Things are conceived as ideas before they take practical shape as things. Thus the objects of the world are once removed from reality. Art (literature, painting, sculpture) being the reproduction of these things, is twice removed from reality.Therefore poetry takes men away from reality rather than towards it. So poetry helps neither to mould character nor to promote the well-being of the state-- the two things by which Plato judged all human endeavour.
The poet writes because he is 'inspired' not because he has thought long over a subject. According to Plato this sudden outpouring of the soul cannot be a reliable substitute for truths based on reason. Even if there is profound truth in poetry it needs to be subjected to a further test-- the test of reason. Poetry therefore cannot take the place of philosophy.
Poetry is a product of inspiration rather than of
reason and therefore it appeals to the heart rather than to the
intellect. Poetry is concerned about the beauty of form. An individual who
is in search of truth, can never be guided by poetry. Plato illustrates
this by referring to the tragic poetry of his age, in which weeping and wailing
were indulged to the full to move the hearts of the spectators. So poetry
‘fed and watered’ the passions instead of drying them up and let them rule
instead of ruling them as they ought to be ruled with a view to the happiness
and virtue of mankind.
d) It’s Non-moral character
Finally, Plato
indicts poetry for its lack of concern with morality. In its treatment of
life it treats both virtue and vice alike, sometimes making the one and
sometimes making the other triumph indifferently, without regard for moral
considerations. It pained Plato to see virtue often coming to grief in
the literature of his time. The epics ofHomer, the narrative works of Hesiod,
the odes of Pindar and the tragedies ofAeschylus, Sophocles andEuripides. Such literature,
according to Plato, corrupted both the citizen and the state.
a.Art (poetry) is twice removed from reality.
b.Poetic inspiration
c.The emotional appeal to poetry
d.It’s Non-moral character
PLATO
E x t r a r e a d i n g
An extract from plato’s Ion
PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE:
Socrates, Ion
Socrates: Would you or a good prophet be a better interpreter of what these two poets say about divination, not only when they agree, but when they disagree?
Ion: A prophet.
Socrates: And if you were a prophet, would you be able to interpret them when they disagree as well as when they agree?
Ion: Clearly.
Socrates: But how did you come to have this skill about Homer only and not about Hesiod or the other poets? Does not Homer speak the same themes which all other p0ets handle? Is not war his great argument? And does he not speak of human society and of intercourse of men, good and bad, skilled and unskilled, and of the good conversing with one another and with mankind, and about what happens in heaven and in the world below, and the generations of gods
and heroes? Are not these the themes of which Homer sings?
Ion: Very true, Socrates.
Socrates: And do not the other poets sing of the same?
Ion: Yes, Socrates; but not in the same way as Homer.
Socrates: What, in a worse way?
Ion: Yes, in a far worse.
Socrates: And Homer in a better way?
Ion: He is incomparably better.
Socrates: And yet surely, my dear friend Ion, in a discussion about arithmetic, where many people are speaking, and one speaks better than the rest, there is somebody who can judge which of them is the good speaker?
Socrates: And he who judges of the good will be the same as he who judges of the bad speakers?
Ion: The same.
Socrates: And he will be the arithmetician?
Ion: Yes.
Socrates: Well, and in discussions about the wholesomeness of food, when many persons are speaking, and one speaks better than the rest, will he who recognizes the better speaker be a different person from him who recognizes the worse, or the same?
Ion: Clearly the same.
Socrates: And who is he, and what is his name?
Ion: The physician.
Socrates: And speaking generally, in all discussions in which the subject is the same and many men are speaking, will not he who knows the good know the bad speaker also? For if he does not know the bad, neither will he know the good when the same topic is being discussed.
Ion: True.
Socrates: Is not the same person skillful in both?
Ion: Yes.
Socrates: And you say that Homer and the other poets, such as Hesiod and Archilochus, speak of the same things; although not in the same way; but the one speaks well and the other not so well?
Ion:
Socrates: And if you knew the good speaker, you would also know the inferior speakers to be inferior?
Ion: That is true.
Socrates: Then, my dear friend, can I be mistaken in saying that Ion is equally skilled in Homer and in other poets, since he himself acknowledges that the same person will be a good judge of all those who speak of the same things; and that almost all poets do speak of the same things?
Ion: Why then, Socrates, do I lose attention and go to sleep and have absolutely no ideas of the least value, when any one speaks of any other poet; but when Homer is mentioned, I wake up at once and am all attention and have plenty to say?
Socrates: The reason, my friend, is obvious. No one can fail to see that you speak of Homer without any art or knowledge. If you were able to speak of him by rules of art, you would have been able to speak of all other poets; for poetry is a whole.
Ion: Yes.
Socrates: And when any one acquires any other art as a whole, the same may be said of them. Would you like me to explain my meaning, Ion?
Ion: Yes, indeed, Socrates; I very much wish that you would for I love to hear you wise men talk.
Socrates: 0 that we were wise, Ion, and that you could truly call us so; but you rhapsodes and actors, and the poets whose verses you sing, are wise; whereas I am a common man, who only speaks the truth. For consider what a very commonplace and trivial thing is this which I have said-a thing which any man might say: that when a man has acquired a knowledge of a whole art, the enquiry into good and bad is one and the same. Let us consider this matter; is not the art of painting a whole?
Ion: Yes.
Socrates: And there are and have been many painters good and bad.
Ion: Yes.
(The dialogue continues. Plato was highly poetic in his prose though he stood against poetry. Aristotle stood for poetry but his prose was rather dry.)
Tennyson's Ulysses is quite Homer's hero, who is wise, variant and compassionate and is perfectly content to spend the rest of his life with his devoted wife and son and for whom the first duty is to govern his country. Tennyson to some extent is indebted to Dante for his portrait of Ulysses. Dante, however, does not approve of his hero's neglect of social and family responsibilities and in fact, condemns him for his perpetual longing for new experiences at the expense of social realities.
Tennyson's hero is neither Homer's Odysseus with his quite magnificence nor even Dante's Ulysses, who is condemned for his selfish escapism. Tennyson through his character reflects the complex tendencies of his age and his own temperament. In one way, the poet expresses his admiration for the active life and the courage and strong determination of his hero. He is fascinated by the defiant strength and stoic assertion of life displayed by Ulysses. The voyage may be symbolic of Tennyson's reusing himself from impotent melancholy. To the poet, Ulysses represents the romantic figure of a man for whom the purpose and joy of life lie in variety and fullness of experience. He has the unquenchable thirst for new knowledge and experience. He has always been a man of action and has 'drunk the delight of battle with his peers'. He is a part of all that he has experienced and still feels that 'all experience is an arch where through / Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades for ever and for ever' when he moves. He cannot be tied down to the narrow confines of his little island kingdom Ithaca. The sea for him has an irresistible fascination and he urges his mariners to set out for the last, desperate voyage towards the 'utmost bound of human thought'. Though time and fate have diminished their physical prowess, they still have the heroic spirit and strong will 'to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield'. Thus, in one way Ulysses is expressive of a character endowed with a restless spirit – an eternal seeker of knowledge. This is in a way reflective of the Victorian age with its scientific spirit and colonial expansion. AUDIO BOOKS
But there is the other side of the picture too. The first five lines of the poem give us some insight into the character of Ulysses by telling us what he hates. His scorn for his people and his contempt for his wife are revealed both in words and, more importantly, in the very tone. He calls his country "barren crags" and his wife 'aged' and his people 'a savage race'. The line 'That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me' consists of hard monosyllables and reveals his utter disgust with the animal-like existence of his people. Curiously enough, he pretends to admire his son Telemachus for possessing the very qualities which he himself despises. Though he had contempt for his country people and his wife he admires Telemachus for his 'slow prudence to make mild a rugged people'. He boasts of striving with gods and yet talks of Telemachus paying 'meet adoration to gods.' It appears that he does not believe in immortality (which, incidentally is the central doctrine of IN MEMORIAM) as he talks of 'the eternal silence' and that 'death closes all'. He is not certain whether they will all be drowned in the high seas or they will be able to reach Elysium and meet Achilles. At any rate, he appears to be proud and boastful and neglects his duty and social responsibilities. Some critics have gone to the extent of saying that the poem is a repudiation of life and responsibilities. For them "it is a brilliant failure in which the details are inconsistent, the reasoning specious" and it deals with life without faith, which can only lead to personal and social disintegration. The last lines, no doubt, are exalted; but the rhetoric in "To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield' should be viewed in the light of all that preceded them. We find them devoid of purpose or significance.
Tennyson's Ulysses is a bundle of contradictions. Scornful of his people, and contemptuous of his own son and wife, skeptical of gods and immortality, Ulysses talks rhetorically of the life of infinite search and yearning for new knowledge and experience. The poet thus depicts some of the contradictions apparent both in himself and in his age through his character.
Rules and Principles of a Poet Mentioned in ARS POETICA by Horace [Roman Critic].
Horace formulated his critical theory in ARS POETICA, known as the ART OF POETRY. He followed the ancient classical line. He advised the would be writers to follow Greek models rigorously and faithfully:
Be Homer's works your study and delight, Read them by day, and meditate by night.
His ARS POETICA is a compendium of rules and principles which poets should follow. It deals with the art of poetry under three heads:
a) Poesis or the subject-matter
b) Poema or form, and,
c) Poeta or the poet.
Poetry according to Horace, is a combination of fact and fiction, which both insructs and pleases the reader. Thus the function of poetry is "to instruct and to delight." The nature of poetry is "to charm the mind." The poetic composition must have unity of design. Horace remarks, "He who chooses his subject wisely will find that neither words nor lucid arrangement fail him" for "sound judgement is the basis and sourse of good writing."
1) Subject Matter for Great Poetry
According to Horace subject matter of poetry should take the model from life and customs. But this imitation should be enriched with imagination or even with some 'believable false'.
2) Function of Poetry
Poets should inculcate a love of all that is noble in life so that our young men, like persons who live in a healthy place, may be perpetually influenced for good. He further says, "for poems to have beauty, they must also be pleasing and lead the listener's soul whither they will."
3) Theme of Poetry
The theme of poetry should be "simple and uniform."
4) Meter and Language of Poetry
There is, according to Horace, a fixed appropriate meter for each kind of poetry whether epic, lyric, elegy and so on. In the use of language of poetry, Horace accepts the verdict of Homer i.e., a poet is free to use both familiar words and new ones provided they give clearness and effectiveness to the poem.
A monumental figure in the history of Western philosophy; Plato looms nearly as large in the history of European literary theory. Indeed, for many literary scholars he marks the beginning of the tradition of literary theory, although his choice of the dialogue format, in which historical personages convey particular arguments, suggests that the issue he raises had alreadybeen debated before he took them up-as do the extant fragments of the writings of the pre-Socratic philosophers. The several dozen dialogues attributed to Plato engage almost every issue that interests philosophers: the nature of being; the question of how we come to know things; the proper ordering of human society) and the nature of justice, truth; the good, beauty, and love. Although Plato did not set out to write systematic literary theory-unlike his student ARISTOTLE, who produced a treatise on poetics-,-his consideration of philosophical issues in several of the dialogues leads him to reflect on poetry, and those reflections have often set the terms of literary debate in the West.
What binds together Plato's various discussions of poetry is a distrust of mimesis (representation or imitation). According to Plato, all art...,-including poetry-is a mimesis of nature, a copy of objects in the physical world. But those objects in the material world, according to the idealist philosophy that Plato propounds, are themselves only mutable copies of timeless universals, called Forms or Ideas. Poetry is merely a copy of a copy, leading away from the truth rather than toward it. Philosophers and literary critics ever since, from PLOTINUS in the third century C.E. to JACQUES DERRIDA in the late twentieth century, have wrestled with the terms of Plato's critique of poetry, revising it or attempting to point out inconsistencies in his argument.
Plato was born about four years after the beginning of the twenty-five-year-long Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta and just after the death of the great Athenian statesman Pericles, who had overseen the city's artistic golden age. His parents both came from distinguished Athenian.families, and his stepfather, an associate of Pericles, was an active participant in the political and cultural life of fifth century Athens. Plato had two older brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, who appear as characters in his longest dialogue; Republic (ca. 375 B.C.E.). As a young man, growing up in a city at war and ,in constant political turmoil, he seems to have been destined for a ,political career. But after·the Peloponnesian War ended in 405, with the defeat and humiliation of Athens, the excesses of Athenian political life under the oligarchical rule (404-403) of the so-called Thirty Tyrants and under the restored democracy left Plato disillusioned with political life. The execution in 399 of Socrates, on charges of impiety and corrupting the young, was a turning point in his life. The older philosopher was a close friend of Plato's family, and Plato's writings attest to Socrates' great influence on him. Indeed, the position of Socrates in European philosophy is unique. Though he apparently never wrote a word, his influence on subsequent thought through his' followers, Plato hi particular, is incalculable. After Socrates' death Plato retired from Athenian political life and traveled for a number of years. In 388 he journeyed to Italy and Sicily, where he became the friend of Dionysius I, the ruler of Syracuse, and his brother-in-law Dion. The following year he returned to Athens, where he founded the Academy, an institution devoted to research and instruction in philosophy and the sciences; he taught there for the rest of his life. Plato envisioned the Academy as a school for statesmen where he could train a new kind of philosopher-ruler (or "guardian") according to the principles set forth in his Republic. Unlike the older sophist GORGIAS or Plato's contemporary rival Isocrates, who both taught the arts of rhetoric and persuasion, Plato focused primarily in the Academy on mathematics, logic, and philosophy. However, when Dionysius died in 367, Dion invited Plato to return to Syracuse to undertake the philosophical education of the new ruler, Dlonysius II. Plato went, perhaps with the hope of putting the theory of Republic into practice; but philosophy proved no match for local politics and Dionysius's suspicions. Indeed, a return visit resulted In Plato's brief Imprisonment; by 360 he was back at the Academy for good.
Plato is recognized as a master of the dialogue form and as one of the great prose stylists of the Greek language; His published writings; apparently all of which are preserved, consist of some twenty-six dramatic dialogues on philosophical and related themes. The central problematic posed by this form is that it becomes virtually impossible to attribute any statement directly to Plato: he never speaks in his own person. The only exceptions are a series of thirteen letters (whose authenticity is still a matter of scholarly debate) written in the last decades of Plato's life, most addressing the political situation in Syracuse. Only the seventh-and longest-letter takes up philosophical issues. For the most part, Plato places his arguments in the, mouths of characters who mayor may not be based on historical persons. The speakers can never be assumed' to be voicing Plato's own views or the views of those whose names they bear. In almost all the dialogues, Socrates is the focal character and Plato's mouthpiece, but Plato's Socrates is not the historical Socrates. These complications, which thwart efforts to fix Plato's thought within a series of propositional statements, have attracted much attention, especially from late-twentieth-century post-structuralist philosophers like Derrida.
The chronology of Plato's dialogues is highly controversial, but most scholars divide the works roughly into three periods. The earliest works, begun after 399, include the Apology of Socrates and Crito, in which Plato defends Socrates against the charges that led to his death; Gorgias, in which Socrates' opponent is the sophist Gorgias; and Ion (one of our selections), which examines poetry as a kind of divine madness. Characteristic of these early Platonic dialogues is Socrates' disarming claim of ignorance and a formal technique of cross-examination called elenchus, a method of questioning designed to lead a learner through stages of reasoning and to expose the contradictions in an opponent's original statement. This method of "emptying out" the question by Socrates to reveal his opponents' ignorance is especially evident in his discussion of poetry with Ion, a rhapsode (professional reciter of epic poetry). The middle period, from 380 to 367, includes the Symposium, Cratylus, and Republic, all begun after the founding of the Academy; they develop the theory of Forms or Ideas anticipated in the early dialogues. The Forms constitute a realm of unchanging being to which the world of individual mutable objects is subordinate. Because the Forms are immutable, they are more real-and more true than the changeable material world. The Form of the Good enjoys a unique status, for it is responsible for the being and intelligibility of the world as a whole. Plato's famous "Allegory of the Cave" in book 7 of Republic (one of our selections), a passage that has generated much interest among post-structuralist theorists, provides a memorable introduction to the Platonic theory of Forms, which is reiterated in book 10's equally well known critique of artistic imitation. Cratylus is of interest to theorists of language because the dispute in this dialogue concerns the "correctness" of names: do they point unproblematic ally to the "Nature of things"-that is, to the Forms-as Hermogenes contends, or are they merely a matter of convention, as Cratylus argues? Socrates concludes that the matter is unresolvable, but that "no one with any understanding will commit himself or the education of his soul to names, or trust them or their givers to the point of firmly stating that he knows something." To the late period (366-360) belong Timaeus, which throughout the Middle Ages was Plato's most widely known work; Critias; Sophist; and Phaedrus, the latter closing with a notorious attack on writing.
In Ion, our opening selection, Plato's Socrates engages Ion in a debate about the nature of the rhapsode's knowledge of poetry, about the nature of poetry, and about the status of knowledge itself. Poetry, Socrates maintains, is not an art; it is a form of divine madness: "the poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind." This debate between the claims of inspiration and those of art would subsequently have a long history in European literary criticism. Is poetry primarily a craft with a set of rules that can be taught and learned, as HORACE, GEOFFREY OF VINSAUF, and ALEXANDER POPE argue, or is it primarily the result of inspiration or genius, as LONGINUS, PLOTINUS, FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER, WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, RALPH WALDO EMERSON, and others, following Plato, have maintained?
Plato's Socrates goes a step further. Not only is poetry a form of divinely inspired madness, but so is criticism. "You are powerless to speak of Homer," he tells Ion, "on the basis of knowledge or mastery." Socrates uses the image of a magnet as a metaphor for divine inspiration: as a magnet attracts iron and passes that attraction along, so the gods inspire the artist, who inspires the interpreter, who, in turn, inspires the audience. For Plato's Socrates, the work of poet and critic is not divided between inspiration and rational analysis, as it is for most modern critics (see, for instance, MATTHEW ARNOLD and the New Critic CLEANTH BROOKS); rather, it lies on a continuum, and the work of the critic is no more rational than that of the poet, the,critic's knowledge no more truthful.
However, it is helpful when reading Plato to remember that his dialogues don't always present a straightforward argument or arrive at a single unambiguous conclusion. The process of elenchus and Socrates' persistent irony often make it difficult to pin him down to anyone position. In Ion, is Socrates making fun of the pomposity of the rhapsode, or does he seriously believe that whatever truth emerges from poetry and the interpretation of poetry results only from divine madness? On the surface, it might seem that Ion treats poetry very differently than does the later Republic, our second selection, where Plato's Socrates argues that far from being divinely inspired, poets lie and ought to be banished from the ideal republic-or, at the very least, heavily censored and kept in check. But Ion presents a view of knowledge that is consistent with the weightier arguments in Republic. However divinely inspired, Socrates argues, poets' and critics' knowledge is of a different order than, and one decidedly inferior to, the knowledge of charioteers, fishermen, or philosophers. To the modern student of literature, this denigration of the poet's learning appears downright odd. Surely the standards by which the knowledge of a charioteer or a fisherman or a mathematician would be judged are irrelevant in judging the value of poetry. Why demand that the poet "know" about horses in the same way that a horseman "knows" about horses?
To understand Socrates' remarks about knowledge, the modern reader needs to understand the centrality of poetry to Greek education. In a culture in which literacy was a relatively new and suspect technology, knowledge was frequently encoded and passed :on through the mnemonic devices of music and poetry.·The instruction provided by.the sophists and by Plato's main rival, lsocrates, was almost exclusively rhetorical and literary. Even in Republic, a book concerned with the ideal education of the guardians and citizens, Socrates divides schooling:into physical training for the body and music and poetry for the soul. Socrates' criticism of poetry and its representations appears to be directed against a culture that,believed literally "that poets know all crafts, all human affairs." In such a culture Socrates' insistence makes more sense: a poet needs to know, a horse the way a horseman knows a horse .. In his Academy, however, Plato promoted all earning whose foundation was dialectics, dialogue, and philosophical reasoning.
Both the Allegory of the Cave and Republic 10's infamous critique of mimesis explore the nature of knowledge and its proper objects. The world we perceive through the senses, Socrates argues, is illusory and deceptive. It depends on a prior realm of separately existing Forms, organized beneath the Form of Good. The realm of Forms is accessible not through the senses, as is the world of appearances, but only through rigorous philosophic discussion and thought, based on mathematical reasoning. For Plato's Socrates, measuring, counting, and weighing all bring us closer to the realm of Forms than do poetry's pale representations of nature. All' art and poetry, because they represent what is already an inferior representation of the true original (the Forms), can only lead further away from the truth, and further into a world of illusion and deception. Virtually every subsequent defense of poetry (memorable examples include those by Aristotle, SIR PHILIP SIDNEY, APHRA BEHN, and PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY) has had to come to terms with Plato's devastating attack on poetry as inferior and deceptive mimesis.
Plato's Phaedrus (from which our final selection has been taken) has been of interest
to contemporary literary theory for its discussion of the evils of writing. There Plato has Socrates relate the story of the· invention, of writing by the, Egyptian god Theuth (Thoth), who offers it to King Thamus. Thamus declines the offer, deciding that humans are better of without writing because, it substitutes an alien inscription- lifeless signs-for the ,authentic living presence of spoken. language. Far from aiding memory, writing will cause it,to atrophy. For Plato, the only good memory is anamnesis, the recollection of spiritual truths through 'genuine; living wisdom! that is, through philosophy. Plato reiterates this point in his Seventh Letter, where he says: "anyone who is seriously studying high matters will be the last to write about them and thus expose his thought to the envy and criticism of men. i.e. whenever we see a book, whether the Jaws of a legislator or a composition on any other subject, we can be sure that if the author is really serious; the book does 'not contain his best thoughts; they are stored away with the fairest of his possessions. And if, he has committed these serious thoughts to writing, it is because men, not the gods, 'have taken his wits away.' " Yet Plato's use of a myth in Phaedrus to frame his philosophical objections to writing raises questions of its own, since presumably myths suffer from the same defects as the texts of the sophists, rhetoricians, poets, and other purveyors of false wisdom whom Plato criticizes elsewhere. Derrida offers a celebrated unraveling of the logic of Plato's argument against writing in his Dissemination (see below), which may be the most significant encounter between a twentieth-century philosopher and Plato.
Plato is the progenitor of Western didactic criticism and theory: the idea that literature
should serve moral and social functions.' Republic, where, he, describes an ideal well-regulated community in which the educational curriculum promotes respect for law, reason, authority, self.,discipline; and piety, has been specially influential. Although Plato's Socrates loves and regularly cites Homer's Iliad and Odyssey\ he calls for the censorship of many passages in these )works ;that ,represent sacrilegious; sentimental; unlawful, and irrational behaviour'. Above all else, he' requires that literature teach goodness and grace. Plato's relentless application of this standard to all literature marks one of the, most noteworthy beginnings of the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.
Discussing the essential ingredients of Grand style, Arnold says that Grand Style 'arises in poetry when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or severity a serious subject'. The grand style issues from rapidity of movement, plainness and directness of language, nobility of nature and simple lucidity of mind. It is the same thing that Longinus calls sublimity. There can be no sublimity without sublime thoughts, and sublime emotions issuing from a sublime heart. There can be no sublimity without the sublimity of the soul.
Great thoughts and great words issue only from great minds. At the same time the subject treated therein also should be serious and grand enough to bear the weight of the grand style. A trivial subject cannot bear the weight of grand style. The subjects fit for treatment in grand style must "powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections; to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time". There are universal subjects that cannot be bound down by any limits of time or place. They are fundamental with human nature sublimely elevated. The action or situation to be treated under grand style must have the power 'to please, to move, to elevate'. The greatest practitioners of grand style are Homer in Greek, Dante in Latin, and Milton in English. Arnold advises the modern poets to study and analyse their style and subject matter if they seek to develop grand style in their own writings.
Ben Jonson was the first great classical English critic. He was a strong advocate of classical principles and models in all branches of literature. He advocated that the famous classical models should be kept in view by the English authors while writing their literary works in different genres. He specially valued Aristotle’s precepts and noted them down in his ‘Discoveries’ for the guidance of English authors. He earnestly wanted English literary works to be raised to the excellence of Greek and Latin works. However he advised to avoid ‘excess’ in any case, excess in passion, excess of imagination, and excess of expression. He was a staunch advocate of ‘discipline and order.’
Ben Jonson laid special emphasis on the UNITY OF ACTION in drama, epic or any type of long poem. In this respect he lays down the following guide-lines for producing a powerful and unified ‘fable’ or ‘plot.’ He writes, “The fable is called the imitation of one entire and perfect action, whose parts are so joined and knit together, as nothing in the structure can be changed, or taken away, without impairing or troubling the whole.” He further says that the Action should neither be too vast nor too small. If the Action be too great, the audience wouldn’t be able to comprehend the whole, or if too small it wouldn’t give sufficient pleasure. The action should not exceed the compass of one day and it should be one and entire. The classical models are Homer for Epic, Virgil for Pastoral, Seneca for Tragedy, Plautus and Terence for Comedy, and Juvenal for Satire.
What is meant by "sublimity" in literature according to Longinus?
Before Longinus the function of great literature was summed up in a formula of three words-- to instruct, to delight, and to persuade. But Longinus found this formula of three words inadequate in evaluating the total effect of the literature produced by the great Greek masters. He found that the epics of Homer and tragedies of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides, and the lyrics of Pindar transported the reader or the spectator to ecstacy or emotional rapture. He called this ecstasy SUBLIMITY. Explaining this term, he said, "Sublimity consists in a certain distinction and consummate excellence in expression, and it's from this and no other source, that the greatest poets and prose-writers have gained their eminence and immortal fame."
Great literature transports the reader out of himself to ecstasy caused by an irresistible magic of speech. The reader is so moved that he can neither think nor feel except what the writer thinks or feels. This kind of literature has the quality of the sublime. This quality of Sublimity, the power to transport or elevate is irresistible- it irresistibly pleases, excites, moves, transports, and elevates all readers of all times. This is the true test of the SUBLIMITY in literature.
The concept was introduced into the criticism of literature and art by a Greek treatise Peri hupsous ("On the sublime"), attributed in the manuscript to Longinus and probably written in the first century A.D. AS defined by Longinus, the sublime is a quality that can occur in any type of discourse, whether poetry or prose. Whereas the effect of rhetoric on the hearer or reader of a discourse is persuasion, the effect of the sublime is "transport" (ekstasis)— it is that quality of a passage which "shatters the hearer's composure," exercises irresistible "domination" over him, and "scatters the subjects like a bolt of lightning." The source of the sublime lies in the capacities of the speaker or writer. Three of these capacities—the use of figurative language, nobility of expression, and elevated composition—are matters of art that can be acquired by practice; but two other, and more important, capacities, are largely innate: "loftiness of thought" and "strong and inspired passion." The ability to achieve sublimity is in itself enough to establish the transcendent genius of a writer, and expresses the nobility of the writer's character: "sublimity is the ring of greatness in the soul." Longinus' examples of sublime passages in poems range from the epics of Homer through the tragedies of Aeschylus to a love-lyric by Sappho; his examples in prose are taken from the writings of the philosopher Plato, the orator Demosthenes, and the historian Herodotus. Especially notable is his quotation, as a prime instance of sublimity, of the passage in the Book of Genesis written by "the lawgiver of the Jews": "And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light, 'Let there be land,' and there was land."
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Longinus' treatise exerted a persistent effect on literary criticism after it became widely known by way of a French translation by Boileau in 1674; eventually, it helped establish both the expressive theory of poetry and the critical method of impressionism. In the eighteenth century an important phenomenon was the shift in the location of the sublime from a quality of linguistic discourse that originates in the powers of a writer's mind, to a quality inherent in external objects, and above all in the scenes and occurrences of the natural world. Thus Edmund Burke's highly influential Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published 1757, attributes the source of the sublime to whatever things are "in any sort terrible"—that is, to whatever is "fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger"—provided that the observer is in a situation of safety from danger, and so is able to experience what would otherwise be a painful terror as a "delightful horror." The qualities of objects conducive to sublime horror that Burke stresses are obscurity, immense power, and vastness in dimension or quantity. Burke's examples of the sublime include vast architectural structures, Milton's description of Satan in Paradise Lost, the description of the king's army in Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV, and natural phenomena; a sublime passion may be produced by "the noise of vast cataracts, raging storms, thunder or artillery," all of which evoke "a great and awful sensation in the mind."
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During the eighteenth century, tourists and landscape painters traveled to the English Lake Country and to the Alps in search of sublime scenery that was thrillingly vast, dark, wild, stormy, and ominous. Writers of what was called "the sublime ode," such as Thomas Gray and William Collins, sought to achieve effects of wildness and obscurity in their descriptive style and abrupt transitions, as well as to render the wildness, vastness, and obscurity of the sublime objects they described. Authors of Gothic novels exploited the sublimity of delightful horror both in the natural and architectural settings of their narratives and in the actions and events that they narrated. Samuel H. Monk, a pioneer historian of the sublime in the eighteenth century, cites as the "apotheosis" of the natural sublime the description of Simplón Pass in Wordsworth's The Prelude (1805), 4.554 ff.:
The immeasurable height Of woods decaying, never to be decayed, The stationary blasts of waterfalls, And everywhere along the hollow rent Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn, The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky, The rocks that muttered close upon our ears— Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside As if a voice were in them—the sick sight And giddy prospect of the raving stream, Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light...
In an extended analysis of the sublime in his Critique of Judgment (1790),the philosopher Immanuel Kant divided the sublime objects specified by Burkeand other earlier theorists into two kinds: (1) the "mathematical sublime" encompassesthe sublime of magnitude—of vastness in size or seeming limitlessness or infinitude in number. (2) The "dynamic sublime" encompasses the objects conducive to terror at our seeming helplessness before the overwhelming power of nature, provided that the terror is rendered pleasurable by the safe situation of the observer. All of Kant's examples of sublimity are scenes and events in the natural world: "the immeasurable host" of starry systems such as the Milky Way, "shapeless mountain masses towering one above the other in wild disorder," "volcanoes in all their violence of destruction, hurricanes leaving desolation in their track, the boundless ocean rising with rebellious force, the high waterfall of some mighty river." Kant maintains, however, that the sublimity resides "not in the Object of nature" itself, but "only in the mind of the judging Subject" who contemplates the object. In a noted passage he describes the experience of sublimity as a rapid sequence of painful blockage and pleasurable release—"the feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces followed at once by a discharge all the more powerful." In the mathematical sublime, the mind is checked by its inadequacy to comprehend as a totality the boundlessness or seeming infinity of natural magnitudes, and in the dynamic sublime, it is checked by its helplessness before the seeming irresistibility of natural powers. But the mind then goes on to feel exultation at the recognition of its inherent capacity to think a totality in a way that transcends "every standard of sense/' or else at its discovery within ourselves of a capacity for resistance which "gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature." In Kant's view, the ability to experience the sublime exemplifies on the one hand the limitations and weakness of finite humanity, but on the other hand its "preeminence over nature," even when confronted by the "immeasurability" of nature's magnitude and the "irresistibility" of its might.
Classicism
is an attitude to literature that is guided by admiration of the qualities of
formal balance, proportion, decorum, and restraint attributed to the
major works of ancient Greek and Roman literature ('the classics') in
preference to the irregularities of later vernacular literatures, and
especially (since about 1800) to the artistic liberties proclaimed by romanticism.
A classic is a work of the highest class, and has also been taken to mean a
work suitable for study in school classes. During and since the renaissance,
these overlapping meanings came to be applied to the writings of major Greek
and Roman authors from Homer to Juvenal, which were regarded as unsurpassed
models of excellence. The adjective classical, usually applied to this body of
writings, has since been extended to outstandingly creative periods of other
literatures: the 17th century may be regarded as the classical age of French
literature, and the 19th century the classical period of the Western novel,
while the finest fiction of the United States in the mid-19th century from Cooper
to Twain was referred to by D. H. Lawrence as Classic American Literature
(despite the opposition between 'classical' and 'romantic' views of art, a
romantic work can now still be a classic). A classical style or approach to
literary composition is usually one that imitates Greek or Roman models in
subject-matter (e.g. Greek legends) or in form (by the adoption of GENRES like
TRAGEDY, EPic, ODE, or verse SATIRE), or both. As a literary doctrine,
classicism holds that the writer must be governed by rules, models, or
conventions, rather than by wayward inspiration: in its most strictly codified
form in the 17th and 18th centuries (see neoclassicism), it required the
observance of rules derived from Aristotle's Poetics (4th century BCE) and
Horace's Ars Poetica (c.20 BCE), principally those of decorum and the dramatic unities.
The dominant tendency of French literature in the 17th and 18th centuries,
classicism in a weaker form also characterized the augustan age in
England; the later German classicism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries
was distinguished by its exclusive interest in Greek models, as opposed to the
Roman bias of French and English classicisms. After the end of the 18th
century, 'classical' came to be contrasted with 'romantic' in an opposition of
increasingly generalized terms embracing moods and attitudes as well as
characteristics of actual works. While partisans of Romanticism associated the
classical with the rigidly artificial and the romantic with the freely
creative, the classicists condemned romantic self-expression as eccentric
self-indulgence, in the name of classical sanity and order. The great German
writer]. W. von Goethe summarized his conversion to classical principles by
defining the classical as healthy, the romantic as sickly. Since then, literary
classicism has often been less a matter of imitating Greek and Roman models
than of resisting the claims of Romanticism and all that it may be thought to
stand for (Protestantism, liberalism, democracy, anarchy): the critical
doctrines of Matthew Arnold and more especially of T. S. Eliot are classicist
in this sense of reacting against the Romantic principle of unrestrained
self expression.
