please check this 2009 precis

[agnes]

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.







precis of above paragraph


From ancient times, art has been blamed arouse ones emotions & to disturb moral life. Every poet presents his own theory of art. Plato accuses poetry to arouse ones emotions rather than let them die. Tolstoi lays emphasis on art being outlet to negative emotions. Artistic, observatory experiance and passion in art are different from perception of one's mind. Wordsworth explains poetry as gathering memories, not from past but instantly and subject to be felt. Memories also drive to new direction. Shakespeare has no imaginative explaination but push one to derive actual message behind the characte. So his theory of art, if any matches with the great artists.

[Da Skeptic]

I am sorry to say, Dear, that I could not connect most of the lines of your precis to the actual paragraph.. Hope you don't mind..

Here is mine one..

For ages, art has been blamed for evoking our previously experienced negative emotions and destabilizing our moral life. Plato considered poetical imagination as something abetting us, Tolstoy called it an infection. But art or poetry contains emotions that do not belong to past; rather present and live. Secondly, the emotions that the art possesses are not actual; they are just an imitation of the real and this imitation serves to clarify the nature and causes etc of these emotions and this clarification enables us to control them, not controlled by them. Shakespeare also seems to present a similar theory in his dramas that art is a mirror to the reality, not the reality itself.