often carry, not least when the questioner is a teacher confronted by children’s poems.
