Abstract: Poetry, one of humanity’s earliest art
forms, has conveyed history, religion, and philosophy through rhythm and meter.
While universally revered, it has faced criticism. Plato dismissed poetry as a
deceptive imitation, while Freud saw it as an illusory gratification, though he
acknowledged its therapeutic effects. Aristotle, however, viewed poetry as
cathartic, expressing universal truths beyond history. Horace emphasized its
dual role—to delight and uplift. Despite differing views, poetry’s power to
move, heal, and enlighten remains undisputed, securing its lasting significance
in world literature.
Keywords:
Poetry, Aesthetic expression, Universal truths, Philosophical critique,
Therapeutic effect, literary tradition, Emotional appeal.
“Poetry is one of the earliest aesthetic
activities of the human mind. The most common vehicle for history, religion,
magic and even law, has been poetry which is rhythmical and metrical in form”1.
Aryan race in India versified almost all types of metaphysical compositions and
ruminations. Even Egyptian cosmogony and astronomy were versified. Religion also
expressed itself in rhyme or meter. Poetry in some way can be considered as a
heightened or emotionally charged form of ordinary speech. Still, finding this
definition incomplete, I would rather say that poetry is a metaphor.
All countries and all human languages
have their literary tradition entrenched in poetry which arises mainly from
emotional utterance. Even primitive men expressed this very emotional utterance
through dance, music, and simple verse. As such, poetry is held in high esteem
in all world literature. Though poetry is held in high esteem throughout all the
world literature, only a few thinkers in the past like Plato, Sigmund Freud,
Lenin, Marx and Stephen Gosson made adverse comments.
In Book X of his famous book, ‘The
Republic’ Plato, on ethical and metaphysical grounds, thoughtlessly banished
poets from his ideal state. All art in his opinion is the product of wild
imagination for it distorts truth and is also thrice removed from reality.
Further, it being an imitation of the idea of God it becomes an imitation of
imitation of imitation. Though he believes that poetry makes an immediate appeal
to the emotions of the audience, he also believes that poetry has a baneful
effect on the healthy growth of mind.
After 2500 years, Freud raised similar
doubts and apprehensions about art. He considered art as a ‘substitute
gratification’, ‘an illusion in contrast to reality’, but however, considers
literary men as precursors and adjudicators of psychoanalysis, as they can
comprehend the latent motives of life. He also feels that ‘poetry has a
therapeutic effect in releasing mental tension’.
Aristotle, like Plato, believes that
poetry makes an immediate appeal to the emotions, but for him these emotions are
aroused with a view to make the audience undergo a cathartic experience (purging
unpleasant feelings from the soul). In the medical language, it denotes the
removal of painful or disturbing elements from the organism; elimination of
alien matter leads to the purification of the soul. So, the emotional appeal of
poetry is health giving and artistically satisfying.
Through poetry the poet reveals truths of a permanent and universal kind.
To prove this, he draws a comparison between poetry and history. While history
speaks of what has happened, poetry, what may happen? Poetry, therefore, for
Aristotle, is something more philosophical and higher than history, for poetry
tends to express the universal, history, the particular. As for its function, he
says, the immediate function is to please and delight. ‘To instruct is not ruled
out if it is incidental to the pleasure it gives’.
For Horace, poetry should be both
pleasure giving and morally elevating.
Further, the test of poetry lies not in delight or instruction or
persuasion, ‘but in its transportation--its capacity to move the reader to
ecstasy.’
What P B Shelley said about poetry is
really remarkable. He says, ‘Poetry reveals to us the loveliness of nature,
brings back the freshness of youthful feeling, revives the relish of simple
pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warned the spring time of our
being, refines youthful love, strengthens our interest in human nature by vivid
delineations of its tenderest and softest feelings, and through the brightness
of its prophetic vision, helps faith to lay hold on the future life.’ Shelley
wrote a beautiful essay, ‘A Defense of Poetry’ in 1821: ‘Poetry is indeed
something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of Knowledge, it is
that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be
referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of
thought. It is that from which all spring and that which adorns us all; and that
which, if blighted denies the fruits and the seed, and withholds from the barren
world of nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. It is
the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odor
and the color of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as
the form and splendor of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and
corruption. The delight of love and friendship, the ecstasy of the admiration of
nature, the joy of the perception and still more of the creation of poetry, is
often wholly unalloyed. Those who produce and preserve this pleasure are poets
or poetical philosophers.’2
Poetry, continues Shelley, immortalizes all that is best and most beautiful in
the world. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man. It
turns all things to loveliness, it exalts the beauty of that which is the most
beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed, it molds
exaltation and honor, grief and pleasure, eternity and changes; it subdues to
union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it
touches; and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by
wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret
alchemy turns to portable goal the poisonous waters which flow from earth
through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare
the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the beauty of its forms. He is the
wisest, the happiest and the best in as much as he’s a poet, is equally
incontrovertible: the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue,
of the most consummate prudence. A poet participates in the eternal or the
infinite.
Shelley has really been insightful and
meaningful in describing poetry: ‘a poem is the very image of life expressed in
its eternal truth. A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to
cheer his own solitude with sweet sounds. Poetry acts in another diviner manner.
It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a
thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the
hidden beauty of the world and makes familiar objects be as if they were not
familiar, it reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed
in its Elysian light’.
For Arnold the function of the poet is
not only to present life as it is, but also to add something to it. Poetry for
him ‘is also the criticism of life and by contributing something to life,
enriches it. It becomes the power of forming, sustaining and delighting us as
nothing else can. Its future, so, ‘is immense’ and in future it would replace
religion because in it we find all values--aesthetic, moral and religious,
coalesce. Religion in its form deals with essentially moral and historical
facts, but poetry with ideas born out of the depth of experiences’3.
Religion has failed us, Arnold says, because it has attached its emotions to
historical facts whereas poetry represents ideas. In a sense, poetry itself is a
religious act. Poetry alone can restore man from his fall and establish peace,
order and harmony. Peace is not won by war, but by poetry. It has peace as its
God. Hence, through poetry, irrespective of its language form, the world can be
united, vasudika kutumbam can be established. The pursuit of science pleases the
scientist. There is no truth in science that can please a common man, being
fully the product of meddling intellect. It is not felt in the blood and along
the heart as the truth of poetry is. Further, the truths that science discovers
benefit us only materially, but the truths of poetry clasp “to us as a necessary
part of our existence”. Poetry is surely the breath of finer spirit of all
knowledge. It is the highest and supreme form of human expression. It is an
impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science.
According to Christopher Caudwell, art is
the science of feeling and science is the art of knowing. We must know to be
able to do, but we must also feel to know what to do. Art is all active
cognition and science, cognitive action. While science is concerned with
external reality, art, with internal reality.
Science achieves its purpose of survival
by adapting external reality to the genotype just as art adapts the genotype to
external reality. Just as art achieves its adaptive purpose by projecting the
genotype’s latent aspirations on to external reality, so science achieves
its end by receiving the requisitioning from external reality poured into the
mind, in the illusory or weird mirror-world of scientific ideology. When
necessity is projected into the psyche, it becomes conscious and man can mould
external reality according to his will. As art, by adapting the genotype and
projecting its characteristics into external reality, tells us what the genotype
is, so science, by receiving the reflection of external reality into the psyche,
tells us what external reality is. As art conveys the importance and meaning of
all we are in the language of feeling, so science tells us the significance of
all we see in the real world in the language of cognition. One is temporal, full
of change; the other spatial and it appears static.
It is difficult, rather impossible to generate a phantastic projection of
the whole Universe, but together, though being contradictory,’ are dialectic,
and call into being the spatio-temporal, historic Universe; not by themselves
but by the practice, the concrete living, from which they emerge’. The Universe
that emerges is contradictory, explosive, full of heterogeneities, ironies,
paradoxes and dynamically moving apart, because these are the salient features
of the movement of reality which generated them, the movement of life as well as
human life.
This apart, when we say that the universe is material, we mean that all
phenomena have an underlying unity/underground connections in the form of causes
or determining relations which have an ultimate homogeneity we call matter. This
is the first assumption of science. The whole history of science is the
discovery of these connections and their demonstration through every stage of
experiment.’4
Though, science perennially works for the
advancement of society, art supports and records that advancement. Science
contributes to the growth of humanity, and art ensures that humanity doesn't
fade away as it grows. Together they both play a vital role in the growth of
humanity. That way, both are equally important and neither can prosper and
flourish without the help of the other. Science improves technologies that are
used to "express" art. Whereas, art provides creativity and answers questions
that science cannot, providing "stimulus" to scientists’ imagination.
Though both artists and scientists
endeavor to see the world in novel ways, and to communicate what they see to the
world, the world, ironically, sees differently what is shown, changing the
fundamental 'truth' altogether as a
result. Further, both scientists and artists with nothing new to reveal and
communicate their insights are great failures. It takes both dexterity and
skills to make a successful scientist or artist. Both artists and scientists
often need to formulate new concepts, ideas and technologies to achieve their
goals. Scientists who are able to communicate but have nothing unique or new to
say are mere hypesters. Artists who have new ideas and views of creativity but
who fail to express these effectively appear wackos. Since both often work very
hard to acquire skills and generate novelty that will help them to be successful
and to promote knowledge in their concerned areas, many prestigious schools and
organizations of science and art have come up throughout the world to promote
both science and art.
Both science and art have wonderful
spin-offs as applied science is technology and applied art is adornment.
Technology and embellishment combined to make life exquisite, smooth and useful
for boosting imagination and furthering all practical pursuits.
One of the most primeval and innate needs
of man is to understand the world around him, and then widely share that
understanding. We share because we are mainly social beings. The success or
failure of others is meaningful and important for all of us. We would like to
share all information if we have any, though it may be trivial as we are all
tied up together in this world. Science and art are human attempts to understand
the world around him. Their background, subjects and methods have different
traditions, cultural outlook and protean audiences, but the motivations,
objectives and goals are basically the same. The future of science is tied to
the destiny of mankind and the future of mankind is tied to the destiny of art.
The future of mankind, thus, is tied to the destiny of science and art, both.
1.
Illusion and Reality is a book
of Marxist literary criticism by Christopher Caudwell published in 1937.
Illusion and Reality, A Study of the Sources of Poetry. Reprinted: 1956.
2.
A Defence of Poetry (Written 1821, first published
posthumously in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, ed.
Mary Shelley, 1840). 1821.
3.
“The Study of Poetry,” by
Matthew Arnold was originally published as the general introduction to T.H.
Ward's anthology, The English Poets (1880).
4.
Christopher Caudwell,
‘Illusion and Reality’: A Study of the Sources of Poetry. Reprinted: 1956.