practical skill and for the systematic knowledge or experience that underlies
it. “The resulting range of application,” Stephen Halliwell points out, “is ex-
tensive, covering at one end of the spectrum the activity of a carpenter,
builder, smith, sculptor, similar manual craftsman, and, at the other, at least
from the ¤fth century onwards, the ability and practices of rhetoricians and
sophists.”^10 So techné, meaning “craft,” “skill,” “technique,” “method,” “art,”
coupled with episteme, meaning “knowledge,” is the domain of the arts. But
the discourse about poetry, Plato concludes in the Ion, doesn’t seem to have
suf¤cient techné kai episteme: unlike the shipbuilder or carpenter, the rhap-
sode demonstrates no special skill in speaking about Homer, and hence his
ability to do so must be purely a matter of inspiration—in other words, an
instinctive ability to interpret Homer that cannot be taught or learned—it
simply is.
Criticism, by this account, is no more than a second-order discourse, a
repetition, in diluted form, of what a given poem or artwork “says.” Scien-
tists and social scientists often hold this view of poetics: witness the NEH
commentary cited above. But the theory that poetry is a branch of the arts
need not lead to such impressionism. On the contrary, to conceive of poetry
as an art also implies that it is a form of discourse inherently other, that po-
etic language is to be distinguished from ordinary speaking and writing.
This is the Aristotelian view: a tragedy or epic will be read less for its poten-
tial truth value or its speci¤c rhetorical properties than as a unique aesthetic
construct, whose “plot” or structure (ton pragmaton systasis) is coherent and
characterized by what Aristotle called to prepon (¤tness). The “formalist”
analysis that such structures prompt is often associated with the New Critics,
although their interest was primarily in thematic, rather than in formal or
structural, coherence.
For real Formalist criticism in our time, we must look less to the New
Critics than to the Russian Formalists, whose object was to de¤ne poeticity
not in the individual poem but as a recurrent feature in poems across a wide
spectrum. Indeed, the Russian Formalists studied the poetic function in a
variety of genres and media, from the folk epic to the personal letter. A show-
piece would be Roman Jakobson’s “Marginal Notes on the Prose of Boris
Pasternak,” which analyzes the role of passive verb constructions in creating
the particular tone of a Pasternak short story, Jakobson’s point being that
“prose” can be just as “artistic” as “poetry.”^11 The Formalist division between
“literary” and “ordinary” language has been challenged from many quarters:
for example, in Stanley Fish’s famous essay “How Ordinary Is Ordinary Lan-
guage?” (1973), which argues that so-called poetic devices can be found in
newspaper editorials as easily as in lyric poems.^12 But although most critics
8Chapter 1