A Study of Poetry | Page 3

Aesthetics.
1. The Study of Poetry and the Study of Aesthetics
The Greeks invented a convenient word to describe the study of poetry:
"Poetics." Aristotle's famous fragmentary treatise bore that title, and it
was concerned with the nature and laws of certain types of poetry and
with the relations of poetry to the other arts. For the Greeks assumed,
as we do, that poetry is an art: that it expresses emotion through words
rhythmically arranged. But as soon as they began to inquire into the
particular kind of emotion which is utilized in poetry and the various
rhythmical arrangements employed by poets, they found themselves
compelled to ask further questions. How do the other arts convey
feeling? What arrangement or rhythmic ordering of facts do they use in
this process? What takes place in us as we confront the work of art, or,
in other words, what is our reaction to an artistic stimulus?
For an answer to such wider questions as these, we moderns turn to the
so-called science of Aesthetics. This word, derived from the Greek
aisthanomai (to perceive), has been defined as "anything having to do
with perception by the senses." But it was first used in its present sense
by the German thinker Baumgarten in the middle of the eighteenth
century. He meant by it "the theory of the fine arts." It has proved a

convenient term to describe both "The Science of the Beautiful" and
"The Philosophy of Beauty"; that is, both the analysis and classification
of beautiful things as well as speculation as to the origin and nature of
Beauty itself. But it should be borne in mind that aesthetic inquiry and
answer may precede by thousands of years the use of the formal
language of aesthetic theory. Mr. Kipling's "Story of Ung" cleverly
represents the cave-men as discussing the very topics which the
contemporary studio and classroom strive in vain to settle,--in vain,
because they are the eternal problems of art. Here are two faces, two
trees, two colors, one of which seems preferable to the other. Wherein
lies the difference, as far as the objects themselves are concerned? And
what is it which the preferable face or tree or color stirs or awakens
within us as we look at it? These are what we call aesthetic questions,
but a man or a race may have a delicate and sure sense of beauty
without consciously asking such questions at all. The awareness of
beautiful objects in nature, and even the ability to create a beautiful
work of art, may not be accompanied by any gift for aesthetic
speculation. Conversely, many a Professor of aesthetics has contentedly
lived in an ugly house and you would not think that he had ever looked
at river or sky or had his pulses quickened by a tune. Nevertheless, no
one can turn the pages of a formal History of Aesthetics without being
reminded that the oldest and apparently the most simple inquiries in
this field may also be the subtlest and in a sense the most modern. For
illustration, take the three philosophical contributions of the Greeks to
aesthetic theory, as they are stated by Bosanquet: [Footnote: Bosanquet,
History of Aesthetic, chap. 3.]
(1) the conception that art deals with
images, not realities, i.e. with aesthetic "semblance" or things as they
appear to the artist; (2) the conception that art consists in "imitation,"
which they carried to an absurdity, indeed, by arguing that an imitation
must be less "valuable" than the thing imitated;
(3) the conception
that beauty consists in certain formal relations, such as symmetry,
harmony of parts--in a word, "unity in variety."
Now no one can snap a Kodak effectively without putting into practice
the first of these conceptions: nor understand the "new music" and "free
verse" without reckoning with both the second and the third. The value
to the student of poetry of some acquaintance with aesthetic theory is

sometimes direct, as in the really invaluable discussion contained in
Aristotle's Poetics, but more often, perhaps, it will be found in the
indirect stimulus to his sympathy and taste. For he must survey the
widespread sense of beauty in the ancient world, the splendid periods
of artistic creation in the Middle Ages, the growth of a new feeling for
landscape and for the richer and deeper human emotions, and the
emergence of the sense of the "significant" or individually
"characteristic" in the work of art. Finally he may come to lose himself
with Kant or Hegel or Coleridge in philosophical theories about the
nature of beauty, or to follow the curious analyses of experimental
aesthetics in modern laboratories, where the psycho-physical reactions
to aesthetic stimuli are cunningly registered and the effects of lines and
colors and tones upon the human organism are set forth with
mathematical precision. He need