Poetry

Plato's treatment of poetry proceeds from the theory of imitation. In the tenth book of the Republic, the carpenter who makes a bed imitates the Form of Bed, and the painter who paints the bed imitates the carpenter's work; the poet stands to reality as the painter does, producing images of images, and so at a third remove from truth. Since for Plato all knowledge is itself a kind of imitation, the difference between poet and philosopher lies in what each imitates. The notions of the philosopher imitate the Ideas; the images of the poet imitate sensible appearances, which are themselves imitations of the Ideas. Poetry, even when it is accurate, must on this view remain an inferior mode, belonging with fancy and belief on the level of opinion. The poet does not assist the philosopher but competes with him, and attempts on the level of imagination what reason does better.

The Ion reaches a similar conclusion from the side of the poet's own competence. Socrates brings the rhapsode to admit that he can give no rational account of his art, and therefore possesses no techne, no body of knowledge that can be taught and defended. He is instead possessed, drawn along by inspiration as iron rings are drawn along a magnetic chain. Whether this counts as praise or as reproach may be argued either way. The poet speaks beautifully, but he cannot distinguish the true from the false in his own utterance, nor answer for it when questioned. Yet Plato does not treat inspiration only as a defect. The Symposium and the Phaedrus speak of poetic madness with something near reverence, and the myths of the dialogues themselves proceed by image rather than by argument.

Because poetry works upon the young before argument can reach them, Plato treats it as a matter for public regulation rather than private taste. The second and third books of the Republic prescribe what may be told of gods and heroes to those who are to be guardians, and the Laws lays down further rules for poetic content. Imitations, he holds there, are not to be judged by pleasure or by false opinion but by the standard of truth and by no other, so that the competent judge must know what the imitation is of, whether it is true, and whether it has been well executed in words and melodies and rhythms. In the same connection Plato separates the manners of storytelling, distinguishing pure imitation, in which the author never speaks in his own person, from narration that may combine both methods. Aristotle takes over this division as the difference between dramatic and epic poetry.

The terms Plato sets govern much of what follows. Aristotle replies that poetry is not a kind of knowledge at all, so that the standards proper to knowledge do not apply to it; Dante claims for the poet an illumination which dialectic cannot reach. Whether the state may regulate what poets write is pursued further under the ideas of Art and Liberty, where Milton and Mill oppose censorship in principle. What the tradition inherits from Plato is less a conclusion than a demand, that poetry give some account of its hold upon the soul.

Aristotle's answer to Plato turns on the denial that poetry is a kind of knowledge. Since it is not, the standards proper to knowledge do not apply to it, and there is not the same kind of correctness in poetry as in politics or medicine or any other special science. Having removed poetry from that jurisdiction, Aristotle compares it with history instead, and to poetry's advantage. The historian relates what a particular man did; the poet shows how a person of a certain type will on occasion speak or act, according to the law of probability or necessity. Poetry therefore tends to express the universal, and is in that respect more philosophical than history. The difference does not lie in verse, for the work of Herodotus would remain a species of history if it were put into metre.

The Poetics is for the most part an analysis of the parts of tragedy: plot, character, thought, diction, melody, and spectacle. Plot is the soul of tragedy, and by extension the first principle of all narrative poetry, so that the poet or maker should be the maker of plots rather than of verses. A well constructed plot has a beginning, a middle, and an end, observes at least the unity of action, and gains its effects by recognition and reversal of fortune. Aristotle draws the further division of epic from dramatic poetry not from the medium or the object of imitation, which are the same in both, but from the manner. Epic narration may take another personality or speak in the poet's own person, and since it need not be limited in time or place it may carry a multiplicity of plots.

The rule of the probable and the possible governs the poet's inventions. A convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility, and a technical error in natural science does not touch the essentials of the poetic art, though the poet is at fault if he meant to describe the thing correctly and failed for want of power of expression. Tragedy imitates an action that is serious, and through pity and fear effects the proper purgation of these emotions, a doctrine which later writers from Augustine to Johnson interpret in various ways. On the side of language, Aristotle asks for a diction that is clear without being ordinary, and holds command of metaphor to be the greatest thing by far, since to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances. These matters belong as much to the idea of Rhetoric as to poetics.

The rules formulated in the Poetics serve at once as directions for the poet and as standards for the critic, and in this double office they are taken up by Cervantes, Fielding, and later writers on the novel. Whether the primacy of plot is an infallible measure of excellence, or whether modern narratives that place their emphasis on the development of character have a greatness of their own, remains in dispute. Dante and Milton extend the claim that poetry expresses the universal in a theological direction, while Hume and Mill reduce it to a psychological one.

Dante meets Plato's objection by making poetry the bearer of theology rather than a rival to it. The Letter to Can Grande proposes that the Divine Comedy be read on four levels at once: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical. The journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise is the pilgrimage of one man, an allegory of the soul's ascent to God, an instruction in virtue and vice, and an image of humanity's final condition. Poetry of this kind is not an image of an image. It answers rather to what Bacon would later call allegorical poetry, that which represents intellectual things to the senses, and it belongs with Paradise Lost and Faust among the poems commonly called philosophical, not because they argue but because doctrine is carried in the symbolism of the whole.

In the construction of the poem Dante follows the Aristotelian requirement that the parts be ordered to a single action. Three cantiche of thirty-three cantos, with one canto introducing the whole, are bound together by terza rima; the plot reaches from the dark wood to the vision of God, and its magnitude in time and place is that of the created universe. His guide through Hell and Purgatory is Virgil, whom the Middle Ages read as an unwitting prophet, and in Paradise Beatrice takes Virgil's place, since human love transfigured by grace goes where natural reason cannot. The arrangement carries an argument about the poet's faculties: imagination disciplined by learning may be led further than learning alone.

The claim implied in this arrangement is larger than the one Aristotle makes for the poet. Plato held that the poet speaks without knowing; Dante holds that the poet, when illuminated, speaks with a knowledge that dialectic does not reach, and warns his readers to look for the teaching hidden beneath the veil of the verses. Whether such a claim can be made good, or whether it confuses the persuasive force of images with the possession of truth, is among the questions the tradition leaves open. What is not in dispute is that on Dante's understanding the beauty of the verse is not ornament laid over doctrine but the form doctrine takes when it addresses intellect, will, and appetite together.

Dante's example alters what later poets suppose poetry may undertake. Milton takes up the ambition to write a Christian epic surpassing the pagan models, though in a Protestant key and with a different account of the poet's authority, while Chaucer declines the prophetic claim and reserves doctrine for the Parson and the saints. The question whether the allegorical mode conveys truth or merely adorns it is treated further under the ideas of Art and Religion.

Chaucer belongs to that part of the tradition which answers Plato by praising poetry as an instrument of moral instruction as well as of delight. He is careful, however, about the manner of the instruction. He does not teach dogmatically, by stating propositions and drawing conclusions, but as experience teaches, by affording the mind the materials and occasions for insight and inference. The Canterbury Tales advances no moral system of its own; it contains the Parson's Tale, which is a received system faithfully set down. The pilgrims speak, and the narrator reports. Whatever instruction the poem affords comes of encountering some thirty characters, each formed by a different estate and a different relation to what he has inherited, and each given a tale which expresses or complicates that relation. The reader draws the inferences; the poet has arranged the occasions.

The invocations of Troilus and Criseyde make explicit what the Canterbury frame leaves implied. In the second book Chaucer invokes Clio, muse of history, and describes himself as following his author if he can. He claims no original vision, no prophetic authority, no power of penetrating to the truth behind appearances. He follows Lollius, a source of his own devising, and he follows Boccaccio without naming him. The pose of subordination to the tradition is also an aesthetic preference, for Chaucer is by inclination a poet of the inherited rather than the invented, who takes existing stories and gives them a new social and psychological texture. Where Dante holds that the illuminated poet speaks with a knowledge deeper than dialectic, Chaucer declines the claim on the poet's behalf and reserves it for the Parson and the saints' lives.

The relation of prose to verse, which Chaucer takes up in the Prologue to Melibeus, bears on the same point. When the Host interrupts the verse romance of Sir Thopas as worthless and demands instead a tale in prose containing mirth or doctrine good and plain, Chaucer supplies the Melibeus, a moral treatise so labored that it reads as a parody of the merely didactic. Neither verse for its own sake nor instruction for its own sake makes a poem; the two must be held together, though the manner of holding them is not fixed by rule. The Miller's Prologue makes the point another way. Chaucer warns the fastidious to turn the leaf and choose another tale, knowing that no reader will, since the appeal of the tale lies in a vividness and a comedy which edifying stories do not represent.

Chaucer stands at a measurable distance from both his neighbors in this sequence. Dante claims prophetic authority and makes the fourfold allegory a vehicle of theological truth; Milton claims divine inspiration and writes his epic as a theodicy. Chaucer claims neither for poetry as such. What he claims for the poem is more modest and harder to state: that the representation of the whole range of human social experience, from the Knight's Tale to the Miller's, from the Parson's penitential treatise to the Wife of Bath's account of herself, is a form of instruction which neither preaching nor argument supplies, because it works by recognition. That poetry may be better than the experience it represents, being already impregnated with ideas, is a claim considered further under the idea of Art.

Milton states his undertaking in the opening lines of Paradise Lost: to pursue things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme, and to justify the ways of God to men. The project is Dante's transposed into Protestant England, without the apparatus of saints and sacraments and resting on the authority of Scripture. He does not retell the Fall so much as construct it as an action of epic magnitude, reaching from Heaven through the world to Hell, and turning upon the question of freedom, obedience, and the origin of evil. In this he keeps the Aristotelian requirement that the poem be one action of sufficient greatness, while claiming a subject he holds higher than the wars of Homer or the empire of Virgil. He invokes not the Muse but the Spirit that was present from the first.

Milton's account of poetry cannot be separated from his account of liberty. The Areopagitica argues that truth and falsehood should be permitted to grapple freely, and it stands, with Mill's later argument, at the opposite extreme from Plato's regulation of the poets. Paradise Lost proceeds on the same principle within the fiction. Adam and Eve fall not for want of information but by choosing wrongly in the face of clear knowledge, and the poem's power depends on the reality of that choice. Satan persuades because he is genuinely in rebellion; Eve is tragic because the error is her own. Milton's rejection of rhyme as the invention of a barbarous age follows from the same preference for a measure that does not constrain the movement of thought.

On tragedy Milton is more nearly Aristotelian than in anything else. He calls it the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other poems, and understands the purging of the passions as tempering and reducing them to just measure with a kind of delight, stirred up by seeing those passions well imitated. Johnson would give the doctrine a more particular reading, holding that we are terrified by the consequences of ambition carried too far and taught thereby to moderate it; Milton's formulation leaves the mechanism less specified. The poet's authority, on his understanding, comes neither from craft alone nor from inspiration alone, but from inspiration disciplined by learning, and he assumed in his readers a learning comparable to his own.

Milton's influence runs in two directions at once. Kant and Hegel both rank poetry at the summit of the arts, and Kant cites the poet's power to give sensible expression to the kingdom of the blessed and the kingdom of hell, which is Milton's achievement described in another vocabulary. Yet few later poets have shared his confidence that epic could carry the weight of theological argument, and the Romantic readers who preferred Satan to God took the poem in a direction he did not intend. The question of censorship on which he wrote is pursued further under the idea of Liberty.

Hume approaches poetry neither as metaphysician nor as theologian but as an empiricist with a practical question: why do men disagree about which poems are good, and whether such disputes admit of settlement. His essay begins by granting the harder side of the case. Beauty, he writes, is no quality in things themselves but exists in the mind which contemplates them, and each mind perceives a different beauty. If this is allowed to stand without qualification, the judgment that Homer surpasses a hack is a report of private feeling, and criticism becomes autobiography. The position stands at the far end of the tradition from Plato, who required that imitations be judged by the standard of truth and by no other, and from Kant, who judges poetry by its contribution to the work of the understanding.

Hume does not rest in that conclusion. He observes that beneath individual variation there is broad agreement across nations and centuries about which works endure, and that Homer, Virgil, and Terence have outlasted every change of fashion. The convergence is not accidental. Certain qualities in a work, clarity of expression, proportion among the parts, vivacity of imagery, are fitted to please the mind as it actually operates, so that the standard is founded in the constitution of human nature rather than in the object. What is wanting is not a standard but the conditions under which men are able to apply it, since prejudice, inexperience, and dullness of perception obstruct the operation in most cases.

The true judge is accordingly not whoever happens to hold an opinion. He is a man of wide acquaintance with works of the kind, refined in perception and calm in temper, who has compared many examples and freed himself so far as he can from personal bias and the fashion of his time and country. Hume is describing the conditions under which aesthetic judgment becomes reliable rather than founding an order of critics, and the comparison he invites is with the discernment of a palate rather than with the authority of a priest. Whether such delicacy can be acquired by discipline, and how far the diversity of manners among ages limits the agreement, are questions treated further under the ideas of Beauty and Custom.

The essay sets the terms for the aesthetics that follows it. Kant accepts the starting point, that beauty involves a subjective response, while holding that judgments of taste claim a universality which Hume's appeal to observed agreement does not secure. Mill inherits the empiricist framework and turns it toward poetry considered as the expression of individual feeling. What Hume establishes for the later discussion is that treating beauty as a matter of sentiment need not be the surrender of every standard.

Kant assigns poetry the first place among the fine arts, and the assignment follows from the theory of aesthetic judgment set out earlier in the Critique of Judgment. A judgment of beauty is disinterested, universal, purposive without a determinate purpose, and necessary. In calling a poem beautiful a man does not report a private sensation; he claims that any properly constituted judge would concur. Kant thus meets Hume on the point where Hume's argument is weakest, grounding the universality of taste not in the observed agreement of nations but in the structure of the judging mind. Like Plato, and unlike Bacon, he is willing to consider poetry in relation to knowledge; unlike Plato, he finds that it assists the understanding rather than competing with it.

Poetry earns its rank because it expands the mind more than any other art. It sets the imagination at liberty to range beyond the limits of experience while preserving the appearance of rational order. The poet presents what Kant calls aesthetic ideas, representations of the imagination which occasion much thought without any determinate concept being adequate to them. When Milton depicts the kingdom of the damned or Dante the celestial rose, they give sensible expression to rational ideas of invisible beings, of eternity, of creation. The reader's faculties are set in motion between imagination and understanding, and this free play is the source of the pleasure. The poem does not decorate a concept already possessed but generates a surplus which no paraphrase exhausts.

The comparison Kant draws between poetry and oratory sharpens the point. The orator promises a serious business of the understanding and delivers a mere play with ideas; the poet promises a play with ideas and performs a serious business. Rhetoric so far as it works by beautiful illusion Kant judges unworthy of respect, since it manipulates the hearer's assent. Poetry announces itself as imagination and leaves the reader's judgment free. Because the poet's promise is a modest one and his performance exceeds it, he conducts, in Kant's phrase, a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding, and so provides food for the understanding and gives life to its concepts by means of the imagination.

Hegel takes over the placement of poetry at the summit of the arts and sets it within a historical scheme Kant would not have admitted, while Mill draws upon the emphasis on inner experience in developing his account of poetry as feeling turned inward. After Kant the defense of poetry rests neither on its fidelity to nature nor on its service to God but on its power to set the faculties in free play. The relation between the beautiful and the true which this account presupposes is examined further under the ideas of Beauty and Judgment.

Hegel places poetry within a scheme of historical development. Art is one of the three modes, with religion and philosophy, in which Spirit comes to know itself, and it passes through three phases. In the symbolic, meaning overwhelms the form that would embody it, as in the temples of Egypt and the epics of India; in the classical, meaning and form are brought into balance, as in Greek sculpture and the tragedy of Sophocles; in the romantic, meaning exceeds any sensuous embodiment and withdraws into interiority, as in Christian painting and the modern lyric. Poetry has a part in all three phases, since its medium is neither stone nor pigment but language, the least material of media. It is on this ground the universal art, accompanying Spirit at every stage.

Within poetry Hegel distinguishes the epic, the lyric, and the dramatic, a division he inherits from Plato and Aristotle but reads in terms of the relation of subject to world. Epic presents the objective world of a people in its totality, and Homer is the instance. Lyric expresses the inner life of the individual subject, and is the form proper to an age in which Spirit has withdrawn from external embodiment. Drama sets subjective will against objective circumstance and produces collision. Tragedy Hegel ranks highest among dramatic kinds, because it stages the conflict of ethical claims each of which is justified: the loyalty of Antigone to her family and that of Creon to the state are both legitimate, and the outcome shows that no finite position contains the whole truth.

Art, on this account, has a destiny as well as a history. Reflection has advanced in the modern world to a point at which Spirit no longer finds adequate expression in sensuous form, and philosophy supersedes art as the medium of self-knowledge. Hegel does not say that poetry ceases, but that it can no longer discharge the office it held in ancient Greece, when Homer served his people at once as theologian, historian, and moral teacher. Modern poetry is necessarily self-conscious and aware of its own limits, and Hegel regards this as an advance while acknowledging the loss. Whether art is thus destined to be surpassed is treated further under the ideas of Art and History.

The scheme drew opposition as much as assent. Tolstoy sets aside the whole apparatus of Hegelian aesthetics in favor of a moral criterion, that art is good insofar as it communicates sincere feeling to ordinary men. Yet the proposition that the office of poetry alters with historical circumstance is not easily dismissed, and after Hegel a theory of poetry which treats it as a timeless kind, unaffected by the conditions under which it is made, must argue for that position rather than assume it.

Tolstoy defines art as the activity by which one man hands on to others, through external signs, a feeling he has lived through, so that they are infected by it and experience it themselves. The definition is meant to be simple, and it displaces the criteria that had governed the discussion since antiquity. Beauty is not the test, nor form, nor the verdict of those trained to judge. The test is whether the feeling passes. By this measure a peasant song which moves its hearers to genuine sympathy stands above a sonata which leaves them bored or mystified. The position is nearer to Plato than to anything between them, in that it subjects poetry to a standard external to the art and holds the poet accountable for the effect his work produces.

He applies the standard without exemptions. Shakespeare fails, on his account, because the plays are artificial, the characters unconvincing, the language remote from common speech. The late works of Beethoven fail because they can be received only by a trained few, and Wagner fails more completely as spectacle contrived to pass for feeling. Tolstoy includes several of his own novels among the works he judges bad art, which removes the suspicion that the criterion was framed to spare its author. His contention is that the tradition of cultivated aesthetics, from Aristotle through Hegel, has taken the pleasures of an educated class for a universal human good, and has built its analyses of form and its histories of Spirit upon that substitution.

What Tolstoy asks of art, poetry included, is moral community. The highest art transmits feelings which unite men in the religious consciousness of their age, and for Tolstoy, writing after his conversion, that consciousness is of the brotherhood of men under God. Art which divides, which is accessible only to the wealthy or the schooled, which flatters a refined taste, he judges positively harmful rather than simply inferior, since it confirms the separation of classes and the corruption that attends privilege. Whether art can bear this weight, and whether comprehensibility to all is a proper measure of merit, are questions bearing on the ideas of Art, Religion, and Custom, where the relation of taste to social condition is examined at greater length.

Tolstoy has few followers in aesthetic theory, in part because the conclusions leave so little of the received canon standing. But the demand that art answer to ordinary human feeling rather than to the discriminations of connoisseurs recurs in later argument about popular culture, accessibility, and the social office of literature. The question he presses upon the tradition, which the tradition has generally preferred to leave unasked, is for whom poetry is made.

Mill's definition of poetry departs from the accounts that preceded it by locating the difference in the poet's relation to a hearer rather than in the object imitated or the medium employed. Eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard. The orator addresses an audience and means to persuade it; the poet confesses feeling to himself in solitude, and the reader happens upon the confession. Neither form nor subject matter settles the question. Verse composed to move a crowd is eloquence, and a passage of prose which expresses genuine feeling without regard for effect is poetry. Where Aristotle had made plot the soul of the poem, Mill holds that narrative poetry is scarcely poetry at all, since the essence lies in the state of mind expressed and not in the action arranged.

The theory has its origin in Mill's own history. The breakdown described in the Autobiography followed years of a rigorous education which had cultivated the analytic faculties at the expense of the feelings, and his recovery came in part through Wordsworth, whose poems addressed the emotions without requiring intellectual assent. From this he concluded that poetry discharges an office which neither philosophy nor science can take over. It cultivates the feelings and keeps the inner life from atrophy under the pressure of analysis. The claim is psychological where Kant's is transcendental, but it arrives at a comparable result, that the value of poetry lies in what it does to the faculties of the reader rather than in any doctrine it conveys.

The distinction between poetry and eloquence carries a further implication. The orator calculates the effect of each word upon his hearers; the poet, absorbed in the feeling, calculates nothing, and his sincerity is secured by that absorption rather than by any theory of the faculties. Mill does not deny eloquence its uses, and his own argument in On Liberty against the suppression of opinion places him, with Milton, at the opposite pole from Plato's regulation of the poets. But he holds that poetry occupies different ground. What the poet seeks is not assent but an understanding of what he feels, and the reader's presence is incidental to it.

The distance travelled from the beginning of this sequence can be measured in Mill's terms. Plato was troubled by the power of poetry over its audience; Mill defines poetry as that which has no audience in view. Aristotle analyzed the construction of plots; Mill sets narrative aside as inessential. The turn inward which Hegel had described as the destiny of art in the modern world receives in Mill its plainest theoretical statement, and the questions it raises about the relation of feeling to judgment belong also to the ideas of Emotion and Rhetoric.