ABSTRACT
Song and dance are, perhaps, only a little less old than man himself. It is with his music and dance, the recreation through art of the rhythms suggested by and implicit in the tempo of his life and cultural environment, that man purges his soul of the tensions of daily strife and maintains his harmony in the universe. This chapter discusses Pope's famous couplet 'True Ease in Writing', which stands as an epigraph, it is neither the first nor the last of a distinguished series of pronouncements through the ages in which the dance appears as an emblem in literary theory. The dance-like decorum of neat stylistic interchange, the ceremonious finality of elegant, symmetrical pairings, does not invariably celebrate serenities of cohesion and benevolent harmony. The chapter discusses earlier that Nature, among the writers, should be thought of as an animating ideal or live fiction, rather than as a precisely apprehended deity or the embodiment of a coherently formulated ideology.
