Plato's Timaeus and the Inner Life of Stars
Richard L. Poss
The University of Arizona
From Aristotle's On the Heavens to the poetry of Wendell Berry and Mary
Oliver, the stars have the paradoxical quality of being located both at
the farthest reaches of the universe and deep inside our innermost selves.
This paper will examine the dynamics of the inner and the outer in the
poetic treatment of stars in works which embody this paradox, beginning
with the classic statement of this relationship in Plato's Timaeus. What
are those things which stars evoke in the reader, when nothing else will
do? The surrealistic furies of Dylan Thomas and the ecstatic meditations
of Gerard Manley Hopkins refute the angry denials of those like Thomas
a Kempis who hold that attention to the stars is vain and shallow. We will
see that they initiate a transcending of the self and a melding with
Nature that is approached not through grand generalizations but through
the unpretentious description of exquisite detail, a rigorous honesty in
the treatment of the poet's experience, and a commitment to working with
the craft of words.
From Gustave Flaubert and his pathetic dancing bear stars in Madame
Bovary and the delineations of Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella
("Star-Lover and Star") to the nature writers of the modern American west,
stellar imagery modulates the poetic strains of the age to mutually contextualize
the poetic and scientific worlds.