Please critically evaluate my 2009 precis

[muhammad imran sethi]

From Plato to Tolstoi art has been accused of exciting our emotions and thus of disturbing the order and harmony of our moral life.” Poetical imagination, according to Plato, waters our experience of lust and anger, of desire and pain, and makes them grow when they ought to starve with drought. “Tolstoi sees in art a source of infection. “Not only in infection,” he says, “a sign of art , but the degree of infectiousness is also the sole measure of excellence in art.” But the flaw in this theory is obvious. Tolstoi suppresses a fundamental moment of art, the moment of form. The aesthetic experience – the experience of contemplation- is a different state of mind from the coolness of our theoretical and the sobriety of our moral judgment. It is filled with the liveliest energies of passion, but passion itself is here transformed both in its nature and in its meaning. Wordsworth defines poetry as “ emotion recollected in tranquility’. But the tranquility we feel in great poetry is not that of recollection. The emotions aroused by the poet do not belong to a remote past. They are “ here”- alive and immediate. We are aware of their full strength, but this strength tends in a new direction. It is rather seen than immediately felt. Our passions are no longer dark and impenetrable powers; they become, as it were, transparent. Shakespeare never gives us an aesthetic theory. He does not speculate about the nature of art. Yet in the only passage in which he speaks of the character and functions of dramatic art the whole stress is laid upon this point. “ The purpose of playing,” as Hamlet explains, “ both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as, twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure.” But the image of the passion is not the passion itself. The poet who represents a passion doest not infected us with this passion. At a Shakespeare play we are not infected with the ambition of Macbeth, with the cruelty of Richard III or with the jealously of Othello. We are not at the mercy of these emotions; we look through them; we seem to penetrate into their very nature and essence. In this respect Shakespeare’s theory of dramatic art, if he had such a theory, is in complete agreement with the conception of the fine arts of the great painters and sculptors.

[muhammad imran sethi]

TRaditionally,philosophers through the ages,have considered poetry as a wellspring of moral improbity,through unwarranted arousal of raw emotions.In fact in this view,the extent to which the mind is inflicted with this infection,is the sole parameter ,to gauge poetical consummation.However,this view completly misses the point.Poetical imagination ,is altogether on a different plane as compared to ethical judgments in every day life.Though poetry is laden with passions,yet the latter undergo a transformational change in their context and substance in poetical form.THIs metamorphosis lends the abstract nature of emotions more clarity.Thus when one is introduced with undesireable traits of a villain in a playone is not automatically overwhelmed with those undesirable traits.Rather this exercise increses our conceptual understanding of emotional states. THE REAL INTENT OF ART

[out of place]

so are we supposed to completely eschew the mention of names while making precise...for example: plato,,tolstoy, shakespeare etc..Almost 2/3 rd of the original passage is about their views..I say this also because the word count of ur precise is at least 20 words less than even the 1/3rd....so wat say ????

[muhammad imran sethi]

IN my view its better to generalize than mentioning specific names from the passage .I request other members to share their views in this regard

[muhammad imran sethi]

Hamza bhai pl evaluate this precis

[out of place]

and what abt the word count??? yours is almost 20 words less than the 1/3rd...isnt it too brief????

[muhammad imran sethi]

u r right i should be 1/3rd