The Poetic Enlightenment by Jones Tom. Boyson Rowan

Author:Jones, Tom.,Boyson, Rowan.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781848934047
Publisher: National Book Network International

The connectedness of first and second characters also illuminates the place of art within civil society:

Politeness always holds proportion with laws and liberty, so that where the one is with a tolerable progress in the first species (viz. 1st Characters), the other (viz. 2nd Characters) will soon prevail, and where it ceases and tyranny prevails, art and 2nd Characters accordingly sink.76

Conclusion

A brief consideration of the broader implications of Shaftesbury’s poetic theory, incomplete as that theory may be, could begin with its early eighteenth-century conduits. Attempts to ‘versify’ Shaftesbury’s philosophy, usually in unrhymed blank verse (which he would presumably have approved), began as early as 1709 with Matthew Tindal’s ‘Poetick Rhapsody’, an imitation of The Moralists. This practice was continued in both admiring and satirical veins by Henry Needler, George Berkeley, and most famously with Mark Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination, and beyond to William Cowper.77 A strong aesthetic tributary of Shaftesbury’s ideas was his nephew James Harris’s Three Treatises (1738). The second treatise, ‘Concerning Music, Painting and Poetry’ went much further than Shaftesbury in singling out poetry as a superior art, because it conveyed meaning ‘by compact’ and used ‘artificial’ media unlike music and painting – so could express everything conceivable.78 Poetry alone can ‘raise no other Idea than what every Mind is furnished with before’, so appeals to our higher moral sense, ‘an express Consciousness of something similar within; of something homogeneous in the Recesses of our own Minds; in that, which constitutes to each of us his true and real Self’.79 As his biographer Clive Probyn has argued, ‘[n]o English critic before Harris had gone as far as this in relating the philosophy of mind to the study of language’.80 But though Harris echoes Shaftesbury’s language, there is a subtly different argument. Where Shaftesbury’s deep ‘Recess’ indicates a split, even violently carved space within the self where dramatic dialogue will revive its true plurality or sociability, Harris’ phrase indicates a single ‘real Self’, a selfh ood found within, rather than created or practiced.

This chapter has attempted to identify the status of poetry in Shaftesbury’s philosophy, but in so doing also attend to its unfamiliarity, which lies partly in the distance of this theory from concepts of feeling, and of natural, authentic interiority. To an extent it has responded to Robert Marsh’s earlier contention that Shaftesbury offered a rather different poetic theory from other neoclassical currents, and that to view Shaftesbury as chiefly a thinker of affect, the ‘agent for the tradition of natural intuitional benevolism in British ethical theory is inadequate and misleading’.81 Marsh identifies three dominant neoclassical theories: ‘problematic’ (distinguishing poetry from history, rhetoric, philosophy or science as a field of enquiry: Aristotle to Hobbes, the Fieldings, Lessing), ‘rhetorical’ (species of poems and their use for certain purposes and audiences: Horace, Aristotle to Dryden, Pope, Johnson) and ‘causal’ (effects of poetry in relation to humans’ natural behavior: Leucippus, Democritus, Lucretius, to Addison, Hutcheson, Hume). Whilst he sees this ‘causal’ theory as coming to dominate by the late

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