To be very solemn, the difficulty [of Ai's Cruelty] has to do with the problem addressed but not resolved by Aristotle, the question of the moral standing of the pleasure we take in the pain in which art often and properly deals. But of course, if I am not much mistaken, art, in any of the usual acceptances of the term, is not very high on the list of this author's intentions. If I inquire why then these utterances arrogate to themselves the honorable name of poetry, the modest answer may be (in such cases it usually is) that they mean to modify or transform our sense of what poetry is. At this point the argument is, as far as I am concerned, at an end. It seems to me that the claims or justifications one might advance for Cruelty resemble those one might advance for pornography; and...