POETRY AND M. MARITAIN
395
ancients-and our own classical age-dealt with Poetics." (His
italics.) The identification of poetry with working reason in
former epochs is argued elaborately in
Art
et
Scolastique.
*
Once
this theory of creation is accepted as the norm of art and the
explanation of its most complete accomplishments, modern poetry
appears as an aberration arising from excess of spirit and pride.
For it is plain that poetry since Baudelaire has called into play
other faculties than the "working intelligence," that it has often
been unhappily agitated by indefinable energies, and that it has
inclined to be aware of itself as different from the rest of man's
labors.
But has the profession of poetry always been identical with
artisanship?
Even the most obvious records indicate that, among the
Greeks, poetry, far from being a practice like that of the artisans,
was an inspired calling drawing from streams beyond the indi–
vidual shaping mind. Plato gives witness of this in the much-quoted
passage of the
I
on
on the madness of the poet. Aristotle, too, asserts
in his Poetics that "poetry implies a happy gift of nature or
a
strain of madness.
In the one case a man can take the mould of
any character; in the other, he is lifted out of his proper self."
(My italics. ) Both "happy gift" and madness bring about that
enstrangement of the poet . from his own reason, passions, and
motives which is called inspiration or enthusiasm, and which is
improper to the artisan. Even if we grant Maritain that when Aris–
totle speaks of the gift of imitation he means a completely sane
"habitus"
developed in connection with a craft tradition, still
poetry is not, even with Aristotle, always, that is, as a universal,
an "activity of the working reason"; for he says it can also imply
*There we g,ather from the footnotes and context that
"les ancieru"
to whom art
was "working reason" were chiefly the scholastics, especially Aquinas, and Aristotle,
u
interpreted of course by medieval philosophy. Evidently, however, Maritain has
become convinced that these writers brought into order the experience of all antiquity,
for in the
Kenyon
piece he does not limit the "ancients" to the scholastic tradition,
but contrasts the definition of poetry attributed to them with one that arose "only at
a comparatively recent time." Thus poetry as "an activity of the working reason"
becomes the "Poetics" of the Greeks, the Romans, the medieval and renaissance
Europeans, and, with our present conception of antiquity, even of the primitive Baby–
lonian, Egyptian, Semitic, Oriental and other cultures.
