Seems like a good reading to me, Michael. I think the Frost poem is a really fine philosophical piece, as many of his poems are.

And John, if you believe Parmenides, who said that thought and being are the same, heck yeah, poetry and philosophy have a lot in common. Then again, what Parmenides meant by “thought” isn’t what post-Cartesian philosophy means by it. Poetic philosophy or philosophical poetry puts the mind back in the whole, even if the whole is broken. Much modern philosophy does the opposite:

A Fragment

Locke sank into a swoon;
The Garden died.
God took the spinning jenny
Out of his side.

Where got I that truth?
Out of a medium's mouth,
Out of nothing it came,
Out of the dark night where lay
The crowns of Nineveh.

--Yeats

Thanks, Andrew. I'm glad to know it also makes sense to you.

I think Frost had a genius for expressing sophisticated thoughts in simple images and words. And I think he was a master at multiple layers of meaning.

A belated thought - and going back to the State of the Sphere - if we really think it needs a boost, why not give some thought to reviving the Tipsy Muse?

Forgive me, Andrew, for letting this sit so long. Things were overtaken by events, and then I got lost in research, which was ultimately unproductive.

The first question is still a mystery to me. Some don't like to put down their thoughts, out of concerns they'll change tomorrow. Others, like me, have entered into discussions with philosophers, and found my own thoughts cloudy, inexact, unsupportable. We all know so little about the history of aesthetics that it's easy to be bested in such discussions. Still others sincerely believe in Lao Tzu, and hold that those who know don't talk about it, and those who talk about it know little. I get really frustrated with that one.

On the issue at hand, what is beauty? Is it objective or subjective? Is it in the poem, or in the spirit of the reader? Can a poem possess qualities of beauty, which then stimulate the reader's mind? What kinds of poems are actually beautiful? Are poems beautiful in themselves, or only if they lead us to ethical action or intellectual insight? Does beauty lead us to other worthwhile things, and what is its relation to those things?

It seems to me these are the core questions of aesthetics, and the answers supplied are often unsatisfying. Take Diotima. Now, I'm rather fond of her. She says we should contemplate and study the bodies of those who we find physically attractive, and revel in the beauty of the loved one. Seems a worthy goal. But then she says this appreciation of physical beauty is simply preparation for appreciating other forms of beauty, intellectual beauty, the beauty of laws, etc. So I turn away, agreeing with Barthelme: 'I don't want to contemplate a silly red towel. I want to look at the beautiful Snow White arse itself!'

Plato is even less satisfying. Forms themselves are beautiful, but no poem can have real beauty (see under Emerson), since the most beautiful thing is objective truth, and no poem can fully possess that. This is why Keats' monism is so unsatisfying: one thing *is* the other, but we can't have either, since they only exist "out there" somewhere. All we can do is dimly remember a time when we existed in that pure realm of forms, and so poetry's only role is the equivalent of Proust's madeleine.

Now, Yeats says 'measurement began our might,' and so sides with the pythagoreans. Beauty comes from form and relationships, from numbers, and the best poets naturally embody such things without thinking (cf. Pope: I lisped in numbers for the numbers came). The people who point to the relations of music and mathematics must agree with this idea. And no-one's going to say Bach isn't beautiful. Still, after a little while, I admit to getting bored as he runs through all 16 progressions in sequence. It's like reading the Prelude: I want to throw the book across the room.

Before we leave the old people, there's one other idea they clung to: beauty is not truth, beauty is good. And by partaking of it... well, the poem is like syrup of ipecac: it purges the bad out of us. The most beautiful poem will make us throw up the most, and then we'll feel better: more balanced, more healthy. I shouldn't make fun of Aristotle this way, it's almost like heresy. But honestly...

As long as we're making fun of people, let's make fun of Shelley, shall we? Mount Blanc is literally awesome (yes, he's stealing this stuff from Kant) it's so big, it fills us with a sense of wonder precisely because it's beyond us. It takes away our puny thoughts, and leaves our mind empty, the way an overwhelming orgasm does. Cynics would say it no longer counts, because we now have enough explosives to blow up the whole mountain. But we can't blow up the universe, and contemplating its vastness leads to that same sense of awe. Under this idea, the deep space images Hubble sends back are the most beautiful things we have. Maybe.

But it sounds like we're going up in a balloon. Back on earth, some say beauty is conflict, or arises out of conflict and juxtaposition. Nabokov would hate the idea he's repeating Hegel and Nietzsche, but he does exactly that. Beauty becomes synthetic, you need two things for the synthesis to happen, and as soon as you achieve equilibrium, the new conflict leads to imbalance. This is why new poems have to be written. Adorno was wrong, we shouldn't stop writing poetry, the problem is that the world had gotten out of balance, and the only way to rectify the world is to write new poems to restore the harmony. Very hard to argue with that one, in spite of all the misreadings of Auden.

We haven't mentioned spiritual aesthetics, and I admit to being put off by them. Take Christianity: you're supposed to do two things - contemplate the cross, and contemplate the eucharist. Remember Diotima: contemplation leads us towards the beatific vision, and what could be more important than that? And it's like looking at Mount Blanc: we're so over-awed, our minds become empty, allowing room for something else to flow into us. The idea isn't unique to spirituality: when I first went out with Kate, we went for coffee. She seemed so beautiful I lost all my words, I couldn't even talk. W.C. Williams says the same thing: "Shaken by her beauty." The moment was transformational, it changed my life. This is the justification for beauty in poetry: a truly beautiful poem leaves us speechless, and changes us in a deep way. Music and painting can do the same - they're not simply objects (this is the mistake the New Critics made), they are truly transformative, real agents in our lives.

But why and how? We've just gone past halloween, a pale imitation of the Samhain my ancestors celebrated. They believed that, on this one evening, the barriers that separate the various realms became a little less solid, and movement between them became possible. It's a nice idea. Should we accept it?

For a long time, I didn't. Then one day, I went to one of Kate's concerts. There were all kinds of people there, rich and poor, educated and unlettered, young and old. I happened to be sitting next to a couple of 80 year old nuns. And when they heard her singing, after just a little while, they started to weep, not tears of sadness, but of joy. I've seen her have the same effect at funerals: people transformed from mourning to joyous peace. It's striking, and perhaps unbelievable until one experiences it. Accept, for a moment, the effect is real. But again, why and how?

The only answer I can come up with is the beauty of her voice. It has nothing to do with the words, or with numbers, or proportions, or study, or ethics, or Truth. When she's able to open herself completely, the beauty of her voice itself opens us, empties us, the barriers between realms come down, and something flows into us, which brings us peace and joy, such incredible joy we begin weeping.

That's the poem I want to write, a poem that can do that. If I were a painter, I'd want to paint an image which can do that. Is there some secret golden chord, some transformative line of poetry? Would I even recognize it if I accidentally wrote it? I have no idea. And if it worked on me, would it work on a reader?

I've already gone on too long, and I have to go feed the chickens and gather the eggs. I can hear them clucking outside my window. If you've gotten this far, thank you for your patience. I really wish I could solve this problem.

Best,

Bill

I wonder as if the problem is the wish to "solve" beauty by dissecting the eyes or spinning the blood of the image into its separate parts so you can find the right proportion of salt to iron in a fair curve.

Maybe you don't mean that sort of thing but it sounds like it sometimes.

I hope beauty remains an untrackable, undefinable nonsense just barely making it across the rope of translation, barefoot, no net below. Forever.

If you meet beauty on the road, kill it.

Best,

Ed

"On the issue at hand, what is beauty? Is it objective or subjective?"

The objective is vanishing before our eyes. Turns out it's all subjective.

It's objective when applied to standards, but the standards are subjective.

Thanks for that great post, Bill (#224, above). Whatever it is in Kate’s voice, in an algebraic equation, or for that matter in the Kaaba or the ocean that moves people to the core—that’s beauty. I think that is the gist of what you say there at the end of the post. Everybody knows it when they’ve experienced it, and everybody wants that experience, however we define it or can’t define it, wherever we find it or don’t find it. It isn’t surprising that it is so hard to talk about or define—it would be surprising if it were otherwise, with anything that has such scope and power.

A brief disagreement with your characterization of Christian theories of beauty: Pseudo-Dionysius. I can’t do better than to say, as he does, that whatever beauty is, it transcends any particular manifestation of it—since it is experienced in so many ways and forms. Like being. The fact that I can say “I am,” and that it is true, doesn’t make it any less true when someone else says it. The “I” transcends the individual who says it. Megalomania (i.e., everyday delusion enjoyed by us all) is forgetting this. Beauty too is above and beyond its particular form. If this were not so, it is hard to see how it could be transformative in the way you describe. Beauty’s un-pin-down-able-ness, which you and Ed and Andrew M. refer to, comes from its not being a thing among other things. It can’t be possessed or googled, figured out or embalmed. The experience of it takes us out of the isolation of me-in-here subjectivity, into direct communion, to the I-am-no-longer-I, as Juan Ramón Jiménez puts it: Yo no soy yo. I am not I. Soy este / que va a mi lado sin yo verlo, / que, a veces, voy a ver, / y que, a veces olvido. “I am this one who goes along by my side without my seeing him, who at times I am on the verge of seeing, and who at times I forget.” The experience of beauty is the remembering, so whatever beauty is “in itself,” it has got to be something akin to that not-I or Other which is who we really are.

That’s what I understand by the curious phrase “Beauty is a transcendental.”

Someone, I think it was the sculptor Eric Gill, said that the last thing an artist should aim for is beauty. And he was a follower of Maritain. Gill’s point was, just do the work and do it well, and the beauty will come—or it won’t.

All art is a matter of objective subjectivity. And Keats nailed beauty. It's silly to go into such long and tortured definitions of these things. "It's Academic".