Poetics -- Table of Contents (original) (raw)

Review: Narrative Poetics in the

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Poetry and Poetics: some critical-creative reflections

Itinera

Christopher Norris is Emeritus professor at Cardiff University. Recently, he began to address philosophical questions through poetry. In his paper, he explains why. Rather than expressing definite ideas in an elegant way, poetry can be intended as a process from which new ideas (also philosophical ones) can emerge. The result are a number of poems which cover a variety of issues, ranging from philosophy to politics, arts, history of ideas and science. Itinera has already begun to publish a few of these poems in previous issues and is now presenting three of them on painters (Turner, Matisse, Magritte).

Poetry Handout by Dr. J. S. Rohan Savarimuttu

Concepts and Clarifications 1. Poetry is the first light-giver to ignorance, and first nurse. (Sidney) 2. Philosophers appear to the world but under the masks of poets. 3. Great passport of poetry to beauty and judgement. 4. Hard dull wits softened and sharpened with the sweet delights of poetry. 5. A poet is a diviner, foreseer, or prophet. 6. Poetry is heart-ravishing knowledge. 7. A poet is a maker. 8. World is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden. 9. Poesy is a speaking picture, to teach and delight. 10. Poesy is the lute, the light. 11. Peerless poets perform by precept and example. 12. Poesy deals with universal consideration. 13. The end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing. (Johnson) 14. All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. (Wordsworth) 15. Poesy is outcome of lively sensibility. 16. Poetry is the most philosophical of all writings; it is so; its object is truth, and individual and local, but general, and operative. 17. Poetry is the image of man and nature. 18. Poetry is an acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe. 19. Poetry looks at the world in the spirit of love. 20. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge. 21. The poet binds together by passion and knowledge. 22. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge. 23. The poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration. 24. The poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness to think and feel. 25. Good sense is the body of poetic genius, fancy its drapery, motion its life, and imagination the soul that is everywhere, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole. (S. T. Coleridge) 26. Poetry is expression of imagination. (Shelley) 27. To be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful. 28. The poets are the authors of language and of music…they are the institutors of laws…the founders of civil society…the inventors of the arts of life…the teachers. 29. The poets are legislators and prophets. 30. A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one. 31. The poets are the authors of revolutions. 32. Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. 33. A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. 34. A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet known not whence and why. 35. Beauty of conceptions in its naked truth and splendour. 36. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world. 37. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight. 38. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. 39. Poems contribute to the happiness and perfection of man. 40. Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it. 41. Poetry is ever still the light of life; the source of whatever of beautiful or generous or true can have place in an evil time. 42. The world would have fallen into utter anarchy and darkness, but that there were found poets among the authors. 43. Creation itself is poetry, so its creators were poets; and language was the instrument of their art. 44. Poetry is a burning atom of inextinguishable thought. 45. All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. 46. A great poem is a fountain of ever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight.