Romanticism & Shelley s Defense of Poetry

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Dale Stevenson
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1 Romanticism & Shelley s Defense of Poetry Descendents of the Romantic Genius Our latter day preoccupation with authenticity and originality in art. (Dayton, 7); the avant-garde. The subordination of imitation to expression. Criticism focused on the biography and character of the artist (qua genius), in contrast to actual artistic production. Veneration of imagination as immediate, sensuous knowledge; of symbolism as the special instinct of the genius for making the invisible and/or the infinite sensuously present. 1

Still Other Aspects of Romanticism Romanticism is notoriously difficult to define adequately, but some further (descriptive) characteristics include: Freedom from classical restrictions in art

2 Still Other Aspects of Romanticism Romanticism is notoriously difficult to define adequately, but some further (descriptive) characteristics include: Freedom from classical restrictions in art Preference for strong emotions, extreme situations (e.g., Caspar David Friedrich, William Blake, P. Shelley) Veneration of the dark Middle Ages/Gothic Christianity in contrast to classical/enlightenment order and light. (< Romances; e.g., the legend of King Arthur) Veneration of nature; distrust of technology and the industrial revolution (e.g., Mary Shelley s Frankenstein) Etc. etc. William Blake, Satan Inflicting Boils on Job, c

Caspar David Friedrich, The Wreck of the Hope, 1842 Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) Among the

A Defense of Poetry (1821) purportedly written in response to Thomas Love Peacock's attack in The

3 Caspar David Friedrich, The Wreck of the Hope, 1842 Percy Bysshe Shelley ( ) Among the greatest English Romantic poets (though his fame is largely posthumous). A Defense of Poetry (1821) purportedly written in response to Thomas Love Peacock's attack in The Four Ages of Poetry (1820). But it seems fairly clear that Shelley is responding to other philosophical figures as well (e.g., Plato). 3

4 Reason vs. Imagination Reason: The to logizein or principle of analysis. Reason relates one thought to another; it relates and enumerates Imagination: The to poiein or principle of synthesis. Imagination colors [thoughts] with its own light ; it perceives value and finds similitudes Reason is to the imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance. (90) I.e., imagination is not subordinate to reason as Peacock (or Plato) might suppose, but is instead a kind of necessary condition for the operation of reason. Poetry Poetry: the expression of the imagination Like winds on the strings of an Aeolian lyre, human beings resound with the external and internal impressions (i.e., natural, social, and psychic influences) that are driven upon them. Imagination adds harmony to this Aeolian melody. 4

5 The wind one supposes, stands for we might call the raw sense data the raw feels of experience. In adding harmony, imagination perceives value and makes similitudes (i.e., comparisons, metaphors). Implication: The real poetry is not what we find in the poem. Instead, it is the experience or inspired trance the original imaginative work of the poet:..when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet" (103) In the Beginning In the youth of the world people danced and sang and imitated natural objects/things. And they observed in these activities a certain rhythm or order (91) which is the source of the pleasure that they take in these activities. Taste, says Shelley, is what we now call the sense of an approximation to this order Poets are those people for whom taste exists in excess 5

6 The Original Poetry Shelley: Poetry, as the expression of the imagination, did not arise simply as a means of describing (imitating) things. (Compare, e.g., Aristotle) Instead, poetry is the origin of language: In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry (91) Poetry is the original making of language, the creative ordering of experience. (A proto- dead metaphor theory of language) But Wait, There s More Poets are not only the authors of language and of music they are also the institutors of laws and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. (91, emphasis added) A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth (93) (Compare, e.g., Plato, who was essentially a poet, 92) 6

7 Poetry s Effects Upon Society Shelley: The great instrument of moral good is not ethics (i.e., ethical science, ethical reasoning) but imagination. Ethical science simply arranges (analyzes) the elements that poetry (the expression of the imagination) has first synthesized. Poetry strengthens and enlarges the imagination, the organ of the moral nature of man (Cf, e.g., Hirsch, Rorty on moral education) Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. (105, emphasis added) 7

Nietzsche: Art as Illusion / Life as Art Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) The notorious German (Polish?

8 Nietzsche: Art as Illusion / Life as Art Friedrich Nietzsche ( ) The notorious German (Polish? officially stateless) philologist and philosopher Notorious for, inter alia: His radical questioning of value; of the very idea of objective truth; his contempt for Christian religion; his rejection of egalitarianism. In these respects (and others), a progenitor of existentialism and postmodernism Exponent, but later enemy, of a certain stream in late- Romantic art. Case in point: Richard Wagner 8

9 The Trajectory of Nietzsche s View of Art Early Nietzsche (under the influence of Shopenhauer s metaphysics): it is only as an esthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified. (The Birth of Tragedy [1872]) In tragic art, the metaphysical horror of existence (reality) is both revealed and made bearable (in pleasing appearances) Mature (post-metaphysical) Nietzsche: as an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable for us (The Gay Science [1882], 163) N.B. The world is gone since that depends on a distinction between appearance and reality that Nietzsche can no longer accept. Instead: existence as in our everyday existence as human beings ( for us ). In place of the appearance and reality distinction: a distinction between truth and lies 9

10 Two Psychic Forces Apollonian Dreams: the higher truth, the perfection of these states [stands] in contrast to the incompletely intelligible everyday world (107) Desire for intelligibility and order (or, really, the illusion or imposition of order) Reality differentiated by forms Dionysian Intoxication, the narcotic draught Ecstatic, orgiastic celebration of Primal Unity Reality undifferentiated by forms Dionysian drunkeness transfigures the ordinary, and overflows into creativity. Dionysian emotions cause the subjective to vanish into complete self-forgetfulness (107) Experiencing a universal harmony he feels as if the veil of Mâyâ had been torn aside and were now merely fluttering in tatters before the mysterious Primordial Unity (108, < Schopenhauer) But intoxication, alas, is only temporary: When it passes, reality returns, bringing with it a sense of nausea and repulsion 10

11 Art-impulses of nature : Both the Apollonian and Dionysian are creative, artistic forces, but they exist first without the mediation of the human artist. Human art arises from the Apollonian/Dionysian struggle. Artists, in the first instance, are imitators either of Apollonian dreams or Dionysian ecstasies. Tragedy, the profound invention of the Ancient Greeks, combines and cross-fertilizes both Before there was tragedy, Nietzsche speculates, Greek plastic arts (e.g., sculpture, frieze-work) were Apollonian idealizations. (e.g., the Doric order) Music began with the Dionysian impulse, but as the music is formalized into an art form, it is made to submit to Apollonian order. In (Attic) tragedy, the Apollonian and Dionysian elements are combined into one seamless whole, one which allows the spectator to experience the full spectrum of the human condition. 11

12 It is only through the spirit of music that we can understand the joy involved in the annihilation of the individual the hero, the highest manifestation of the will, is disavowed for our pleasure, because he is only a phenomenon, and because the eternal life of the will is not affected by his annihilation. We believe in eternal life exclaims tragedy. ( 16, emphasis added) The Subjective and the Objective Greek tragedy is so great because it provides a way for the audience to confront the sheer terror and horror of the loss of subjectivity that comes along with confronting the primal unity, the primordial pain (which is, after all, reality) But it manages to do so without falsifying life, without pretending to a self-assured stance of objectivity which cannot actually be attained. Pure subjectivity ( pure contemplation ), says Nietzsche, isn t any sort of aesthetic value (cf. Kant) it is the antithesis, the antagonist of art. (115) 12

13 The entire comedy of art is neither performed for our betterment or education, nor are we the true authors of this art-world. On the contrary, we may assume that we are merely pictures and artistic projections for the true author, and that we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art for it is only as an esthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified. (115, emphasis added) Nietzsche on Truth and Lies Lies and deception require no especially complicated explanation they are examples of ordinary means of self-preservation, means by which weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves (117) In fact, nature (mercifully) lies to us all the time: man permits himself to be deceived in his dreams every night (117) 13

14 what really requires an explanation is the (supposed) human will to truth. It turns out, though, that the drive for truth is also basically driven by self-preservation, though of a slightly higher order. On the one hand, we need to co-exist with the herd. So, in order to avoid an inevitable bellum omni contra omnes (Hobbes), we enter into a kind of social/intellectual peace treaty: that which shall count as truth from now on is established (117) Moreover, we can t really know (we can t handle) the truth of the thing in itself. Instead, contra Plato (but rather as Shelley describes), we abstract from our encounters with unique, vivid, overfull experience of life by means of metaphor and then we collectively forget that they are metaphors and take those metaphors to be more real than real things the idea that in addition to the leaves there exists in nature the leaf : the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, stretched, measured, curled and painted (119) 14

15 What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations, which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to people to be fixed, canonical and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins (119, emphasis added) Subjectivity & Self-Consciousness This forgetfulness is, for most of us, most of time, necessary for our well-being, our sanity Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man can live with any repose, security, and consistency. (120, emphasis in original) If someone were to catch a glimpse of the fiery liquid of the disorganized, chaotic, but absolutely vivid world of experience his self-consciousness [i.e., his sense of himself as a distinct subject] would immediately be destroyed (120) 15

16 this sometimes happens in dreams. And in art. The drive to create metaphors, is not something to be regretted or overcome. It is a fundamental human drive. It seeks a new realm and another channel for its activity, and it finds this in myth and in art it is only by means of the rigid and regular web of concepts that the waking man clearly sees that he is awake precisely because of this he sometimes thinks that he must be dreaming when this web of concepts is torn by art. (122) 16

Humanities 4: Lecture 19. Friedrich Schiller: On the Aesthetic Education of Man

Humanities 4: Lecture 19. Friedrich Schiller: On the Aesthetic Education of Man Humanities 4: Lecture 19 Friedrich Schiller: On the Aesthetic Education of Man Biography of Schiller 1759-1805 Studied medicine Author, historian, dramatist, & poet The Robbers (1781) Ode to Joy (1785)