Schopenhauer Cocktail Hour, Part 2
In which three poets examine Schopenhauer's view of the lofty heights of poetry and music.
This transcript of a recorded conversation has been lightly edited for clarity. To listen to this episode, click here!
Elijah: Schopenhauer begins his discussion of poetry with a really interesting point which had not occurred to me. He says:
“As the reader’s imagination is the material in which poetry presents its pictures, this has the advantage that the more detailed development and finer touches take place in the imagination of everyone, as is most appropriate to his individuality, his sphere of knowledge and his frame of mind, and so it moves him most vividly. This partly explains why the works of poetry exercise a much stronger, deeper and more universal effect than pictures and statues do.”
So he’s saying that if you are looking at a sculpture or a picture, you’re looking at an artist’s vision of the world. And basically all you’re doing is saying, “This artist made this thing, and now I get to contemplate it and consider it, but it’s ultimately their vision of things.” Now, the poet, of course, also has their own vision. They’re the ones who are writing down the words, they’re writing the poem, they’re writing their thoughts. But the reader is more of a participant in it, because the reader is the one who has to imagine the scene that’s happening, the emotions that are being gone through. The reader lives through the poem, and the reader brings to the poem their own imagination, their own empathy. So they are more intimately involved in the poem, and therefore the poem has a more powerful effect on them. And the response of readers to poems is going to be highly individualized, it’s going to be very personal. So it’s almost as if there’s greater stakes in poetry. And he will later say that this is true of music as well. Music and poetry involve the imagination in a way that’s almost kind of invasive. A poem or piece of music gets lodged in the mind and transformed. And in a way, the reader is a kind of co-author– not of the poem, but of what the poem means to them. They can take ownership of that experience in a way that you wouldn’t if you were looking at a sculpture or a painting.
Cameron: Ethan, you were commenting to Elijah earlier about this, about how you thought this led to a moral situation for the poet because the poet is responsible for the thoughts that the poem breeds in the reader’s mind.
Ethan: Poetry has a power to make the reader of the poem feel as if a thought is from their own inspiration, and so I think it does lead to a moral responsibility for the poet. This is something that Elijah’s definitely talked about on his podcast before. And I do think that this also has to do with Schopenhauer’s discussion of the interaction between philosophy and poetry– what each can do, and what each can do together.
Elijah: In a way, when you’re reading a poem, you’re inserting the thought of someone else into your own brain and you’re absorbing it and transforming it. And so if the thought that’s in the poem is unwise or hysterical or irrational, then that can have a toxic or tainting effect on the imagination, especially if you become emotionally invested in these words and you start to take ownership of them in yourself. Then it can start to mold the personality in a way that is perhaps not ideal. On the other hand, if a poem is dealing with the world as truly as possible, as precisely as possible, the exercise of the reader going through that in their mind and imaginatively interacting with it could lead to better thinking in the reader, courtesy of the writer.
