literary art

 The ideal poem is a “balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative….a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order. All of this formed into one graceful and intelligent whole”—which sounds a lot like discordia concours. This was, Coleridge said, “the nature of poetry in the strictest sense of the word”—undoubtedly the kind Coleridge aspired to write himself—and, as to be discussed below, it had metaphysical implications. Poems, like other works of art, have to make sense, more or less, if they are to sustain interest, but people are more likely to go to the arts for wildness than order. In a story or novel “something has to happen,” we say. We usually mean something surprising, something out of the ordinary, and probably disorderly. (A friend who read the early chapters in the first draft of a novel I had written complained, “It’s like waiting for a bus that never arrives.”)