Form, Reflection, Disclosure: Literary Aesthetics and Contemporary Criticism
What is the relation between philosophy and poetry; or, rather, how might the relations in which the two continually find themselves be thought productively through aesthetics? Schlegel’s fragment frames the argument I want to develop here, not just by its insistence on a contrast between the two, but in its refusal of a ‘kingdom of barbarity beyond the boundaries of culture’: it is not a question of protecting the boundaries of culture by defending established notions of poetry and philosophy, but, instead, of exploring the ways in which both continually test the limits that tradition has erected. This, I want to claim, might productively be done by evoking once again the categories of philosophical aesthetics to rethink the ways in which poetry, literature and art have been figured in recent theoreticalwork, and to reactivate their potentials to transform experience, thought and critical practice.
DEEP IN THE HEART: MARK TWAIN AND WALKER PERCY AS AUTHORS OF AGENCY
....................................................................................................... ii DEDICATION.................................................................................................. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................. v CHAPTER ONE: NO LINE ON THE HORIZON
The Poet, The Critic, and the Moralist: Horace, Epistles 1.19
I begin by quoting from two valuable recent works on Horace. Professor Brink in his Horace on Poetry (1964) writes: ‘The centre of the short piece lies in lines 21—34. Readers, among them critics and poets, had denied one aspect of the Odes which was surely above criticism—the striking originality of these poems. Horace's defence turns on the question of originality’ (p. 180) and ‘Epistle 19 is unique in that it alone among the literary satires and letters reiterates Horace's claim to be the Latin fidicen’ (p. 182). And Dr. McGann in his Studies in Horace's First Book of Epistles (Collection Latomus 100: 1969): ‘In Ep. 19... as in the literary satires, Horace is a practising poet or at least a very recently practising one, engaged in defending himself against hostile criticism’ (p. 40) and ‘As the only epistle concerned exclusively with literary matters, the nineteenth stands apart’ (p. 82).