Aristotle on Discovery

I set myself a difficult task by promising to read Aristotle's On Poetics. The goal was to gain insight into how poetry works, but Aristotle is primarily interested in narrative. It's refreshing to read a carefully structural analysis written by someone who still believes that there's such a thing as the Perfect Plot. His ideas make particularly good starting points for discussions about drama and fiction, but their applicability to poetry is complicated.

It seems more productive to work negatively; that is, start with something that Aristotle focuses on and then chart its absence in lyric poetry. The thing that jumps out at me is the fascinating discussion of "discovery." He lists the ways in which characters may discover information about themselves or others and what these discoveries can lead to. For Aristotle, the greatest discoveries are those that lead to a change in fortunes for the hero. His fate or the fate of others hangs in the balance.

I turn to modern lyric poetry and ask myself what the "characters" discover and what hinges on these discoveries. Because I'm focusing on Ezra Pound for an upcoming project, I think of his work. But I discover that overt discoveries are rare, at least within the bounds of the poems themselves. First problem: often the only "character" in a lyric poem is the poetic speaker. Second problem: these poems are often aestheticized statements of previously-held positions. There is not a change but an attempt articulate or confirm a given perspective. This is especially true of Pound, who spends a lot of time asserting rather than searching for discoveries. Here's the first two lines of "Salvationists" as an example:

Come, my songs, let us speak of perfection-
We shall get ourselves rather disliked.

Pound has a position and he asserts it. There's a certain amount of bluster in poems of this sort. Perhaps more useful in this discussion are those poems (unfortunately more rare) which most faithfully hold to the Imagist ideal. "Alba" serves as a good example:

As cool as the pale wet leaves
of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.

There is something to this poem, but the poetic speaker does not actually make a discovery. That is, there is no before the discovery and after the discovery. Aristotle joins the discovery to the peripety (the change in direction or fortunes). Instead, the discovery seems to be the reader's prerogative. The poem is basically a simile offered to the reader, but one that isn't dramatically experienced by the speaker. What do we make of this equivalence? It seems that narratives structure discovery, while lyrics juxtapose suggestions, bequeathing discovery on readers.