How Poetry is Created
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How poetry is created and how the creation is experienced are related but distinct aspects of the poetic enterprise. Aristotle expects "the man who possesses the master-art of poetic interpretation" to have a command of distinct "modes of utterance" or the elements of language (Poetics 53), such as the kind of statement (interrogative, declarative, request) being made. But he also distinguishes between interpretation and creation, explaining that criticism directed at poetry that does not conform to the critic's notion of what form poetic expression "should" take is inferior to criticism that seeks to identify what that expression "is." That is why he condemns Protagoras's "carping criticism of Homer" for (as Protagoras thinks) not understanding the difference between a prayer and a command (Poetics 53). Nevertheless, Aristotle makes the point that poetic style can be evaluated and graded. The best poetic expression is "clear without being low," with low meaning the least subtle because it "uses the regular words for things" (Poetics 59). As expressions become less direct, or more "alien," and according as they are employed moderately, in proportion with more straightforward language, the poetry is likely to achieve "an effect of distinction, while at the same time by virtue of its overlapping with normal usage [] will promote clarity" (Poetics 59). Aristotle uses the term alien as a proxy for "anything other than the standard terminology"; metaphor is an instance of alien la
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scipline of "emotion recollected in tranquillity" (Wordsworth 57). The emotion so informs the tranquil moment of poetic creation that good poetry must result and will "excite thought or feeling in the reader" (Wordsworth 60).
Toward the end of a 19th century in Europe and America the Industrial Revolution, created a need in poets, critics, and philosophers alike for a polemical aesthetics. For some, the power of metaphor and language, as well as art itself, was in doubt. Acknowledging the attraction of truth and reality, Nietzsche questions whether language that conforms to conventional modes of expression or articulates received wisdom as truth, is or can be the expression of "all realities" (90), i.e., of truth. That is because truth is "a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms [that] . . . after long usage seem to a nation fixed, canonic and binding" (92).
Nietzsche's discourse seems meant as much an exercise in social theory as in poetry critique, for he discusses metaphor--indeed all art--as an artifact of culture. Metaphor subsumed by a culture that takes a proxy of truth for truth becomes a trick of language rather than an expression of ideas, or a "residuum of a metaphor" (93; emphasis in original), phon
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1514
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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