The interest in the effect of objects on the mind went together with the interest in ‘sublimity. Two of them are the qualities of an author: the author’s “power to form great conceptions” (elevation of mind) and “vehement and inspired passion”, and three of them namely “formation of figures of speech, noble diction and dignified and elevated composition” are the features of a poem.

He mentions five elements that help create elevated language and add to sublimity. Longinus, “On the Sublime” has tried to balance and blend inspiration and rhetorical mastery. Therefore he is not held in the question of whether a praiseworthy poem is the creation of nature or art, but in the relation of the poem to the reader. He says that “painters and poets have always had an equal privilege of daring to do anything they wish”. Horace is particularly interested not in defining what a poem is and what literature is, but in practical questions of how the poet may delight and instruct an intelligent reader. Fiction composed to please should be very near to truth, so that the play may not demand unlimited belief.

Poets desire either to improve or please, or to unite the agreeable and the profitable. Therefore, virtuous action is the goal of all learning. Good poets are those who write both to delight and teach, or in other words, for delightful instruction.įurthermore, the objective of all arts and sciences is to lift human life to the highest altitudes of perfection. Despite the fact that pragmatic criticism originated in the Roman times, Philip Sidney, a Renaissance critic, is one of its most influential theorists. For Sidney, poetry has a clear-cut purpose to achieve certain effect in an audience.

Effects may be for the aesthetic pleasure, instruction or any kind of emotion. The work is treated as something that is constructed to achieve certain effects on the audience. Pragmatic theories emphasize on the reader’s relation to the work. For pragmatists, ideas demonstrate their value insofar as they enrich human experience. The pragmatist believed in the progress of human knowledge and those ideas are tools whose validity and significance are established as people adapt and test them in physical and social settings.

Pragmata definition