The Formal Experience of Emotion

A few weeks ago, I proposed that poetry is the art of writing emotions down. Kasey Mohammad was stimulated but "finally unsatisfied". He noted that my slogan "suggests that poetry doesn't deal with concepts or philosophy with emotions." He also wondered whether it isn't possible that "concepts involve emotions, or vice versa". Continuing themes I've been dealing with lately, I want to try to defend my slogan against these objections.

The line I want to take is to distinguish the poetry from the poem. Poetry, then, is the essence of the poem qua poem "and not some other thing", in Eliot's phrase. Poems are only imperfect realisations of the poetry they aspire to be. I mean all poems, which by virtue of being realised at all, and always "in context", will necessarily find themselves embedded with strange fellas, and therefore will be, at the very least, imperfectly read and will, later, have only incomplete effects on the medium (language) that is the focus of its concern.

Every emotion actually written down, committed to the page, is a contribution to the poetry of the poem. While the introduction of a concept may not reduce its literary merit generally, i.e., while concepts might contribute to the poem qua "some other thing" like philosophy or writing in general, the presence of "conceptual notation" in a poem detracts from the poetry.

A poem may become a lesser piece of literature by the removal of conceptual matter even as it becomes more of a poem.

All experience involves concepts and emotions, but emotions and concepts can, and should, be precisely located, and then clarified (for concepts) or intensified (for emotions). When you are doing the latter, you are doing poetry, and when you are doing the former you are doing philosophy. In both cases you are engaging in a Poundian "charging" of language.

The great majority of writing does both. But the ambition to do primarily one or the other is manifest in almost all work.

Kitasono, whom I'm fond of taking out of context, talked about "pure and orthodox poetry". He believed the poet should find a nice, tidy, harmless place in "the system of literature". I think what I'm describing here is pretty much the same idea. (We mean "harmless" ironically, yes?)

And what this means is that the poet, working within the limitations imposed by a whole language, a language which is only intermittently poetic, tries to isolate and present the emotion in a precise, intense formula. The formulation of felt experience as emotion is the task of the poet. The formal experience of emotion, or the form of the experience of emotion itself, is called institution. It is the medium of the immediacy of power.

[Quick PS, 21:32: The second last sentence may need some some work. The formal experience of feeling is institution. Its form, I think, is institutional. So institutions are the form of the experience of the emotion itself in imagination, while the emotion is the form of the feeling as experienced institutionally. Like I say, a bit more work to clean up this transcendental aesthetic is probably in order.]