Essayist: Lessing contended that an art form's medium dictates the kind of representation the art form must employ in order to be legitimate; painting, for example, must represent simultaneous arrays of colored shapes, while literature, consisting of words read in succession, must represent events or actions occurring in sequence.
Conclusion
Lessing's claim about literature must be rejected.
rephrase: Literature does not have to represent events or actions occurring in sequence to be legitimate.
Evidence
The imagist poems are legitimate.
The imagist poems consist solely of amalgams of disparate images.
Evaluate
When we have a Conditional Conclusion, we play along with the IF half. We can add it to our evidence as a background constraint of the conversation. We're always debating / trying to prove the outcome.
The conclusion is saying, .
So play along with imagist poetry as legitimate. And we try to prove L's claim must be rejected.
We're trying to refute someone's strong claim. In fact, it's so strong ("must represent"), that we're Refuting a Conditional.
This is a specific style of argument which lends itself to a specific plan of attack. To refute the conditional "If X, then Y", you need a counterexample with these two qualities - X is true - Y isn't true
For example, to refute, "If you're a boy, you like sports", you need a counterexample example with these two qualities - this person is a boy - this person doesn't like sports
We're trying to refute, So we need a counterexample with these two qualities - it's legitimate literature - it doesn't represent events / actions occurring in sequence
The evidence will always establish one of these must-have's, but we won't know the other one; we'll usually just have some proxy idea.
(Some say all boys like sports. But this must be rejected, because Bob is a boy and he doesn't play outside. This counterexample establishes that we're dealing with a boy, but doesn't establish "doesn't like sports". Instead it uses a proxy idea, "doesn't play outside". So the missing link would be "if don't play outside, then don't like sports".
Goal
Our evidence has established that we're dealing with "legitimate literature". (We're allowed to think that poetry is a subset of literature, without them having to spell that out).
But we've never established "doesn't represent events / actions occurring in sequence."
We just have a proxy idea "consists solely of amalgams of disparate images".
So the missing link is,