begin in wonder

In the Metaphysics, Aristotle tells us that through wonder (thaumazein) “people both now begin and in the first began to philosophize.” Earlier, in Plato’s Theaetatus we learn that “wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.” Both poetry and philosophy intersect in their desire for the essence or source of things.

—Mark Irwin, “Poetry and Originality: Have You Been There Before?” The Writer’s Chronicle, Vol. 48, Number 2, Oct./Nov. 2015

not a sandheap

S.H. Butcher, best known for his translations and commentary of Aristotle’s Poetics (New York, 1907)…wrote previously a survey entitled “Greek Literary Criticism” where he presented fully and clearly the significance of Phaedrus 264C*. After quoting the whole passage, Butcher says: “Here, observe, and for the first time, the law of internal unity is enunciated, as a primary condition of literary art—now commonplace, then a discovery...Organic as distinct from mechanical unity; not the homogeneous sameness of a sandheap, but a unity combined with variety, a unity vital and structural, implying mutual dependence of all the parts, such that if a part is displaced or removed, the whole is dislocated...From this point of view the unity and artistic beauty of a literary composition are found to reside in a pervasive harmony, a single animating and controlling principle.” (pp. 192-193)

[quoted from a delightful treatise on the subject of: Organic Unity In Ancient & Later Poetics (Southern Illinois U. Press, 1975) by G. N. Giordano Orsini]

*”Every discourse must be composed like, or in the likeness of, a living being, with a body of its own as it were, so as not to be headless or feetless, but to have a middle and members arranged in fitting relation to each other and to the whole.”