> 2009/4/27 andrew burke <[log in to unmask]>
> I've just blogged this fiercesome quote from George Eliot: “To be a poet is
> to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it,
> and
> so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely
> ordered
> variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes
> instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of
> knowledge.”
>
> Challenging?
>
>
Does the "new organ of knowledge" pass instantaneously back into feeling
again, and so on? Could be a problem with feedback there.
Joking apart, I like the idea of a dialectic between two registers, one
of discernment (knowledge, which "finely orders" the matter of
experience) and one of association (feeling, in which discrete "shades
of quality" are chorded together). Eliot hasn't moved very far away from
Coleridge's sublime psychologism here though.
Dominic
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