Three Aspects Of Poetic Poetry In Hegel's Lyrical Poetry

Hegel begins by describing poetry as a form that manifests ideas into concrete actuality, rather than abstract feeling (p. 960). From the inner imagination comes the formation of material in poetry–but this material is not made poetic by being harboured in ideas, but that it is being harboured in an artistic imagination. Here, Hegel defines the artistic imagination as to keep the abstract universality of thought separate from the sensuously concrete objects. Poetry employs language as an external sign of the spiritual, which is, paradoxically, the inner imagination and intuition itself – ‘man’s external world which has essential worth only in relation to man’s inner consciousness’ (p.972). On the subject-matter of a poetic work, Hegel believes …show more content…
He says of lyrical poetry the general idea of a poem is individual in situation and concerns, and of the poet, his or her mind is of subjective judgement on feelings and through such experiences the mind comes to consciousness of itself. The contents of lyrical poetry are extreme in variety and touch life in every direction. Lyrical poetry, Hegel believes is inherently universal, and touches on the depth of human faith, ideas and knowledge. From this, any single idea, though it must be the whole soul of a feeling, is seized in its deeper essential character and made permanent in its expression. The soul of the feeling is only what matters, not through which it embodies. As for the form of lyric poetry, in general terms the same is important–the individual in his inner ideas and feelings. The content and connection of particular aspects are not supported automatically by being a matter of substance, nor by their external appearance, but by the poet. A lyric poem therefore has a unity in its inwardness of mood or reflection, which mirrors in the external world of …show more content…
Aphra Behn expresses Cloris’s anxieties in an analogous event (her conflicting desire with Lysander’s promise of pleasure and her sense of social status in being chaste) in such a way that the centre of the “spirit” is not the occurrence of the event itself but the state of mind mirrored in it. Of this, therefore, what occurs is this centre of the “spirit” which can be relational, and therefore universal. The Disappointment is then a poem in which the subject-matter is epic, but the treatment is lyrical. The proper unity of the poem is not achieved by the event and its objective reality but by Aphra Behn’s inner movement of spirit and her way of treating the content. Of the content, Hegel believes it is wholly accidental and the only important thing is the poet’s treatment and presentation of such ideas (p.. Here I wonder, as Hegel never explicitly argues on implied meaning, whether the reader is meant to disregard their own relations and derivations of the poem’s meaning and submit to the poet’s intended meaning? If this is true, then I feel strongly that this is a shortcoming of his theory, as the pleasure in reading The Disappointment is directly correlated with the associations and relations of each of the particular aspects–form, content, sounds, rhythm. The mood or general reflection aroused poetically by the external object forms the centre of the “spirit”,