vico on the poverty and necessity of poetry

Vico, par. 34 (same quoted in post on Vico below):

For Vico, two are the sources of all poetic locution: poverty of language 
•necessity to explain and make oneself understood.

Often associated with the richness of linguistic expression, poetry is here instead based on poverty -- poetry emerges whenever people have the need to explain and be understood. They use whatever means at their disposal to do so.

Necessity, rather than freedom, drives imagination.

Vico linked this necessity to the lack of abstract thinking that for him characterized early humanity, hence establishing (as par. 34 explains) an inverse relationship between poetry and abstract thought, imagination and theoretical elaboration.

Such inverse relationship still characterizes much anthropological thought. An implicit ethnocentrism underlines the celebration of the poetry of others. While being amazing creators, these "others" were misunderstanding the phenomena they were narrating.  They could not make sense of these phenomena through abstract thinking, and expressed them via poetry.

and yet, and this is where Vico stands out, poetic knowledge is epistemologically (which for Vico means historically) "true", the outcome of a veritable engagement with the world, a world composed through human actions. So poetry is the record of those actions. It is up to the "modern" reader to decipher and understand how these "fables" are truthful accounts.

Here the question of ‘‘necessity” becomes crucial and Vico's assertion involves a further turn: imagination is not a sign of the lack of the intellectual capabilities of the early poets --it is a natural necessity to explain oneself by whatever means possible. This natural necessity is itself historical: nowadays it has faded, hence it is hard to come to terms with poetry, make sense of its reality, of its necessity-- given how far ‘‘our civilized natures” (but the Italian has ingentilite: made more gentile, more refined, more tender but also less poetic) have become.

The necessity concerns explanation (spiegarsi) and understanding (farsi intendere), not the expression of inner feelings. This is because Vico here has in mind mainly epic/heroic poetry, but we can read him as also implying that poetry is not about oneself, but one's relation with others (explain and understand).

  

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