Poetological Positions

Choose a subject that is suited to your abilities, you who aspire to be writers; give long
thought to what you are capable of undertaking, and what is beyond you. A man who chooses
a subject within his powers will never be at a loss for words, and his thoughts will be clear
and orderly. […] Poets aim either to benefit or to please, or to combine the giving of pleasure
with some useful precepts for life. When you are giving precepts of any kind, be succinct, so
that receptive minds may easily grasp what you are say and retain it firmly; when the mind
has plenty to cope with, anything superfluous merely goes in one ear and out of the other.
Works invented to give pleasure should be as true to life as possible, and your play should not
demand belief for just anything that catches your fancy; […] The man who has managed to
blend usefulness with pleasure wins everyone’s approbation, for he delights his reader at the
same time as he instructs him. This is the book that not only makes money for the booksellers,
but is carried to distant lands and ensures a lasting fame for its author. [Horace, from The Art
of Poetry]

There is no art delivered to mankind that hath not the works of nature for his principal
object, without which they could not consist, and on which they so depend, as they become
actors and players, as it were, of what nature will have set forth. So doth the astronomer look
upon the stars, and, by the last seeth, set down what order nature hath taken therein. So doth
the geometrician and arithmetician in their diverse sorts of quantities. […] Only the poet,
disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention,
doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth,
or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops,
Chimeras, Furies, and such like […] Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as
divers poets have done; neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers,
nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. […] Poesy therefore is
an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis ‒ that is to say, a
representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth ‒ to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture ‒
with this end, to teach and delight. [Sir Philip Sidney, from The Defense of Poesy]

What is a poet? […] He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more
lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human
nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a
man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the
spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as
manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he
does not find them. […] Aristotle, I have been told, hath said, that poetry is the most
philosophic of all writing; it is so: its object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and
operative; not standing upon its external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion;
[…] Poetry is the image of man and nature. […] [A poet] considers man and nature as
essentially adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest
and most interesting qualities of nature. […] I have said that poetry is the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the
emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and
an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually
produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition
generally begins […]. [William Wordsworth, from Preface to Lyrical Ballads]

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his
appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value
him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. The necessity that
he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art
is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.
The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the
introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is
complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty,
the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions,
values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the
old and the new. […] The analogy was that of a catalyst. When the two gases […] are mixed
in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes
place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of
platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and
unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate
upon the experience of the man himself: but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely
separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly
will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material. […] For it is not the
‘greatness,’ the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic
process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts. […]It is not
in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet
is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or
flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of
the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. […]The business
of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them into
poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has
never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must
believe that ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ is an inexact formula. For it is neither
emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquility. It is a concentration,
and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences
which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a
concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. [T.S. Eliot from
Tradition and the Individual Talent]