Concrete and Abstract
Definition:
In standard philosophical usage a "concrete term" is a word that denotes a particular person or physical object, and an "abstract term" denotes either a class of things or else (as in "brightness," "beauty," "evil," "despair") qualities that exist only as attributes of particular persons or things. A sentence, accordingly, is said to be concrete if it makes an assertion about a particular subject (T. S. Eliot's "Grishkin is nice ..."), and abstract if it makes an assertion about an abstract subject (Alexander Pope's "Hope springs eternal in the human breast"). Critics of literature, however, often use these terms in an extended way: a passage is called abstract if it represents its subject matter in general or no sensuous words or with only a thin realization of its experienced qualities; it is called concrete if it represents its subject matter with striking particularity and sensuous detail. In his "Ode to Psyche" (1820) John Keats' ' Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed, Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian is a concrete description of a locale which intervolves qualities that are perceived by four different senses: hearing, touch, sight, and smell. And in the opening of his 'Ode to a Nightingale," Keats communicates concretely, by a combination of literal and figurative language, how it feels, in physical detail, to experience the full-throated song of the nightingale: My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains ... It is frequently asserted that "poetry is concrete," or, as John Crowe Ransom put it in The World's Body (1938), that its proper subject is "the rich, contin- gent materiality of things." Most poetry is certainly more concrete than other modes of language, especially in its use of imagery. It should be kept in mind, however, that poets do not hesitate to use abstract language when the area of reference or artistic purpose calls for it. Keats, though he was one of the most concrete of poets, began Endymion with a sentence composed of abstract terms: A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; ... And some of the most moving and memorable passages in poetry are not concrete; for example, the statement about God in Dante's Paradiso, "In His will is our peace," or the bleak comment by Edgar in the last act of King Lear, Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither; Ripeness is all.
