The Soul of Poetry Redefined: Vacillations of Mimesis from Aristotle to Romanticism by Mats Malm (review)

“Aristotle, I have been told, has said, that Poetry is the most philosophical of all writing . . . ” Carefully holding Aristotle’s Poetics at a distance while yet claiming it as a critical authority, Wordsworth’s bit of hearsay in the preface to Lyrical Ballads is a rhetorical gesture with a long history. The poet was but one in a long line of writers eager to cite Aristotle’s poetic dicta while radically and fruitfully redefining the basic terms of Aristotle’s argument. Mats Malm’s The Soul of Poetry Redefined represents a welcome attempt to clarify the various, ever-changing meanings attached to some of these basic terms—most notably mimesis, diction, and verisimilitude—amid the reception and interpretation of the Poetics from the twelfth to the eighteenth century. Far from granting these vacillations in meaning to be contingent merely on the historical circumstances of reception, the book argues that this tradition of radical reinterpretation is a necessary outcome of the complex internal dynamics of Aristotle’s theory of mimesis. The transhistorical breadth required of such a project makes it an ambitious undertaking; the book’s achievements (and its occasional shortcomings) arise from its narrow constraint of focus on the traditional terms and categories of Aristotle’s treatise.

The book takes as its starting point a fundamental ambiguity in Aristotle’s Poetics concerning the essence of mimesis. Although Aristotle memorably describes plot as the “soul” of tragic and epic poetry, he nonetheless devotes considerable attention to the importance of the verbal medium that finally brings this plot into being. On these grounds, Malm convincingly argues that Aristotle’s understanding of mimesis properly enfolds a pair of competing categories of poetic creation. The author terms these categories “mimesis-composition” and “mimesis-representation” (16): the former regards the choice and arrangement of narrative content as the essential poetic act, whereas the latter views verbal expression or representation as poetry’s hallmark. For Malm, these competing categories are immanent not only in the Poetics but also, by extension, in the critical tradition surrounding its reception. It is precisely the elusiveness of Aristotle’s understanding of mimesis that compels and facilitates its endless redefinition as later interpreters vacillate between, and attempt to reconcile, these divergent notions of poetry’s soul.

The first seven chapters trace critical understandings of mimesis from Aristotle to Johann Adolph Schlegel by way of readings of Averroës, the fourteenth-century Swedish monk Mathias Lincopensis, key theorists of the Italian renaissance (Robortello, Castelvetro, and Tesauro), exemplars of French classicism (Corneille and Racine), and the eighteenth-century aesthetician Charles Batteux. Despite its title, Malm’s study is less a tale of vacillation than of steady drift in which verbal representation—and, in particular, vividness of language—gradually eclipses composition as the defining aspect of mimesis. This process begins with Averroës, for whom the soul of poetry “becomes equivalent to the rhetorical devices of visualization” (59). Mathias and Tesauro, in turn, further develop this Averroistic reading by taking metaphor to be synonymous with mimesis itself. Finally, in Batteux’s interpretation of Aristotle, poetry is redefined to include “the representation of emotions” (191)—a seminal shift, according to Malm, which provided the basis for romantic understandings of the lyric genre. As narrated by Malm, the reception history of Aristotle’s Poetics opens up a broader intellectual history of literary theory’s shifting attitudes toward its own categories, revealing how representation came to displace composition as the privileged object of poetic analysis.

Chapters 8, 9, and 10 move “beyond Aristotelian concepts” (7)—which is to say, they depart entirely from the book’s central narrative and instead take up the issues of the sublime, the symbol, and the role of emotions in poetry respectively. Each chapter moves swiftly from a classical source—Longinus, Augustine, or Plato, as the case may be—to its later interpreters, tracking vacillations in a key...