Poetry and Politics

229 Pages·20.457 MB·English

by  Mortimer J. Adler

POETRY AND POLITICS
by
MORTIMER J. ADLER
INTRODUCTION BY SAMUEL HAZO
DUQUESNE UNIVERSITY PRESS
PITTSBURGH, PA.
Editions E. Nauwelaerts, Louvain, Belgium
All rights reserved
© 1965 by DUQUESNE UNIVERSITY
Selected and revised chapters from a work entitled
ART AND PRUDENCE by Mortimer J. Adler
originally published in 1937 by Longmans, Green and
Co. This revision is published by arrangement with
David McKay Co., Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
Ao PRESS, LTD.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 65-16137
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
I TRODUCTION
VII
CHAPTER ONE
Plato ................................... .
CHAPTER TWO
ristotle . .. .. . . . . .. . .. . . . .. . .. . .. .. . . . .. .. 19
CHAPTER THREE
Christianity . . . .. . . .. . .. .. .. . .. .. . . . . . . .. .. 52
CHAPTER FOUR
Democracy . .. . . .. . . . . . .. .. .. . .. .. . . .. . . . .. 91
CHAPTER FIVE
Historical Transformations . . .. . .. . .. . . . .. . .. 113
CHAPTER SIX
Art and Prudence 143
NOTES ...................................... 172
Introduction
Few relations are more complicated and delicate than that of
a poet and society. Even the most tentative consideration of the
changing nature of this relationship compels us to face anew not
only some of the basic questions of art but also those which go
beyond art. What is a poet? What is the purpose of poetry?
What is the poet's obligation to his fellow man? Is there a way
of reconciling the world of art-in which the poet works
with the world of prudence-in which the poet lives? Is art
merely a cultural or social ornament, or does it proceed from
the very fountainhead of the cultural life of man? And if
poetry is central to human culture, what are the proper criteria
for criticizing and evaluating it?
All of these questions underscore the importance of the poet's
place in society as well as the problems related to it. One way
to begin to understand what is involved is to consider, briefly,
the history of this relationship as philosophers, critics and poets
themselves have described it. Such a consideration, though
valuable in itself for aesthetic reasons, can have other assets
since the way in which a poet is regarded, not only by his fellow
poets but also by other members of his society, often influences
the esteem or disrepute in which poetry itself is held. One of
Dr. Adler's central assumptions in Poetry and Politics, which
is a revision of a portion of his Art and Prudence published in
1937, is that such an examination can yield more than merely
aesthetic conclusions and that the relationship of the poet and
the polis should never be confined to aestheticism alone.
VII
VIII POETRY AND POLITICS
Primitive poets, such as the minstrels whom Homer depicted
in The Odyssey, were men whose songs were primarily intended
to give pleasure; no more than that was asked of or expected
from them. On the other hand, the Old Testament prophets
faced the need of "fountaining forth" ( as the etymology of
the word-prophet-indicates) the conscience of their people
-at times to the chagrin of the Israelites and thus to the
prophet's occasional personal unpopularity. For Euripides and
Aristophanes, despite their obvious differences as playwrights,
the aim of the poetic dramatist was to better his fellow man;
poetry, therefore, was meant to subserve and even buttress the
moral good of the citizen of the state.
Plato, who was equally concerned with preserving the moral
good of the state, turned his attention to the poet's way of
knowing. He claimed that poets were thrice-removed from the
real world of ideas and that, at their best, they were merely
instruments to relay the divine afflatus to others. Although
Plato did respect the power of poetry to sway its hearers, he
had to conclude that poets, being in no way responsible for
the beauty and power of their utterances, should be excluded
from any society of men who respected the primacy of reason.
The irony of this position, as Dr. Adler suggests, is that
Plato's commitment to rationalism forced him to espouse a
view which his temperament and style seemed to oppose. To
be sure, Plato subsequently tempered this view by expressing
his willingness to admit poets into the Republic if they could
prove that their poems had a use as well as a delight. Like
Euripides and Aristophanes, Plato attempted to justify poetry
in terms of morality, and the same argument with only minor
modifications would be resuscitated by Horace, Sidney and
others. Poetry's value, according to this tradition, did not
derive from the unique and pleasurable knowledge which only
it could afford but from its ability to serve an extrinsic good.
In brief, poetry was judged primarily by criteria other than
its own.
It remained for Aristotle to formulate an approach to poetry
by which it could be appreciated and judged according to its
fidelity to the laws of its own creation. By remaining dispas
sionate, Aristotle was able to detect poetic vakes that Plato's
INTRODUCTION lX
a priori approach simply overlooked. "Aristotle's method is
essentially one of examining observed phenomena with a view
to noting their qualities and characteristics," wrote David
Daiches in Critical Approaches to Literature. "His concern is
the ontological one of discovering what in fact literature is
rather than the normative one of describing what it should be.
He is describing, not legislating; yet his description is so organ
ized as to make an account of the nature of literature involve
an account of its function, and its value emerges in terms of its
function." For Aristotle, therefore, poets were men who,
obeying a natural instinct to imitate and an equally strong
instinct for harmony and rhythm, represented men acting in
fictive situations governed by laws of probability as irrevocable
as the laws of possibility in life. The poetic dramatist, by
imitating what could naturally and inevitably happen to a
particular man in a particular circumstance, could both delight
his audience and purge or purify it into what Walter Jackson
Bate has called a "harmonious serenity." In brief, therefore,
Aristotle's poet obeyed a basic law of his being by becoming a
maker, and the plays that he made ( rooted in irony and capable
of arousing the cathartic emotions of awe and pity) could
create in his audience a unique pleasure as well as an insight into
life that was more philosophical and universal than that found
in any other form of expression. In any case, Aristotle did
not commit Plato's error in judging poetry by purely extrinsic
criteria. Instead he viewed it as an activity anrn,erable to its
own organic laws. "Plato confused the study of art with the
study of morals," R. A. Scott-James wrote in The Making of
Literature. "Aristotle, removing the confusion, created the
study of aesthetics. We find, then, that Aristotle in the Poetics
takes it for granted that a work of art, whether it be a picture
or a poem, is a thing of beauty; and that it affords pleasure
appropriate to its kind."
While Aristotle established the climate whereby poetry could
be judged for its own sake, such subsequent critics as Longinus
and Horace gave most of their attention to questions of style.
They contributed little to a deeper understanding of the poet's
role in society. Longinus' essay "On the Sublime" is a study of
linguistic excellence and the various tropes by which such ex-
X POETRY AND POLITICS
cellence can be achieved. Horace's "Epistle to the Pisos"
itself the very embodiment of the critical principles it advo
cates-is essentially a collection of well-expressed views on
poetry, poetic diction, propriety and various poetic genres.
Horace, apart from reiterating the Platonic canon that poetry
should be beneficial as well as delightful ( utile et dulce), is
ultimately a critic's critic, and his synthesis of previous views
of poetry anticipated and set the pattern for the style-con
scious tracts of many of his critical descendents, such as Vida,
Boileau and Sidney, to name only a few.
Questions of style meant little to the early fathers of the
Church. The critical positions of the patristic writers, as Dr.
Adler considers in detail, were essentially censorial. After
objecting to the late Roman poetic dramas as licentious and cor
rupting, the Church fathers gravitated quickly to the Platonic
position of exclusion. Drama per se was suspect. St. Thomas
Aquinas would later establish a philosophical accommodation
for art within the Christian tradition by insisting on the moral
neutrality of art as art and by indicating that the poet's way
of knowledge, though not ratiocinative, was nonetheless a valid
way of apprehending truth. But St. Thomas' views were
lamrntably abbreviated; a fuller exploration of the Scholastic
position would have to wait for neo-Thomists like Jacques
Maritain and Thomas Gilby in a much later century. Despite
this lag in the development of a philosophy of aesthetics, the
medieval church gradually did attempt to make its peace with
the dramatic medium which the patristic writers had so severely
condemned. Little by little the clergy put drama to the service
of religion. They originated mimetic representations of various
Biblical stories for the edification of the faithful. In essence,
this primitive use of art for religious purposes was simply a
baptism of the older Hellenic view of art. Out of this would
grow the cycles of York, Townely, Chester and Coventry, the
morality plays, the interludes, early English comedies like
"Gammar Gurton's Needle" and "Ralph Roister Doister,"
Seneca-like tragedies such as "Gorboduc" and "The Misfor
tunes of Arthur," and ultimately the full flowering of Renais
sance poetic drama from Lyly, Peele, Greene, Kyd and
INTRODUCTION XI
Marlowe to Chapman, Dekker, Heywood, Ben Jonson and, at
the apogee, Shakespeare himself.
Although the early church dramas were the seed out of
which the great dramas of the Renaissance grew, the rudimen
tary views of Aquinas on the nature of art and poetic knowl
edge did not spawn a similar aesthetic evolution. Among
Renaissance critical documents, for example, Sir Philip Sidney's
"Apology for Poetry" recast the old notion of the poet as a
moral teacher as a defense against the dismissive attacks of
such early humanists as Roger Ascham and Stephen Gosson.
The echoes in Sidney are Platonic, Aristotelian and Horatian
rather than Thomistic, and most of the other Renaissance
critics wrote in a similar vein.
Following the profuse but often repetitive Renaissance specu
lations on poetry and poetic diction and aside from the subse
quent judiciousness of a Dr. Samuel Johnson or the critical
flexibility of John Dryden, no new and formidable insights
into the relation of the poet and society appeared in English
letters until the end of the eighteenth century. It began when
William Wordsworth wrote that a true poet was a man speak
ing to other men and that there was a moral dignity derivable
from the pleasure of poetry. Other romantic apologists went
further. For Coleridge-and, a few years afterward, for
Shelley as well-the poet was not only a maker or a man speak
ing to other men but a seer, a visionary. Coleridge called
artistic creation "a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal
act of creation in the infinite I Am." Shelley would subse
quently identify poets as "the unacknowledged legislators of
the world," implying that men in possession of the divinizing
power of the imagination were the true and ultimate spokesmen
and shapers of their societies-not in a geographical, partisan
or social sense, but spiritually. Similarly, when Keats cham
pioned a life of "sensations" rather than of "thoughts," he
was extolling every romantic poet's way of seeing the world.
Aubrey De Selencourt put the matter tersely by stressing that
poetry for Keats and his fellow romantics "was a way of pene
trating to the ultimate mystery of human life-not a garland
to adorn it, but a power to mold it." Such a view, rather than
condemning the poet as a pariah or tolerating his poems as
Xll POETRY A TD POLITICS
sugarcoated presentations of religion, ethics or civics, placed
him at the very center of the life of society. Moreover, for
Coleridge and the other romantics, poetry was not merely
what issued in belles lctlres; rather it was the source of all
vital manifestations of culture and civilization, i.e., architecture,
music, government, philosophy, literature and so forth.
As the nineteenth century progressed, Matthew Arnold, who
advocated a similar view of poetry as both the soul and leaven
of social life, looked to poets to reveal life's "high seriousness,"
and he urged critics to educate the rapidly burgeoning English
middle class to the beauty of poetry which, more than religion,
could raise the level of social life. This was not an echo of
Plato's insistence in the Laws that poetry serve a utilitarian
purpose in order to be admitted into the Republic; this was an
affirmation of poetry's redemptive and educative possibilities
in, of and by itself. To put it in other words, as T. S. Eliot
did in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, "poetry
is not religion, but it is a capital substitute for religion." The
effect of this was that the experience of poetry, according to
Arnold, was essentially the very means by which gradually
urbanizing societies could insure and maintain their civilization.
In America, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman
espoused the same view; their writings were more overtly influ
enced by transcendental and romantic thought, but the social
role ascribed to the poet in a democratic society was not far
different in its ultimate effect from the Arnoldian vision.
In our own time the dialectic continues. I. A. Richards has
perpetuated some of Arnold's theories and embellished them
with h:s affective, semantic and psychological dicta. T. S. Eliot,
who in 1928 in The Sacred J,V ood called poetry a "superior
amusement," had for years insisted upon a reading of poetry
with closer attention to words, techniques, metrics and so forth
in order that the total experience of the poem might result
in a "development of sensibility." For Eliot the poet is pri
marily an artist, and the poem's value emanates from the
reader's experience of it per se and in the context of a poetic
tradition that it is meant to further. John Dewey, whom Dr.
Adler considers at some length in Chapter IV, took the position
that poetry is a means of "social education," and this inevi-
INTRODUCTION Xlll
tably places him in a tradition that begins with Aristotle and
continues to Arnold and Eliot, although Dewey can never be
considered as profound a critic as they.
Concerning the poet's role in society, there is a rich literature
in several traditions. Dr. Adler, who writes more as a political
philosopher than a literary critic, has prudently concentrated
on those dominant traditions around which the key opinions
have pola~ized. If he has chosen to examine the political and
social implications of a problem that many literary critics have
slighted in favor of aesthetic considerations, these same critics
should consider his inquiries as beneficial supplements to their
own. Certainly, poetry's social echoes are as unmistakable now
as they have been in the past. Many of the supra-aesthetic
problems raised by Greek and Shakespearian tragedy are again
raised by the poetry of today as it is manifested in verse, fiction
or the contemporary film. Dr. Adler has proceeded where
most literary critics would, with aesthetic justification, stop, but,
by proceeding, he has shown that all the questions that should
be asked of and about poetry need not be exclusively aesthetic.
SAMUEL HAzO