Poetry To God Volume 2: No Fault Found

Poems like "Does Anyone Care Anymore? Led by "Grow to Know Jesus," the idea of change or growth is a staple of the work as well. Webb is convinced that one cannot seek, much less find, God if he is not willing to change himself, alluding to the ideal example of "O Lucifer," which portrays the stubbornness of an angel turned greatest sinner. Terry Webb's collection seeks to provide all mankind with eyes of faith. Christian poetry is not a new method of expressing one's faith. The earliest examples come directly from the Bible's Old Testament, but the tradition has continued into modern times.

Some writers such as Donne and Blake channeled their beliefs into masterpieces of literature, while others such as Helen Steiner Rice wrote to inspire the common man. The author of this collection falls into this latter category, offering up simple poems of hope, love, and trust designed to lead others to a new or richer life in Christ. Although predominantly evangelistic, the selections in this second collection of Webb's verse cover a wide range of Christian topics. Some focus on specific ways that God ministers to mankind such as through grace, love, and protection.

Plato on Rhetoric and Poetry

Others are a definite call for his readers to turn to a savior who is ever reaching out to them. Sprinkled here and there within the mix are some pieces that are more introspective, reflecting Webb's own desire to grow deeper in his faith. All of the poems, though, resonate with the author's personal passion and commitment to Jesus. This book is not perfect, and a few of the poems suffer from some unintentional grammar and typographical errors.

However, Webb's poetry seems deliberately unpretentious and straightforward, completely devoid of the devices some poets use to make their verse sound more highbrow or to make their audience have to analyze each line to determine the poem's point. Instead, the author uses everyday vocabulary, standard rhyme schemes, and uncomplicated stanza patterns in an obvious attempt to communicate clearly rather than confuse.

Alexander Pope - Wikiquote

This fits with his stated desire to "change the lives of everyone who reads it, one person at a time. Terry Webb, a former drug addict finds God's mercy and love and turns his life around, recovering all that he had lost. Every word the poet puts to paper in this series is filled with overwhelming love not only for Jesus Christ, but for humanity. While Volume 1 of this series revolved around the idea of awakening from sin, this third volume dwells in the magical power of love and prayer that provides never-ending peace and comfort.

One way to address this shift away from the Lord is prayer. So as interpreters we are making claims about the truth of Homer's teachings about XYZ ; and thus we are assuming that Homer sought to state the truth about XYZ. Given that he discusses the central topics of human and godly life c1-d2 , it would seem that Homer claims to be wise, and that as his devoted encomiasts we too must be claiming to be wise d6-e1.

But claims to wisdom are subject to counter-claims the poets disagree with each other, as Socrates points out ; and in order to adjudicate between them, as well as support our assessment of their relative merits, we must open ourselves to informed discussion both technical and philosophical. It is but a step from there to the proposition that neither Ion nor Homer can sustain their claims to knowledge, and therefore could not sustain the claim that the poems are fine and beautiful works.

In passage after passage, Homer pronounces on subjects that are the province of a specialized techne art or skill , that is, a specialized branch of knowledge. But neither the rhapsode nor Homer possesses knowledge of all or indeed perhaps any of those specialized branches generalship, chariot making, medicine, navigation, divination, agriculture, fishing, horsemanship, cow herding, cithara playing, wool working, etc.

Ion attempts to resist this by claiming that thanks to his study of Homer, he knows what a general for example should say d5. To this might be added the claim that the poets and their exponents know the nature of the cosmos and of the divine. In the Republic Socrates in effect allows them comprehensive claims to knowledge along those lines, and then attacks across the board, seeking to show that the poets have got it wrong on all important counts.

So when Ion claims that Homer speaks beautifully about X, he just means that Homer speaks beautifully in a rhetorical sense even though he Homer does not necessarily know what he is talking about. By extension, the poet would on this interpretation make the same claim about himself. This would seem to reduce them to rhetoricians, which in effect is what Socrates argues in the Gorgias , with the further proviso that rhetoric as popularly practiced is not even a techne. Poetry-as-mere-rhetoric is not a promising credential for authority either to educate all of Greece or to better one's audience; b.

Ion would be liable to the question as to how he knows all that , however; and in any case would at best shift Socrates' attack to the real target, viz. It consists in the thesis that Ion recites and Homer composes not from knowledge but from divine inspiration.

Descrizione prodotto

Neither knows what he is saying, but is nonetheless capable of speaking or composing beautifully thanks to the divine. They are like the worshippers of Bacchus, out of their right minds b4—6. This creative madness, as we might call it, they share with other Muse-inspired artists as well as prophets and diviners b7-d1. This is supposed to explain why Ion can recite only Homer beautifully; he's been divinely inspired only in that area, and that is all he means when he says that Homer is better than his rival poets. The spark is generated by the god, and is passed down through the poet to the rhapsode and then to the audience.

In Socrates' unforgettable simile, the relationship of the god to poet to rhapsode to audience is like a magnetized sequence of rings, each of which sticks to the next thanks to the power of the divine magnet at the start e7—b4 , as though they were links in a chain as we might put it. This simile helps to answer an important question: Socrates' answer is that as the last link on this chain of inspiration, we are capable of being deeply affected by poetry.

In the Ion he doesn't offer a further explanation of how this effect is supposed to happen—for that, we will turn to the Republic —but the important point is that it does happen. It would seem that the audience is transformed by the experience in a way that momentarily takes them out of themselves. Perhaps it does not leave them as they were, for their understanding of what properly elicits their grief or their laughter would seem to be shaped by this powerful experience, an experience they presumably repeat many times throughout childhood and beyond.

None of this would matter much if superb poetry left us unmoved, or in any case as we were. Plato's critique depends on the assumption that poetry can and does shape the soul. One problem is indicated by the last few lines of the dialogue, where Socrates offers Ion a choice: How easy it would be to confuse divine and human madness to borrow a distinction from the Phaedrus a5—c4! And not all of the contenders for the prize Ion has won could be equally worthy of promotion to divine status.

For Plato, this means that they must be held accountable. It is philosophy's mission to force them to give an account of themselves, and to examine its soundness. This would mean that they are required to engage philosophy on its turf, just as Ion has somewhat reluctantly done. The legitimacy of that requirement is itself a point of contention, it is one aspect of the quarrel between philosophy and poetry. In order to respond to the famous challenge put to Socrates by Glaucon and Adeimantus, it is necessary to define justice.

It turns out that philosophic guardians are to rule the polis, and the next question concerns their education e2. The concern in book II is very much with the proper education of a citizen, as befits the project of creating a model city. From the outset, Socrates treats the poems those by Hesiod and Homer are singled out, but the critique isn't meant to be confined to them as though they contained not just falsehoods, but falsehoods held up as models of good behavior.

The poems are taken as educational and thus broadly political texts; persuasion see c7 of a class of the young is very much at stake. The young cannot judge well what is true and false; since a view of things taken on at early age is very hard to eradicate or change, it is necessary to ensure that they hear only myths that encourage true virtue d7-e3.

Thus while the critique of poetry in book II and beyond is in this sense shaped by the contextual concerns, it is not limited to them. The scope of the critique is breathtaking. Along the way Socrates makes yet another point of great importance, namely that the poets ought not be permitted to say that those punished for misdeeds are wretched; rather, they must say that in paying a just penalty, bad men are benefited by the god b2—6.

Socrates is starting to push against the theses that bad people will flourish or that good people can be harmed. The cosmos is structured in such a way as to support virtue. In book III Socrates expands the argument considerably. The concern now is squarely with poetry that encourages virtue in the souls of the young. Courage and moderation are the first two virtues considered here; the psychological and ethical effects of poetry are now scrutinized.

The entire portrait of Hades must go, since it is neither true nor beneficial for auditors who must become fearless in the face of death. Death is not the worst thing there is, and all depictions of famous or allegedly good men wailing and lamenting their misfortunes must go or at least, be confined to unimportant women and to bad men; e9—a3. The poets must not imitate see c3 for the term gods or men suffering any extremes of emotion, including hilarity, for the strong souls are not overpowered by any emotion, let along any bodily desire.

Nor do they suffer from spiritual conflict c. He does so in a way that marks a new direction in the conversation. The issue turns out to be of deep ethical import, because it concerns the way in which poetry affects the soul. Up until now, the mechanism, so to speak, has been vague; now it becomes a little bit clearer.

The notion of mimesis , missing from the Ion , now takes center stage. For then the poet is likening himself to this character, and trying to make the audience believe that it's the character speaking.

Alexander Pope

Some poetry comedy and tragedy are mentioned proceeds wholly by imitation, another wholly by simple narration dithyrambs are mentioned , and epic poetry combines the two forms of narrative. What follows this classificatory scheme is a polemic against imitation.

The initial thesis is that every person can do a fine job in just one activity only. Consequently, nobody can do a fine job of imitating more than one thing for example, an actor cannot be a rhapsode, a comic poet cannot be a tragic poet, if any of these is finely done. Imitation is itself something one does, and so one cannot both imitate X say, generalship well and also do the activity X in question eb. It has to be said that this thesis is set out with little real argument.

In any case, the best souls the guardians, in this case, in the city in speech ought not imitate anything. And were they to imitate anything, every care must be taken that they are ennobled rather than degraded as a result. Unlike simple narrative, mimesis poses a particular psychic danger, because as the speaker of the narrative one may take on the character of literary persona in question. There is no airtight barrier between throwing yourself especially habitually into a certain part, body and soul, and being molded by the part; no firm boundary, in that sense, between what happens on and off the stage.

By contrast, Socrates argues, a simple narration preserves distance between narrator and narrated. Before passing onto critiques of music and gymnastic, Socrates concludes this section of his critique of poetry with the stipulation that a poet who imitates all things both good and bad in all styles cannot be admitted into the good polis.

This critique of mimetic poetry has struck not a few readers as a bit strange and obtuse, even putting aside the question of the legitimacy of censorship of the arts. It seems not to distinguish between the poet, the reciter of the poem, and the audience; no spectatorial distance is allowed to the audience; and the author is allowed little distance from the characters he is representing. All become the speakers or performers of the poem when they say or think the lines; and speaking the poem, taking it on as it were, is alleged to have real effects on one's dispositions.

In book II the critique of poetry focused on mimesis understood as representation; the fundamental point was that poets misrepresent the nature of the subjects about which they write e. They do not produce a true likeness of their topics. The renewed criticism leads up to the famous statement that there exists an ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Book X starts us off with a reaffirmation of a main deficiency of poets: Socrates posits that there are Forms or Ideas of beds and tables, the maker of which is a god; there are imitations thereof, namely beds and tables, produced by craftsmen such as carpenters who behold the Forms as though they were looking at blueprints ; thirdly, there are imitators of the products of the craftsmen, who, like painters, create a kind of image of these objects in the world of becoming.

The tripartite schema presents the interpreter with many problems. Let us focus on one of the implications of this schema, about which Socrates is quite specific. The poets don't know the originals of i. The fundamental point is by now familiar to us: Even putting aside all of the matters relating to arts and crafts technai such as medicine , and focusing on the greatest and most important things—above all, the governance of societies and the education of a human being—Homer simply does not stand up to examination ce.

And what, apart from their own ignorance of the truth, governs their very partial perspective on the world of becoming? Socrates implies that they pander to their audience, to the hoi polloi b3—4. This links them to the rhetoricians as Socrates describes them in the Gorgias. At the same time, they take advantage of that part in us the hoi polloi are governed by; here Socrates attempts to bring his discussion of psychology, presented since book III, to bear.

The ensuing discussion is remarkable in the way in which it elaborates on these theses. How would a decent person respond to such a calamity?

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Socrates sketches the character of the decent and good person this way: This may be a sketch of Socrates himself, whose imitation Plato has produced. By contrast, the tragic imitators excel at portraying the psychic conflicts of people who are suffering and who do not even attempt to respond philosophically. Since their audience consists of people whose own selves are in that sort of condition too, imitators and audience are locked into a sort of mutually reinforcing picture of the human condition.

Both are captured by that part of themselves given to the non-rational or irrational; both are most interested in the condition of internal conflict. Onlookers become emotively involved in the poet's drama. Another remarkable passage follows: So the danger posed by poetry is great, for it appeals to something to which even the best—the most philosophical—are liable, and induces a dream-like, uncritical state in which we lose ourselves in the emotions in question above all, in sorrow, grief, anger, resentment.

That is why poetry, with its throbbing rhythms and beating of breasts, appeals equally to the nondescript mob in the theater and to the best among us. But if poetry goes straight to the lower part of the psyche, that is where it must come from. He does not separate knowledge of beauty and knowledge of good. It is as though the pleasure we take in the representation of sorrow on the stage will—because it is pleasure in that which the representation represents and not just a representation on the stage or in a poem —transmute into pleasure in the expression of sorrow in life.

And that is not only an ethical effect, but a bad one, for Plato. These are ingredients of his disagreements on the subject with Aristotle, as well as with myriad thinkers since then. The poets help enslave even the best of us to the lower parts of our soul; and just insofar as they do so, they must be kept out of any community that wishes to be free and virtuous.

Famously, or notoriously, Plato refuses to countenance a firm separation between the private and the public, between the virtue of the one and the regulation of the other. What goes on in the theater, in your home, in your fantasy life, are connected. Poetry unregulated by philosophy is a danger to soul and community. The conclusion is the same: The poets have been characterized as making claims to truth, to telling it like it is, that are in fact—contrary to appearances—little more than the poet's unargued imaginative projections whose tenability is established by their ability to command the applause of the audience.

That is, the poets are rhetoricians who are, as it were, selling their products to as large a market as possible, in the hope of gaining repute and influence. The tripartite schema of Idea, artifact, and imitator is as much about making as it is about imitation.

Making is a continual thread through all three levels of the schema. The Ideas too are said to be made , even though that is entirely inconsistent with the doctrine of Ideas as eternal expressed earlier in the Republic itself and in all the other Platonic dialogues. Their effort has to do with discovery rather than making. Nowhere in the Republic does Socrates mention the poet's claim to inspiration.

Indeed, that claim is pointedly omitted in the passage in which Socrates talks about the beginnings of the Iliad e2—a5; see Bloom's note ad loc. Socrates implicitly denies the soundness of that claim here. Given his conception of the divine as Idea, such a claim could not be true, since the Ideas do not speak, let alone speak the things which Homer, Hesiod, and their followers recount.

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The result is that the poets are fabricators even of the appearance of knowing what they are talking about; this is not inconsistent with the Ion 's characterization of poetry as inspired ignorance. Does the critique of poetry in the Republic extend beyond the project of founding the just city in speech? I have already suggested an affirmative answer when discussing book II.

The concerns about poetry expressed in books III and X would also extend beyond the immediate project of the dialogue, if they carry any water at all, even though the targets Plato names are of course taken from his own times. It has been argued that the authority to speak truth that poets claim is shared by many widely esteemed poets since then. Controversies about, say, the effects of graphic depictions of violence, of the degradation of women, and of sex, echo the Platonic worries about the ethical and social effects of art.

The Gorgias is one of Plato's most bitter dialogues in that the exchanges are at times full of anger, of uncompromising disagreement, plenty of misunderstanding, and cutting rhetoric.

In these respects it goes beyond even the Protagoras , a dialogue that depicts a hostile confrontation between Socrates and the renowned sophist by the same name. What is the fight about? Socrates asks Gorgias to define what it is that he does, that is, to define rhetoric.

And he asks him to do it in a way that helps to distinguish rhetorical from philosophical discourse: Gorgias is forced by successive challenges to move from the view that rhetoric is concerned with words speeches to the view that its activity and effectiveness happen only in and through words unlike the manual arts to the view that its object is the greatest of human concerns, namely freedom. But persuasion about what exactly? But surely there are two kinds of persuasion, one that instills beliefs merely, and another that produces knowledge; it is the former only with which rhetoric is concerned.

The analogy of this argument to the critique of poetry is already clear; in both cases, Socrates wants to argue that the speaker is not a truth speaker, and does not convey knowledge to his audience. As already noted, Socrates classifies poetry dithyrambic and tragic poetry are named as a species of rhetoric. Its goal is to gratify and please the spectator, or differently put, it is just a kind of flattery.

Strip away the rhythm and meter, and you have plain prose directed at the mob. It's a kind of public speaking, that's all a6-c The rhetorician is a maker of beliefs in the souls of his auditors a3—4. And without that skill—here Gorgias begins to wax at length and eloquently—other arts such as medicine cannot do their work effectively b ff. Rhetoric is a comprehensive art. More editions of The Phoenix Gene: More editions of The Phoenix Gene Aftermath: The Phoenix Gene Aftermath: Poetry to God, Volume 1: Lord, Please Hear the Cry: The Tree of Renewed Life: Founded in , BookFinder.

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