Page 11 - GALIET POETRY & Metaphor: Shelley IV

Galiet & Galiet
but both have their immediate common ground in the very ideas or forms. Art can also beatify and beautify, embellish all-natural elements precisely where beauty lacks. “Poetry,” extols Shelley, “turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed.”9 Consequently, Poetry or Poiesis becomes, in Shelley’s universe, the immeasurable mirror of beauty:10 a sublime kaleidoscope of being. Though Poetry or Poiesis 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 objects are not mere copies, but qualified representations of the very ideas. 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: mirror of poetry and of p o e s í a.
P o e s í a: whose versification seeks always the rhythmic beauty and majesty of harmonious melodies as an echo of the heavenly spheres.11 Poesía: ever present in the looking glass of Neo- Platonism irradiating its splendour on Shelley’s sublime ideas of a transcendental poetics, never fully devoid of empiricism. Indeed, the poet has a most sensitive soul that apprehends the Platonic forms of the true and the beautiful,12 says Shelley. Alastor’s poet, recluse and ‘luminary’, loses himself in poetical and philosophical altitudes contemplating the immaculate forms seeking, in his veiled Lady philosophy, his very being: the voice and essence of his soul. Poetry for him shall never be a mere crepuscular adornment, a mere imitation, or an anthropological affair, but a two-fold song: mysterious key that unlocks the grand unknown, and Diotiman ladder13 that beckons the essence of the other, othering. It is the necessary ladder that entices us, ever and ever, to climb its constellated stairs towards the wondrous essence of kaleidos: those palpable resplendent forms whose being exists only in transcendental reality. The ladder that leads us, ever and ever, through its wondrous euphonies towards that ineffable universal beyond temporality; yet never forgets the tragic consciousness of the world.
No. Poetry shall remember all things. It shall not be only in the verdant, phosphorescent hues of Macchu Picchu nor the Temples of the Sun and the Moon of Teotihuacan where the breath of poetry shall solely dwell, nor on the peaks of the surrounding Andes nor Mt. Blanc, but it shall
9 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. 527 10 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. 978 11 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. 978 12 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. 978 13 Plato. Complete Works. Symposium. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing, 1997.
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