As a structural linguistic phenomena, what can we say about the nature of poetry? Any proper conception of the nature of poetics in the West must always begin with taking into account the structure of poetics first expatiated upon in classical antiquity by Aristotle. Aristotle believed that unity is an end in and of itself. Life is overwhelming with possibilities, but the goal of art for him is to create a uniform whole—to limit possibilities. Thus connections are essential between segments—no gaps, no superfluities must exist in a work of art. For Aristotle, a literary work must be natural, organic. This can only happen for him when all the parts of a narrative work together in the way they should, with a unified and linear beginning, middle, and end. The poet is a maker. He creates something from other things—components, conventions, principles, rules, codes—necessary for harmony. Aristotle lays out in the Poetics the principle behind an ideal poetic structure. For him, literary phenomena are divisible, available for categorization, and able to be defined and understood. Deeply important to Aristotle is that the universe is comprised of parts that are ordered and can be named, analyzed, and understood, so that hierarchies of importance can be created even in literature, the ideal arrangement of parts can be speculated, and works can thus be judged. In that hierarchy, plot is paramount, followed then by character, thought, diction, song, and only last, spectacle. The revelation of action, imitation, pathos, reversal, and recognition are all literary terms invented by Aristotle in his new science of criticism to aid in the process of looking at and thinking about literature and art, the fulfillment of those terms being what he would claim to be the ultimate aims of any work.
History does not have the sense of unity that for Aristotle the literary work should. Thus, if an artist is to represent a historical event, for him, he must tailor it in such a way that it adheres to the rules of art. Events must be selected and organized in such a way that they present an overall unity within the limits of magnitude that are proper and feasible in a literary work, so that it has the capacity to be retained by the memory and consumed as a work of art without overburdening the audience with disconnected events and details that take away from the unity of the plot. This notion of propriety can also be seen in Aristotle’s conception of proper meter and division of styles, in which the right meter is always used for the right subject matter. Tragedy, comedy, and epic all have their proper meter, dictated by nature. Light meter fits for comedy, heroic for epic, and tragic for tragedy. Poetry evolves from natural human inclinations to imitate and perfect, and thus imitation and the pleasure we take in it are innate because they are a means to learning and contemplation, and because harmony is a felicitous relationship between objects. Thus if we are to imitate nature, our imitation must be organized harmoniously and perfectly. For Aristotle, deviations from this natural flow are perversions, and abominations. However, because art is imitation, not the thing imitated, there is law, logic, and system that is not predicated or dependent on the laws of the world at large. Art is a self-contained whole, complete in itself, and has its own laws that govern its composition. For Aristotle, the end of all literary works is a cathartic response. Thus Aristotle’s ideals for a properly constructed tragedy and epic can be laid out as follows: a work must imitate nature by adhering to the rules of art—it must have the right size, proper magnitude, an interconnected and linear beginning, middle, and end, harmonious unity, dramatic plot, moments of reversal, revelation, and recognition, and it must draw out pity and fear in an audience.
Such formulaic unity as Aristotle advocates cannot always exist in modern genres, however, because a particular genre is often a fusion of other previously established genres and surpasses previous literary boundaries. According to Auerbach, all modern genres are in fact outgrowths of two classical originals: the Homeric and the Hebraic. Even before the advent of modernism, the separation of styles, genres, and discourses, held to be the highest literary protocol of ancient Greece, is violated and set free in literature by the Greek romance, Roman satire, and later the novel. In these the narrative becomes polyphonous, blending and mixing thought and dialogues from different areas and eras and incorporating them into themselves in a way classical literature would never be capable of. By bringing all components of the ancient world (different genres) together, the novel, satire, and the Greek romance change them. Extrinsic and intrinsic concerns are wedded in Auerbach’s Formalism, so that he believed from texts we could abstract into a much larger world order, and the values of a culture could be seen from a given text. Auerbach saw in Petronius’ satirical representations of the vernacular a move towards realism, as opposed to traditional Greek tragic, epic, and even comedic narrative. These were radical changes.
The first break with Aristotelian unity to be noticed in Petronius for Auerbach is that there is an individuation of character through language. Each character speaks uniquely, and is a product of his or her individual experience. The moment of their speech is not as any other moment in their lives, for speech is not unified under the stasis of their nature; it is an amalgam of previous moments. The personality and moral makeup of each character and their speech is not autonomous, free-standing, or intrinsic, but is a consequence of all that has come before in their lives. For Petronius, characters are subject to historical change; they have a historical reality. No one is autonomous; everyone’s existence depends on others. In Auerbach’s view, Petronius introduces the notion that the history of an individual is not unique, but emblematic of the fate of a particular group. The individual is organically connected to the group in which he exists. Further, as opposed to Homeric narrative and tragic, in which status is determined from birth and only rises or falls because of the influence of the gods, here, status is determined by fortune. Chaos orders the universe. Life is a crapshoot and dog-eat-dog. The gods will neither stand behind characters nor hold them down. Thus, anyone can rise and anyone fall by the whim of fortune. Further, the subjectivistic-perspectivistic point of view in Petronius’ satire, the artful splitting of perspectives by making the narrator a participant in his own narrative, destroys the unity of the Aristotelian system of perspective. There is never a first-person point of view in Homer or ancient Greek tragedy and epic, and in comedy, if this exists, the narrators are fools. The world in tragedy and epic is not seen subjectively through the eyes of any character, but is told to us by the narrator, who is often divinely inspired, giving the story an objective claim to truth and authority. In Petronius, however, the values of the narrator can be judged and his authority put in question, because the satire combines genres and mimetic styles. The way in which he judges characters implicitly and conversationally in the satire tells us about his own perspective, and because he is one of their circle, the company is judged by its own standards. The perspective we are given of the characters is thus not unified, but two-fold, and the actions of the characters speak for themselves. No explicit judgment of them need be stated outside of their dialogue, their actions themselves mark the characters for what they are.
Literary genres, from this time forward represent time in different ways than the ancient Greek, and many that exist today were not known to Aristotle in his time. Modernism represents a movement towards simultanaeity and the reduction of linear time and space in literature, in which time becomes relative and disunified. Thus plots need no longer follow the Aristotelian linear ideal of beginning, followed by middle and end, and neither must the meter or style of narrative necessarily remain uniform, but with the introduction of the detective novel we begin to see narratives in which we have an introduction that is abstract or philosophical, followed by protracted background information or the skipping ahead to something that we will only return to much later in the plot, or possibly an example disconnected from the plot illustrating the powers, mental or physical, of the hero or villain, followed only finally by the main narrative plot itself. Any combination of these elements is possible in the detective novel because it synthesizes and reinvents elements from several literary genres. For an artist like Poe, who uses language from several different spheres that Aristotle would find incongruous, his philosophy of composition is almost scientific in nature, a pure process, in which plot is not paramount, but subordinated to the mood or desired effect. Plot is secondary for Poe, and exists only to create an effect, not, as it would be for Aristotle, to unravel an action, and thus Poe and Aristotle are in this respect antithetical.
For 20th century Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky, poets use metaphor to bring words and objects into innovative semantic relationships, allowing us to see them in new lights, in order to present the object to us as sensuous and enstranged. The purpose of images in a novel is not, according to his view, to draw our understanding closer to that which the image stands for, but to allow us to perceive the object in a special way, in order to lead us to a vision of the object rather than a mere recognition. Thus for Shklovsky, form creates for itself its own content. A particular form seeks fulfillment; the elements of the plot must be combined together with other elements to realize the formula. In his own words, “by enstranging objects and complicating form the device of art makes perception long and laborious. The perceptual process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to the fullest. Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity. The artifact itself is quite unimportant.” Most people will go through life without questioning why they use the conventions, symbols, and words that they use so automatically, and Shklovsky argues that the enstranging property of description of symbols in a novel, such as in Tolstoy’s, in a remote way compels us to examine the reasons why we accept these conventions, and either reject or justify them with some amount of logic and activity of thought. By expanding and not describing objects by their name, or by a symbol or metaphor (which Shklovsky claims contributes to this habituated response to the world because poetry of this nature operates on a psychological principle of compression that economizes time and energy by limiting mental activity in imagery—a process of arriving at conceptions through the path of least resistance) novelists such as Tolstoy elaborate to the point where one cannot avoid imaging the actual object. Shklovsky, it can be seen, wants to reclaim the humanist element of literature, so that through consciousness, one’s conscience may be reached. Thinking, for Shklovsky, is foundational to life, and compression, in that it is antithetical to elaboration and thinking, is antithetical to life as well. For Shklovsky, compression has the effect of numbing the senses to the elaborate complexity of life, so that through it one goes through life unconsciously, and thus dead.
Despite their differences, particularly concerning their views on poetry, there is much overlap between early 20th Century Russian Formalism and New Criticism, for all Formalism still derives from Aristotle, and all Formalists view literature as a self-contained artifact, autonomous, and irrespective of time place, politics, history, biography, sociology or impressionistic tastes. The only thing that warrants investigation into a text for a Formalist are the words on the page and their relation to each other. Literature in Formalist thought was to be mined for symbols and paradoxical assertions founded on contradictory principles which still held to be true in the synthesized and unified whole of a work. For Formalists, literature of merit was difficult, and interpretation entailed work, because life, which literature imitated, was founded on the principle of dialectics, which proceeded from thesis to its antithesis to a synthesis, so that all literary work was fraught with irony and paradox. The major difference in schools is that Russian Formalists valued the novel, whereas Western New Critics focused on poetry because they felt that only the language of poetry uses language to its fullest. Poetry was traditionally viewed as the language of the soul, and thus disregarded by Russian Formalism as non-intellectual language, but for New Critics, poetry was also the language of paradox. New Critic Cleanth Brooks claimed that paradox is essential to poetry. Even the poetry of the Romantics, thought in Brooks’ time to be purely emotional, is predicated for him on paradox, symbols, ambiguity, and irony. The theme in poetry, for Brooks, is always a philosophical or abstract articulation of an existential predicament. Paradox for Brooks, because it is the language of complexity, is the only mode of language capable of conveying poetry, and the underlying paradox in poetry is for him precisely the structure that unconsciously gives the reader their emotional joy. Wordsworth’s “Composed on Westminster Bridge” is a poem which Brooks points out to be emblematic of this, in which the sublime experience of nature is transposed onto the landscape of the city. To conceive of the life of the city in the way and the moment in which Wordsworth is seeing it entails using the only language available to express life, which is the language of nature. Thus, though the mechanical, the manmade, is dead, the city for Wordsworth is not dead; it is sleeping. Paradox has been created, and though the Romantics themselves would have their audiences think that their poems are not clever or contrived, in reality they very much are, for the emotion they convey rests on synthesis and paradox, which lend the work its seemingly organic form. This is made evident in Brooks’ explication of Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” a transitional poem connecting Neo-Classicism and Romanticism.
Its status as Neo-Classical and/or Romantic is critical to Brooks’ interpretation of it, and the fact also that it is a highly anthologized work indicated for him that it had been traditionally thought of as transparent, simple, eloquent, and easy to read. Brooks begins his interpretation first by stating that because the poem is an elegy whose message was thought so free from ambiguity and irony, and so sincere, that it would be the hardest to subsume under the theory of poetic structure that he was advancing. However, paradoxically, he goes on to state that the poems seeming simplicity is precisely what gives it its true complexity. Gray’s poem opens with a subjective perspective, looking outside of the churchyard itself, though the elegy is written in a country churchyard. Here there is irony, for the poem deals not at all with the night shrouded area in which its composer stands. Though spatially in the churchyard, we are compelled by the speaker to perceive outside of the space and time which we are in. Everything in the poem is connected not to the churchyard, to the place of death, but to life. Therefore, the elegy does not derive its power from a realistic or a poetic description of the churchyard itself, but by contrast with its opposites, both the lives of the now deceased bucolics and the great abbey church which houses the rich. The afterlife of the dead, the condition of their souls, the condition of their bodies, or of the church itself, or reference to how the poor farmers died is never mentioned. The poem is thus not a simple mood piece, as I.A. Richards claims when he says that to paraphrase this poem in the prose sense nothing is lost. Brooks illuminates how the reader’s response is not determined in the message of the poem, but in its structure, its method. Brooks recognizes that in the traditional conception of the poem it is believed that the poetic device is adornment, not necessary to content, but points out that the poem is based on this paradox and intertextuality, the incorporation of other poems and their contexts. The poem is thus not simple; it is complex and suffused with other references and echoes of other poems. Further, this is so whether the author is conscious of this or not, for poets unwittingly more often than knowingly borrow from their fathers. Thus, all poetry is necessarily infused with the poetry of others who came before. And thus, Gray’s elegy may seem not to resort to device, but this is only so because the device is inherent in poetry, so that we do not even notice it consciously. Nevertheless, the poem is rich and moving rather than trite and conventional because of the modifications to the poem made in these allusions to other poems. Every word, letter, and punctuation in the poem, no matter how obscure, ambiguous, or contradictory their symbols, synthesize together to create an organic whole in which, in the interdependency of symbols on one another, all paradoxes may exist side by side and be articulated in such a way that they can be understood and allow the reader to transcend to a deeper level of meaning, whether recognized emotionally or intellectually, so that ultimately, the poem may exist for the reader on level that is timeless, universal, and unified in its meaning, precisely through the bringing together of divergent ideas and opposites. And this unity was the goal of literature not only for the 20th Century Formalists we have discussed here, but also for Aristotle himself, so that his influence, we must recognize, permeates everything that this school of thought tried to achieve.
