Baumgarten’s Reflections on Poetry, here for the first time translated into English, has a unique place in the history of aesthetics. In it the author coined the term and “aesthetics. and ” But the work contributes far more than the mere name. Reducing classical poetics to an orderly system, Baumgarten undertook to demonstrate that not only our intellectual but also our perceptual faculties are capable of a certain perfection. First published, in Latin, in 1735, the work marked the beginning of an important change in the structure of the sciences or disciplines which comprised rationalist philosophy.The Reflections confines itself to the art of poetry and expounds its ideas by the method of setting forth clear definitions of terms, basic principles, and deriving from them important generalizations about poetry. The severity of the main structure of the argument is relieved by many lively illustrations from Classical poets. Baumgarten seeks to show just what special kind of discourse poetry is amongst the many kinds of discourse we employ to express ourselves. The special language of poetry is concrete, vivid, full of imagery, description, and example, and it aims at a certain kind of clarity which differs essentially from the clarity of scientific discourse. This is the material or content side of poetry. In its formal aspect, the poem is the progressive illumination of a single theme with the fullness and brevity necessary to to make the theme vivid and effective. The ancient doctrine according to which a work of art is an imitation of a thing already in existence is given a new turn. The artist does indeed imitate nature, but he imitates in that his creative act is like the progressive development or process in nature whereby individual things and the universe as a whole come into being and move toward their destiny. The author also seeks to make place for pleasure and emotions in poetry.An extraordinarily condensed treatise on poetry, the Reflections touches on the great problems that poets and students, past and present, have had to face. The work might be termed the original charter of modern philosophical aesthetics.The translators’ introduction relates Baumgarten to the rationalist movement, analyzes his methods, and provides a commentary on the arguments of the Reflections. Includes the original text in Latin.

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