Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 843
from
Brown Corpus
A sketch of the emotional value of the study of literature would have to take account of all of these.
In the wide range of experiences common to our earth-bound race none is more difficult to manage, more troublesome, and more enduring in its effects than the control of love and hate.
William Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, it seems to me, have a penetrating insight into the way in which this control is effected: `` For if we say poetry is to talk of beauty and love ( and yet not aim at exciting erotic emotion or even an emotion of Platonic esteem ) and if it is to talk of anger and murder ( and yet not aim at arousing anger and indignation ) -- then it may be that the poetic way of dealing with these emotions will not be any kind of intensification, compounding, or magnification, or any direct assault upon the affections at all.
Something indirect, mixed, reconciling, tensional might well be the stratagem, the devious technique by which a poet indulged in all kinds of talk about love and anger and even in something like `` expressions '' of these emotions, without aiming at their incitement or even uttering anything that essentially involves their incitement ''.
The rehearsal through literature of emotional life under controlled conditions may be a most valuable human experience.
I mean something more like Freud's concept of the utility of `` play '' to a small child: he plays `` house '' or `` doctor '' or `` fireman '' as a way of mastering slightly frightening experiences, reliving them imaginatively until they are under control.
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