The Absolute Truth In George Eliot's Poetry

The understanding is that there ARE limitations to ordinary knowledge and experience but when these are organised into a coherent whole they might give glimpses of the absolute truth.

This understanding brings to the fore very crucial aspects of Eliot’s epistemology. This philosophy puts the individual in an ‘organised’ universal system, wherein the individual experiences, individually, might not take us anywhere but the ‘organisation’ of many individual experiences might take us nearer to the absolute truth. Thus, at one level the individual experiences do not count much but at another level these very experiences when organised into a universal whole take one a step closer to the ultimate truth.

Further, what it explains is very crucial in

The first level could be assigned to that phase of creation where the poet or the artist deals with the technicalities of the art form. For instance, if a poet is creating his poem, the first level of creation would include the very fact that she/he chooses to write a poem and not a novel or a short story or for that matter anything else as a form of expression. Next would be the actual process of writing a poem using different styles, meter, rhyme, rhythm etc. At this first level, the artist is like that doctor who is operating on his son’s body. Of course, he is not always tense or in grief like the doctor. Nevertheless, the point here is that in the first level of creation there is a possibility of detachment and this detachment in a way would be beneficial for the entire process. However, it is merely a possibility and not in any way a necessity. This is because the artist’s personality has a role to play right from the process of selection of the medium through which she/he would express their deepest emotions. It becomes difficult to negate the role of the artist’s personality then. Nevertheless, when we say that there is a possibility of detachment, it means that there is no direct involvement of the poet’s emotions in this phase of creation. And, thus, at least a sense of detachment can be considered unlike at the second level of