Positive and Near-Positive Aesthetics

I don’t so very much mind this being chided by Miss Herschberger for not speaking handsomely enough about poetry. In the remarks of mine to which she refers I was anxious to learn and practise what has been hard for me in writing about poetry, namely, a temperance, and a reasonableness; I thought effort should be made to overcome the horrid barriers to communication between the factions. I felt prepared to furnish a usual show of zeal at some other time, as occasion might require. Evidently I seemed backward in this quality; but it is nice to be outdone in it by a critic so closely affiliated with the modern philosophies.

Apparently outdone. The Positivists, according to Miss Herschberger, are anxious to recall their original famous doctrine that poetry emotionally might be “expressive,” but semantically was “nonsense.” But the way to win them to poetry now, in her view, is to show that poetry makes a very Positive sense indeed. Accordingly she accepts the obvious prose argument at the center, and even considers that the “multiplicity” of items on the side (in the metaphor for example) really “integrates” into another argument which is “complete with usefulness, logical necessity, and true and reliable statements.” This is to convert poetry altogether into prose, and to contend that its radical departures from prose are only illusory.