Hi, I'm a poet, I've published a few poetry books in French. I've been told that my poems are beautiful. I know that they are beautiful but I don't understand why. I also know that I can create beauty but I can't understand where this ability comes from. Is it a god-given ability or is it about technique? Any answers? Umar ( Mauritius )

In the history of philosophy, the term beauty (or its supposed equivalents in other languages) has sometimes been used as the most general term to designate aesthetic merit. It seems improbable that the term used in this way designates some quality (natural or non-natural) that inheres in beautfiul objects. Rather, it has since the 18th century been taken to denote tendency that the experiencing of certain natural objects or works of art has to be pleasurable for humans. For works of art like poems, presumably this means that they are beautiful if the reading of them tends to elicit pleasure in a reader (perhaps with some qualifications about a 'proerly qualified reader"--i.e. one who knows the language, who knows what a poem is, etc. and some qualifications about the pleasure--i.e. that it be 'disinterested' e.g. not economic or sexual.) There is, I think, a more interesting use of 'beautiful" in criticism in which it is not necessarily a positive feature of a work, but simply refers to certain...