Term paper on Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The Poet"

THE POET by RALPH WALDO EMERSON


RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century and was seen as a champion of individualism. He was born on May 25, 1803, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the son of William and Ruth (Haskins) Emerson; his father was a clergyman, as many of his male ancestors had been. He attended the Boston Latin School, followed by Harvard University (from which he graduated in 1821) and the Harvard School of Divinity. He was licensed as a minister in 1826 and ordained to the Unitarian church in 1829. Emerson married Ellen Tucker in 1829. When she died of tuberculosis in 1831, he was grief-stricken. Her death, added to his own recent crisis of faith, caused him to resign from the clergy.

In 1832 Emerson traveled to Europe, where he met with literary figures Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. When he returned home in 1833, he began to lecture on topics of spiritual experience and ethical living. He moved to Concord, Massachusetts, in 1834 and married Lydia Jackson in 1835. Emerson’s early preaching had often touched on the personal nature of spirituality. He influenced Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller; Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman later. Emerson was significant as well for English and European intellectuals and philosophers, including George Eliot and Friedrich Nietzsche, and for the American philosophers William James and John Dewey. Emerson died of pneumonia on April 27, 1882.

 Emerson's first book, Nature, was published anonymously in 1836 and this brief book contained  all of his philosophical thoughts. Following this ground-breaking work, he gave a speech entitled "The American Scholar" in 1837. Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first, then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series, published respectively in 1841 and 1844—represent the core of his thinking, and include such well-known essays as Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet and Experience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a leading exponent of New England Transcendentalism. Transcendentalism was a philosophical movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the eastern region of the United States. The movement was a reaction to, or protest against the general state of intellectualism and spirituality. Emerson became known as the central figure of his literary and philosophical group, now known as the American Transcendentalists. These writers shared a key belief that each individual could transcend, or move beyond, the physical world of the senses into deeper spiritual experience through free will and intuition. In this school of thought, God was not remote and unknowable; believers understood God and themselves by looking into their own souls and by feeling their own connection to nature. Emerson played an active role in the meetings of the Transcendental Club. He believed that all of creation is one, that men and women are inherently good, that intuition is the source of truth, and that individual perception illuminates and structures the world. "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind," Emerson professed, and this view led him to criticize the traditions, beliefs, and practices of the past that restricted the intellectual and moral development of persons in the present. God dwells within, according to Emerson, and thus each person should, he said early and late, establish an "Original relation to the universe." He worked as the editor of the journal The Dial, which was recognised as the official voice of American Transcendentalism.
Emerson was one of the proponents of American Romanticism. Romanticism in America flowered somewhat later than in Europe. The American independence from British rule in 1776, that opened the path to examining national identity, the development of a distinctly American literary tradition in the light of Romantically reconceived visions of the self and nature. The major American Romantics included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville. While some of these writers were influenced by European Romantics and philosophers, nearly all of them were inspired by a nationalistic concern to develop an indigenous cultural tradition and a distinctly American literature. They sought to redeem the ideas of spirit, nature, and the richness of the human self within a specifically American context. It was Emerson who laid the foundations of American Romanticism. Utilizing the ideas of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle, he developed organicist ideas of nature, language, and imagination, and called for American writers to depart from the strict genres and formal hierarchies of European literary tradition and to forge their own modes of expression.



THE POET

The essay "The Poet" by Ralph Waldo Emerson was written between 1841 and 1843 and published in his Essays: Second Series in 1844. In this essay, Emerson speaks about what a true poet is and how a true poet is able to express the thoughts and puts the words, what many people cannot do. Themes concerning nature, the religious sentiment, and the transcendentalist attitude of withdrawal from the currently degraded state of politics, are brought together in the essay."The Poet" contains Emerson's thoughts on what makes a poet offering a profound look at the poem and its role in society. Emerson also expresses the need for the United States to have its own new and unique poet to write about the new country's virtues and vices. The essay played an instrumental role in the 1855 appearance of the first edition of Walt Whitman's collection of poems, Leaves of Grass.

The first section of the essay outlines the character of the poet as an interpreter and a visionary. Emerson begins the essay by noting that works of art are judged by umpires with their pre-knowledge of some rules and particulars, which is a ''proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty as it lies in the minds of our amateurs''. Unlike the intellectual, who sees no dependence between the material world and the world of thoughts and ideas, or the theologian, who relies exclusively on historical evidence for truth, the poet acknowledges an interdependence between the spiritual and the material worlds. Emerson then states that we are "children of the fire," and the energy and brilliance of this fire is similar to the spirit in each of us. Emerson calls the poet the ‘Man of Beauty’ as the poet acknowledges interdependence between the material and spiritual world.  

Following the introductory paragraph, Emerson says that a poet represents humanity and that he could be called as ''the complete man''. Isolated from society, the poet has a spiritual affinity with nature. We need interpreters of what nature expresses, Emerson comments, because too many of us have distanced ourselves from nature's life-affirming spirit and could not even articulate the conversation that we had with nature. The best interpreter of nature is the poet and who sees what most of us only dream about. The poet , ''in whom all the powers are in balance'' must act as a conduit, exposing nature's hidden secrets to us.

Emerson considers the poet to one of three "children" of the universe, he constructs a system of threes: cause, operation, and effect or Christianity's Father, Spirit, and Son, and the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. These triads stand for the love of truth, the love of good, and the love of beauty, respectively, with the poet representing the last element in each set. That is, the poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. Emerson creates an argument formally known as a syllogism: If, as he maintains, "Beauty is the creator of the universe"; and if the poet is "the man of Beauty"; then the poet is the creator of the universe.

Emerson says that poetry is not something that was found some time back, but for ages ago, poets did exist and a poem could bring out the time that the poet existed and it is the strength of poetry. He also says here that it is not the style that matter, but the content and message to be conveyed that matters, rest everything will follow. The poet announces that which no man foretold and he is the true and only doctor. All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of the poet is the principal event in chronology. Man keeps on watching for the arrival of a brother who can hold him steady to a truth until he has made it his own.

The second section of the essay deals with the mode of communication of the poet. It is the poet whose province is language; nature offers its vast variety to him as a “picture-language.” He uses the things in nature as types, as symbols; hence, objects in nature acquire a second value, and nature “is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part”. Emerson helps us to make sense of this by reminding us that the “Universe is the externization of the soul,” and that its symbolic value lies in its pointing beyond itself, toward the supernatural. Emerson considers science as something sensual and superficial.

According to him, it is not only the poets, the men of leisure and cultivation, who live with nature. But also hunters, farmers, grooms and butchers, though they express their affection in their choice of life and not in their choice of words. He continues that it does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem and every new relation is a new word. Though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. The poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. Emerson expands the notion of the poet-as-visionary and asserts that the poet, using the gift of imagination, can liberate humanity by enabling others to experience transcendental visions. He says that, by using the imagination ideas, a poet could bring elements of reality in the poem. Emerson views genius as the activity which repairs the decays of things, whether wholly or partly of a material and finite kind just as Nature, through all her kingdoms, insures herself.

In the next section, the poet releases the energizing power of our imaginations and could find our inspiration through the poet words. A poet could unlock the selfish thoughts within us and make us realize that we live in a world where we are concerned about our thoughts and needs only, turning to be very selfish. From this idea Emerson moves to the frequent association of poets with overindulgence, especially with alcohol or narcotics, which is to be understood, he says, ''to add extraordinary powers to their normal powers''. To support this point of his, Emerson quotes Milton that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is, not 'Devil's wine,' but God's wine.

Emerson now returns to the importance of the poet to humanity, and this time he stresses that the poet is not only an interpreter of nature: He is akin to "liberating gods." In other words, the intellect is freed from its bondage to the restrictive bodily sphere of practical interests and survival. Emerson refers to poets as “liberating gods . . . They are free, and they make free”. They liberate us from the tyranny and fragmentation of conventional perception, from “the jailyard of individual relations,” and enable us to see ourselves and the world in a more comprehensive and far-reaching light. Every thought is a prison, says Emerson, and the poet liberates by yielding a new thought. We prize this liberation because “we are miserably dying”. And a poet ''unlocks our chains and admits us to a new scene''.

In discussing this liberating aspect of poetry, Emerson invokes the name of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish mystic and philosopher who is mentioned in many of his essays. Swedenborg is an example of the visionary who sees what others do not, and whose strange and original images allow us to view our world in a new light. At first glance, Emerson seems to be contradicting his own proclamations concerning this new American vision when he admiringly discusses Swedenborg. However, Swedenborg represents an ideal that Emerson hopes Americans will achieve for themselves.

In the final section of the essay, Emerson reflects on the need for an American poetic genius to express the particular beauty of the continent and its peoples. As with his essay “The American Scholar,” Emerson concludes by calling for poetic universality to comprehend what is peculiarly American. There exists, as yet, no poet of genius in America: “our fisheries, our Negroes and Indians . . . the northern trade, the southern planting . . . are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for meters”. Emerson’s words proved prophetic in Whitman’s “I sing America.” The poet is he for whom “the ideal shall be real”. Emerson is true to the Romantic inversion of the categories of the bourgeois world: that world is insular, incomplete, and denuded of all relation, all context in which it would find its true meaning. To redeem such relation is the poet’s task. Emerson reflects the need of a true American poet, like how Shakespeare was to the British and Dante to the Italians. This essay was written before Robert Frost or Walt Whitman started writing, as they are considered as answers to Emerson’s seeking. Emerson's essay conclude: '' Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldst walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble''.


 In "The Poet," Emerson pictures the imaginative seer as liberating us from ordinary life, which is characterized as miserable and prison like. The poet, says Emerson, “proposes Beauty as his main end,”. Like many Romantics, Emerson laments that the current age is reduced to a mechanical understanding of the world. Man at present, says Emerson, “works on the world with his understanding alone. He lives in it and masters it by a penny-wisdom”. While Emerson appeals for a modern and exclusively American literature, Emerson himself bases his arguments on views of English writers and Romantics like William Wordsworth. Emerson thereby contradicts himself as he cannot come out of his English and European influences. Moreover, Emerson's 'poet' throughout the essay is addressed as 'he' and, on the other hand, 'nature' for Emerson is strictly feminine. In short, Ralph Waldo Emerson in this essay tries to define a poet and laments the distancing of urbans from nature. Emerson in the essay self implicatively speaks of poetry being a poet.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abrams, M. H. and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 10th ed. New Delhi: Cengage Learning, 2012. Print.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature and Selected Essays. New Delhi: Penguin, 2003.

Habib, M. A. R. A History of Literary Criticism: from Plato to the Present. New Delhi: Blackwell, 2006. Print. pp 455- 463.

Habib, M. A. R. Literary Criticism from Plato to the Present: An Introduction.      Singapore: Blackwell, 2011. Print.

''Ralph Waldo Emerson''. Leitch, Vincent B. ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Ctiticism. New York: Norton, 2001. Print. pp 717-739.

Term Paper on Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky: “Literature and Revolution”

A revolutionary socialist and a leading force in the Russian Revolution of 1917 Leon Trotsky is a major political figure if the twentieth century. He is denounced by those who support Tsarsiam for whom the formation of workers state in Russia were destructing, threatening developments. Also at the same time, as he opposed Stanlin’s rise to power in the new Soviet Union and saw it in  the ruin of everything Russian workers and peasants fought for, he was denigrated by Stalinists and others who viewed revolutionary socialism with some other form of state control and dictatorship.

He was born in 1879 in Ukraine as the son of a Jewish farmer. He was sympathetic to the plight of farmers and peasants around him, and turned to Marxism in the mid-1890s. He was sent to exile in 1900 because of his political activities, from where he escaped and journeyed to London, where he, Vladimir Lenin, and others edited a journal, The Spark. Having returned to Russia in 1905, he was imprisoned again. Escaping from there again, he for the next few years works as a journalist in Vienna , Paris and New York City and returned Russia following the beginning of the Russian Revolution in 1917, supported Lenin and joined the Bolshevik party and won the elections to its central committee. A superb orator, writer, and agitator, Trotsky first was appointed foreign minister and then commissar of war. He commanded the Red Army during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, and he believed that he would be Lenin's successor. But Joseph Stalin was a shrewder, more vicious politician then him outmanoeuvred him and eventually expelled him from the Comunist Party in 1927. Having been deported from Russia he lived in Turkey (1929-33), France (1933-35), Norway (1935-36), and finally Mexico (I 935-40) before being assassinated by a Spanish Communist named Ramon Mercader in August 1940, in Mexico City.

Some critics see the Russian revolution as a misguided or malevolently motivated mistake—a bloody, conspiratorial revolt against the barbarity of czarism and of capitalist imperialism (the Revolution grew directly out of World War I) that led inevitably to the brutality of Stalin’s police state, show trials, and gulags. The collapse of the Soviet union and its East Bloc satellites at the end of 1980s created fresh opportunities opportunities for historical and political analysis outside the confines of a Cold War mindset, a confidently progressive and open-minded rethinking of the Revolution has been slow to emerge and take hold. Trotsky in his remarkable “History of the Russian Revolution”, published in 1931, saw the Revolution as the first great movement in the self-emancipation of humanity, a movement led by workers organized through an awareness of their power to transform society.

Trotsky makes a unique contribution to understanding of cultural conflict and change in the period of the Russian Revolution. “Literature and Revolution” was published in 1924. The essays that make up the book are believed to be written during the summers of 1922 and 1923. Though the Civil War of 1918-1921 had ended with the Bolshevik-led workers’ state victorious over the forces that wanted to return Russia to czarism, the country was economically and socially devastated. Many of the most effective working-class revolutionaries had died fighting the counter revolutionary White Army. Industrial production had fallen to catastrophic levels, forcing the government to adopt a series of measures known as the New Economic Policy (NEP), which permitted a return to small-scale capitalist trade. The international revolutionary movement, without which a socialist society in Russia was impossible, had suffered severe defeats—particularly in Germany in 1918 and again in 1923. In addition, Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Party and chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, had suffered debilitating strokes in May 1922 and March 1923, making it easier for Stalin to consolidate his power base within the bureaucracy and to form his alliance (or troika) with Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev for the primary purpose of weakening Trotsky’s influence. Under such circumstances, it does at first seem surprising that Trotsky would have turned his attention to questions of culture, art, and literature.

But in fact, the genesis and argument of “Literature and Revolution” demonstrate some of the deepest impulses in Trotsky’s political thinking. But in fact, the genesis and argument of “Literature and Revolution” demonstrate some of the deepest impulses in Trotsky’s political thinking.  As head of the Red Army, he understood as well as anyone that revolutionary moments in history are most decisively defined and driven by the material necessities of life. Trotsky argues in his Introduction, human cultural needs are in their own way as real as any other needs:

…even a successful solution of the elementary problems of food, clothing, shelter, and even of literacy, would in no way signify a complete victory of the new historic principle, that is, of Socialism. Only a movement of scientific thought on a national scale and the development of a new art would signify that the historic seed has not only grown into a plant, but has even flowered. In this sense, the development of art is the highest test of the vitality and significance of each epoch...

 Art, as a distinctive form of culture understood most broadly as the “sum of knowledge and capacity which characterizes the entire society” (000), at once follows and completes a society’s response to the “elementary problems” of human need, production, and distribution.

Trotsky begins the fifth chapter, The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism, of “Literature and Revolution” by saying that art is neither self contained, separate from politics, nor political, a matter solely of ideology. Literature then was produced by the elite, the intelligentia who had a lot of money and tme to spare unlike the industrial workers who had to run around to make a living. They, the intelligentia were actually the profit makers of the industrial world hence the working class or the proletariats could not speak for themselves. Trotsky in the essay asks if it is possible for the proletariats to produce literature.

While defining a,”Marxist point of view," he stresses that Marxism does not require that we "dominate it by means of decrees and orders" or mandate that we esteem only those works of art that celebrate workers. However contrary to then political scenario Trotsky does not prescribe how a literary artist should write. At the same time, Trotsky by no means favours allowing art to exist independently of; political judgments, as his, adverse, commentary on formalism and futurism indicates.

Formalism was an early-twentieth-century movement in literary criticism that emphasized the analysis of literary language; its formal properties and strategies. The Formalist school headed by Shlovsky and Jacobson declared form to be the essence of poetry. Trotsky argues that this analysis which they see as the essence of poetry is useful and necessary but at the same time it is partial, scrappy, subsidiary and preparatory in character. But the Formalists are not content to ascribe to their methods a merely subsidiary serviceable and technical significance, to them verbal art ends finally and fully with the word, and deceptive art with colour. For Shklovsky “art was always free of life, and its colours never reflected the colour of the flag which it waved over the fortress city. For Russian Formalism form determines content.

The shift from the agrarian society to the urban industrialised settlements of the period could be seen in art as well. The new form that originated forced he poet to seek appropriate materials for representation and pushed him in the direction of cities. The changes in the social environment transmits the new impulse of life through the artistic consciousness of the poet. . Language changed and complicated by urban conditions, gives the poet a new verbal material, and suggests or facilitates new word combinations for the poetic formulation of new thoughts or of new feelings, which strive to break through the dark shell of the subconscious. He argues that if there were no changes in psychology according to the changes in the social environment, there would be no movement in art: people would continue to be content, from generation to generation, with the poetry of the Bible or of the old Greek texts.

Art is always a social servant and historically utilitarian. It finds the necessary rhythm of words for dark and vague moods, it brings thought and feeling closer or cOntrasts them with one another, it enriches the spiritual experience of the individual and of the community, it refines feeling, makes it more flexible, more responsive, it enlarges the volume of thought in advance and not through the personal method of accumulated experience, it educates the individual, the social group, the class and the nation. And art performed these tasks irrespective of whether it was ‘pure’ or tendencious.

Each class has its own policy in art, that is, a system of presenting demands on art, which changes with time. He further explains Marxist conception of art. He says that the Marxist view of objective social dependence and social utility of art, when translated into the language of politics does not at all mean to dominate art by means of decrees and orders but as a new and revolutionary which speaks of the workers. He stands for the complete freedom in the creation of art. However he requests the writers to consider the new class and call them in the process of creation of a new world. He says that the proletariat too needs to have an expression of the new spiritual point of view which is just beginning to be formulated in him, which woulf need the help of art to give it a form. It is a historic necessity not a state order.

He criticizes the Formalists school for not having al logical conclusion for their idea of art. If one is to regard the process of poetic creation only as a combination of sounds or words, and to seek the solution of all the problems of poetry along these lines, then the only perfect formula of "poetics" will be this: Arm yourself with a dictionary and create by means of algebraic combinations and permutations of words, all the poetic works of the world which have been created and which have not yet been created.”

He then destructs Shklovsky’s attempt to destroy Marxism in five points. And says that one cannot always go by the principles of Marxism in deciding whether to reject or accept a piece of art, but, he adds, Marxism alone can explain why and how a given tendency in art has originated in a given period of history; in other words, who it was who made a demand for such an artistic form and not for another, and why. He says, the artistic work of man is continuous. Each new rising, class places itself on the shoulders of its preceding one. But this continuity is dialectic, that is  it finds itself by means of internal repulsions and breaks. New artistic needs or demands for new literary and artistic points of view are stimulated by economics, through the development of a new class, and minor stimuli are supplied by changes in the position of the class, under the influence of the growth of its wealth and cultural power. Artistic creation is always complicated. Turning inside out of old forms, under the influence of new stimuli which originate outside of art. In this large sense of the word, art is a handmaiden. It is not a disembodied element feeding on itself, but a function of social man indissolubly tied to his life and environment.

He concludes by saying that the formalist methods are necessary but insufficient. One may count up the alliterations in popular proverbs, classify metaphors, and count up the number of vowels and consonants in a wedding song. It will undoubtedly enrich ones knowledge of folk art, in one way or another; but if he do not  know the peasant system of sowing, and the life that is based on it, then he does not know the part the scythe plays, and if he has not mastered the meaning of the church calendar to the peasant, of the time when the peasant marries, or when the peasant women give birth, then he has only understood the outer shell of folk art, but the kernel will not have been reached. The effort is to set art free from life, to declare it a craft self-sufficient unto itself, devitalizes and kills art. The very need of such an operation is an unmistakable symptom of intellectual decline.

Bibliography

·         Literature and Revolution, ed. Keach, William. Illinos, Chicago. Haymart Books, 2005

·         The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2001)

·         A History of Russian Literary History and Criticism”Soviet Age and Beyond. Ed.Dobrenko, Eygeny and Tihanov, Galin.  Pittsburg,University of Pittsburg Press, 2011.

·         The Arts in Russia Under Stalin, Berlin, Isaiah.  The New York Review of Books.  October  issue, 2000

Anjitha Tom, Term Paper

                    

                     A Study on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

Virginia Woolf was born into a highly literate and artistic family as Adeline Virginia Woolf in the year 1882. She is one of the foremost modernists and feminists of the twentieth century. She was one of the members of Bloomsbury group, an intellectual circle of writers and artists that encouraged a liberal approach to sexuality and the traditional views. Her famous works include Mrs. Dalloway, To the Light House and Orlando.

She presented two lectures on the topic Women and Fiction at Cambridge University’s Newnham and Girton colleges in 1928 and these lectures were later expanded and revised and became the celebrated book A Room of One’s Own which got published in the year 1929. This book worked at the intersection of modernism and feminism, both of which she stood for. Through this book, she analyzed the differences between women as objects of representation and women as authors of representation and invited the audience to think about “the books that are not there”. This book is a landmark of twentieth century feminist criticism and opened up the entire territory of modern feminist thoughts.

The paper gives a detailed study on three celebrated moments from the book A Room of One’s Own, Shakespeare’s Sister, Chloe Liked Olivia and Androgyny.

In Shakespeare’s sister, Woolf is puzzled of the reason for the absence of women writers in the most fertile Elizabethan Age. She believes that absence has to do a lot with the living conditions of the time. She finds that women of the age only had few rights, despite having strong personalities, especially in the works of art. Here, she is reminded of the Bishop’s comment that no women equal the genius of Shakespeare and she imagines what would have happened had Shakespeare had an equally talented sister, named Judith. Woolf outlines the possible course of Shakespeare’s life, the grammar school, work at theatre in London, acting, meeting theatre people and so on. His talented sister however was not able to attend school since education was denied for women during the time and her family discouraged her from studying on her own. She was married against her will as a teenager and she ran away to London to pursue her desires at night. The men at the theatre denied her the chance to work and to learn the craft. An actor manager showed sympathy on her and later got impregnated by him, torn between her passion for the art and the life she lived, she committed suicide and got buried at some unknown cross roads. This is how Woolf believes such a female genius would have become in the time of Shakespeare.

However, she agrees with the bishop that no women of the time would have had such genius, “for genius like Shakespeare is not born among laboring, uneducated, servile people. It was not born in England among the Saxons and the Britons. It is not born today among the working classes” and women back then fit into this category. Yet she admits that genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working classes. Now and again an Emily Bronte or a Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on to paper.

Woolf finds that creating art is very difficult and one must need a private space and money of their own to write and the women of the age were denied both and the creativity of the female writers was opposed actively. She claims that when one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Woolf thinks that the male discouragement was in accord with the masculine desire to retain the status of superiority. She thinks that the anonymous writers were always women. Edward Fitzgerald suggests that it were women who made the ballads and the folk-songs, crooning them to her children, beguiling her spinning with them, or the length of the winter's night.

Towards the end of this part, she starts developing her theory that for a writer to attain genius like Shakespeare’s, there must be no external obstacles both from one’s inside and outside, only then a genius can be incandescent.

Another detailed study is on a moment that comes under chapter 5 of the book, Chloe liked Olivia. Here, Woolf proposes the idea of friendship between women and contemplates on its substance and harmony. For explaining this, she pulls down a novel called “Life’s Adventure” by Mary Carmichael. She at first claims that this prose work is not as good as Jane Austen’s. The smooth gliding of the sentence after sentence that can be find in Austen’s cannot be find here, instead it is interrupted, something tore and something scratched. She soon revises her opinion noting that Miss. Carmichael’s writing has nothing in common with Austen’s; it is attempting something completely different. The decisive moment in Mary Carmichael’s innovation comes with her words, “Chloe liked Olivia.” Woolf realizes how rarely literature has presented real, amicable relations between women. Women were always, at least until the nineteenth century, considered in their relationship to men and were represented with a peculiar nature in fiction, her beauty and horror, alternations between heavenly goodness and hellish depravity, and represented in the need of love, to get protected.

Here, in Life’s Adventure, Chloe and Olivia work together in a laboratory outside, a fact which greatly changes the kind of friends they can be. The narrator begins to think that an important transition has occurred in the field of literature, “for if Chloe liked Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been.” Woolf claims that if men in literature were portrayed only in relationship to women, not in friends to other men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers, literature would suffer; only a few parts of Shakespearian play would be written. Woolf watched how both Olivia and Chloe looked each other and looked deep down to their unrecorded gestures. She exclaimed at Carmichael’s writing and looked into the space where women are alone, unlit by the capricious' and coloured light of the other sex. Even if she portrayed the relationship between women, Woolf is not fully convinced with Carmichael. She points out that she does not represent the culmination of the literary development Woolf has in mind, “for she will still encumbered with that self-consciousness” that keeps her in the realm of nature- novelist, rather than a contemplative artist. She advices Carmichael to learn not only to tell the truth about women, but also to tell, gently and without rancor, that bit of truth about men that has gone untold because it is what they cannot see in themselves.

Woolf’s interest in homosexuality can be traced back to her own life. She had an affair with a poet as well as a gardener named, Vita Sackville West. After a tentative start of their affair, they began a sexual relationship. Woolf’s affection towards her resulted in a book written by her, Orlando, which is considered as the most charming love letter in literature. Through this book, she explores Vita, weaves her in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds, teases her, flirts with her, drops a veil of mist around her. After the affair ended, the two women remained as friends until Woolf’s death in 1941.

Literature has portrayed only a little of the relationship between the same sexes. Since heterosexuality is seen as the norm by the society, the ‘other’ will not be accepted by it. Woolf is actually requesting the writers to write about the truth that are hidden behind the ‘norm’ which is considered as the only truth.

Another moment in “A Room of One’s Own” that is taken under study is “Androgyny”, which comes in the chapter six. Here, the major concept raised by Woolf is that of gender difference and that of androgynous mind. Woolf argues that for a mind to be fully fertilized it should have the fusion of both male and female living in harmony with each other and spiritually co- operating. An androgynous mind does not concern about the gender but with the subject it deals with. It does not care what the sex of the writer is but concentrates on the subject matter that it is about write. Androgyny does not imply a total absence of gender, but such a complete fusion that wipes away any gender consciousness and free the mind.

Woolf refers to what Coleridge has once said; he said that a great mind is androgynous. For her, Shakespeare is a fine model of this androgynous mind. An androgynous mind transmits emotion without impediment; it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided. She points out that it is harder to find current example in this “sex- conscious” age. The narrator blames both the sexes for bringing about this self- consciousness of gender. She judges the androgyny of various famous writers. She tells that if a writer’s mind is purely male or female, if there is not total freedom of thought, then the writing will never be fertilized. It is one of the tokens of the fully developed mind that it does not think specially or separately of sex.

Woolf believes that the suffrage campaign for the women provoked men’s defensiveness over their own sex. She gives example for this by reading a new novel by a well- respected male contemporary writer. The writing is clear and strong, indicative of a free mind, but she later notices that the male writer protests against the equality of the other sex by asserting his own superiority. If a writer only has one mind her/his can only be understood by their own sexes, thus other sexes will suffer.

Again, Woolf talks of the writings by women. She does not consider the idea that writing out of protest can often be more powerful than writing out of complacency. She gives high position to complacency than the idea that was held high by other feminists. She insists upon the absence of anger and protest in writing. This is where she gets differentiated from other female writers.

She then comes back to the point that was discussed much earlier. She repeats that without material things, one cannot have intellectual freedom and without intellectual freedom one cannot have intellectual poetry. Through this, she again claims the idea of private space and money one must possess their own.

The book is generally seen as a feminist text and is noted in its argument for both a literal space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by patriarchy.

Bibliography

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. The Norton Antghology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Leitch B Vincent. New York: W.W Norton and Company Ltd. 2001. Print.

Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Wadsworth: Cengage, 2012. Print

TERM PAPER, SAAD MOHAMMED MUHASSIN, PLATO'S REPUBLIC

INTRODUCTION

Plato is widely acknowledged as being responsible for laying the foundations of Western philosophy. While claims are quoted such as saying that the entire concept of Western philosophy is indebted it can be considered as a bit of an exaggeration. Regardless Plato is responsible for raising questions on our soul its connection on our body, the ideal political state, and the use of literature and arts. These questions are still pondered upon and we have not been able to reach a consensus on these matters.

Plato was born in the year 428 B.C. to an aristocratic family, which helped in shaping his values in later life. Four years had passed since the end of the long and bloody Peloponnesian War fought by the Athenian forces on one side and The Spartans on the other. The Athenian statesman, Pericles under whom Athens reached the zenith of its glory and grandeur, had just passed away. Like many other young men of his age, Plato fell under the spell of the Greek thinker and teacher, Socrates who influenced the young Plato greatly  Socrates was a controversial figure in the sense that he undermined and questioned the conventional practices and beliefs of the public. People from different circles of life ranging from politicians to artists felt the sharpness of his intellect and he rose the hostility of those who pretended as wise men and teachers by deflating their pretensions. He was charged and condemned to death for his beliefs in 399 B.C.

This event turned out to be a turning point in the life of Plato who left Athens and travelled to different nations such as Italy, Sicily, and Egypt. On his return he found an academy, where the students were given training in different disciplines such as geometry, mathematics, philosophy, biology and political theory to say a few. Among the students of this academy were none other than Aristotle who later critically examined and expounded Plato’s observations into his own.

The aim of this paper is to critically examine Book II and Book VII from Plato’s Republic where he speaks on different issues such as education of the young, censorship, the role of art and literature and the concept of ideal republic where he devises a set of laws which would help in running the republic. He speaks on mimesis and the now infamous allegory of cave where he questions our notion on reality.

To Plato the purpose and aim of literature is didactic i.e., it serves a moral purpose and the aim of a poet is to ensure that the public is given a message which is morally and socially relevant to the society. This instance marks the age old debate whether poetry is for the sake of poetry or for a higher purpose such as to ensure the moral rightness of the people.

REPUBLIC

BOOK II

Childhood is an age when our personalities, habits and beliefs begin to form and solidify. In the words of Plato himself, “That’s when most of the formation takes place, and it absorbs every impression that anyone wants to stamp on it”. Plato devises an educational system where it would satisfy both the body and mind. It includes activities such as exercise for the sake of one’s body and cultural studies for the mind. For such a scheme to be successfully implemented, strict control must be kept on what they hear and take into their mind. According to Plato it is the duty of the mothers and nurses to ensure that the children grow up listening to “suitable” stories. Just as they mould their children’s body with their hands, their minds should also be molded in a similar manner.

Children are not to be raised with stories of Gods fighting or plotting against each other.  According to Plato poets of the past have often narrated false stories so in a similar fashion the modern poets narrate the stories of Gods by distorting the true message and presenting an often false and distorted one which is quite similar to how painters on painting a portrait fails to capture the true essence of the object depicted. Plato says;

            “Now, I think that even if these stories are true, they oughtn’t to be told so casually to young people and people who lack discrimination; it’s better to keep silent, and if one absolutely has to speak, to make them esoteric secrets told to as few people as possible, who are to have sacrificed no mere piglet, but something so large and rare that the smallest conceivable number of people get to hear them”.

Plato says that the children who will eventually become the guardians of the city should only hear the censured stories so as that they would not go corrupt and if at all the pure version has to be revealed it can be done once they grew into adulthood.

Then he goes on to say that goodness is responsible for everything in this world. He says that as God is good all good actions must be attributed to him but when it comes to bad actions or events it must be attributed to some other source. If at all events such as fights and conspiracies are included the playwright must take care that it is shown in such a way that God’s actions are justified. God is responsible for all goodness but not evil.

Doing this Plato is attempting to censure the stories that can be found in Greek mythology such as Gods fornicating, intervening in worldly matters and bitter jealousy among others. This is particularly relevant in today’s context as we see various attempts done by various agencies to censure works of art or literature on the basis that they feel it is unsuitable, dangerous or hurts one’s religious or caste sentiments.

BOOK VII

Plato says in this book;

“Imagine people living in a cavernous cell down under the ground; at the far end of the cave, a long way off, there’s an entrance open to outside world. They’ve been there since childhood, with their legs and necks tied up in a way which keeps them in one place and allows them to look only straight ahead, but not to turn their heads. There’s firelight burning a long way further up the cave behind them, and up the slope between the fire and the prisoners there’s a road, beside which you should imagine a low wall has been built- like the partition which conjurors place between themselves and their audience and above which they show their tricks. Imagine also that there are people on the other side of the wall who are carrying all sorts of artifacts. These artifacts, human statuettes, and animal models carved in stone and wood and all kinds of materials stick out over the wall; and as you’d expect, some of the people talk as they carry these objects along, while others are silent”.

This is a segment from Book VII which is now famous for the iconic Allegory of the Cave segment. Here Plato questions the very notion of reality. According to him we perceive the world according to our five senses therefore what we see, hear, taste, or smell becomes reality for us. We find it very difficult to accept new ideas and beliefs and those who are brave enough to do so are dismissed as lunatics. Plato through this segment wishes to say that reality is not only what we see or perceive by our five senses but there are things which are hidden from us and we cannot understand or grasp yet. There is no single reality or viewpoint through which the world

can be perceived and understood but rather there can be multiple realities.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

·         Habib, M. A. R. (2005). A History of Literary Criticism. New Delhi: Blackwell Publishing.

·         Leitch, Vincent. B. (2001). The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. USA: W.W. Norton & Company.

TERM PAPER

ARS POETICA

SALMANUL FARIS K

I MA ECL

“If in a picture, Piso, you should see

A handsome woman with a fish’s tale

Or a man’s head upon a horse’s neck

or limbs of beasts of the most different kinds

covered with feathers of all sorts of birds

would you not laugh, and thinks the painter mad?”

Ars Poetica, or “The Art of Poetry,” is a poem written by ancient Roman poet Horace who advises in the poem about the poets on the art of writing poetry and drama. The work was written during the Augustan age and it was known as the golden age of Roman literature. In that glorious age of literature, Horace was one of the leading members of the illustrious circle of poets patronized by the emperor Augustus. At the same time a great satirist of his time. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and stands almost equal to Virgil in Poetry. 

Horace produced a number of lyric poems (epodes), odes, and verse epistles. His epistles are mostly deals with the subject of poetry. "Epistle to Florus", “Epistle to Augustus” and ”Epistle to the Pisones" are examines the role of poetry in its state and asserts the merit of poetry. The famous “Epistle to the Pisones” is known as “Ars Poetica” or “The Art of Poetry”. Ars Poetica has influenced the writers of the subsequent generations in Europe. Some of the writers considered Ars Poetica as their literary manual.  

Quintilian was the first person who give the title Ars Poetica (Art of Poetry) or Fiber de' Arte Poetica (book of the poetic art) to Horace’s “Epistle to the Pisones”. Pisones are a famous Roman family with an interest in literature, poetry and literary criticism. Precisely to the senior Piso, Lucius Calpurnius Piso and his two sons. Ars Poetica is letter in form, a long conversational poem discussed about poetry. This form of poetry were widely imitated by later poets like, Geoffrey Of Vinsauf in the twelfth century, Pierre De Ronsard in the sixteenth century Nicolas Boileau in the seventeenth, Alexander Pope in the eighteenth, Lord Byron in the nineteenth, and Wallace Stevence in the twentieth.

In his distinguished critical work “Essay on Criticism”, Pope pays the following tribute to Horace:

Horace still charms with graceful negligence,

and without method talks us into sense,

Will, like a friend, familiarly convey,

The thrust notions in the earliest way.

The genre of literary theory in verse form present many challenges. Because of the requirements of  versification, the structure of Horace’s text is dictated less logical argumentation than by verbal association and rhetorical one.

While heavily indebted to Greek literature, and in particular to Aristotle (especially the Poetics and Rhetoric), the Ars Poetica is neither a systematic exposition of a coherent theory of poetic composition nor a comprehensive textbook for aspiring writers. Instead it is an argument for poetry as craft. Another key principle that dominates the whole of the An Poetica is decorum. It is the most acceptable Horatian principle which appealed to later European neoclassical critics.

They often applied standards of decorum as more rigid than Horace himself would have. The Ars Poetica" has no clear design or the theory of poetry and drama. Here the poet  mixes numerous literary maxims in a manner which is likely to confuse an ordinary reader. A critic rightly calls the poem “art without an art”. Horace had borrowed his doctrines and precepts from the study of Greek masters, especially from Aristotle’s "Poetics". Plato had emphasized on the didactic angle of poetry and had said that it should make better citizens. On the other hand, Aristotle laid stress on the aesthetic delight of poetry, Horace synthesizes both there ideals and says: “a poet should instruct, or please, or both”—line 370.

“Ars Poetica” begin with the ‘unity’ and ‘consistency’. If a painter should wish to unite a horse’s neck to a human head, and spread a variety of plumage over limbs [of different animals] taken from every part [of nature], so that what is a beautiful woman in the upper part terminates unsightly in an ugly fish below; could you, my friends, refrain from laughter, were you admitted to such a sight. It is a question for the reader which is whether he laughed at such sight or not? Through this suggestion Horace try to say about the unity and consistency.

A poem must have organic unity; all the parts must be vitally connected with one another. The poet is free to indulge his fancy, but he must not lapse into absurdity and create monsters or impossible figures.  The poet must choose only those subjects which he is able to deal with. The subject must suit both the power and style of the poet.

We can categorize the topics which discussed in the poem.

The subject-matter of Poetry

The subject-matter of poetry should be simple, i.e., from familiar material, and uniform, that is full of wholeness. He says that he who chooses his subject wisely, will find that neither words nor lucid arrangement will fail him, for sound judgment is the basis and source of good writing.

Poetic Diction

Horace will always be remembered for his theory of poetic diction. Poetic diction, he says, can never be altogether established and stationary affair. The function of language in poetry is to express; but man’s experience, which poetry exists to express, is continually changing, since it is continually adding to itself. With the growth of experience, the language of poetry must keep pace, if it is to be truly expressive. Language is like a tree; and its words are like leaves. As the years go on, the old leaves fall, and new leaves take their place; but the tree remains the same. Horace’s observations on poetic diction are like those of Aristotle. Following Aristotle, he also emphasises the right choice of words and their effective arrangement in composition. A poet is free to use both familiar and new words. New words continually go on coming to the poet like new leaves to the tree. The poet must not rely wholly on the vocabulary of his predecessors; he must coin new words too.

His Observations on Style

Horace wished that the writer should observe the settled forms and shades of style in poetry. He pointed out some of the shortcomings of style. ‘I endeavour to be brief and become obscure; sinew and spirit desert the searcher after polish : one striving for grandeur becomes bombastic; whosoever is excessively cautious and fearful of the tempest crawls along the ground; and he who yearns after too prodigal a variety in his theme— he paints a dolphin in the forest, or a wild boar amid the waves. If the poet does not have genuine artistry, the effort to avoid an imperfection leads him into graver butchery.

Metres and their appropriateness

‘Homer has shown us in what metre may best be written the deeds of kings and great captains, and sombre war. Verses of unequal length were first used for laments, later also for the sentiment that attends granted beseechings. The Muse has given to the lyre the celebration of the gods and their offspring, the victorious boxer, the horse, first in the race, the amorous yearnings of youth, and the unrestrained pleasures of wine. If one does not know and cannot observe the conventions and forms of poems, he does not deserve to be called a poet. Comic material, for instance, is not to be treated in the verses of tragedy ; similarly, it would be outrageous to narrate the feast of Thyestes in verse proper to common daily life and almost to comedy.’ Sincerity of Emotion       

‘It is not enough for poems to have beauty; they must also be pleasing and lead the listener’s soul whither they will. If you would have me weep, you must first express grief yourself.

Views on Drama

In Ars Poetica the treatment of drama is desultory. No systematic theory of drama is presented on a larger basis. Only fragmentary and casual views are expressed, e.g. ‘Either follow tradition or invent a story which is consistent. But the conventional features of traditional characters should be preserved.’ ‘If in your tale you represent the renowned Achilles, let him appear restless, passionate, inexorable and dauntless.’ ‘If you commit a new theme on the stage and venture to create a new character, ct the first impression be preserved to the end, and let his nature be consistent. ‘Let not Medea murder her children in front of the audience nor impious Atreus cook human flesh in the public nor Procne be changed into bird. Let a play be neither shorter nor longer than five acts and let no god intervene unless some problem arises that demands to be solved. The number of actors should not be more than three and the chorus should form an integral part of the action and its songs should advance and subserve the interest of the plot.’ ‘Let it support the good and give them kindly counsel, restrain the wrathful and favour those who fear to sin; let it praise the fare of a simple table, salutary justice and Law and Peace with open gates’.

Horace studies drama under three heads : plot, characterization and style. Plot should be borrowed from familiar material; the chorus should be an integral part of the plot; characters should behave consistently and naturally; iambic metre was most suitable for drama. Dramatic speech should observe propriety : it should suit the character, its sex, its age; its station in life, its circumstances, its moods. A god will speak differently from a mortal, a man from a woman, an aged man from a heated youth, a prosperous merchant from a poor farmer, a man in grief from a man in joy, an angry-fellow from a playful one. if you utter words ill-suited to your part, I shall either doze or smile.’ In all this Horace closely follows Aristotle.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1.      Habib, M. A. R. A History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present. New Delhi: Blackwell, 2006. Print

2.        The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Leitch B Vincent. New York: W.W Norton and Company Ltd. 2001. Print.

3.      Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Wadsworth: Cengage, 2012. Print

"

  TERM PAPER

Aristotle’s  Poetics

Submitted by:Uvais                       Submitted to :Dr. Shalini                                                                                                                     

           

                              DATED ON : 12/11/2015

Introduction

“With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible.” 
                                                                                       ― Aristotle, Poetics

Poetics is the monumental work of  Philosophy, dramatic theory and  literary theory  in which Aristotle speaks about poetry, drama, comedy, tragedy, satyr play, lyric poetry and epic poetry. It played a vital role in the literary tradition of the western world but unfortunately it was lost and later  reproduced from  latin with the help of Arabic translation of it by Averroes for the days of middle age and the renaissance. Composed  around  330 BCE, it was mostly preserved like the  student’s lecture notes. Most importantly, in many parts of it he gives  responses  to his teacher, Plato, who has said that art is mere representation of   many appearances and it’s a waste of time as it thus misleading and morally suspect. Analysing things quite scientifically, Aristotle takes a different approach from that of his  teacher  by attempting to describe art’s social function , ethical utility and features of each “species” of the text. Any way we could say that any work of  literature  must  be  subjected to aristotlian views and Aristotle was  a man of letters who became a popular subject for many critics.

It is inevitably declared that the study  of  literary criticism and theory must be started from the poetics of Aristotle. It is a long text which contains 24 chapters. Trough this paper I would be dealing with a simple analysing of poetics.

Content

 Dealing with aristotle’s poetics is little bit complex , though, for the general understanding of  criticism it is by all means necessary. Before  going deeply to the text, I give short summary of each chapters. Aristotle comes to define the purpose of poetry as imitation, that is mimesis,in the first chapter where  he speaks about the tragedy and the comedy in the second chapter as he says that the aim of  this  imitation is representation of humanity in good and evil; it will cover the good people of  merit, the virtues of  superior men. Its kind is the tragedy. Representing mistreated  poor  people and their vices. Its kind is the laughable and the  ugly : the comedy. Trough the third chapter he describes two ways of  telling , namely, 1)  story , imitate by telling , 2)  theatre, imitating all the characters with all the characters as acting, as in act. In the next chapter it is  said  that the  poetry as the literary production by imitation and it differentiates between animals and humans. He  described the epic, tragedy and comedy trough the later chapters; The epic is a story that is not limited in time and  the tragedy should long as long as “a revolution of the sun”, or one day. The 6^th chapter defines the  tragedy is precisely  as “the imitation  of an action of high character and complete a certain extent,  in a language statement seasoning of a  particular species according to the various parties, imitation that is made by characters in action, not a story, and, arousing  pity and fear, operates  purgation  [catharsis] specific to such emotions.” Later he says that   imitation of the action is “history”  as  it arranges  of the facts  of the characters.  The seventh chapter deals with  the story ; mythos  must be in order. Tragedy is an imitation of an action  got to an end and must be fully adjusted with. It needs a good start, a good middle and  a good end where in chapter eight he makes a unit of  imitation , namely, the story cannot be changed, which  we call today the  global economy of history. In the ninth  chapter, he differentiates between historian and the poet as the historians describes the latest events where poet would say what could happen and happens in general.

In chapter ten, he simply tells simple  and  complex  plots. Then it talks about catharsis; pity and fear, reversal and recognition. The various parts of  tragedy are described in  the chapter twelve  where he reminds of the pitfalls to avoid in producing  various arts forms in the thirteenth chapter. The theory of  knotting that is the arrangement of  situations are spoken in the next chapter. Then everything related to the character is detailed in the fifteenth chapter. Goodness in the words and actions , the truth of character in the representation of character, the similiarity in the appearance of the character and the consistency of the characters are  the main characters of the character.

 Types of recognition, node and outcome, poetic style, the pronunciation and the sound, few elements in the rhetoric , appropriateness of common names and the vocabulary in the tragedy, the epic wants to be like tragedy and the tragedy is superior to epic are respectively discussed in certain chapters.

 1. Poetry as Mimesis

The first discussed topic  in the Poetics is the initial recognition  of dramatic poetry as a form of imitation. The  poet as creator, and is  offended  that he might be merely some sort of  device. The  painter  teaches us how to look and shows us what we never saw, the dramatist presents things that never imagined until he imagined them, and makes us  feel worlds we could never have found  Aristotle does not  diminish the poet, and  says  that poetry is more philosophic than history. According to Aristotle, imitation  does not mean the sort of mimicry by which Aristophanes, say, finds syllables that resembles the sound of frogs. He is speaking of the imitation of action, and by action he does not mean  the real happenings.

Action refers only to what is chosen for finding completion in the achievement of any purpose. Young  children  and animals  do not act in this sense, though  action is not the life of any . The poet should look  for the arrival  of action in  life, and a sense  which deserves worth attention . A feeling, intelligent, shaping human mind must find them. At the same time, the action of the drama  is not on the stage. It’s form is in the imagination of every spectator. The actors move and speak and gesture, but it is the poet speaks through them, to produce to us the thing that he has done. The imitation is by all the meaning  the thing that is re-produced for our life  by his art. The imitation would  be a powerful kind of manly communication, and the imitated thing  is what defines the human standing. Without the  power to imitate action, life will be washing  over us without leaving any model.

 Mimics those are skilled can imitate people we are related, by gesture, voice, and so on, and here already we must contact   imagination and intelligence and   together. The dramatist imitates things more remote from the eye and ear than familiar people. “Sophocles and Shakespeare, for example, imitate repentance and forgiveness, true instances of action in Aristotle's sense of the word, and we need all the human powers to recognize what these poets put before us. So the mere phrase imitation of an action is packed with meaning, available to us as soon as we ask what an action is, and how the image of such a thing might be perceived”

Aristotle presents   tragedy as a raise and development out of the kid's mimicry of animal voices, but in the same way that he perceives philosophy as a raise out of the enjoyment of sight-seeing.  Everythin

 g  of these raisings there was a vast number of possible interconnected stages, but how philosophy is the ultimate result and form of the desire to study, like that  tragedy is considered by Aristotle the ultimate result and  form of our innate enjoyment and delight in imitation. Homer got and achieved the important features and possibilities of the imitation of action, but the tragedians who, intensified the imitation, and achieved its perfection.

2. The style of Tragedy

 Only if a work arouses pity and fears it becomes tragedy was the opinion  of Aristotle. He uses a word which  means passions (toiouta), but many of critics   think that he  only  “indicate that pity and fear are not themselves things subject to identification with pin-point precision, but that each refers to a range of feeling.”  The another question aroused by many of  critics was why he told two states of mind. Aristotle justifies that it is the sign “of an educated person to know what needs explanation and what doesn't.” Further, he does not try to prove that there are two states of mind. But he says that those two states are helpful to be more inquired about the work and it’s consequences.

 The theater is just a platform  for the manipulation of  interests and passions in  so many  ways that are joyous and pleasant in the short run and at least longest and  reckless to continue  repeatedly. By all means, the drama could be seen as kind of many additions, which  produce the solutions  for everything.

Tragedy always  involves  finding the limits and weakness of  human. This would not be a combination of mere of intense feeling, but a

  More artistic discovering of  powers to bear  the image of the worldly representation. Aristotle is right that “the powers which first of all bring this human image to sight for us are pity and fear”. Nobody can say that the artists throughout the world only try to raise pity and fear but the feelings they arouse are substituted and subordinated to another feelings and effect. “Aristotle begins by saying that tragedy arouses pity and fear in such a way as to culminate in a cleansing of those passions, the famous catharsis. The word is used by Aristotle only the once, in his preliminary definition of tragedy.”

3.  Catharsis from the Tragedy                                                             

     Tragic catharsis is a purgation. Fear is the only one thing that can make human’s life to be anxious about something. In horror movies, they redirect our fears toward something  grotesque, external and finally ridiculous, in order to  clean and puncture them. Fear is something different, though it hid anything , feel us purgated if it is joined by the desire for thrill.

This purgation,is what we mean when we call cathartic. Making a drama more cathartic nothing matters like beauty and truth but the artistic reality.

 In Greek catharsis means purification. Purging means getting rid of it, purifying s means getting rid of the baser parts of it. Tragedy purifies the feelings of fear and pity. It happens variously in our lives too. Perhaps the poet teaches the power of imagination, sensibilities and our powers to feel by refining them in the artistic ways. “The poetic imagination is limited only by its skill, and can turn any object into a focus for any feeling. Some people turn to poetry to find delicious and exquisite new ways to feel old feelings, and consider themselves to enter in that way into a purified state. It has been argued that this sort of thing is what tragedy and the tragic pleasure are all about, but it doesn't match up with experience.”

conclusion

“The Poetics of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) is a much-disdained book. So unpoetic a soul as Aristotle's has no business speaking about such a topic, much less telling poets how to go about their business. He reduces the drama to its language, people say, and the language itself to its least poetic element, the story, and then he encourages insensitive readers like himself to subject stories to crudely moralistic readings, that reduce tragedies to the childish proportions of Aesop-fables. Strangely, though, the Poetics itself is rarely read with the kind of sensitivity its critics claim to possess, and the thing criticized is not the book Aristotle wrote but a caricature of it. Aristotle himself respected Homer so much that he personally corrected a copy of the Iliad for his student Alexander, who carried it all over the world. In his Rhetoric (III, xvi, 9), Aristotle criticizes orators who write exclusively from the intellect, rather than from the heart, in the way Sophocles makes Antigone speak. Aristotle is often thought of as a logician, but he regularly uses the adverb logikôs, logically, as a term of reproach contrasted with phusikôs, naturally or appropriately, to describe arguments made by others, or preliminary and inadequate arguments of his own. Those who take the trouble to look at thePoetics closely will find, I think, a book that treats its topic appropriately and naturally, and contains the reflections of a good reader and characteristically powerful thinker”.

Bibliography :
  The Norton Antghology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Leitch B Vincent. New York: W.W Norton and Company Ltd. 2001. Print.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1983. Print.