Fri 1 Jan 2010
Chain Stitch 1
Posted by Charles Bivona under Literary Theory
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February 12, 2002
In the mimetic process of Plato and Aristotle truth was housed firmly in the object. The artist imitated the object through the mimetic process, creating a work of art. The philosophical question was whether art, and specifically poetry, pushed us further away from truth or pulled us closer to the essence of things. Was a poem merely a shadow of a shadow or did it bypass the reflection all together and embody some of the true essence in a physical form? Plato, of course, agreed with the former, he considered poetry dangerous and reluctantly banned it from his perfect state.
It would be the Romantics who would radically redefine the epistemology of the ancients. Influenced heavily by German philosophers, the English Romantics would locate the seat of reality not in the objective world, but in the subjective world of the individual. Perception would now partially create the world. Blake’s Song of Innocence and Experience, with its subtitle “shewing the two contrary states of the human soul,” would illustrate vividly how a single objective reality takes on a new coloring and form when filtered through opposite perspectives. Wordsworth, in turn, would define poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” in his 1800 introduction to Lyrical Ballads. In his view, the poet expresses his own mental and emotional reactions to the world around him. P.B. Shelly, in A Defence of Poetry, would offer a more passive image, likening the poet to an aeolian harp moved by the gentle winds of inspiration. The poet is but a passive receiver of inspiration. That divine spark is then processed through his mind, memory and life, transformed by his individuality into a concrete embodiment of beauty. These ideas would move theory away from the objectivity of classical and neoclassical art into a new realm of self-expression in which the individual’s life would take center stage.
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