Regarding the preceding Posts (#1575-178) on Poetry: I  very much agree with Tittivulus in that "poetry can give us insights in nuce of the 'spirit of landscape' or 'sense of landscape' sometimes  better than a long list of tecnical concept-parameters attempting to explain it."    In this Post I attempt to bridge between Poetry and those technical concepts we had been discussing. Starting with a quote from the painter Georges Braque:

 

"Reality only reveals itself when illuminated by a ray of poetry".

 

     Which, in our field of enquiry, may be paraphrased as –the reality that Geography purports to describe is revealed to us when illuminated by poetry. The above quote may have been very much in the mind of John Jakle when discussing landscape character, since he uses it as the opening line of his Chapter on the subject.

 

       In his book "The Visual Elements of  Landscape "( 1987) John  Jakle  devotes an entire Chapter to " Character in Landscape"; in his words:

 

 " Character brings to a scene the distinctiveness of  object and spatial order that stamps a particular place as truly unique. It cues what Lawrence Durrell (Letters and Essays on Travel) calls the 'spirit of place' and what others authors variously refer to as  'personality of place' and 'sense of place'.  It is obtained not so much by moving through a landscape as by stopping and watching a place in its various manifestations."

 

  ….Lawrence Durrell writes of sightseeing: "It is a pity indeed to travel and not to get this essential sense of landscape values. One does not need a sixth sense for it because all landscapes ask the same question:

   I am watching you – are you watching yourself in me? 

 

To watch oneself in the landscape is, I'd venture to say, the attitude assumed by Lamartine, Shelley and many other poets when expressing what those landscapes aroused in them.

 

   John Jakle discusses a number of factors that contribute to the character of landscapes. I'll dwell on them in a later post; here I'd like to mention two in particular, since, as said, I'm trying to bridge with Poetry: what Jakle calls "Rhyme and Rhythm"; (loc. cit. pp.92 et fol):

 

" Sense of appropriateness is enhanced by rhyme and rhythm in landscape. Their nature and interrelation helps define landscape in romantic, classical or cosmic terms. Rhyme involves recurring correspondences that bind or tie. They are likenesses that offer special relationships"….  "Rhythm in landscapes may be of three kinds regular variable and irregular ( Niels Prak, 1977). Regular rhythms are easily predicted as sequences inviolate. Variable rhythms either increase or decrease the cadence in a regulated manner whereas irregular rhytms are intermittent and variously metered. Regular rhythms evoke a sense of movement in landscape as an observer anticipates redundancies ahead. Increasing rhythm heightens this impression; decreasing rhythm lessens it " …."Irregular rhythm enhances romanticism in landscape where dimensional and metaphoric rhymes predominate"