"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic."
So declared Oscar Wilde. Harold Bloom rendered it: "All bad poetry is sincere."
Tragedy in art exposes a flaw, usually in persons of outstanding or remarkable greatness or consequence. It is a portrait of the human condition as downfall. We identify with the victim while being in possession of the "knowing" which is not revealed to the hero, or perhaps only after it is too late.
Comedy is the portrait of that same bottomless condition tinselled with the magic of humour and grace. Comedy is art which allows us to break free from the undertow that comes with the "knowing" to which we are tragically bound.
I like to think of both artforms working together to create something better and beyond that which we see in the mirror, and which lends greater richness of meaning and purpose to our lives.
Thank you, as always, for the wonderful verses! I do not think that tragedy and comedy come from the same place. At the end of Plato's Symposium, Socrates is said to have compelled his drowsy interlocutors (Agathon the tragedian and Aristophanes the comedian) to agree that it belonged to the same man to know how to compose tragedy and comedy. The idea is literally forced. I'm not sure I can think of an example outside Shakespeare, a bizarre exception to prove a rule. My pet dictum is borne out by Shakespeare's works, and speaks to the different patterns of action that form the spine of the tragic and comic worlds: comedy ends in marriage, and tragedy begins the morning after.
It made my head spin trying to think through the subject. To be honest, by the time I had finished hammering it out, I ended up somewhere completely different from where I saw myself going when I started reflecting on the matter. Uncertain, but daring to be wrong, I posted the end result and in that dark wood, found myself in the company of such great luminaries as Plato and Socrates!
The blacksmith and the wordsmith, it seems, share much the same method. Ideas must be put to the forge and tested. Creative intelligence is not just process of elimination of opposites, right and wrong, but one of achieving a delicate balance... the ability to hold to opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still function.
"Faith, here's an equivocator, that could
swear in both the scales against either scale;
who committed treason enough for God's sake,
yet could not equivocate to heaven: O, come
in, equivocator."
...that goes the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire
"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic."
So declared Oscar Wilde. Harold Bloom rendered it: "All bad poetry is sincere."
Tragedy in art exposes a flaw, usually in persons of outstanding or remarkable greatness or consequence. It is a portrait of the human condition as downfall. We identify with the victim while being in possession of the "knowing" which is not revealed to the hero, or perhaps only after it is too late.
Comedy is the portrait of that same bottomless condition tinselled with the magic of humour and grace. Comedy is art which allows us to break free from the undertow that comes with the "knowing" to which we are tragically bound.
I like to think of both artforms working together to create something better and beyond that which we see in the mirror, and which lends greater richness of meaning and purpose to our lives.
"Poor man! what art? A tennis-ball of error,
A ship of glass toss'd in a sea of terror;
Issuing in blood and sorrow from the womb,
Crawling in tears and mourning to the tomb:
How slippery are thy paths! How sure thy fall!
How art thou nothing, when th'art most of all!"
Thank you, as always, for the wonderful verses! I do not think that tragedy and comedy come from the same place. At the end of Plato's Symposium, Socrates is said to have compelled his drowsy interlocutors (Agathon the tragedian and Aristophanes the comedian) to agree that it belonged to the same man to know how to compose tragedy and comedy. The idea is literally forced. I'm not sure I can think of an example outside Shakespeare, a bizarre exception to prove a rule. My pet dictum is borne out by Shakespeare's works, and speaks to the different patterns of action that form the spine of the tragic and comic worlds: comedy ends in marriage, and tragedy begins the morning after.
It made my head spin trying to think through the subject. To be honest, by the time I had finished hammering it out, I ended up somewhere completely different from where I saw myself going when I started reflecting on the matter. Uncertain, but daring to be wrong, I posted the end result and in that dark wood, found myself in the company of such great luminaries as Plato and Socrates!
The blacksmith and the wordsmith, it seems, share much the same method. Ideas must be put to the forge and tested. Creative intelligence is not just process of elimination of opposites, right and wrong, but one of achieving a delicate balance... the ability to hold to opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still function.
"Faith, here's an equivocator, that could
swear in both the scales against either scale;
who committed treason enough for God's sake,
yet could not equivocate to heaven: O, come
in, equivocator."
...that goes the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire