ABSTRACT
The lucidity of poetry is properly ethical, residing in the capacity to break out of the confines of fantasy and illusion. The language of La Rochefoucauld's aphorisms, Descartes's clear and distinct ideas, and of the eighteenth-century philosophers with their poise and clarity of style offers up lucidity as a broad cultural thematic in a manner which no other language does. For both Jefferson and Holmes, lucidity links a perception on life experiences and a relation to mimesis, to a different medium, the modern novel, life-writing, cinema, and its play of perspectives. In Alison Finch's cultural history, she saves lucid' as a term of praise. She comments on the vigour and lucidity with which relativism is propounded in the works of Montesquieu and Rousseau. Her expertise in French literature post-1800 has also been rendered subtler, more deeply resonant, through her wide reading of literature from earlier centuries, and also of the great works of European and English literature.
