ANNA CHRISTINA RIBEIRO

Aesthetic Attributions: The Case of Poetry

i. introduction

Some claims about poems are uncontroversial: that a poem is composed in dactylic hexameter, as in Homer’s epics, or in iambic pentameter, as in Shakespeare’s sonnets, or in no particular traditional meter, as in most of e. e. cummings’s work; that it rhymes following an abab pattern or that it does not; that it is very long, very short, or any length in between; that it employs sophisticated diction, archaic language, or common everyday words; that its similes and metaphors are novel ´ Such claims may easily be ascertained or cliche. by those able to count syllables, those able to distinguish the stressed syllables from the unstressed ones, and those familiar with the varieties of poetic meter; by those able to tell whether two or more words sound alike; by those able to distinguish different text lengths; by those able to recognize when words are of the garden-variety kind.1 Except for familiarity with the kinds of poetic meter, “those” are most of us. We may call these ‘base,’ ‘lower level,’ or ‘structural’ properties. At another level of description, poems may be tightly knit, unified, balanced, heavy and somber, light and jolly, and so on. The attributions in this case are still descriptive, but an evaluative judgment may be embedded in them, or it may be typically taken to be embedded, or intended to be embedded, in them. That is, a positive or negative valence may sometimes accompany the judgment that a poem is unified and balanced: one may find it good or bad in virtue of those characteristics (though one may also find it good or bad regardless of those characteristics). Further, justifications of why a poem is unified, balanced, and so on are made by reference to the qualities specified at the first level of description: it is unified because all the parts fit well together in

some manner. We may call these ‘aesthetic attributions’; as Jerrold Levinson puts it, here we have “an overall impression afforded, an impression that cannot simply be identified with the structural properties that underpin it.”2 At a third level still, and in part in virtue of facts at the previous two levels, poems may be beautiful, terrific, or horrendously bad: here we have wholly evaluative attributions, or aesthetic judgments properly so-called. Note how there is an inverse proportion in informative value between base properties and aesthetic judgments: base properties are informative about a work (“is in iambic pentameter”) but not aesthetically evaluative and thus not aesthetically informative; aesthetic evaluations (“is beautiful”) are aesthetically informative, but tell us nothing about the specific characteristics of a work. Aesthetic attributions fall in the middle also in that they may retain some of the informative value of either extreme: they may be somewhat structurally informative and somewhat aesthetically informative (“unified”). If it is true that these three levels are at once distinguishable and intrinsically related, some questions one may ask are: How are they related? How is our perception of a set of words arranged in a certain cadence and with breaks visually or aurally marked related to our perceiving in them or attributing to them a certain set of aesthetic qualities?3 How do we go from characteristics such as “has lines of eighteen syllables, where a marked syllable is followed by two unmarked ones throughout” to “is tightly knit” to “is beautiful”? In other words, how do we move from purely descriptive attributes to aesthetic and evaluative ones? Anyone may count syllables, and most of us can more or less tell when a syllable is stressed relative to another that precedes or follows it. We may likewise be able to judge whether a metaphor

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70:3 Summer 2012 c 2012 The American Society for Aesthetics 

294 is unusual or not simply by recalling whether we have heard anything like it in the past, or how unlike each other the terms of comparison are. That assessment may be accompanied by approval or disapproval; in itself it need not express either (“That’s a novel metaphor: it is awful” is a perfectly sensible statement). Finally, when we move to ‘beautiful’ and ‘moving,’ we are making a judgment of taste: our approval is embedded in those terms. My concern in what follows is with the move from lower-level perceptual qualities to the attribution of aesthetic qualities. I am not concerned with how we go from there to an overall aesthetic evaluation. In my proposal, I question the much discussed wisdom handed down to us by Frank Sibley. I am referring to Sibley’s famous claim, defended in “Aesthetic Concepts” and related articles, that we are never, in any art form, warranted in making the (logical) jump from the description of nonaesthetic properties to the ascription of aesthetic ones.4 In his words, Sibley claimed that “there are no nonaesthetic features which serve in any circumstances as logically sufficient conditions for applying aesthetic terms.”5 We cannot, for instance, go from ‘employ[s] bright colors’ to ‘is lively and vigorous,’ the way we can go from ‘unmarried male’ to ‘bachelor’ or from ‘enclosed figure with four equal sides and four right angles’ to ‘square.’6 Surely we cannot, but why should anyone have thought otherwise? Aesthetic qualities are qualities, not concepts. As an attribute, ‘graceful’ more closely resembles ‘hot’ than it does ‘square.’ There is no reason to expect a one-to-one relationship between base properties and aesthetic attributions, but there is good reason to expect that a range of properties is clearly associated with a range of attributions, just as a range of temperatures is associated with feeling cold. Sibley also claimed that no particular base property or set thereof is necessary for any given aesthetic concept to apply. This is because things may have the same aesthetic quality for different reasons: “one thing is graceful because of these features, another because of those, and so on almost endlessly.”7 I do not question whether Sibley’s claims are defensible when it comes to vases, paintings, sculptures, or sonatas; indeed, his view is compelling as a general rule. However, it seems to me that some varieties of poetry provide, not an exception to Sibley’s rule—I am not claiming logical entailments here, nor do I think any-

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism one could—but evidence for what may be called a ‘defeasible guarantee.’8 In at least some kinds of formal poetry, there is a sense in which a description in nonaesthetic terms sometimes ought to suffice, in virtue of what we may call ‘psychoaesthetic’ associations between the perception of formal features and felt aesthetic qualities, for the attribution of an aesthetic quality. Accordingly, my first goal in what follows is to show in what way I think it is sufficient and to provide some examples in support of that connection. I hope that from this it emerges that Sibley was wrong to hold that unless their relationship is a logicoconceptual one, no base properties ever suffice to warrant the ascription of an aesthetic quality.

ii. sibley’s view

Sibley’s goal in “Aesthetic Concepts” and related articles is to show how aesthetic concepts differ from other kinds of concepts such as mathematics and logic concepts, moral concepts, and character trait concepts. The main criterion used to establish the differences among these kinds of concepts is whether we could establish the necessary and sufficient conditions for their application. The upshot of Sibley’s analysis is that, unlike mathematical, logical, moral, and character trait concepts, aesthetic concepts are not governed by conditions at all, except negatively. A brief summary will suffice to explain his view. Among aesthetic concepts, Sibley distinguishes between those that are natively aesthetic and those that are aesthetic by metaphorical transfer. Natively aesthetic concepts are those whose primary or sole purpose is the expression of aesthetic attributes; for instance, “lovely, pretty, beautiful, dainty, graceful, elegant.”9 Others, like “tightly knit,” “dynamic,” “balanced,” and “melancholy,” are metaphors, borrowed from other domains of life to serve the purpose of criticism.10 All of these are contrasted with verdicts; verdicts may be justified on the basis of such aesthetic qualities, but are not identical with them. They are overall aesthetic evaluations such as “good” or “beautiful”; while informative regarding the aesthetic valence one ascribes to a given object, they are particularly uninformative concerning the basis for that ascription absent further explanation or specific knowledge about what could make an object of the kind in question aesthetically good or bad.

Ribeiro Aesthetic Attributions Sibley contrasts aesthetic concepts with concepts such as “square” and “intelligent.” We can easily give necessary and sufficient conditions for ‘square,’ and, for terms like ‘intelligent,’ he claims, we may specify conditions that individually only count toward (never against) their applicability, and that, together with other such conditions, eventually suffice for the application of the term. For instance, we would not say, “Mary is unintelligent because she is a good chess player”; moreover, if someone tells us in addition that Mary easily earns the highest grade in every subject at Harvard University, we would be justified in concluding that she is intelligent. Likewise for terms like ‘generous’ or ‘lazy’: regularly donating money to the poor is sufficient to warrant the first attribution, just as never doing any work is sufficient for the second. One might think that aesthetic terms like ‘dainty,’ although clearly not like ‘square,’ are perhaps rather like ‘intelligent’ or ‘generous.’ That is, it would seem that being small, for instance, could only count toward, never against, daintiness, and that there comes a point in a description of an object in nonaesthetic terms at which we are warranted in concluding that it must have a given aesthetic property. But Sibley denies that. While we must agree that someone is intelligent if she is very good at chess, easily solves difficult mathematical puzzles, and so on, we cannot, he says, “make any general statement of the form ‘If the vase is pale pink, somewhat curving, lightly mottled, and so forth, it will be delicate, cannot but be delicate.’”11 One might object to Sibley on the basis of current ignorance: perhaps we just do not know yet precisely what set of properties will adequately warrant an aesthetic attribution; but that is a matter of investigation, not of principle. However, Sibley will not have that either. For him, “things may be described to us in nonaesthetic terms as fully as we please, but we are not thereby put in the position of having to admit (or being unable to deny) that they are delicate or graceful or garish or exquisitely balanced.”12 It is true, he admits, that certain features appear to count only in one direction, as, for instance, lightness is associated with delicacy and not with grandeur. But they only count typically or characteristically; they do not count always only in one direction in the way that giving to the poor does in the case of generosity. Upon inspection, Sibley says, an object that is described in terms typically associated with

295 delicacy may turn out to be insipid or anemic.13 There are, moreover, nonaesthetic features that do not seem to count either way: One poem has strength or power because of the regularity of its meter and rhyme; another is monotonous and lacks drive and strength because of its regular meter or rhyme. We do not feel the need to switch from ‘because of’ to ‘in spite of,’ as we might if a vase were delicate in spite of being made of very thick ceramic.14

Of course, this leaves open the possibility that regularity of meter and rhyme scheme are positively associated with some other aesthetic quality. Still, Sibley’s point is granted. Another possible analysis of aesthetic concepts considered by Sibley was by analogy with H. L. A. Hart’s notion of defeasible concepts. A concept is defeasible when a set of conditions A, B, and C is sufficient for it to apply, unless some other feature D is present that precludes its application. The conditions in the case of defeasible concepts count only in one direction, either for or against, and if the defeating or overriding condition is not present, then the concept does apply. To use Hart’s example, ‘offer’ and ‘acceptance’ count only toward entering a valid contract; but if one of the parties is legally insane or has a gun to his head, then the validity of the contract will not hold up. In the absence of these or any other voiding conditions, the contract is valid; to speak like Sibley, it “cannot but be” valid. Nevertheless, aesthetic concepts cannot be accounted for in any such positive sense either, according to Sibley. Even if conditions associated with an aesthetic term typically count toward that term being applicable, the term may not apply in a given case despite the absence of defeating conditions. Again, they are only typically associated with a given aesthetic term, and so their presence may not warrant the application of the term even if there is no contrary feature that overrides other ones by ensuring the inapplicability of that term. The only way in which aesthetic terms are governed, Sibley contends, is negatively. That is, if certain nonaesthetic properties are present, then they may exclude the possibility that a given aesthetic attribution could be made. For instance, having straight lines precludes a vase from being flamboyant.15 While I agree with most of Sibley’s analysis, I think he was too hasty in his dismissal of Hart’s

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notion. For one, one may wonder what, except for a defeating condition, can cause an aesthetic term not to apply that typically does apply in the presence of certain nonaesthetic qualities. Perhaps it is rather the case that either we did not have the typicality relation right in the first place or we did not look closely enough at the set of nonaesthetic qualities exhibited by the work. But I think such broad claims must be tested against specific cases. My aim here is to test them against poetry. My claim is that, at least when it comes to some kinds of formal poetry, Hart’s notion of defeasible concepts, with a minor addendum, strikes me as the appropriate way to construe the relationship between aesthetic qualities and lower-level perceptual properties, in such a way as to allow us to make the move from descriptions in nonaesthetic terms to attributions of at least some aesthetic qualities. So the relationship between lower-level, perceptual properties and aesthetic attributions that I defend is a variation of Hart’s notion of defeasible terms; in my view, the defeating conditions also produce predictable effects. This seems to be particularly evident in the case of nursery rhymes and of limericks. In the case of nursery rhymes, we have a virtually universal poetic form (the ballad stanza) that is one of the most ancient and also has persisted through millennia, while the limerick is a conventional, relatively recent, and geographically (or at least linguistically) bound form.16 Both present themselves as good test cases. I note again that by aesthetic attributions I mean the attribution of particular aesthetic qualities, such as unity, melancholy, harshness, or mellifluousness. By aesthetic judgment I mean the kind of overall evaluation that expresses approval or disapproval, as when we say of a poem that it is good, wonderful, or terrible; what Sibley calls ‘verdicts’ or ‘verdictive statements’; they are “purely evaluative judgments.”17 My claims concern the attribution of aesthetic qualities, not the overall aesthetic evaluation of an object.

conceptual one, it would have been somewhat surprising if necessary and sufficient conditions could have been established for the attribution of aesthetic qualities. So I agree with Sibley that, in the strict sense that he pursues, aesthetic concepts are not positively condition governed—‘mellifluous’ is not like ‘bachelor’. Still, I believe that there are cases in which defeasible generalizations can be stated that relate perceptual properties and aesthetic terms.18 Defeasible generalizations, as the term suggests, need not, and typically do not, obtain one hundred percent of the time. But this does not diminish their predictive power. It may be that the next time I put water on the stove, it will not boil or that the next time an alarm rings, it will not mean there is a fire. Still, I have good reason to expect that in both cases matters will proceed as usual. In the case of aesthetic qualities, law-like generalizations may arise from some natural attunement we have to certain phenomena, or they may emerge from established conventions. In both cases, they will correspond to expectations: they may, either naturally or by convention, give rise to certain expectations in us, expectations directly related to the attribution of certain aesthetic qualities. Moreover, these expectations may be, though they need not necessarily be, category relative. By this I mean that they may be expectations connected with a particular category of art—a particular art form, such as poetry, or a specific category within it, such as the sonnet.19 I think the notion of defeasible terms defended by Hart, suitably amended, may best explain the relationship between the base properties and the aesthetic attributions associated with some kinds of formal poetry. What I propose is that we see this relationship as a law-like generalization that may be defeated, but whose defeating conditions may likewise be subsumed under a more general law. So let us turn to some poetry to see how that actually works.

iii. aesthetic attributions as defeasible attributions

iv. the ballad and the limerick stanzas

The first question one may ask regarding an analysis of aesthetic concepts such as Sibley’s is: why should anyone have expected a logical entailment between perceptual properties and aesthetic attributions? Inasmuch as the realm of aesthetic attributions is an empirical realm, and not a purely

i. The Ballad Stanza. The ballad stanza used in nursery rhymes is a four-line stanza with two to four marked (stressed or long, for example) syllables per line, typically in iambs, but sometimes also in anapestic feet. The rhyme scheme may be aabb, abba, abab, or abxb, where the “x” does not rhyme with any of the other lines (this is also called

Ribeiro Aesthetic Attributions ‘common meter’). The ballad stanza is a virtually universal stanza, and some scholars claim that it is the most ancient stanza form.20 If that is true, the ballad stanza has been with us, wherever we were on the globe and whatever the language we were speaking, for longer, possibly much longer, than 5,000 years. Below are some examples of nursery rhymes: Russian (transliteration) баю-баюшки-баю (bayu-bayushki-bayu) не ложися на краю (ne lozhisya na krayu) ¨ серенький волчoк прийдeт (pridiot seren’kiy volchok) и укусит за бочок (i ukusit za bochok.) Hungarian Boci, boci tarka, ¨ se farka, se fule, ¨ oda megyunk lakni, ahol tejet kapni. Maori E tangi ana koe Hine e hine E ngenge ana koe Hine e hine. Swahili Ukut´ı, Ukut´ı Wa mnaz´ı, Wa mnaz´ı ´ Upepoˆ Ukipata ˆ . . . Watete ˆ . . . Watetemek ˆ ´ Watete a. English Cry Baby Bunting, Daddy’s gone a-hunting, Gone to fetch a rabbit skin To wrap the Baby Bunting in.

It should not be surprising that this metrical structure and rhyme scheme have been used universally in lullabies and nursery rhymes. There seems to be something inherently light, jolly, and singsongy about it; it is not called the “ballad stanza” by accident. This correlation of formal structure and aesthetic qualities occurs largely irrespective of the semantic contribution of the words in the verse. Nursery rhymes often do not make much sense, and many of them are downright nasty, threatening infants reluctant to go to sleep with

297 every variety of scary monster—it is a good thing indeed that for several years children do not understand what they are hearing. For the grownups who do understand, the ballad stanza has been used in light and more or less serious verse alike. Consider the following examples: Johnny was a chemist, But Johnny is no more: For what he thought was H2 O Was H2 SO4 .21 Dies sind die Kleinen Von den Meinen. ¨ wie zu Lust und Taten Hore, Altklug sie raten! In die Welt weit, Aus der Einsamkeit, ¨ Wo Sinnen und Safte stocken, Wollen Sie dich locken. [translated] These are the small Ones of my thralls. Hear how precociously they plead For pleasure and deed! To worldly strife From your lonely life Which dries up sap and sense, They would lure you hence.22

We may consider serious subject matter, grasped as such, as a defeating condition, one that should alter the typical attribution of jolliness and lightness to the verse. But a certain playfulness remains despite the seriousness of the subject matter; the effect we have is of sarcasm, mockery, or cynicism. I am not alone in attributing this kind of aesthetic quality to these verses; one of Goethe’s major translators, for instance, writes of Faust: The old Goethe, intent on husbanding his energies for his creative work, could affect the stiff pose of a Herr Geheimrat to cut short unwelcome visits. But in his verse he is anything but stiff, and Faust manifests an overwhelming disrespect for etiquette and almost every thinkable propriety, including the established canons of poetic form. The play abounds in doggerel, slang, and jokes, and contains more light verse than solemn poetry.23

To sum it up, the way the ballad stanza seems to work is this: that particular metrical and rhyme

298 structure tends to produce a certain effect on us that leads us provisionally to attribute aesthetic qualities such as light, cheerful, jovial, and so on to that kind of verse. The phonetic qualities are felt, while the subject matter is understood. If the latter is such as to go along with the felt phonetic qualities, the overall sense remains the same. Sometimes, however, the subject matter is such as to counter the lightness of the verse; serious subject matter (in verse intended for adults) counts as a defeating condition, a condition counting against the application of that cluster of aesthetic qualities. Nevertheless, such cases do not entail that all hell breaks loose and it is a free-for-all of aesthetic attributions. The effect is again predictable; the new cluster of aesthetic qualities attributable to such verse includes those of a playful seriousness, or perhaps inappropriate lightness: mockery, sarcasm, cynicism, derision, and so on.24 The universality and staying power of this type of stanza, together with the kind of subject matter it has mostly been used for, indeed strongly suggest the closest thing to a logical entailment we can have in nonconceptual connections: could there be a natural (that is, psychological) connection between (certain) sound structures and poetic effect? I think the ballad stanza constitutes evidence in favor of such a claim. ii. The Limerick Stanza. Not all forms are universal, however. The limerick, for instance, has existed only since the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Limericks are first found in print in two volumes: The History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women (1821) and Anecdotes and Adventures of Fifteen Gentlemen (1822). More soon followed with Edward Lear’s A Book of Nonsense (1846), and since then the limerick has been extremely popular. But the limerick is rather recent relative to nursery rhymes—it is a couple of centuries old as compared to 5,000 years or more. Moreover, the limerick is culturally, if not altogether geographically, bound; it is not a universal form. From its beginning, the limerick stanza has been used for satire, mockery, and, as Lear himself announces, nonsense. But this could be merely a convention that stuck; and conventional connections would seem to enjoy a weaker status than the sort of connection evinced by the ballad stanza (that is, one that persists across languages and times). Some (aspects of) poetic form, then, seem to be associated only by convention with particular poetic

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism effects. If so, then at least in these cases Sibley appears to be right: aesthetic qualities are not positively condition governed. What, then, is the status of such conventional associations? The limerick is composed of five lines of accentual verse (anapestic or amphibrachic) rhyming aabba; the first (unaccented) syllable may be omitted: (x) x / x x / x x / a (x) x / x x / x x / a (x) x / x x / b (x) x / x x / b (x) x / x x / x x / a25

Here are some examples from the two early books, respectively: There was an Old Woman at Gloster, Whose parrot two guineas it cost her; But his tongue never ceasing, Was vastly displeasing To that talkative Woman of Gloster.

A merry old man of Oporto, Had long had the gout in his fore toe; And oft when he spoke To relate a good joke, A terrible twinge cut it short O!26

Beyond the metrical structure and rhyme scheme, we may also note the feminine rhymes (last syllable unstressed) throughout the first limerick and in lines 1, 2, and 5 of the second one. Because of this extra syllable at the end, the following line will typically omit the first unstressed syllable, so as to keep the anapestic rhythm. In other words, the first stressed syllable will come one syllable earlier. This is particularly evident in the second limerick, where lines 3 and 4 end in a masculine rhyme (last syllable is stressed). While in line 3 the second syllable is already stressed so as to compensate for the extra unstressed syllable at the end of the previous line, in line 4 we have the usual two unstressed syllables before the first stressed one. And, of course, on the last line we have a nonsense syllable added on at the end so as to keep the feminine rhyme scheme. According to Paul Fussell, meter can “mean” in at least three ways:

Ribeiro Aesthetic Attributions 1. “all meter, by distinguishing rhythmic from ordinary statement, objectifies that statement and impels it toward a significant formality and ever ritualism”; 2. “departures from metrical norms powerfully reinforce emotional effects”; and 3. “meters can mean by association and convention.” i. “In the limerick, for example, the very pattern of short anapestic lines is so firmly associated with light impudence or indecency that a poet can hardly write in anything resembling this measure without evoking smiles.” ii. “To ‘translate’ a limerick into, say, iambic tetrameter, is to drain off the comedy: we must conclude that a great deal of the comedy inheres by now in the meter alone.”27 Still, it seems unlikely that (expectations of) aesthetic effects exist by convention. The fact that the limerick stanza has always been used for “light impudence or indecency” does not mean that a poet could not use that form to write a serious or a sad poem. Indeed, attempts have been made. I here offer an example of each kind, respectively, both of them written in response to earlier versions of this article. “Aubade: A Metrical Experiment” When I wake before dawn, it’s to fear Of death—always there, always near, Ineluctable, fell— That no trick can dispel: An anguish that nothing can cheer. Most things may not happen: this will, And no sophist can sugar the pill With the plausible thought That extinction to naught Is not fearful, for that is the ill. That appals us—no thinking, no sense, No loving, but only immense Oblivion. Appeal To religion’s no deal Any more; courage just means pretence. . .28 “A Sad Limerick” The drumbeat is loud and insistent. The rain drizzling down is persistent.

299 He gave up his life In a meaningless strife That now seems so foreign and distant.29

The serious limerick violates the form in at least two ways: by having caesurae (breaks) in the middle of a line and by having enjambed lines that end in a feminine rhyme (last syllable unstressed). Typically, limericks do not have enjambed lines (incomplete clauses whose sense is completed only in the following line). When they do, the form requires the last syllable to be stressed so as not to break the rhythm, since the first two syllables of the anapestic foot are unstressed. The most serious-sounding stanza in “Aubade: A Metrical Experiment” is the one farthest from the form. Finally, one may also object to the fact that in this example we do not have single-standing limericks. The sad limerick conforms more closely to the form, but it still violates it in the first two lines by having complete sentences (not clauses) as opposed to a single sentence that either is completed on the second line or that is not completed until the end of the poem (see the Lear limericks above for comparison). Not coincidentally, those first two lines are the most sad-sounding ones; they break the light, songlike sound typical of the limerick. As soon as the stanza returns to the conventional limerick form on the third line, that sad mood is thwarted and the stanza acquires a trite rather than sad tone. If my analysis of aesthetic attributions as analogous to defeasible concepts is to hold, however, the sad and serious subject matter of these limericks, being defeating conditions, should nonetheless produce predictable effects. It seems to me that, in these cases, the aesthetic qualities produced will belong in the cluster of the silly, or the mildly ridiculous—the laughable, though not laughable in the good, earnest way that is typically effected by the limerick. It is true that in the case of the limerick such effects will likely be felt only by those with the relevant linguistic sensibility. Such relativism in attributions, however, should not be surprising in the case of poetry. This is because in poetry the prosody of the language in which it is written is profoundly important, and we are naturally more attuned to the sounds of our native language. It seems then that some kinds of formal poetry evince strong connections with certain clusters of

300 aesthetic qualities. The strength of the relationship between the formal properties of some verse and the aesthetic attributions we associate with them is analogous to the notion of defeasible concepts defended by Hart. That is, in the absence of defeating conditions, the aesthetic attributions (a cluster of related qualities rather than a single quality) are the same. Even in the presence of defeating conditions, I further claim, the aesthetic attributions are still predictable, insofar as they always belong in another cluster of related qualities, a cluster that is a direct consequence of those defeating conditions.

v. some difficulties

I have used the ballad and the limerick stanzas as test cases to argue for the possibility that some aesthetic attributions in poetry work rather like Hart’s defeasible concepts. A first and obvious worry is that these are only two cases, and there is a world of poetry out there in different forms. It is unlikely that we should have similar results when it comes to those other ones. It is true that most poems are not limericks, although it is also true that most poetry around the world is composed in the ballad stanza. Still, we have sonnets, sestinas, gazals, alexandrines, and many other poetic forms. Moreover, we have many poems written in no particular traditional form at all (though this does not at all mean that they are formless). My claims would be hard to make regarding free verse, and I do not make them. Still, when it comes to formal verse, poets choose to write sonnets over sestinas for a reason, a reason typically having to do with the poetic effect they wish to produce. If what I say about my two examples is right, I think there is hope of discovering connections when it comes to other conventional poetic forms. We may think of Petrarch, creator of the sonnet form, as having discovered a connection that was always there and only needed tapping (which would help explain why it has worked so well). A second, different kind of problem would be posed by the indiscernibles scenario made famous by Jorge Luis Borges and first discussed by Arthur Danto with respect to the visual arts.30 Here, found poems provide the perfect example. Found poems are sets of sentences picked by a poet out of a newspaper, or a book, or a piece of dialogue, and

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism typically set to verse. That is, the poet inserts line breaks where she finds them most suitable. One might argue that in such cases, nothing changes in the transition: it is simply the same words in the same order. If so, then it would seem that no aesthetic qualities inhere in the sound structure alone, as my analysis appears to suggest. The first thing to note in the case of found poems is that they are found precisely because of the aesthetic potential poets see (or hear) in the words and sentences they harvest out of their original contexts. True, they may, and often do, select them also because of what the words say. But they never do so only because of what is being said, but because it is being said in a certain way. So the words and sentences arguably retain some, if not all, of their aesthetic qualities. They do acquire new qualities, nevertheless. The second thing to note is that the new arrangement is precisely what affects the aesthetic qualities of the same set of words, and the title these words are given will be part of the found poem as a whole. The new structure affects how we perceive the words and consequently the aesthetic qualities we attribute to the poem.

vi. conclusion

If my proposal has any merit, it would seem to have consequences regarding perceptual testimony: we are now warranted in deriving some aesthetic attributions from the base-level descriptions of at least some types of poems. Note that, again, I do not mean higher-level aesthetic evaluations (and so not aesthetic testimony), but the more modest, previous level of assessment. Need we be worried that this would mean that we could just take the testimony and leave the poem behind? Of course not, and there is nothing I said here that would entail that view. We do not listen to and read poems only to know what aesthetic terms apply to them. We want to experience those works. As Malcolm Budd has argued with respect to aesthetic judgment, it concerns knowledge, something distinct from aesthetic appreciation, which is about our experience of a given work.31 In addition, insofar as no description in perceptual terms, however detailed, can ever take us all the way to evaluation, we would not be in a position to give our overall evaluation of a poem on the basis of that alone, although we may conjecture what that evaluation

Ribeiro Aesthetic Attributions would be, on the basis of the description plus our previous experience of other poems, other works of that kind, other works by the same poet, of the same period, and so on. All of that and more may factor into our evaluation and contribute to our claiming of a poem that it is beautiful.32 ANNA CHRISTINA RIBEIRO

Department of Philosophy Texas Tech University Lubbock, Texas 79409 internet: [email protected] 1. When the syllable marker is stress, as it is in English; in other languages it may be syllable length or pitch. 2. Jerrold Levinson, “Aesthetic Properties, Evaluative Force, and Differences of Sensibility,” in Aesthetic Concepts: Essays After Sibley (Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 64. 3. I say “perceiving or attributing” so as to leave to the side the question of whether these are real properties in objects that we perceive or subjective (or intersubjective) properties that emerge in our perception of other properties that are themselves objective. 4. See Frank Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts,” Philosophical Review 68 (1959): 421–450, reprinted in Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), pp. 1–23. All page references are to this later edition. Also see Frank Sibley, “Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic,” in Approach to Aesthetics, pp. 33–51. 5. Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts,” pp. 3–4. 6. Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts,” pp. 4–6. 7. Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts,” p. 4. 8. I am grateful to Susan Feagin for suggesting this terminology for my idea. 9. Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts,” p. 2. 10. Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts,” p. 4. 11. Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts,” p. 5, original emphasis. 12. Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts,” p. 5. 13. Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts,” p. 7. 14. Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts,” p. 7. 15. Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts,” p. 5. 16. See T. V. F. Brogan, “Ballad,” in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, eds. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 116–118. 17. Sibley, “Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic,” pp. 33–34. 18. It is true that, in his later “Aesthetic and NonAesthetic,” Sibley writes, “I do not mean to deny that with care we might produce much more powerful generalizations telling in detail that works with various features always or usually have a certain aesthetic quality” (p. 50). He continues: “All I have argued is that some tempting generalizations that have been proposed are questionable.” But this is clearly not what Sibley dedicated most of this and other articles, arguing for: the first sentence is in direct contradiction to what he claims in “Aesthetic Concepts” (unless we remove the “always”), while in the second sentence he

301 underplays his own thesis in such a way as to distort it. He has not simply set out to show that “some” generalizations from base properties to aesthetic qualities are questionable, but rather that all of them are unsustainable. In the following section of “Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic,” he writes that “the question remaining is whether some nonaesthetic statements could by themselves provide, say, a reasonable measure of inductive support [as opposed to deductive] for the truth of an aesthetic statement” (p. 50). His answer is: “given the complexity of most aesthetic objects and the fact that small differences are often of great significance, it seems most doubtful” (p. 51). I am more hopeful, even if I would never claim “that without such justification criticism is unacceptable” (p. 51). 19. For a classic article on the relationship between art categories and aesthetic qualities, see Kendall L. Walton, “Categories of Art,” Philosophical Review 79 (1970): 334–367. 20. M. P. Worthington, “Nursery Rhyme,” in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 846–847. 21. Other excellent examples of the ballad stanza include Emily Dickinson, “I like a look of agony,” in The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (New York: Barnes ´ ´ in and Noble, 1993), p. 186; Dorothy Parker, “Resum e,” The Collected Dorothy Parker (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 99; Edna St. Vincent Millay, “First Fig,” in Selected Poems: The Centenary Edition, ed. Colin Falck (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 19; and W. H. Auden, “Tommy Did as Mother Told Him,” in As I Walked Out One Evening: Songs, Ballads, Lullabies, Limericks, and Other Light Verse, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage International, Random House, 1995), p. 14. Parker, of whom we may safely say sarcasm was a way of living, used the ballad stanza in most of her poems. 22. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s Faust, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Anchor, 1963), pp. 178–179, lines 1627–1634. 23. Goethe, Goethe’s Faust, p. 4 of introduction. 24. I thank an anonymous referee for suggesting the latter alternative. 25. An “x” stands for an unaccented syllable, a “/” for an accented one. 26. “Edward Lear Homepage,” last modified 1/6/2011, http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/BoN/index.html. 27. Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979), p. 12. 28. I am thankful to philosopher Penelope Mackie for writing and offering these stanzas as a challenge to my thesis, on the occasion of my presenting the first version of this article at the University of Nottingham. Mackie’s “Aubade: A Metrical Experiment” includes a fourth stanza in its final version and is based on Phillip Larkin’s “Aubade.” 29. I am thankful to philosopher Alan Goldman for writing this limerick as a challenge to my thesis when commenting on an earlier version of this article presented at the 2007 meeting of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division). Other attempts at writing sad limericks may be found online at http://allpoetry.com/poem/ 216889 (winning entry of a sad limerick contest), http:// jack.turner08.com/2011/03/sad-limerick.html, http://www.

302 doggyspace.com/journal/30778, and http://sonnetess. wordpress.com/2010/10/27/a-sad-limerick/. They all suffer from the same difficulties of matching discordant content and form. 30. Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 1962), and Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964): 571–584. 31. Malcolm Budd, “The Acquaintance Principle,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (2003): 386–392. See also Paisley Livingston, “On an Apparent Truism in Aesthetics,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (2003): 260–278, and Aaron Meskin, “Aesthetic Testimony: What Can We Learn

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism from Others about Beauty and Art?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 69 (2004): 65–91. 32. Many thanks to the several audiences who listened to earlier versions of this article at the Universities of Nottingham, Oklahoma, Oslo, and Barcelona; at the II International Philosophy Conference in Athens, Greece; and at the 2007 meetings of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division) and the American Society for Aesthetics (Annual), with special thanks to Alan Goldman and Bill Seeley, my commentators in each of these meetings, respectively. I am grateful also to Jerrold Levinson, Paisley Livingston, David Svolba, and an anonymous referee for this journal for their comments on earlier versions of this article.