What does poetry have to do with the liberal arts?
Where do wonderful words and numinous numbers meet?
‘A stitch in time saves nine’; ‘many a mickle makes a muckle’; ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’. I’m sure you can think of many more.
What makes these maxims and sayings so sticky?
The stickiness of maxims, proverbs, and sayings is largely due to their poetic form. They all feature parallelism. But that is only part of the story. A large part, yes, but still only a part. The other part has to do with content. The content will typically feature an element of contrast.
So given the power of the pithy saying, why, in the liberal arts, is there no specific place for poetry or the poetic? Why is there not a place for poetry in the Trivium?
The trivium comprises logic, grammar, and rhetoric – rhetoric, not poetry is the ultimate subject here. The quadrivium comprises arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music – music, not poetry is the ultimate subject there. Come to think of it, there’s no mention of philosophy in the liberal arts either. And yet, in the Republic, Plato outlines a clear path of progression from the One which leads to number, through geometry, astronomy, and music (VII.524d – 531d), to dialectic, leading to the contemplative practice of philosophy (VII.531e – 536a). Having reached this high point, he laughs off the whole process as a joke (VII.536b – 537a). Goodbye quadrivium. Goodbye dialectic (which combines all three topics of the trivium – here, placed higher than the subjects of the quadrivium). And as for poetry, it is nowhere to be seen.
And yet, the whole edifice of the liberal arts – of Greek culture in general, perhaps – depends on poetry. Where would the Greeks have been without Homer or the works of the famed lyric poets of the ancient world? Why would they have celebrated the muses, and honoured almost two thirds of them as being associated with poetry or verse drama?
It may surprise you to read that (according to Plutarch), one of the very earliest Greek writers on the art of rhetoric – Antiphon of Rhamnus (480–411 BCE), whose Art of Rhetoric is lost – started off not as a rhetor or orator but as a poet, but not just any poet …
While [Antiphon] was poetically inclined, he invented an art of curing the distemper of the mind, as physicians are wont to provide cure of bodily diseases. And having at Corinth built him a little house, in or near the market, he set a postscript over the gate, to this effect: that he had a way to cure the distemper of men’s minds by words; and let him but know the cause of their malady, he would immediately prescribe the remedy, to their comfort. But after some time, thinking that art not worth his while, he betook himself to the study and teaching of oratory.
Whatever Antiphon thought of poetry; whatever the results of his attempts to use poetry to heal, the fact remains that poetry has power. It was in poetry that both epic tales and just laws were handed down through oral tradition. Some early lawmakers – Damon of Athens, who advised Pericles, for example – were also musicologists. They used poetry to hand down their received wisdom – wisdom often acquired, according to authors such as Peter Kingsley or Jeremy Naydler, through shamanic spirit quests.
This still happens today, although we may not see it in the same way. Just look at maxims and proverbs. They ‘lay down the law of common sense’ and they typically do so poetically. Where do they come from? Who first thinks them up? The inspired sayings given at the start of this piece would not be half as memorable without the contrast. ‘Stich up a hole when you see a hole’ is a form which invites resistance in me. Does it in you? No way am I going to be inspired to pick up needle and thread to mend a hole in a sock based on that form of the saying – not to mention the fact that the ambiguity of ‘hole’ riles me. ‘A stitch in time saves nine’, however, has me nodding reluctantly at the inherent wisdom in the saying. How does it affect you? And if I asked you to come up with ‘non-sticky’ versions of your favourite memorable sayings, what would you need to avoid doing?
In the entire corpus of the progymnasmata, the tried and trusted classical ‘middle school syllabus for rhetoricians’, there is no instruction on how to compose poetry. There is, however, a great respect for it. Poetry is inspired. It comes from the muses.
Poetry combines both the imaginative power of words that rhetoric leads to and the musicality of number that music leads to. There can be no poetry without words; there can be no poetry without a sense of music, of number, of rhythm, of harmony, of proportion.
Of course, poetry does not have to rhyme, and there are countless examples of poetic prose – just as there are many examples of prosaic poetry, but if we are to engage with the poetic, there is much to be said for making up maxims, working with poetic forms such as sonnets, or appreciating the intricacies of the hexameters of classic epics.
Prose works and written laws started to come in more and more with the presocratic philosophers – yet another sign of a long decline of culture I have traced elsewhere through the history of liberal arts education. There, as here, I argue for the importance of reconnecting with the tradition of liberal arts education as an integrated and integrative tool for learning. The roots of the liberal arts lie in poetry and the liberal arts themselves flourish through poetry and lead to it. Dig down to those roots, and you will find that traditional poetic forms such as sonnets, limericks, and landays are shaped the way they are for a reason – a deep-seated reason to do with story structure. Learning about story structure can help you understand more about the form and function of traditional poetic forms, something I go into in chapter 22 of my book Story and Structure, available online or from your local bookstore.
I started off with the question of why poetry doesn’t feature as part of the traditional Liberal Arts. I still haven’t found a satisfactory answer. Do you know why? Let me know. Comments welcome!