Benedetto Croce: Poetry and Literature

"Great and varied, then, is the labor, the effort, and the thought of the man who wants to 'give names to things'" (131).  With this reference to Pythagoras by way of Cicero, Croce declares at once his intention, and his difficulty. If he felt the task before him to be monumental, that of "naming" poetry and literature as he did with some measure of success for "art", he clearly didn't pay attention to his contemporary Wittgenstein.  If he had, he would have known that the task is not difficult, but impossible.

It's a pity that Wittgenstein's ideas about the nature of language weren't published until the year after Croce's death (if I reckon correctly).  Perhaps reading the former's works would have opened the latter's eyes to the fact that what he determined about poetry, the experience, also applies to "Poetry", the word.  "The joy which everyone feels in a poem (as though the poem were the reader's own work; his own creation)", well-observed by Croce, is the same joy that he sought in "naming" poetry (84).  Perhaps it's a mercy that he died before realizing that his definitions, his names, were no more universal than the deeply personal joy of poetry itself.

The words that Croce put on Poetry and Literature do not inspire in me the same moment of awakening that his words for Art did.  If anything, they seem to obfuscate the questions, backtracking on and losing the thread of his earlier work.  The beauty of his Aesthetic lay in its simplicity and clarity.  So successfully did he craft his word, that in the eyes of this reader he could simply have answered the question of poetry by saying "ditto".  If Art is the moment where the universal human moment finds union with the individual artistic expression, then how is Poetry any different, save in the medium?

As for this reader, Poetry is not the same as Art, though the two ideas overlap.  Croce correctly observes that poetry is "The rhythmization of the universe", just as painting is its visualization, and music its vibration (195).  But he is incorrect to stop there, for rhythm alone does not make poetry, it is but one level of that which makes something "poetic".  The texture, figurative language, structure, and music of a poetic work all lay upon each other in a marvelous palimpsest with other elements, and something is "poetic" in my mind to the exact degree that its layers are many and sympathetic to each other.  Something can accordingly be "poetic" without being "art", and vice versa.  The best, naturally, are those things that are both.

And Croce further loses his way when adding the element of Literature to the mix.  This is a third miracle, independent of, but overlapping with, the other two.  Poetry and Art exist in a vacuum, in that they are moments unto themselves.  Literature is not; it is the very act of "Letters", of knowing, using, and connecting to the rest of existing human discourse.  A work is Literary to the exact degree that it connects with everything else, using the nature of its particular medium as the conductive material.

But if I were to assume that others experience the three miracles in the same way that I do, I would be making the same mistake Croce did.  It is only for me that Art is the miracle of expression, Poetry the miracle of plurality, and Literature the miracle of connection.  Whether proclaiming such is merely an act of cowardice in the light of its unprovability, and whether Croce wasn't a better man to have at least tried, is a matter that will have to remain open for now.