Essay on Love And Beauty In Literature And Poetry Text

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Beauty is a problem for poetry because we no longer imagine beauty as a serious way of knowing. Beauty wedges into the artistic space a structure for continuously imagining what we do not know. This claim reverses shelley's formulation of poetry as the place where we imagine that which we know, which presumes that creativity translates knowledge into imagination. Our general lack of response to beauty nowadays at least in critical literature results, among other things, from an intuitive sense that beauty defies such translation.

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We can neither measure the knowledge that shelley's imagination turns to beauty, nor can we translate that beauty back into its components of knowledge and imagination. We have developed, implicitly, a sense of the non conceptual in artistic beauty but we have not much developed sympathetic theories that will allow us to discuss beauty in these terms. We still largely imagine beauty in shelley's terms, and so we think that those parts of beauty which resist the translation back to knowledge are uselessly private and uncommunicative. In fact, they are what beauty knows: that knowledge is also perhaps most importantly what we do not yet know. Forms of beauty are resistant structures, imaginative structures that present an impenetrable model of the unknown. Beauty is therefore endlessly talk inspiring, predictive rather than descriptive, dynamic rather than settled, infinitely serious and useful.

That beauty cannot be translated into expository terms is a particular problem for poetry, especially in an abstract language like english. Poetry's material language is, in other contexts, overwhelmingly used and valued for its conceptual and communicative facilities. But when we distinguish pleasing or mellifluous versions of phanopoeia and melopoeia from the conceptual discursive world of logopoeia. We err if we think the first two simple minded and the last the place of seriousness. Music is feeling, then, not sound, writes stevens, and we think that we cannot think about feeling or music, since they are subjective and ineluctable.

We think we cannot say anything critically useful about them, and so we divide aesthetics from theoretical and/or conceptual content and concentrate on the latter, about which we feel we can say something. The problem is compounded by some of the critical correctives of the last couple of decades.1 as we pursue historical, cultural, and gender based critical modes, theories of beauty are often labeled hegemonic models bequeathed by white males, in part because they often are shelley's, for example. As a result, we really have not gotten much further in our theories than alexander baumgarten's definition of a poem as a perfect sensate discourse 39 communicating content via sensory form or kant's antinomy of taste, which is fairly useless if we hold that aesthetic disinterestedness is a contradiction in terms. In fact, when baumgarten coined aesthetic from the greek aisthesis sensory perception he was perhaps more enlightened than we often are about the power of the senses, since he wanted to make serious place for the lower sensory functions among higher functions of rational meaning.

So, what is the experience of poetic beauty? it is, first of all, subjective interestedness. Interestedness requires sympathy, so poetic beauty might be defined as the result of subjective sympathy: paying enough attention to a poem for it to teach us how to read it and crucially feeling that it fulfills the terms it lays out. These terms may be of many varieties, such as lyricism, word attention, sound dissonance, even of a faltering which is part of the poem's point. Poems whose beauty strikes us overwhelmingly and immediately are poems that use well some of the rules we are well trained to perceive. Poems whose beauty takes time for us to appreciate have worked to increase our aesthetic faculties. Many do not fulfill the terms of their own construction, and so leave us feeling dissatisfied.

On the other hand, some poems leave us feeling dissatisfied because that is part of their point. It is as impossible to determine the difference in terms of establishing interpretive predictions or tools as it is to define poetic beauty. Beauty is contingent and unique and cannot be derived from or defined according to rules or explanatory codes. But i want to insist that poetic beauty is important to talk about and wonderful to experience. As wendy steiner puts it, the pleasures of art, however scandalous they have come to be seen, are valuable and worth protecting 80.

One of the difficulties in writing about poetic beauty is that poetry, being all of the same basic matter ie, words is always formed and therefore, in the formositas sense, always beautiful. To put it in scholastic or phenomenological terms: the material object of poetry is language, its marks and sounds the intentional object is how we subjectively read that material. In the material sense language is beautiful, while in the intentional sense well, it all depends on our training.

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What westerners commonly register as ugliness is the effort of poetic language to resist formal regularity, whether at the level of phoneme, word, line, or overall form. The vowels dance with the consonants: ur el owitzer oft to oust who moves to suddenly spirited to smooth. How is this kind of poetic beauty different from what we might expect to hear discussed in an essay about mellifluous poetic beauty? we might expect to read excerpts from yeats or gjertrud schnackenberg, or at the very least from some of stein's or david bromige's sweet simplicities. But poetic beauty is not only evident lyricisms or the apparently perfect mesh of prosodic tool with signified point. To risk a definition that pre defines nothing: poetic beauty is a different thing in different poems. So, what is the problem of poetic beauty? it is not simply the neglect of beauty, or the denial of its existence it is also the several reasons for that neglect and denial. Andrй breton calls this convulsive beauty: art he likes must arouse a physical sensation.

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