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animus et mens

Latin Phrases
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Spirit and mind; the dual aspects of the inner human life, encompassing both emotional vitality and rational thought.

Detailed Definition
Animus et mens distinguishes between the passionate, animate spirit and the reasoning intellect. In poetry, the tension and interplay between these two faculties is a perennial subject. Poets explore the conflict between feeling and thinking, impulse and reflection, the instinctive cry and the measured line. The phrase is useful in discussing the psychology of the lyric speaker and the balance or imbalance between emotional force and intellectual control in verse.
Example
Example in poetry:
Keats's odes dramatize the tension of animus et mens — the passionate spirit yearning to dissolve into the nightingale's song while the rational mind keeps pulling him back to the reality of mortality; The Metaphysical poets, particularly Donne and Herbert, are fascinated by animus et mens — their poems perform elaborate intellectual arguments in the service of passionate feeling; A student writing a love poem might be asked to balance animus et mens — ensuring the emotional heat of the animus is shaped and clarified by the discipline of the mens; T.S. Eliot's diagnosis of a "dissociation of sensibility" in seventeenth-century English poetry is essentially a lament for the loss of animus et mens — the unity of thought and feeling in verse; Wallace Stevens's poetry enacts animus et mens — the supreme fiction he seeks is one that satisfies both the emotional and the rational demands of human consciousness
Additional Notes
Animus et mens represents one of the fundamental distinctions in Latin psychological vocabulary. Animus is the vital, passionate, emotional dimension of the inner life — the part that loves, rages, grieves, and desires — while mens is the rational, reflective, deliberating faculty of the mind. The distinction maps roughly onto the later Freudian contrast between id (animus) and ego/superego (mens), and onto the Platonic tripartite soul's distinction between the spirited part (thumos) and the rational part (logos). Students should note that Horace's ideal of the balanced poem — dulce et utile, pleasing and useful — requires the cooperation of animus and mens: without animus, the poem is cold and merely clever; without mens, it is incoherent and merely emotional. The creative tension between these two faculties is one of the most productive subjects in poetics.
Also Known As
spirit and mind mind and spirit soul and reason
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