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No sentence will hold the whole truth, and the only way in which we can be just, is by giving ourselves the lie.
--Emerson, in "Nominalist and Realist."
The apparent resignation to aphorism and parataxis is often an attempt to recuperate on the level of style what is lost on the level of history.
--from Paul de Man's Preface to The Rhetoric of Romanticism.
What Is "Poetics" (that One May, or May Not, Have One)?
The discourse on poetry, what it is, what its function is, how it works, what its kinds are, what its component parts are, is a branch of knowledge (or science) and is called poetics [Peri Poietikes, Aristotle].
Poetics is not so much the science, as it is the art of poetry, handed down from generation to generation of poets by means of a reading and imitation of the great works of literature [Ars Poetica, Horace].
Poetics is not an indefinite art, subject to the vagaries of individual and conflicting meanings, but a transcendent mode of interpretation, or exegesis, in which "nothing is contained in the spiritual sense which is not put forward in the literal sense"; hence, poetics is an aspect of theology [Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas; adapted by Dante in Il Convivio].
The poet is a vates, "as much diviner, foreseer, or prophet... so heavenly a title did [the Romans] bestow upon this heart-ravishing knowledge" ; hence Poetics is not a handmaid of theology, but an apology, or justification, of Poetry on its own terms [An Apologie for Poetry, Sir Philip Sidney].
Poetics is not a justification of poetry, because poetry needs no justification: Virgil has survived without the kind of disputes that Plato, for example, grapples with to this day in philosophical discourse. Poetics is concerned with "the common sentiments of human nature"; hence Poetics is an analysis of universal, disinterested standards [Of the Standard of Taste, David Hume].
Poetics is the defense of the Imagination, the synthesizing and creative power of the human mind, against a progressively imperial and destructive reason, or analysis [A Defense of Poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelley].
Poetics is not the defense of "a naive and intuitive approach to art," the latent ideology of bourgeois liberalism made manifest in Romanticism; Poetics is an aspect of dialectical aesthetic theory, unfolding historically and "emancipating [poetry] from its parasitical dependence on ritual" [Ästhetische Theorie, Theodor Adorno; with a remark of Walter Benjamin's].
Poetics is neither a matter of interpretation nor a general aesthetic theory, but a specific discourse in its own right, the structural science of poetry known as Poetics [Poétique, Tzvetan Todorov].
There is no one "Poetics," any more than there is one right way of doing anything; there are as many individual poetics as there are practitioners, or theorists of poetry, or both [A Poetics, Charles Bernstein].
Having come just a little more than full circle, I thought I could re-approach the question put to me, namely, Have you formulated a specific poetics which you are pursuing? But I have found that the work of defining "poetics" has all revolved around various assumptions about another key term. And so I asked myself another question,
What is "That Numbrous Kind of Writing" called Poetry?
Poetry is "some semblance of existence," an imitation of an appearance, a beautiful illusion, the seduction of appearance, and hence Deceit, and the nurse of Error.
Actually, Religion is the illusion, Poetry is The Future of the Illusion: Poetry is the necessary fiction, the supreme fiction, or the necessary angel. Thus all the theological questions return, in the sense of the return of the repressed, as poetic questions.
* * *
Actually, all of the poetic questions return as psychological questions. Now, psychical action is of two kinds: external stimuli and internal psychical energy, or instinctual drives. The pleasure principle is the tendency of the psyche to discharge energy accruing from drives, in order to achieve pleasure and avoid pain. The reality principle is the tendency of consciousness to bind otherwise free-flowing energies and discharge them in a way which is not unpleasurable to consciousness. Where there is a conflict between the nature of the energy and consciousness, the preconscious represses the energy, and the psyche works in reverse--regressively--by discharging these energies in perceptual representations (dreams, or hallucinations) or in neurotic symptoms (the return of the repressed).
Poetry is essentially regressive.
* * *
"Poetry is giving form to the irrational," the poem, a symbolic articulation of the pre- or super-rational, whose analogue is the dream, displacing and condensing in fulfillment of the wish of literature.
Poetry is the dream-work, poetics is the talking cure.
* * *
What is the illness? Behold, (I teach you) Man is the illness, something to be overcome. What is great in poetry is that it is a bridge and not an end. Poetry is a rope tied between ape and ghost, "a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping." Poetry is a tightrope tied between becoming and being; a bridge, between the pre-linguistic and the super-linguistic.
Poetics is the map, or the signage, or the toll booth.
* * *
Poetry is an organic totality, and hence subject to the defects of bodies, in other words, subject to illness. Therefore: An excess of blood, or heat, characterized by sanguinity (or amorousness), will produce unpleasantness, whose healthy state is the forceful style; an excess of bile, or dryness, characterized by biliousness, will produce aridity, whose healthy state is the plain style; an excess of phlegm, or moistness, characterized by phlegmaticness, will produce the affected style, whose healthy state is the elegant style; an excess of black bile, or coldness, characterized by melancholy, will produce frigidity, whose healthy state is the elevated style.
In any case, it is easy to see that the function of poetics is prescriptive.
* * *
Prescriptive poetics is authoritarian, Poetics at best is descriptive: Poetics describes the laws of literary form.
Poetry is transgression: of the laws of form, or "of conformity in the pursuit of new forms," or of codes of oppression, or of instrumental being-in-the-world.
And poetics: you gotta get your story straight for the cops.
* * *
In our earliest interrogation of poetry, that of Plato's dialogues, we have an acknowledgment of poets as the masters of a particular and distinct art, or techne. Techniques can be learned, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of cloying rhythm, flatulent rhetoric, sentimentality, vagueness. And technology is a cumulative social process, thus we can speak of the history, or progress, of poetry.
Poetics is progressive, the historical demythologization of poetry, the emptying out from poetry "of a primitive magic content, emancipating [poetry] from its parasitical dependence on ritual."
* * *
Poetry is "that which is sent bringing spirit to nature, entering into nature, and seemingly losing its spirit, that nature being revealed as symbol may lose the power to delude. [Poetry] is thus the philosophic name of the Saviour, whose symbolic name is Christ, just as Nature is the philosophic name of Satan and Adam. In saying that Christ redeems Adam (and Eve) from becoming Satan, we say that [Poetry] redeems Reason (and Passion) from becoming Delusion,--or Nature."
Poetry is symbolism, Poetics allegory; symbolism being defined as the participation of the real in its being rendered intelligible in signs; allegory being defined as either commentary in general, or, more narrowly, the attempt to pre-scribe meaning onto the work of literary art.
As an example in practice--in the line, "I cannot see the forest for the trees": Poetics is the forest, Poetry is the trees.
* * *
Poetry is the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the garden of signs. Poetics is the apple.
No, Poetics is the snake, "For the Serpent was wiser than any of the animals that were in Paradise.... But the creator cursed the serpent, and called him devil." Poetics is the Serpent, or Instructor, saying "you shall not die; for it was out of jealousy that he said this to you. Rather, your eyes shall open, and you shall become like gods, recognizing evil and good."
* * *
Poetry is the Dark Tower, or Castle, looming in the background; the Poet is the Knight who has put on the whole armor of God; poetics, the horned Devil the Knight has left behind; Death is History riding along side.
The salamander represents faith, surviving trial by fire, but what is the significance of the dog, possibly a pointer or setter [?], in this engraving by Dürer?
* * *
Poetry is the Castle we may never gain admittance to in the end; which is to say that "Poetry," considered as a whole, as universal concept and as historical fact, is a myth. Poetics is demythologization.
In the phrase, "Poetry is timeless," Poetics is the clock.
* * *
Poetry is the pattern of myth in music, the "melody of events in which the imprint of a knowledge... enters the generative memory and the history of man takes on tenor."
"It's not rhyming and versing,"--in short, it is not words as music "that maketh a poet--no more than a long gown maketh an advocate" (to paraphrase Sir Philip Sidney).
(But as Stevens wrote, paraphrasing Pascal:) "[I]f medical men did not have their cassocks and the mules they wore and if doctors did not have their square hats and robes four times too large, they would never have been able to dupe the world, which is incapable of resisting so genuine a display."
* * *
What is the illusion? One could say, as Frye did of the Paradiso, that Poetics is the "upper limit, a point at which an imaginative vision of an eternal world becomes an experience of it."
Poetics is the limit of what can be said about Poetry.
Poetry is the silence whereof one must speak.
Do I Have a Poetics Which I Am Specifially Pursuing?
On the one hand there is reality, physis or nature; on the other hand, the poem is its own reality, its own physis or nature. How does one get from the reality of the poem to that other reality, except by a crossing over? This is what I believe Barbara Guest implies when she writes of "a metaphysics of poetry." And for me, this suggests a transcendent signified: the object of which that crossing over is the subject. I cannot rationally demonstrate this, but I subjectively experience it. What I am pursuing in my poetry is the limit of this experience as poetry. A limit I hope I never come to, because it would be the end of my writing.
* * *
"And I reflect with delight," wrote Coleridge in a critique of Wordsworth's poetics as formulated in the Preface, "how little a mere theory, though of his own workmanship, interferes with the processes of genuine imagination in a man of true poetic genius, who possesses, as Mr. Wordsworth, if ever man did, most assuredly does possess,
The vision and the faculty divine."
Yes, but to which I'd respond: "I must create a system," as Blake wrote in Jerusalem, "or be enslav'd by another Mans."
G.K.