It's not words & meter, but it's also something more than an idea.
Agreed, but I haven't suggested that poems/art/whatever are
only ideas. Obviously the way in which art is expressed is an inextricable part of it. The only thing I've taken issue with is the suggestion that art isn't really about ideas or suffers in some fundamental way by having a point of view. The above seems to flip the burden of proof, by asking me to defend the idea that it is
only ideas, when my actual position is that it is not
only feeling.
Poetry as the Greeks knew it is a form of psycho-therapy. The transformation into dream symbolism of some disturbing emotional crisis in the poet’s mind (whether dominated by delight or pain) poetry has the power of healing other men’s minds similarly troubled, by presenting them under the spell of hypnosis (through using rhythm) with an allegorical solution of the trouble.
I think the phrase "allegorical solution" is a perfect example of what I mean. I think the process being described fits what I said earlier about "working backwards to the idea from the feeling." Creative work can establish a bond with those "similarly troubled," as you say, and once established, use that bond to transmit an idea that enriches or comforts them, even if that idea is simply some kind of perspective from their pain. I don't see the idea and the aesthetics as mutually exclusive, or even at tension with one another, but rather as two irreducible components of a single thing.
I'll grant this is all a little muddied by the fact that our emotions sometimes allow us to understand something on an intuitive level before we can articulate that understanding intellectually. I think that makes it difficult to know which part of creative expression is the cart, and which is the horse, but I'm not sure it matters, anyway. What matters is that you need them both if you're going to be transported anywhere.
I.e. a schoolteacher might say the whole importance of Wordsworth's poem lies in his simple perception of the beauty of daffodils, but it's an important poem only because Wordsworth has written spontaneously and recorded to his own satisfaction an emotional state which we all can recognize. The daffodils have interrupted the thoughts of an unhappy, lonely man and, reminding him of his childhood, become at once emblems of a golden age of disinterested human companionship; he uses their memory later as a charm to banish the spectres of trouble and loneliness.
This is all true (and lovely), but it also seems perfectly in step with what I'm saying. If that poem had stopped a few lines earlier it would seem like a purely aesthetic description of flowers, but it doesn't: it concludes with the idea that these memories can be invoked in a sullen mood to brighten the spirit. The description of pretty flowers stops and gives way to, put crudely, a set of instructions for its use!
Do you see how that goes against the i d e a that poems are conveying an idea. It's the same for films in a roundabout way.
The emphasis on "an" is throwing me a bit. Is the disagreement here based on the belief that I'm saying they have to contain
one? Because I'm definitely not saying that. If I've ever used the singular "idea" in any contention it's just a general reference to the concept, and not a suggestion that every work of art has to have some kind of singular thrust to it.