The pleasures

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.

Mike Sanders has been ruminating on issues of pleasure as they relate to blogging. It jogged my brain cells back to a text I've spent a lot of time with, Percy Shelley's Defence of Poetry. Shelley saw man as a harp, stretched tight and blown by winds both inside and out to produce songs of pleasure. The good, to Shelley, would always be naturally reinforced by this process because it was the most pleasurable. There is no need for ethics or morality, if we only follow our pleasure. Of course, Shelley was branded as being immoral, because he denied the moral sentiments any place in his poetry. I like his argument on the subject, because I believe that life itself is a poetic act.

The whole objection however of the immorality of poetry rests upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one another.

This cuts to the core of my hatred of prescriptive theory. "Admirable doctrines" don't do much to further the cause of man. I think the poetry of observation must remain aloof from prescription. Poetry indeed, rules.

But poetry acts in another and a diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world; and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it re-produces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it co-exists.

There is a peculiar oxymoron here— Mind is awakened and enlarged, and yet it is rendered— reduced or purified, until it becomes the receptacle of unapprehended combinations of thought? That is indeed the way that I feel when I read some people's blogs. I love seeing how others connect the dots. It lifts the veil of strangeness from some, and exposes the beauty of others.

The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action or person, not our own. A man to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination: and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A Poet therefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong which are usually those of his place and time in his poetical creations, which participate in neither.

Poetry has been working on my organ for a long time now. I like it. It feels good. But blogging is a newer pleasure, and it's interesting to compare the attributes. Blogging, as a flexing of the mental faculties, is related to the type of pleasure which Shelley was on about. Stretching the mind, outside itself and into the otherness that surrounds, is a good thing. Reading the thoughts of others, and contributing my own becomes a sort of cooking and eating. I'm always hungry for good food.