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On 19 Mar 2003 at 2:33, Mike Shipley wrote: > In a message dated 3/18/2003 9:07:43 PM Pacific Standard Time, > [log in to unmask] writes: > > You are basically suggesting that the exact same poem has > different value depending on who wrote it. > > > Yes, exactly....since the "value" of the poem is in our reaction > to it, and not in any intrinsic value of the work itself. A poem > is just words...it has no power except as we give it wings to fly. > Value lies in the reader's mind, and is a choice made by the > reader. As stated this is trivially true and seriously false. It is certainly true that an unread poem has no "value"--a word that should always be avoided in aesthetics--for the set of all its nonreaders. The process of valuation taken in the widest sense requires an emotional and aesthetic reaction. But to consider a poem just a haphazard heap of words thrown together without any intrinsic formal capacity to shape the reader's response is, if I understand the remarks above, quite false. Valuation may lie ultimately in the reader's mind, but it's not a perfectly free choice like the decision to eat a Big Mac rather than a spinach salad. It takes good poets the devil of a lot of work, as Yeats once said, to fashion words into a form that gives them the capacity to evoke and condition a deep reaction in us. Aesthetic valuation is not a branch of rational choice theory. I know of no sensitive reader who experiences a poem and then says to himself, "OK, this satisfies me in some way that has nothing to do with its inherent verbal structure, so I make a choice to stamp it with a Parnassian status denied some other wordheaps that don't satisfy me for equally vacuous reasons." The whole of Pseudo-Longinus' "On the Sublime" is a testament to intrinsic power of words to transport the reader out of himself into a higher plane of emotional experience. Not all poetry, of course, aspires to "hypsos" (literally 'elevation'), which is just the extreme case of what all good verse does in its own way: summon a manifold of intellectual, emotional and aesthetic experience that may allow us a wide latitude of interpretation but is not hermeneutically infinite. The ability of poetry to do that is not accidental. The author of the treatise, as most Greek critics, argues very persuasively that a "tekhnh" underlies this quality of "hypsos," and if it underlies sublimity, it must in some fashion underlie all superior poetry. > It is the reader or the viewer that gives value to a work of art, > and our perceptions of the creator's character and motives > strongly affect our reaction to it. If one takes the fallacious view that poetry is just a wordheap, then any accidental feeling we may attach to it can color our reaction. It need not be something to do with the author's unsavory biography. Virtually any transient feeling, like that dull burning sensation left by the Big Mac in our stomach, will affect our reaction. Having stripped the poem of all intrinsic power to move us, every form of sentient twitch can change our estimation of verbal pleasure. > I think that the analogy of a great poem written by Hitler holds > true. We would probably refuse to read it at all, and any academic > who proclaimed admiration for Hitler's literary skills would be > scorned and scourged into silence...or even into an apology. If Hitler had written a great poem, say a kind of "Todesfuge" in negative, a hymn that succeeded in erasing Celan's the same way Leverkuehn tried to erase a predecessor's great spiritual work, it would certainly be read and studied. There might be some attempt to limit the audience and availability, but one wouldn't need a Department of Hitler Studies for wide analysis and study. And we have in fact a very good parallel with Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 masterpiece "Triumph des Willens," which documents the Sixth Nuremburg Party Congress. Until at least the 1980s it was very difficult to get a 16mm print or tape. I managed to secure one about 1985 for a class session on propaganda and led them through it, to their growing and almost irresistible fascination, as an object lesson in the power a work of aesthetic manipulation could achieve. Now of course the film is easily available and often taught in film classes. My students' reaction, as the reaction of nearly anyone who sees it for the first time, disproves the claim that inherent aesthetic structure plays no role in our responses. > To suggest that we would accept and love a poem written by Hitler > despite the author's hideous biography seems mildly dishonest...or > at least unrealistic. The issue is not our "love" for the Hitlerian poem, but our engagement with its hypothetical enargeia. We have a lot of decent, occasionally even great, poetry written in very bad causes. Auden's attempt to banish "Spain 1937" from his canon is one example. The thousands of encomia written to Stalin, including one by Mandelstam to save his life, are others. We have fascist poems and communist poems of every sort, not a few of which are worth reading. Our job is not to shirk their study but to warn students what dangers can await us in art. One cannot indict Spenser, then, just on the basis of his actions in Ireland. The overwhelming import of his work, taken in its totality, militates against this. If, however, Shipley could show that the ethical lapses of his behavior (which I take to be proven) had a subtle, corrupting influence on his ethics in the major works, that they somehow corroded and trivialized his presentation of the human situation, that they blunted his human sympathies, that they led to a simplification of our moral options, that they produced a kind of allegorical pastiche, then he might make a case. ====================================== Steven J. Willett Shizuoka University of Art and Culture 1794-1 Noguchi-cho, Hamamatsu City Japan 430-8533 Tel/Autofax: (53) 457-6142 Japan email: [log in to unmask] US email: [log in to unmask]