Page 14 - GALIET POETRY & Metaphor: Shelley IV

Galiet & Galiet
3⁄4 sings of beings as creatures that promulgate supreme munificence. “To be greatly good, they [he] must imagine intensely and comprehensively; must put themselves [himself] in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become their [his] own.”27 While never fully resigned to tragic realism, Shelley’s philosophy pursues the dream of a utopian humanism: a transcendental human nature where love or caritas becomes the prime mover and motivator for action. Neither Nietzsche’s candid ‘will to power’ nor Hobbes’ frank ‘every man against every man’28 suffices to instill in our human spirit that seed of beauty that Plato dreamt of amidst the tragic images, tensions and catastrophe, both moral and intellectual, felt during Classical Greece’s zeitgeist and its harsh Peloponnesian War aftermath.
Shelley, like Plato, in the fury of his times, also suffers and dreams; yet his dreams differ. Shelley inverts Plato’s criticism of the imagination as distortion, and objects to Plato’s curse on the immorality of poets. Shelley shall never cease to exalt the imagination as the “great instrument of moral good.”29 Imagination shall no longer distort reality or reflect itself in those pseudo-waters and pseudo-mirrors that Plato lowly sung.30 Neither shall they project those deceiving images and cast their pathetic shadows on Plato’s dark cavern of unbeing. Imagination, in Shelley as in Plotinus, returns to its pre-Indo-European, matriarchal roots: aisthesis and dynamis, sensibility and potentiality, demoting Platonic and Kantian notions of pure reason (nous) and action (reality) to Lethe’s banks. In this sense, existence is a poetic becoming that must reject reason (logos or natura naturata) to perceive and intuitively grasp, in nature and naturalism (physis or natura naturans), the essential beingness of things (ousia), clearly and distinctly, in their totality and completeness, as they participate in their universal idea or form, through the transforming, and magic mirror of poetry and metaphor. Regal imagination becomes key and ladder, open door and window that grasp the euphonies of heaven in their fullness, caressing existence in its plenitude, while reason grasps the cacophonies of earth in their varying degrees of being.31 Imagination, as mirror of heaven, ceases to be a distortion in Shelley’s poetics of being. Imagination shall no longer be relegated to our labyrinths and caverns nor reflect the myopic, yet haunting visions of
27 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. 519 28 Hobbes. Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
29Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. 520 30 Plato. Complete Works. Republic. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing, 1997. Book VI. Allegory of the Line.
31 Plato too views existence as degrees of being. Plato's line is a hierarchy: things at the top (first principles) have more truth and more existence; the things at the bottom (images) have almost lesser truth and barely exist. At the very bottom dwells total ignorance or nothingness. Slightly higher, shadows and distorted images analogous to reflections in water and in mirrors also dwell. Higher, physical objects, some of which exist and don’t exist also dwell alongside objects of opinion that are and are not. At its pinnacle, the pure and absolute forms of being dwell: that timeless ontology of ‘thein:’ as a running and an escaping from the shadows towards the good. Plato. Complete Works. Republic. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing, 1997. Book VI
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