[R. Nemo Hill]

What Andrew said (since I have no time for saying more myself right now...though I found myself dreaming this discussion all last night).

Nemo

[Ed Shacklee]

Originally Posted by Andrew Mandelbaum

Ed, the centipede is just an example of the grand ideas operating intuitively or underneath, and the need to keep them quiet when pen goes to paper, not evidence that the ideas aloud are "silly", right?

Yes, that's what I was trying to convey. My own limitations aside, however, there are numerous people out there, and here, who can both talk a good game and play it, too. I can't, and confess a bit of impatience with those who seem to feel everyone should -- in my case, I feel as if they're trying to paste wings on a turtle.

And I agree with Andrew Frisardi, if I understand him correctly, a poet's theories may be worthy even if his or her poems are bad. What I meant is that, personally, I am far more likely to trust or at least listen to a poet's theories if I think his or her poems are good. The proof isn't necessarily in the pudding, but. . . .

Best,

Ed

[Andrew Frisardi]

I want to add a postscript to my last post, which is with Ed’s last couple of posts in mind but which actually applies to this whole section of the thread.

Ed, your response to my earlier Sufi quote on beauty (post #248) seems to suggest that I believe that everyone who ascribes to that mystical or esoteric view writes or ought to write like Rumi. Or even like Rumi’s grandmother. That’s not what I meant. The “radiation on a particular level of reality of the Beauty of the Face of the Beloved” isn’t only beauty that evokes the numinous. It doesn’t have to be that grandiose. Even a small poem with beauty in it carries that quality, even if (much) less radiantly. This is about beauty as such, however it appears, not a contest judged by Donald Trump.

Here's my postscript: An idea of beauty is a raison d’être of the activity of making. It rarely, if ever, means that the work that’s done actually reaches the level of the ideal. This isn’t a question of having an ideal and then living up to it—that would be hopeless. Michelangelo purposely defaced some of his work in marble when it didn’t live up to the internal picture he had. As you no doubt know, he thought of the figures that he shaped from marble as existing already in the material; his job as sculptor was simply to free them from the stone. Beauty as it exists in the work of art comes from the extent to which the artist does or does not do this. There are degrees of it.

For me, a metaphysically rooted idea of beauty gives a reason for being to the arts, since it connects the arts to a larger whole—the same whole “life” belongs to. A basic question in philosophy is: Why is there something rather than nothing? A basic question in the arts is: What’s the point?

Any theory of beauty that isn’t merely “academic” (as the misnomer went) is going to address that.

[Ed Shacklee]

I wish I hadn't edited out my initial response to your Sufi quote, Andrew -- which was, simply, "Seyyed seems like a good egg" -- instead of going off into the brambles. My tongue is a bit rusty when it comes to this topic, and I regret any awkwardness. I actually do agree with much of what you say.

I very much believe that, though we may only perceive facets of it, there is an ideal of beauty. I'm happy, if sometimes bemused, when others are so taken with the notion that they go on and on about it, like lovers describing the beloved. Do I hide a yawn sometimes? Well, yes, but that doesn't mean their hearts aren't pure. My own spindly shanked, fey-eyed muse, however, is averse to the thought of being mooned over, and does not take well to such serenades, not from my lips, anyway.

Best,

Ed

[Claudia Gary]

Ed, I agree strongly.
My own muse seeks beauty and concision equally.

[Allen Tice]

Some well-informed academics that I know would give Catullus a "high-five" just for starters!

Originally Posted by Michael Ferris

I have nothing against academics, but didn’t this guy put the point fiendishly well...


The Scholars

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.
All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?

-- WB Yeats

[Allen Tice]

I just realized that Yeats' poem above is a good counter-example to Keats : beautiful, but the implications are quite untrue, even for late-Victorian Latinists.