Josh Corey responds (on 8/28) to my Theorie of Faculties Poetickal.

Josh, I think the idea of choosing a favorite tendency (pleasure-principled, or reflective/establishment, or irascible/engaged) is probably an illusion. Not because there is no free choice, but because tendencies are like symptoms (in a society of infinite & vast solipsism). Symptoms are sub-cultural, sub-aesthetic.

I think of the visionary or contemplative as an active process, not a mechanical reflection of "things as they are" (whatever that is). A work of finding relations & connections across varied & separate ranges of things & experiences. The visionary makes sense of history & contemporary reality through this process.

Whereas the "irascible" or engage tendency moves immediately from the "answer" to the persuasion; the answer is sort of assumed (an unjust state of things, for example). The visionary shows the state of things in their complexity.

On the plane back from Minnesota (seated amidst a beery wisecracking post-Labor Day Fife & Drum Band from Boston, going home), re-reading Carl Schorske's cultural history, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna. Hofmannsthal, poet & playwright, brooding over the relation of artist to society. A paradox : the moment the artist (the poet) arrogates the role of creating, rather than illustrating or ornamenting, culture, he or she becomes irrelevant.