Term paper posted

In Praise of Poetry: My Inspiration in Literature

"This purifying of wit-this enriching of memory, enabling of judgment, and enlarging of conceit-which commonly called learning, under what name soever it come forth, or to what immediate end soever it be directed, the final end is to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodging, can be capable of."
Sir Philip Sidney

To Inform. To take. To create. By means of my education I have come and will continue to come into my own. Learning has led me to an awareness of my own passion for poetry, and thus, passion for life: of what I need and where I need to go in my life. This quote from Sir Phillip Sidney’s “Defense of Poetry” succeeds in expressing expresses in words what, naturally, I could not, and so stood out from the entire essay to me, and this entire course, as a summary of what I’ve been mulling over in my mind for so long: the beauty of knowledge, education, information: the poetry of wisdom. It is through this journey of learning that I have and will continue to confront the best version of myself.
I would like to model that ideal version of myself on that ingenious hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha, a hero by my standards, and in a sense that is completely un-pared in all literature I’ve encountered. Senor Quixote begins his quest when he dedicates himself to the pursuits of knight errantry; he makes it his mission to imitate the language of his books. It takes an understanding and appreciation of literature (which I harbor in my heart as an English major) to consider this mission as one of utmost honor, and not in the least bit farce. In fact I envy our hero for boasting this as his life’s mission: to live himself into his books. Don Quixote speaks of himself and his adventures in the style of the books of chivalry that have ransacked his mind. Oh, that Don Quixote would ransack my mind and invoke me to speak in this high rhetoric so long ago lost! Even if everyone I encounter on my journey thinks me mad, that I would pay it no mind, like our hero. I have wistful notions of adopting Don Quixote’s mission and his rhetoric, but alas, I cannot even read his words out-loud and sound convincing, much less invent my own discourse. I suppose I fear those accusations of madness that the Knight of La Mancha handles so gracefully. That I would be so graceful, this Knight is my hero! The high-rhetoric and wit and wisdom via madness that Don Quixote possesses, his delightfully dignified manner of presenting himself: I envy the hidalgo for all these heroic qualities.
As different as I am from Don Quixote in some respects (those listed in the previous sentence, for instance), I feel smugly similar to him in others. We both have our books, of course (that is we share a dependence on literature). And we have something else, too.
I recall one of many episodes where the knight defends himself and his profession, in Chapter 13 of the First Part, after Don Quixote has met a group of goatherds on the road and is traveling with them to a funeral. One of the travelers they encounter en route to the burial begins to interrogate Don Quixote about his purpose in the land, to which he reiterates his usual elegant explanation of his mission as a knight errant. They immediately consider him mad, both for his exuberant undertaking and equally exuberant way of relating it. They continue to inquire, so as to gauge exactly how mad he is. Don Quixote speaks to them of great knights and soldiers of the past like King Arthur, and then audaciously praises theses knights as more valiant than priests and religious men, because they actively defend the morality that priests only speak about. “In this way we are ministers of God on earth, the arms by which His justice is put into effect on earth” (Cervantes 88). It’s an outrageous claim, I know, but I would defend the poets in the exact same way, including myself: the poets represent the divine in art. Further on in the book, Don Quixote gets another chance to explain lend his knightly wisdom and opinions to a stranger he meets on the road- this time a man in a green coat, with a son studying languages in university. The man in the green coat confesses that he is troubled by his son’s coursework, which he hardly considers to be an “area of knowledge” worth studying. Don Quixote does a better job than I can of defending his son’s choice of curriculum, as well as defining anagogy and praising the poet, explaining that the natural poet, “with that inclination granted to him by heaven, with no further study or artifice composes things that prove the truthfulness of the man who said: Est Dues in nobis” (Cervantes 557). God is in us.
Outrageous. Extravagant. Over-the-top. How could I compare myself to that ingenious knight of La Mancha? I suppose I aim to model myself off of this man just as he does those warriors in his beloved books of chivalry. And since the imaginative Don Quixote makes a far better symbol of poetry than he does a knight errant anyway, maybe it’s not that outrageous.
And so I declare that I am an English major, “the kind, as people say, who go to seek adventures” (Cervantes 553), and like my hero, I am willing to leave my home and comfort and “throw myself into the arms of Fortune so that she may carry me wherever she chooses” that I might “fulfill a good part of my desire” (Cervantes 553). While our desires may differ- his being “to revive a long-dead knight errantry”, and mine to praise and defend the madness of such characters and exuberance in literature- I can only hope that one day I will arrive at a place where I am so “obliged to sing my own praises” as impressively and eloquently as my hero of La Mancha.