Class today opened with a brief discussion of a line from Othello, which Gabryelle is reading. "Put out the light, then put out the light." This is an example of an intelligent and poetic tautology, which one would expect to encounter in a writer like Shakespeare, and would not expect to find in half-baked modern politicians.

There are two big things to know about Sir Phillip Sidney's argument.
1. Poetry's is a golden world, Nature's a brazen(brass) world
2. Poetry provides models of virtue, models of what should be shunned.

And then there is Shelley(whose apology I got to reading the other night and which I actually enjoyed a great deal), who goes a step or two beyond Sidney, granting god-like powers to the poet, to the point where nature virtually disappears.

And there was this great quote(which I'm probably not putting down accurately) from Northrop Frye: "Bigots and fanatics have no use for the arts, because they are too preoccupied with their beliefs." This ties in with what Mikhail Bactein(sic?) said about the "dialogical imagination", whereby the artist stands back from their beliefs or agendas when creating. This prevents the characters from being simply mouthpieces for a particular point of view. But how would you judge this? You'd have to have some sort of knowledge of the artist's beliefs to know for certain that they were injected into the work. Which brings into question potentially the possiblity of taking the work completely on its own. Or I could be entirely off-base. Literature is after all polysemous, having many meanings.

And I think my interest has been piqued about the "School of Night" now.