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[ 161 ] 9 ] Dewey, Gadamer, and the Status of Poetry among the Arts David Vessey When Alcuin argued for the artes liberales in the Carolingian court, three things kept poetry from finding a distinctive place: Plato’s concerns about the corruptive power of poetry; poesis—“making”—suggesting poetry belonged to the mechanical rather than liberal arts; and the Pythagorean mathematicization of music. Through the Middle Ages, the best poetry could hope for was a place under the category of rhetoric; though, since it was then seen as oriented only to pleasure, the medieval church shared Plato’s suspicions. When poetry took off in the fourteenth century, it’s not surprising that something so connected to both language and music should seem to transcend the split between the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and quadrivium (arithmetic , geometry, astronomy, and music). When Leonardo da Vinci in 1490 argued that painting not only belongs among the liberal arts but is the highest of the arts, it was music and poetry—one the master of invisible things, the other the master of visible things—he sought to dethrone. Poetry was no longer a tool of rhetoric but an art of first rank, and the nature of music lay in its emotional power, not in mathematical relations. Leonardo’s arguments never caught on, but the link between poetry and music has been often repeated, as has been their status as the highest of the arts. In the nineteenth century, G. W. F. Hegel called poetry “the universal art of the mind.”1 It “runs though all the arts” and is art’s “highest phase,” one phase higher than music. Arthur Schopenhauer inverted the priority: poetry is “the true mirror of the real nature of the world and life,”2 but music, since it speaks directly to the will unmediated by ideas, is the “most powerful of all the arts.”3 A young John Dewey wrote, “The various fine arts, architecture , sculpture, painting, music and poetry are the successive attempts of the mind to adequately express its own ideal nature, or, more correctly stated, adequately to produce that which will satisfy its own demands for a love of a perfectly harmonious nature, something in which admiration may rest.”4 The ordering of the arts is not accidental; poetry is above music, especially )DLUILHOG&KLQGG $0 162 David Vessey dramatic poetry, as it “consummates . . . the range of fine arts, because in dramatic form we have the highest ideal of self, personality displaying itself in the form of personality. . . . [B]eyond this art cannot go.”5 Forty years later, in Art as Experience, Dewey returned to the idea of ranking the arts, but by then his views had changed. He presents the very fact that Schopenhauer even thought to rank the arts as evidence of “a complete failure of philosophy to meet the challenge that art offers reflective thought.”6 By 1931, Dewey was no longer willing to give any art form pride of place among the arts. The question I want to take up is the place of poetry in the arts: specifically, does it hold pride of place either as the telos of art, or as the essence of art, or at least as deserving special consideration among the arts? I will look at Dewey’s theory of poetry and how he argues that it does not hold a philosophically distinctive place and contrast it with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s theory about “the essential priority of poetry with respect to the other arts.”7 Martin Heidegger may have expressed the view most dramatically when he claimed that “the essence of art is poetry,”8 but, as in so many other cases, it is Gadamer who fully articulates it and locates it in the history of philosophy. Finally, I will argue with Gadamer that poetry does have a distinctive place among the arts, and poetry is particularly useful for helping us understand the arts in general. The key to this argument is seeing that language, especially poetic language, is not first and foremost a tool, not even, as Dewey writes, the “tool of tools.”9 Dewey’s Understanding of Poetry among the Arts Of course, what Dewey is known most for is arguing against distinguishing art from other areas of life. In Art as Experience, it is the continuity among the arts, and above all the continuity of aesthetic experience and everyday experience, that takes the fore. He argues that were we to understand life as practical through...

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