*Aristotle answers this (so does Sidney) by saying that when we see terrible things, those terrible things become a waring to us, a lesson of what we should not do.
*Aristotle also offered up the solution of catharsis: if we do not see anyone doing these terrible things, we will go and do them. Poetry and tragedy give us the psychological means to cleanse our emotions.
*Stephen Gossen and Thomas Love Peacock both wrote attacks on poetry
*Matthew Arnold's "disinterested" doesn't mean not interested, it just means not terribly anxiety ridden
*Sidney believed that literature gives us an idealization of things
*Joyce believed that pornography was anything that gets you to do something.
hamartia: Aristotle's tragic flaw (when Oedipus comes to realize what he's done)
*The job of the poet is not to project the particular (historical fact) but to find the universal.
deus ex machina: god from the machine/miracle means to resolve the plot
*The moral is less important for Aristotle than the plot.
*Modern writers suggest that the meaning of the work is the work itself
Dante's 4 levels 1. Literal 2. Allegorical 3. Moral 4. Anagogical
*The metaphor is an intermediary stage
allegory: a notion of extended metaphor, talking about one thing and meaning another
*Parable comes out of the word parabola; it comes at you from a curve
DR. SEXSON QUOTE: The most interesting place is always beside the point.
*When you put quotes around anything, you are distancing yourself from any committment to the literal.
*Anagogical is almost like the sublime. It is the level of the text that supercedes any other level. It suggests the unity or integration of self and text.
*Sidney introduces us to the pragmatic - does this text make me a better or a worse person?
"It was so and it was not so" -the poet never lies because he never affirms
*Nature is imperfect so the artist improves on nature.
prolyxity too much veriage
*Wallace Stevens agress with Sidney; the poet does make the world prettier.
*Oscar Wilde would say that there was no snow until Robert Frost wrote about it
*Poet gives us a world that is golden instead of bronze.
*The historian is bound to the particular and the specific. He can only tell you what happens.
*The poet is far more important than the Historian. He deals with general, universal truth.
*The poet's figurative language conveys a deeper truth
*Johnson believed that the function of literature is to make you a better person. Poetry is the highest learning
*The poet is not concerned with the particular, with the streaks on tulips. He is concerned with a general truth. This general truth does not change.
*Poet gives a representation of general nature.
*The Romantics fly off into the circumambient gases.
*Johnson's pragmatic approach deals with what the poetry does for the human being.
"Imagination is a repetition in the infinite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM"
