When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since canceled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanished sight.
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of forebemoanèd moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
   But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
   All losses are restored and sorrows end.

Shakespeare
Sonnet Thirty

 
. . . and this higher principle is ready to follow this suggestion of reason?

Clearly.

And the other principle, which inclines us to recollection of our troubles and to lamentation, and can never have enough of them, we may call irrational, useless, and cowardly?

Indeed, we may.

Plato

" . . . irrational, useless, and cowardly."  Indeed we may not.  "Irrational," perhaps (though "non-rational" would be a better word and the point, once made and accepted, would not necessarily be a criticism), but certainly not "useless" and "cowardly."  Plato is reviewing hypothetical applications for admission to his hypothetical "well-ordered State," and has decided that he will refuse those from hypothetical poets.  His case is a good one:  poets obviously do not meet the entrance requirements.  But even if there were such a state, the situation would remain hypothetical--poets would not apply; they would not want to live in such a "clean, well-lighted place."  There is no place for poets in Plato's ideal state, and that is not because poets are inferior and undesirable persons, but because the "ideal state" is somewhat less than ideal.  Its citizens would not be superhuman, but less than human.

Plato says that since it is man's rationality that separates him from other animals, it is degrees of rationality that separate men from other men, The rational man is the superior man, and non-rational men and non-rational matters have no place in an ideal society.  But in addition to being the rational animal, man is also (and perhaps more importantly) the empathetic animal.  He is given the cumulative fruits of his ancestor's experiences, and can benefit from their triumphs and learn from their mistakes.

Thus far Plato would agree, and would say that the superior man is able to consider historical information rationally in order to avoid unnecessarily repeating his fathers' errors.  As Sidney says in his essay, however, just as philosophy is arid without concrete examples to drive the point home and make it memorable, so historical concrete examples alone do not teach the precepts.  But there is another, more important way that men can use their ability to benefit from the experience of other men, and here Plato would not agree.

As human beings, we go through a common set of experiences individually. These experiences, which we all go through but do not nearly understand, we can group as one and call the "human experience."  Though no one comes to a complete understanding of "the human experience," some men understand it far more fully than others, and from this most perceptive group come our poets.  It is their particular blessing (or burden) that they can draw insight from experience far more easily and completely than the rest of us.  We demand of them that they select the experiences (or the same sort of experiences) which produce insight and order them in words in such a way that the insight will grow out of the words for us in the same way that it grew out of the direct experience for them.  This is the function of poetry and it is the function of literature and it is the function of art--and it must be primarily non-rational.

The poet cannot explain the human condition any more than the philosopher can (rationally, it simply does not make sense), but through the use of imagery and the rest of his craft he can create in his readers' minds those moments in which everything clicks into place.  He can produce in his readers insights that the philosopher could never lead them to.  The literature of knowledge, says de Quincey, leads only horizontally.  The literature of power moves vertically.  It does this, in Shelley's words, by making the mind "the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought."

Poetry, by playing images against each other and emotions against each other and images and emotions against each other, makes the old new and brings the new into focus.  It does for the reader (hearer, see-er) of poetry what the poet's superior sensitivity does for him.  Ideally, it brings together portions of his own experience in a way that they had never been together before.  It makes him remember things he didn't know he knew.

Shakespeare's Sonnet Number Thirty is a frontal assault on Plato (it "inclines us to a recollection of our troubles") and a defense of poetry which de Quincey, Sidney, and Shelley would be forced by their essays to admit is a better defense than they could build in their essays.  It is non-rational, and it is emotional (it deals with emotions).  It takes two common experiences (friendship and recollection of sorrow) and makes them uncommon.  It puts the two together and contri-butes deeper insight about both.  The poem itself is ordered (rhythmic, rhymed, alliterated, well-stocked with images) into a memorable, perfect whole.  It works.

At this point I choose to become non-verbal.