Page 9 - GALIET POETRY & Metaphor: Shelley IV

Galiet & Galiet
Rarely has the melody of nature been sensed with the same thread of the sun as the Romantics felt it. Neither has the epiphany of the Romantic imagination been grasped with the same flaming impetus amidst the hustle and bustle of post-modernity. Nor has Romanticism’s stellar lyric
Poetry: Astuteness of Being & Inexhaustible fountain
of love of beauty.
ladder been reconstructed through the absurd ascending. Forever missed 3⁄4 the Romantic spirit, whose anima elevates us towards a natural and divine supernaturalism, and the articulation of those ineffable traces so rarely deciphered or articulated. Lacunas: plagued with ancient mysteries where she, philosophy, glides between the formless and the forms ever so near the eternal streams of poesy. Romanticism 3⁄4 in Shelley’s ecstatic imagination and theory of poetics thrives in sublime notions of an essential, transcendental primordial unity ever so consonant with Parmenidean and Platonic
thought. Poetry, says Shelley, becomes the most perfect expression of the imagination upon the mind’s eternal forms.2 Shelley’s idea of the imagination is seen as a luminary faculty superior and beyond all reason apt of perceiving the essence of things and embracing similitude.3 Essence and Similitude in Parmenides’ and Plato’s realms as in Shelley’s, signify ‘truth,’ ‘sameness’ and ‘oneness.’4 Essence and Similitude relegate the faculty of the mind to its strict logic of appearance and difference: the particulars of the many. Essence and Similitude, which in Shelley’s poetics, can be grasped solely by imagination’s loftiness.
Poetry: celestial vault that becomes a mimetic paradox. Shelley’s theory of poetics is a delightful, rhythmic mimesis: its musings imitate the order and beauty of nature.5 The idea of mimesis, as many others, appears in Plato, ever so close to its most effective metaphor: the mirror. In Book X of The Republic, Plato argues:
The craftsman could make all these things...even you could make it quickly and in lots of places, especially if you were willing to carry a mirror with you,
2 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. 975-977 3 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. 975-977 4 Plato. Parmenides. 491d-511d. Theaetetus, 532c-533a. Sophist, 566a. Phaedo 228d-230c, 231c-232a. Republic. Book X. 427c-429c. Timaeus 457c-d. Plato. Complete Works. Trans. By G.M.A. Grube. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1992.
Kirk, G.S. The Presocratic Philosophers. A Critical History with Selection of Texts. Parmenides. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 239 5 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. 975
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