Poetry is the soul of art

Poetry is the soul of art

Posted on July 7th, 2009 by Frank Wilson

“Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge declared in “Definitions of Poetry,” adding that “poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.”

The idea that the opposite of science is poetry appeals to me as by instinct, but when I first came upon this quote I wasn’t sure if I agreed that “the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.”

In fact, though, the immediate effect of all genuine poetry is pleasure in the sound of the words. The meaning of the words “how weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world” may have nothing to do with pleasure, but the sound of the words themselves has everything to do with it.

Upon reflection, I realize how much my sensibility has been infected with the Puritanism of the age. Nowadays, any artist in any medium who said his aim was to give pleasure to readers, viewers, or listeners would likely be dismissed as a lightweight. This is why actors and rock stars are driven to share with us their clichéd opinions on geopolitics — because being a mere entertainer isn’t serious enough and these narcissists want above all else to be taken seriously. (Why they chose to pursue their frivolous careers instead of getting a degree in some appropriately “serious” field is a question they apparently lack the insight to pose.)

It is, by the way, wrong to think of the word entertain strictly in terms of amusing diversions. The root meaning of the word is “to hold among.” To entertain means to get and to hold the attention of an audience. As Claude Debussy said: “Beauty must appeal to the senses, must provide us with immediate enjoyment, must impress us or insinuate itself into us without any effort on our part.”

Of course, beauty is something else artists are a tad leery of these days, preferring instead to be edgy, transgressive and most of all address the issues of the day, which usually means whatever is in the news. Mere beauty, in the sense of loveliness, harmony and grace would be too much like mere entertainment, insufficiently serious.

This view also is grounded in misunderstanding, a confusion of beauty with what is merely attractive or pretty. There is beauty in tragedy, but there is nothing pretty about it. Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande may be the most sheerly beautiful opera ever written, but it also unrelentingly sad, a heartache in five acts.

Debussy scoffed at the idea of mixing art with quotidian affairs. Art, he said, is “the most beautiful deception of all,” adding that “although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.”

These two views — the one opposing poetry to science, the other opposing art to the utilitarian — have much in common. How much is evident when one considers what poetry’s place in art is. Aristotle, in his Poetics, famously defines “plot” as “the soul of the drama.” By plot, Aristotle didn’t mean the sequence of incidents or storyline. He called that the action. No, by plot he meant the substantial form of the entire work. For him, the plot is to the drama as the soul is to the body.

Poetry, I would argue, is the soul of art. It is what integrates the elements of a work in a way that causes it to “impress us or insinuate itself into us without any effort on our part.” This “communication of immediate pleasure” is what rivets our attention no matter how horrendous what is being depicted may be. For Oedipus the King, Goya’s dark paintings, and Chopin’s funeral march all give pleasure while dealing with pain. It isn’t their dark subjects, however, that makes them art. It is their poetic alchemy.