Page 17 - GALIET POETRY & Metaphor: Shelley IV

Galiet & Galiet
result, high poetry has a rippling effect. It never ceases to greaten its circle. Like a pebble that is hurled on still waters, its inspired poetic truths expand towards the far reaches of oneness, similarity, eternity where beauty, and only beauty, can penetrates its glorious centre: centre of centers.
Centre, that expands infinitely towards its celestial outer dimensions. Centre, that is potentially infinite. Shelley’s lofty and exigent poetic notions flee away through the heavens in the wings of infinitude. “All high poetry is infinite,” says Shelley, “it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially.”41 Shelley’s notion of sublime poetry as infinite suggests that poetry is always in a state of pure potentiality. It was Aristotle who favored the idea of the infinite as possibility or potentiality: δυναμις, a contingent modality of being. Just as from an acorn many potential oaks can come to be, from the word, many forms of poetry can come to existence. ‘High Poetry,’ in analogy to the ‘first acorn,’ brings language back to the origins of its essence: Wind and Breath, mother of the Verb first, and then, Adamic power that all things names. Mother of ‘mythos’ first, and of “logos” then. Wind and Breath: spirit (psyche), which gives birth to sound and word. Rigorous word that, just as the acorn, self-contains finite aleph-bet or alphabets and syllabaries that, once concatenated in infinite ways, give birth to infinitely possible libraries and worlds. Word that engenders infinite holy and unholy speech forms, first spoken, then enlaced, from whose being all poetry, epic, drama, prose and comedy arises.
Word that exists in pure potentiality, that is, in a constant state of becoming towards its essence of essence, beingness of being: supernal poetry, blossom of the forms. Potentiality that resides in the word as in the acorn awaiting its metamorphosis to another state: ‘x’ to become ‘y.’ Thus, the proposition ‘the acorn grows’ is unintelligible if we do not accept that the proposition ‘the acorn has in itself the potentiality to grow’ makes sense. According to Aristotle, we cannot say that ‘x can become y’ if we do not admit first that in ‘x’ some of the conditions exist that will make possible ‘y.’42 Yet, isn’t this ‘x becoming y’ the essence of metaphor as pure potentiality? When Shelley says that the “language of poetry is metaphor,”43 he alludes to Aristotle’s notion. Metaphor consists in giving a thing a name that corresponds to another thing, producing transference (epiphora) from the genus to the species, or from the species to the genus, or from
41 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. 529
42 Aristotle. Metaphysics 3, 1046b 28. Aristotle. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Metaphysics. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York: The Modern Library, 2001.
43 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. 529
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