Home The Nature and Objective of Aesthetics Art and the Artist The Art Work The Art Work in the Making The Creative Mind  Art and the Artist Art and the Layman The Experience of Beauty Beauty in Music Painting Poetry The Nature of Language The Nature of Poetry Poetry As Verbal Music Poetry As Poetic Idea The Poetic Idea	THE POETIC IDEA Prosaic language, we have concluded, is a series of sounds utilized for the expression and conveyance of prosaic, commonplace meaning, the meaning of the sounds being the behavior evoked by a situation calling for action in the interest of the physical welfare of the individual. This is meaning as perception and memory. But there is meaning expressed and conveyed by language that supersedes perception and memory, although built upon and evolved out of perception and memory, by the mental process of imaginative or creative thought which is unique in that it is not common property, shared by all normally constituted persons, but exists only for the person who has evolved it. When such a creative thought is uttered in language adequate for it, and becomes effectively significant as such, in and for itself, it is called a poetic thought or idea, and its utterance in adequate language is a poem. Dufy ekmte This definition of the poetic idea calls for examination. We will do so by questioning some poetic ideas as to their substance, how they differ from non-poetic ideas. Let us take the statement: "There are clouds gathering in the sky, the atmosphere is sultry, and it will probably rain." What are the characteristics of this statement? First of all, it refers to a particular event. It tells something about one aspect of nature, one occurrence, and this occurrence is transient, ephemeral; it comes and goes. The statement is also commonplace. We are thoroughly familiar with it, and it is as true for one person of normal perceptions as for another. It is true not only in that it can be seen as clouds or lightning, heard as thunder, felt as rain, in a word, demonstrated and made manifest by the sense organs, but it is also verified by past experience. It is therefore a factual truth. The statement is furthermore significant, meaningful, in that it is a signal for staying indoors, or getting wet, or seeking shelter, or interfering with plans for a walk, or good for the crops, or breaking a drought. It is a significant factual truth. But no one would call this statement either poetic or beautiful. The sky may be beautiful. The rain may be beautiful. The thunder. storm may be beautiful. But none of these is poetical. No one would speak of a poetical sky, rain, or thunderstorm. But the statement is neither beautiful nor poetical. What then makes a verbal statement both poetical and beautiful? Dufy Let us take another kind of statement, one from a poem and another from prose. The year's at the spring And day's at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hillside's dew pearled; The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn; God's in his heaven-- All's right with the world. Therefore I say unto you, be not anxious for your life, what shall ye eat, or what shall ye drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than the food, and the body than the raiment? Behold the birds of the heaven, that they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not ye of much more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit unto his stature? And why are ye anxious concerning raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. These statements are, by universal consent, both poetic and beautiful. They utter a poetic idea and the idea is beautiful. Wherein lies their poetic quality and why are they beautiful? The contrast between these utterances and the previous statement about clouds and rain is obvious. Browning and Jesus do not speak of a particular event. Their utterances are universal. Nor are they commonplace. They are neither obvious nor familiar. And they are not true by all the usual criteria of truth. They are not factually true, but rather false. Applied to the business of daily living it is not true that all is well with the world, although God may be in his heaven. Jesus' statement is even more false factually than that of Browning, for, put into practice, it would mean starvation and annihilation of life. Nor are these statements demonstrable by sense or verifiable by experience. Both sense and experience prove their falsity. And yet they are true because they are felt to be so. They have a tremendous human appeal, and as such they are true. And their truth is at the same time personal and universal. They are true for me, and I feel that they are also true for all other me's. All the me's become one in them and through them. All the other me's become me, and my me becomes all other me's. The particular becomes the universal and the universal the particular. The words utter a universal truth, which therefore is not true as a fact, but as an ideal. And it is as an ideal that it is true and as such is its appeal. Now it is such an idea, such an ideal idea, that is at once poetic and beautiful, poetic because of its appeal and beautiful because of its intrinsic worth. What is the nature of the appeal, and why the beauty? For an answer to the first question we go to the poet of poetry, Keats, and for an answer to the second to the exponent of idea as beauty, Plato. The key to Keats' conception of the nature of poetry is found in his famous pronouncement about the identity of truth and beauty, that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. while its function is the theme of his Endymion. That the truth which is also beauty is the ideal truth of poetic idea is manifest from Keats' identification of this truth with the imagination. Both in his poetry and letters Keats dwells constantly on the imagination as the source of all significant experience. In a letter to Bailey, written in November, 1817, he affirms that: I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections, and the truth of Imagination! What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth--whether it existed before or not,--for I have the same idea of all our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty. Imagination is for him the activating power of poetry, and poetry is the truth seized by the imagination. The truth of the imagination is the supreme reality, all that we need to know or can know. Of such truth the poet, rather than the philosopher, is the seeker and prophet. Keats had little faith in the deductions of reason. Reason is cold and detached. Its conclusions are not vital personal experiences. But the poet, the man of intuition, comes in close personal contact with his world, lends himself freely to experience and thereby becomes the experience. The poet Keats describes as possessing no identity apart from nature. The poetic character has no separate self. In a letter to Richard Woodhouse, written October 27, 1818, the poet writes: 1st. As to the poetical character itself (I mean that sort, of which, if I am anything, I am a member; that sort distinguished from the Wordsworthian, or egotistical Sublime; which is a thing per se, and stands alone), it is not itself--it has no self--It is everything and nothing. It has no character--it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated.--It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for the bright one, because they both end in speculation. A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no Identity-he is continually in for and filling some other body. The Sun,--the Moon,--the Sea, and men and women, who are creatures of impulse, are poetical, and have about them an unchangeable attribute; the poet has none, no identity--he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's creatures.--If then he has no self, and if I am a poet, where is the wonder that I should say I would write no more? Might I not at that very instant have been cogitating on the Characters of Saturn and Ops? It is a wretched thing to confess; but it is a very fact, that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical Nature--How can it, when I have no Nature? When I am in a room with people, if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then, not myself goes home to myself, but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me, so that I am in a very little time annihilated--not only among men; it would be the same in a nursery of Children. The imagination frees the poet from the chains of earth and permits him to depart into realms of pure being. In imagination he is free and unfettered. Is there so small a range In the present strength of manhood, that the high Imagination can not freely fly As she was wont of old? . . . . . . Has she not shown us all? From the clear space of ether, to the small Breath of new buds unfolding? From the meaning Of Jove's large eye-brow, to the tender greening Of April meadows? Here her altar shone, E'en in this isle; and who could paragon The fervid choir that lifted up a noise Of harmony, to which it aye will poise Its mighty self of convoluting sound Huge as a planet, and like that roll round, Eternally around a dizzy void. But the poet does not flee tangible reality in fancy. He mentally penetrates its surface, freeing it of the débris of perception, and thus comes in touch with its purity of being which is its beauty. To see things as they are, in their naked purity, their absolute truth, is to see them as beauty, and as absolute truth they are pure forms, pure ideas. This is Keats' view of the world, as it is of all poets of idea, whether as poet or as poetic philosopher, like Plato. But what is the significance of this imaginative conception of the world? Wherein lies its great unusual appeal? Keats attempts an answer in Endymion and Hyperion, where he contrasts the realm of the tangible, the particular, the perceptual, with that of the intangible, universal, or imaginative. Endymion is a parable of the struggle and striving of the poet after the Beauty that is also Truth. The poem is the spiritual autobiography of Keats, with the Greek shepherdprince being Keats' poetic self. Of the actual existence of this beauty seized by the imagination, Keats was as convinced as Plato. The imagination did not so much create it, as the mind seized it, attained to it, through the power of imagination. It is created, however, in the sense that, before the imagination seizes it, it exists only potentially, and not actually. Creation is the process of turning the potential into the actual. In Endymion Keats gives an account of the travail in this creative process. It begins with the mind dwelling in the realm of the tangible commonplace, but in which it senses the intangible unique and pure, for which it longs. The mind wishes to dwell below in perception, in the familiar, yet is drawn upwards by the vision of the imagination. To dismiss the imaginative for the perceptual is to cast off a pure for an impure love, because the impure is more readily attainable than the pure. But this is treachery, faithlessness, deception. Endymion has his Indian Maid, and she was irresistible. But there was the Moon-Goddess whom he was betraying by his surrender to the earthly love. The Indian Maid was his Heart's Affection, but the Moon-Goddess was the Beauty of Imagination: the actual real and the potentially real side by side, the one possessed, the other beckoning. He is in travail of perplexity. How can he attain the higher and also retain the lower, or retain the lower without betraying the higher? Yet, could the one exist without the other? Can the higher be attained excepting through the lower, or could the lower be recognized as being lower without the vision of the higher? But if the two are related as means are to ends, how can the means become ends? The answer is by transforming the actual real into the potentially real, so that the lower is lost in the higher by becoming incorporated in it and thus transmuted by it. In this manner peace arises out of conflict, calm out of despair, and perplexity becomes assurance. But the one is a condition of the other. As Endymion sleeps by the side of the Indian Maid, the Moon-Goddess bends towards him. When he awakes from his dream to the presence of the sleeping Maid beside him, he is perplexed and pained. But as the winged horse takes him upwards--as imagination increases in vividness--the Maid fades, and with her the conflict. The Maid becomes the Goddess, and the prince is at peace. But the peace was gained through the despair. Through hell heaven is attained, the heaven being potentially present in the hell. The man is yet to come Who hath not journeyed in this native hell. But few have ever felt how calm and well Sleep may be had in that deep den of all. But it is also true that the man who has had no vision of the "deep den of all," who catches no glimpse of the universal and ultimate and pure, can not be aware of the hell of the particular and impure. However, Endymion does not remain in the quietude of that "deep den of all." Illumination is flash-like. He returns to earth, and to the Maid. And although the "first touch . . . went nigh to kill," although the contrast between the vision and the reality is a shock that well nigh kills, there is security in the tangible and Endymion vows to remain with his earthly love. He dismisses the dream as a dream, not realizing at first that the dream is now the reality and the reality the dream. He realizes this only after the Indian Maid informs him that she can not be his love--for the vision will tolerate naught that is not of its own nature--when he discovers, on his next visit, that the earthly love has been transfigured into the Goddess of the Moon. So Endymion attains perfect repose. The poet attains his culmination when he has evolved his poetic idea from prosaic experience. The poet is alternately despondent and in ecstasy. Endymion is torn between two loves. He is upon the earth, yet not of it. He journeys between hell and heaven. There is no repose in hell because of the vision of heaven, and no peace in heaven because of the memory of hell. But there is the promise of peace in the heaven of idea, and the longing for it turns it into a Truth that is more real than even the reality of fact. When we know this we know all that we need know on earth or ever can know. The poetic idea is the peace-giving idea, and for that reason it is also Truth. Herein lies its significance. But why is it also Beauty? Keats' parable of Maid and Goddess is one with Plato's figure in The Phaedrus of the charioteer driving two winged horses. One of the horses is "noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to him." The ignoble horse is the mortal creature, "a crooked lumbering animal, put together anyhow; he has a short, thick neck; he is flat-faced and of a dark color, with gray eyes and bloodred complexion; the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur." The noble steed is the immortal creature, "upright and cleanly made; he has a lofty neck and an aquiline nose; his color is white, and his eyes dark; he is a lover of honor and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and admonition only." The two horses struggle each to be true to its nature, one pulling downwards to earth, the other upwards to heaven, giving the charioteer much difficulty in handling them. The noble steed draws the charioteer to its own abode of purity, the immortal, the ignoble to its haven of impurity, the mortal. Hence the troubles of the charioteer. When Plato leaves the figure he tells in psychological terms what he implies by the noble steed, the immortal, and why it is pure, and what he symbolizes by the ignoble animal as mortal and impure, as well as the relationship between them and their relative significance. Plato conceives of two realms of being or experience. One is the realm of Idea, "visible only to mind, the pilot of the soul," or in the words of Keats, "seized by Imagination," the other the realm of fact, apparent to sense. Throughout his writings he refers to the Idea as the one, the general, the whole, the perfect, the pure, the absolute, and calls this truth, or true reality, while perceptual experience he designates as the many, the particular, the partial, the imperfect, the impure, the relative, constituting not truth, but opinion, not true reality, but its shadow or appearance. What Plato does is reverse our world of values. What we ordinarily call real he calls unreal, and what is for us unreal is for him real. Now on what grounds does he do so? Obviously his criterion for reality is different from the commonly accepted one. The common test of reality is tangibility. That of Plato is intangibility. But why so? Because, he contends, it is the intangible, the abstract, the ideational, that gives real significance, real value to the tangible, the concrete, the factual. Let us see in his own words what he means by this. In a passage in The Republic Plato engages in demonstrating to his audience the principle that he who, having a sense of beautiful things, but no sense of absolute beauty, is in a dream state, in that he puts the copy in place of the real object, while he, "who recognizes the existence of absolute beauty and is able to distinguish the idea from the objects which participate in the idea, neither putting the objects in the place of the idea nor the idea in the place of the objects" is awake. This being premised, I would ask the gentleman who is of opinion that there is no absolute or unchangeable idea of beauty--in whose opinion the beautiful is the manifold--he, I say, your lover of beautiful sights, who cannot bear to be told that the beautiful is one, and the just is one, or that anything is one--to him I would appeal, saying, Will you be so very kind, sir, as to tell us whether, of all these beautiful things, there is one which will not be found ugly; or of the just, which will not be found unjust; or of the holy, which will not also be unholy? No, he replied; the beautiful will in some point of view be found ugly; and the same is true of the rest. And may not the many which are doubles be also halves?--doubles, that is, of one thing, and halves of another? Quite true. And things great and small, heavy and light, as they are termed, will not be denoted by these any more than by the opposite names? True; both these and the opposite names will always attach to all of them. And can any one of those many things which are called by particular names be said to be this rather than not to be this? He replied: They are like the punning riddles which are asked at feasts or the children's puzzle about the eunuch aiming at the bat, with what he hit him, as they say in the puzzle, and upon what the bat was sitting. The individual objects of which I am speaking are also a riddle, and have a double sense: nor can you fix them in your mind, either as being or not-being, or both, or neither. Then what will you do with them? I said. Can they have a better place than between being and not-being? For they are clearly not in greater darkness or negation than not-being, or more full of light and existence than being. That is quite true, he said. Thus then we seem to have discovered that the many ideas which the multitude entertain about the beautiful and about all other things are tossing about in some region which is half-way between pure being and pure not-being? We have. Yes; and we had before agreed that anything of this kind which we might find was to be described as matter of opinion, and not as matter of knowledge; being the intermediate flux which is caught and detained by the intermediate faculty. Quite true. Then those who see the many beautiful, and who yet neither see absolute beauty, nor can follow any guide who points the way thither; who see the many just, and not absolute justice, and the like,--such persons may be said to have opinion but not knowledge? That is certain. But those who see the absolute and eternal and immutable may be said to know, and not to have opinion only? Neither can that be denied. The one love and embrace the subjects the knowledge, the other those of opinion? The latter are the same, as I dare say you will remember, who listened to sweet sounds and gazed upon fair colors, but would not tolerate the existence of absolute beauty. Yes, I remember. Shall we then be guilty of any impropriety in calling them lovers of opinion rather than lovers of wisdom, and will they be very angry with us for thus describing them? I shall tell them not to be angry; no man should be angry at what is true. But those who love the truth in each thing are to be called lovers of wisdom and not lovers of opinion. Assuredly. The Idea is thus the true reality, in that it is the unity that operates behind multiplicity, the essence of the attributes of sensory experience, the substance of which the things of this world are the predicates. The Idea is being, in that it always is, while temporal and spatial things are in a constant state of becoming, but never are. The Idea is the archetype of which the factual phenomena are the temporary, transitory reflections or shadows. They are not true reality, but copies of reality. Since the Idea is being, it also gives being to him whose imagination seizes it and dwells in it, while for him whose abode is the perceptual world there is no being, only a becoming. In being there is completion, a coming to rest, hence repose. In becoming there is a passing from one stage of completion to another, and therefore a striving, a stress, strain, and travail. It is such an attitude towards the world of phenomenal experience that is characterized as the poetic conception of the universe. And the Platonic Idea is the poetic idea. Carlyle utters a Platonism and a poetic idea when he states that "what thou seest is not there on its own account; strictly taken is not there at all. Matter exists only spiritually and to represent some idea, and body it forth." Keats speaks of this idea variously as "the chief intensity," as "love immortal," as "a one far off event" towards which all of creation moves. Its peace-giving power lies in that: Melting into its radiance, we blend, Mingle and so become a part of it. It means a union of mortal with immortal, a merging with it, and therefore identical with it. . . . if this earthly love has power to make Men's being mortal, immortal; to shake Ambition from their memories, and bring Their measure of content: what merest whim Seems all this endeavor after fame, To one, who keeps within his steadfast aim A love immortal, an immortal too. This then is Truth immortal, everlasting, being true for all men for all time. The love of the earthly comes and goes, but the idea of love and its life-giving and life-propelling power remains. But why is this Truth also Beauty? Why is the poetic idea also an idea of beauty? The beauty is the consequence of the attitude towards the idea, and Keats would have been more correct had he interchanged the words Truth and Beauty and stated that what the Imagination seizes as Beauty is also Truth, for the imagination does not seize beauty but truth, and the truth becomes beauty just because it is a truth of the imagination, a truth of idea and not of fact. Truth is also beauty only when it is the truth created by the imagination. It is not beauty when evolved by perception. Factual truths are not beauty. They become beauty only when the imagination has seized idea through them. Why is this so? The imagination operates on the material supplied by perception. The general is built out of the particular, the absolute from the relative, the whole from the parts, the intangible, the idea, from the tangible, the fact. The imagination operates in perception and generates the ideational out of the perceptual. In doing so it also transforms the perceptual into the ideational, in that the means partake of the nature of the end. The means are the parts of which the end is the whole. But the whole is more than any one or all of its parts. It is built out of the parts, but is not of them in its nature. It has a nature of its own which is independent of the parts, although a result of them. Yet the parts, as parts, partake of the nature of the whole, but only partially so. They are the incomplete whole, therefore the imperfect whole, being at the same time the whole and also not the whole. They reflect the whole, are the shadows of it, but not its reality. If the parts have a meaning it is derived from the whole of which they are the parts. Their meaning is therefore extrinsic, and hence does not possess the quality of beauty. But the whole does not derive its meaning from any source other than itself. It is meaningful in itself. Its significance is what it is as a whole. Hence its value is inherent, intrinsic, and therefore beautiful. Now such is the nature of the truth seized by the imagination in contrast with the truth derived by perception. The idea is evolved out of percepts, but its significance is independent of the percepts. The poetic idea, as the idea seized by imagination, is therefore, also beauty. Beauty may occur apart from poetic idea. But poetic idea is beauty by virtue of being what it is. The poetic idea is truth because of its universal human appeal. It is beauty because it is significant as idea, for what it is in itself. We prize our own ideals not for what they lead to or result in, but for what they lead from. They are not an achieving, but an achievement. They are their own justifications. They are prized for what they are in, by, and for themselves. This is their quality of beauty. The products of perception are never valued as such. Those of imagination always are. What the imagination then seizes as truth is also beauty. The truth of perception is extrinsic. That of imagination is intrinsic. When the truth of perception is transfigured by the truth of imagination, when fact becomes idea, there is beauty. Such is poetry as idea. When extrinsic words become a medium for intrinsic idea, in a manner such that idea transforms and interpenetrates them to such an extent that the words have no significance excepting that cast upon them by idea, resulting in the identification of matter and form, an art work is the result which we call a poem because of its sensuous material, language. Poetry is thus the musical expression of pure idea; it is intrinsic idea in intrinsic form. Whenever such a combination occurs we have poetry. All expression of significant, imaginative experience in adequate language is poetry. The line of demarcation between prose and poetry is so thin as to be vanishing. There is much prose that is poetry, while a good deal of poetry is not even good prose. The mechanical spacing of lines on a page does not make a poem, nor does writing lack poetic quality just because it appears in the form of prose. There are dramas, novels, and essays that are far more poetic than much that passes for poetry. Plato is more of a poet than many officially designated poets. All of Shakespeare is poetry. Turgeniev is a poet. There is more poetry in the prose writings of George Santayana than in most of the literary output of Wordsworth or Byron. A lyric poem is poetry only in the degree to which its melody is the melodic utterance of poetic idea. An epic, dramatic, or narrative poem is poetry only in those parts where poetic idea is wedded inseparably to melodic language. The great poem is the complete balancing of poetic idea and musical language, a creative attainment of which Shakespeare is the supreme model.