Page 11 - GALIET THE BEAUTIFUL FORMS PLATO IV++

Galiet & Galiet
Consequently, Poetry or Poiesis becomes in Shelley’s universe, the immeasurable mirror of beauty:28 a sublime kaleidoscope of being. Although poetry continues to be an imitation or reproduction, its mimetic tendency ceases to be pejorative in the measure that the referent is not empirical, but transcendental. The sensible objects are not mere copies, but qualified representations of the very Ideas or Forms. The poet, thus, no longer will reproduce materiality, but will materialize the Ideas or Forms by gazing at imagination as it appears only in beauty’s mirror: the mirror of poetry. In so doing, the poem’s versification, too, will always aspire to the rhythmic beauty and majestic harmony of the sublime song heard in the Pythagorean heavenly spheres.29
The poetic imagination, ever present in Neo-Platonism’s glorious looking glass, irradiates its splendour on Shelley’s sublime ideas of transcendental poetics: the really real as Pure Beauty. Indeed, says Shelley, the poet has a most sensitivesoulthatapprehendsthePlatonicFormsofthetrueandthebeautiful.30 Shelley’sAlastor’spoet,arecluse and luminary, looses himself in poetical and philosophical altitudes contemplating the immaculate Forms yearning, inhisveiledLadyphilosophy,forhisverybeing:thevoiceandessenceofhissoul.31 Poetryorthepoeticimagination will never be for him a mere crepuscular adornment, a mere imitation, or an anthropological affair, but a two-fold song: the mysterious ladder that not only unlocks the grand unknown, but also Diotima’s luminous ascent towards the perfect and radiant bride of brides, the Form of Beauty itself,32 thus leading humans, ever and ever, through its wondrous ascending euphonies, towards the ineffable universal beyond temporality. A necessary ladder that entices humans, ever and ever, to climb its constellated stairs towards the wondrous essence of beauty (kaleidos): those resplendent Forms whose being, existing in a transcendental reality, need not be perceived solely by reason, or Plato’s noetic intellective seeing, but also by the senses and the sensible poetic imagination.
Thus, lofty inspired poetry, no longer a mimesis, but an aspect of poetic noesis, is able to grasp in delight the majestic and really-really beautiful, and eternal and unchanging Form of Beauty itself. In so doing, the poetic imagination ceases to bleed in impotence and agony in Plato’s twilight Den. In so doing, sublime poetry dwells in the universe, and the universe in its being. The earth breathes in its airs, and it becomes sacred as a star. Lofty poetry sings of its utopia drawn by the perpetuity of its transcendental-metaphysical light. It bids farewell to Plato’s noesis, and it greets, anew, poetry with insight. The poetic imagination is, thus, inspired, and possessing an inner vision, or a seeing that is not noetic or intellective, but intuitive, gives way to knowing the Forms of the Beautiful, the Good and the Just. In so doing, the poetic imagination awakens to see what the day and night keeps. It enjoys and loves the earth, the skies, the
simple and the sublime.
28 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. 978
29Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. 979
30 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. 978
31 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. Shelley. Alastor or the Spirit of Solitude. 789
32 Plato. The Symposium.
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