Mirror, Crystal and Reflection Analogies in Paul Valéry’s and T.S. Eliot’s Critical Essays

Abstract

Analogies do not only illustrate certain phenomena related to the nature of art. Some of them also constitute archetypal images for aesthetic conceptualization: they guide our understanding of artistic phenomena. The mirror, for example, has been used as the symbol of mimetic understanding of art, from Plato to neoclassicism; and the fountain is often used to illustrate the notion of art as an expression of feelings and emotions. Thus, Wordsworth’s famous metaphor, “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, has become the paradigmatic image of the Romantic theory of art. From a rhetorical point of view, Paul Vale?ry’s and T. S. Eliot’s critical and theoretical thought can be seen as a response to the implications of the romantic image. Vale?ry, whose passion for images and metaphors was idiosyncratic, examined the possibilities of the image of the mirror and related phenomena, such as reflection and refraction of light, in order to propose an aesthetic approach with stark narcissist elements. Eliot, on the other side, stood for poetry and a critic which might be located beyond the mimetic and expressive perspectives, and which has crystallized in his notion of metaphysic poetry. As responses to the romantic challenge, Vale?ry’s and Eliot’s work constitute forms of rejoining what the later calls “the classic”.