A Certain Comparison

Lessing's and Eliot's Use of the Poetics

Abstract

The comparison of Eliot's implicit use of the Poetics in his critical essays with Lessing's radical reinterpretation of the treatise in his critique of Neoclassical drama in Hamburg Dramaturgy shows that their views converge on formal affectivism, a concise formula for Aristotle's conception of tragedy. Their agreement on the nature and limits of aesthetic discourse, critical terminology, and drama far outweighs the divergence in their views of later classicisms, reinforcing the validity of Aristotle's criteria and their applicability to the verbal arts in different cultural milieux. But Eliot goes further than Lessing: he reinstates formal affectivism as the foundation of modern criticism by extending Aristotle's dramatic principles to poetry and to literary history. Eliot rehabilitates Aristotle in a post-Romantic age by using his principles to transcend earlier canons - the Romantic, Neoclassical, Renaissance, and classical - and concomitantly invents a modernist critical canon. To him the implications of misconceiving Aristotle's organicist aesthetics and object-centered criticism surpass aesthetic considerations per se. The Poetics informs his attempt to unify the European cultural tradition - its literature and its criticism - which, starting in ancient Greece, culminates in his paradoxical notion of an avant-garde classicist modernism.