Modern Age - Winter 2017 - 80

MODERN AGE

WINTER 2017

is literally said. This is obvious in drama. The essayist or orator
who intones "This above all, to thine own self be true" (Hamlet
1.3.78) is quoting not "Shakespeare" but Polonius, who is hardly a
reliable source of wisdom. And what is true of drama is also true
of narrative fiction, even of lyrical verse: "But even a short lyric
poem is dramatic," write Wimsatt and Beardsley, "the response of
a speaker (no matter how abstractly conceived) to a situation (no
matter how universalized)."14
The result is that the meaning of a work of imaginative literature is not identical to the meaning of its literal verbal discourse.
"As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods," cries out the Earl of
Gloucester in King Lear, "They kill us for their sport" (4.1.36-37).
"The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices / Make instruments
to plague us" (5.3.171-72), says his son Edgar later in the play, in
effect contradicting his father. It would be a rash interpreter who
tried to make either of these utterances the meaning of the play.
What is more, literature is always saying things that, while not true
in any factual sense, are still not lies. "Now, for the poet," writes
Sir Philip Sidney, "he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth."
Sidney continues, "What child is there, that coming to a play and
seeing 'Thebes' written in great letters upon an old door doth
believe that it is Thebes?"15
In order to assess justly the moral status of literature, then, it is
necessary to advert to the work itself, rather than to its author or
audience. Wimsatt defines the issue clearly: "Neither the qualities
of the author's mind nor the effects of the poem upon a reader's
mind should be confused with the moral quality of the meaning expressed by the poem itself."16 Wimsatt is convinced, like Dr.
Johnson, that the distinction between moral and literary excellence is sufficiently firm that a first-rate work of literature-an
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Modern Age - Winter 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Winter 2017

Contents
Modern Age - Winter 2017 - Cover1
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Modern Age - Winter 2017 - Contents
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