Matthew Arnold, in his “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” examines the role of the critic in society and the idea that the “critical power” is of lower rank than the “creative power.”
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Notes on Arnold’s “Modern Literature”
Matthew Arnold attempts in this speech, “On the Modern Element in Literature,” a “general survey of classical literature” in an effort to deliver his age from its current imperfection, i.e., to comprehend man’s present and past.
Shelley’s Defense of Poetry
Shelley begins his “A Defense of Poetry” by making a distinction between reason and imagination: “Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately and as a whole.”
On Kant’s Aesthetic Judgment
The only thing that would be more ponderous and difficult than trudging through Kant’s prose in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment would be attempting to put his aesthetic philosophy found within to the test.
More Plato…
Plato believed that imitation of sensible objects removed the poet, and the observer, from truth and reality by inspiring the emotions of pity and fear. Plato argued that philosophical knowledge is far superior that the mere imitative nature of art.
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Plotinus on Beauty
“We ourselves possess beauty when we are true to our own being; our ugliness is in going over to another order; our self-knowledge, that is to say, is our beauty; in self-ignorance we are ugly.”
Plato’s Phaedrus
Phaedrus addresses much of the subject matter contained in Gorgias, rhetoric and right living, and closes with a discussion of writing. Yet these discussions are products of the pair’s original topic: love.
