The Antigonish Review
Issue # 122
Esther Cameron
Shelley's "Defence"
Today
But is there such a thing as a "roundabout" way?
- Paul Celan
I.
First of all, a confession: I have only just read
Shelley’s "Defence of Poetry." For years I had been hearing
and quoting that one pregnant sentence - "Poets are the unacknowledged
legislators of the world" - without getting around to looking up
the source. Finally a further quotation ("that great poem, which
all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built
up since the beginning of the world") suggested to me that the whole
thing perhaps ought to be read.
It was a first reading with déjà vu,
as if these thoughts had been reaching toward me through other minds ever
since I started wondering about the nature of our curious vocation. I
kept thinking of Paul Celan’s "Meridian" speech. A connecting
link may be Kropotkin, who is mentioned as an influence in "Der Meridian":
Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution was written in London.
At the same time, Shelley’s text seemed to be laying on me a geasa,
a solemn behest to report its cause aright. I myself, who used to
read eighteenth-century German, found it not easy going; and opposite
the words "eternal truth" some hand had penciled "Garbage."
And Auden has intimated he doesn’t think much of that final sentence.
Nevertheless, I think it is still trying to speak to us; perhaps Shelley
was the first to glimpse what the still-accelerating scientific revolution
meant for poetry, and to try to frame an answer.
Shelley begins by distinguishing two classes of
mental action, "reason and imagination." He defines "reason"
as logical thinking, "mind contemplating the relations borne by one
thought to another, however produced." Reason "regards the relations
of things simply as relations; considering thoughts, not in their integral
unity, but as the algebraical representations which conduct to certain
general results." Imagination, on the other hand, is "mind acting
upon those thoughts so as to color them with its own light, and composing
from them, as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself
the principle of its own integrity." Thus, reason is the analytical,
imagination the synthetic faculty.
One wonders: why does Shelley define reason first,
and imagination as a response to it ("acting upon those thoughts")?
Is analysis indeed primary? He surely knew that in Homeric Greek, the
concept of "understanding" was expressed by the ancestor of
our word "synthesize"– understanding at one time meant not taking
things apart, but putting them together! But possibly Shelley defines
reason first because of the primacy of reason in the minds of most of
his hearers. As the argument goes on, it appears that he indeed regards
reason as secondary. Imagination is the "agent," while reason
is the "instrument"; imagination is of the "spirit,"
while reason is of the "body"; imagination is the "substance,"
while reason is the "shadow."
Of course, in this age of materialistic monism,
of deterministic reductionism, "spirit" is usually taken as
the "shadow" and "body" as the "substance."
Still it is sometimes admitted that analysis eventually reduces everything
to particles whose existence is ambiguous. Synthesis, on the other hand,
at least results in something whole, in an increase of order.
A further justification for refusing to reduce
imagination to an operation of rationally analyzable processes, was suggested
to me by a recent phone conversation with the economist and philosopher
Aron Katsenelinboigin. He told me that while in theory it would be possible
to calculate the one optimal move at any given point in a chess game,
the process involved is so complex that it would take the fastest computer
a thousand years. In order to calculate the one optimal move within a
human lifetime, one would have to build a computer that would calculate
faster than the speed of light. Thus, what is theoretically possible is
practically impossible. A theoretically determinate system can be practically
indeterminate. And Prof. Katsenelinboigin’s example - the chess game -
may be simpler than the writing of a poem. A chess game after all only
determines an outcome; it does not create a form "containing within
itself the principle of its own integrity." It has been shown that
a computer (well primed by a team of chess experts) can defeat a chess
champion; but though computers can be programmed to turn out word-combinations
that superficially resemble poetry, I have yet to see so much as a tolerable
computer-written haiku.
Shelley’s high claim for poetry in fact stems
from an intuitive sense of its complexity. Within the broad range of phenomena
of what he calls poetry in general (including not only the other arts
but also "religious and civic habits of action"), poetry in
the usual sense ("arrangements of language, and especially metrical
language") is "the most perfect expression of the poetic faculty"
because language "is a more direct representation of the actions
and passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of more various
and delicate combinations [italics added]," than the media of
the other arts ("colour, form or motion," and "tone").
More problematic, perhaps, is Shelley’s belief
in an "indestructible order" on which poetry is based and to
which he attributes poetry’s civilizing influence. This order supplies
the standards for esthetic judgment; "taste," he writes, is
"the sense of an approximation to this order." Those who "imagine
and express" this indestructible order are not only the creators
of the arts but "the institutors of laws and the founders of civil
society." "The poems of Homer and his contemporaries were [...]
the elements of that social system which is the column upon which all
succeeding civilisation has reposed." This sounds like Plato’s realm
of ideas, and Shelley does in fact acknowledge Plato. Few of us are comfortable
today with categorical statements like "To be a poet is to apprehend
the true and the beautiful."
But again, it’s possible to understand Shelley’s
statements in a non-metaphysical way. When Shelley associates this apprehension
of the true and beautiful with the "rhythm" of mimetic representations
and the "pleasure" they give, he is speaking not just from philosophy,
but from a physiological experience of poetry. Moreover, his statement
that "Poetry is connate with the origin of man" is consistent
with what is now conjectured about our evolution. Verse probably originated
in something like the rhythmic stomping and howling of the chimpanzee.
As the vocal signals refined themselves, as they came to contain more
and more information, the rhythms of poetry also evolved, as an aid to
that communication and cultural memory in which humans excel. Among other
things (I first read this in Kropotkin), poets as the tribal memory were
once the ones who kept track of the laws. Although cultures change, the
structure of the human nervous system, to which the psychotropic and mnemonic
devices of traditional poetry were adapted, has remained unchanged for
the last hundred thousand years. Little though our responses to rhythm
are understood, some of them at least are neither arbitrarily subjective
nor culturally determined. Even plants, it seems, grow better with Mozart
than with rock music in the background. The recent growing awareness of
species-wide neurological patterns does not sound as elevating as Platonic
idealism, but does suggest that the latter contained some truth.
As far as known human cultures go, Shelley is
a relativist, and very far from affirming that poets directly enunciate
absolute truths. His claim for Homer as the founder of Western civilization
does not rest on acceptance of the values of the Homeric age:
Every epoch, under names more or less specious, has deified
its peculiar errors; Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous
age; and Self-deceit is the veiled image of unknown evil, before which
luxury and satiety lie prostrate. But a poet considers the vices of his
contemporaries as the temporary dress in which his creations must be arrayed,
and which cover without concealing the eternal proportions of their beauty.
And similarly:
The distorted notions of invisible things which Dante and
his rival Milton have idealised, are merely the mask and mantle in which
these great poets walk through eternity enveloped and disguised. It is
a difficult question to determine how far they were conscious of the distinction
which must have subsisted in their minds between their own creeds and
that of the people.
Indeed, Dante himself hints in the Paradiso that not
everything here is to be taken literally.
Similarly, Shelley’s claim that poetry is morally
elevating does not rest on any notion that poems inevitably propound righteous
doctrines (or that poets are invariably righteous individuals, though
he thinks that most of them are better than your average acknowledged
legislator). As he observes, it is not "for want of admirable doctrines
that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one
another." Poetry "acts to produce the moral improvement of man"
not by propounding admirable doctrines but by "awaken[ing] and enlarg[ing]
the mind."
The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our
own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which
exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly
good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself
in the place of another and of many others; the pains and the pleasures
of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good
is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon
the cause.
These statements imply a distinction between the
explicit order or value-system which the poem depicts or propounds, and
an implicit order which cannot be directly or consciously known. Like
the Tao? Or as the Russian poet Tjutchev put it, "A thought outspoken
is a lie." Or as in W.H. Auden’s poem "The Hidden Law":
The Hidden Law does not deny
Our laws of probability,
But takes the atom and the star
And human beings as they are
And answers nothing when we lie.
It is the only reason why
No government can codify,
And verbal definitions mar
The Hidden Law.
Its utter patience will not try
To stop us if we want to die.
When we escape it in a car,
When we forget it in a bar,
These are the ways we’re punished by
The Hidden Law.
This poem of Auden’s is likely a direct descendant of Shelley’s
"Defence"; the "hidden Law" corresponds to the "unacknowledged
legislators" and that "order" of "eternal proportions"
which shimmers forth beneath the "dress" of creed and custom.
All the same it seems to me that these reflections
and associations are taking us closer to a "verbal definition"
of what this "order" is or might be. It isn’t after all identical
with basic instinct, though in "rhythm" it has an instinctual
foundation. An analytic reductionism will not confirm this "order,"
but it can be assimilated to some recent speculations, like those of Ilya
Prigogine, which view life as inherently synthetic, "self-organizing."
The implicit and potential "order" of poetry represents a higher,
more information-rich level of organization of the human being, the human
community. Moreover: if its principle is "love" and its
instrument is "imagination," then it must be an order in which
every voice gets a hearing, every perception is taken into account, "where"
- as a poem of mine inspired by Celan has it - "none are deaf, and
none are mute." It is his commitment to such an order that explains
Shelley’s deep and passionate hatred of despotism, where the voice of
Ozymandias booms forth monophonically over a silenced land.
This intuition of implicit order ties in with
Shelley’s account of the creative experience. If I’ve understood Shelley
correctly, the implicit order cannot be fully enunciated above all because
it is incredibly complex. "Love," its first principle (for Shelley
as for Dante), is an instruction to process and integrate an illimitable
number of messages! The Sioux shaman Black Elk reported that at the height
of his vision "I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than
I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in
the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like
one being." Likewise Dante’s vision of the Eternal Light: "In
its depth I saw that it contained, bound by love in one volume, that which
is scattered in leaves through the universe, substances and accidents
and their relations, as it were fused together in such a way that what
I tell is of a simple light." (Sinclair translation) If, as Shelley
notes, poetic creation often takes place at the unconscious level, this
is probably partly because only the unconscious is capable of processing
the quantity of information of which the poem is a distillation.
The poetic "pleasure" of which Shelley’s
essay speaks again and again must flow from the energy of the poem - an
energy that holds things together, that creates communication and order.
This becomes evident from Shelley’s critique-and-defense of the "erotic"
poets who flourished in the declining years of Greek culture. He writes:
An equal sensibility to the influence of the senses and
the affections is to be found in the writings of Homer and Sophocles....The
superiority in these to succeeding writers consists in the presence of
those thoughts which belong to the inner faculties of our nature, not
in the absence of those which are connected with the external: their
incomparable perfection consists in a harmony of the union of all.
[italics added] It is not what the erotic poets have, but what they have
not, in which their imperfection consists. It is not inasmuch as they
were poets, but inasmuch as they were not poets, that they can be considered
with any plausibility as connected with the corruption of their age. Had
that corruption availed so as to extinguish in them the sensibility to
pleasure, passion, and natural scenery, which is imputed to them as an
imperfection the last triumph of evil would have been achieved.
I think of a book that reposes in our piano bench at home,
amid a deposit that has seldom been disturbed over the last few decades:
"The Golden Book of Favorite Songs (Revised Edition)." The copyright
dates are 1915 and 1923. The subjects of these songs are various: faith,
work, patriotism, war, death, nature, aging and nostalgia for childhood,
familiar objects (the old oaken bucket, the grandfather clock), and, of
course, love - usually sentimental, sometimes gently humorous, often in
long-term relationships. The singers must have been rooted in a relatively
rich and stable life, where feeling had many different objects. Or - wait
- maybe they already sensed this kind of life slipping away, at the start
of an age of mass-produced goods and mass-produced feelings. Maybe that
is what we mean by their sentimentality. But at any rate, turning to the
popular music of the present, we find a greater concentration on the specifically
"erotic," a narrowing of theme that suggests an erotically impoverished
world, from which pleasure has largely departed save for "love"’s
dubious promise. And often the songs are tributes more to thanatos than
to eros. Again, Shelley writes:
For the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility
to pleasure; and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at the imagination
and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself thence as a paralysing
venom through the affections into the very appetites, until it becomes
a torpid mass in which hardly sense survives. [Apparently a specimen of
Homo tuberosus sofaensis was shown to him in a vision. - EC] At
the approach of such a period, poetry ever addresses itself to those faculties
which are the last to be destroyed; and its voice, is heard, like the
footsteps of Astraea, departing from the world. Poetry ever communicates
all the pleasure which men are capable of receiving: it is ever still
the light of life; the source of whatever of beautiful or generous or
true can have place in an evil time.... But corruption must utterly have
destroyed the fabric of human society before poetry can ever cease.
But in what does the fabric of human society consist,
and how, in Shelley’s view, does "corruption" attack it? His
next sentence answers the first question:
The sacred links of that chain have never been entirely
disjoined, which descending through the minds of many men is attached
to those great minds, whence as from a magnet the invisible effluence
is sent forth, which at once connects, animates, and sustains the life
of all. It is the faculty which contains within itself the seeds at once
of its own and of social renovation.
If Shelley is right, then the social fabric is held together
above all by the memory of Homer and his poetic descendants! The poetic
masterpieces of the past, as the most intense expressions of in-forming
eros, remain as powerhouses, so to speak, from which that energy radiates
into society.
Once again, confirming voices chime in. Hoelderlin’s
"What remains, the poets establish" (Was aber bleibet, stiften
die Dichter). The Paradiso, again, where it struck me that the
leading saints are celebrated not for miracles, not even predominantly
for their piety, but as rule-makers, creators of orders - Francis,
Dominic, Bernard. And a book called The Medici, by one Col. Ch.
H. Young (I found the Modern Library volume on my last visit to Jerusalem,
in the poet Lea Tanzman’s apartment), portraying the Florentine rulers
as better rather than worse than most princes of their time, and suggesting
to me at least that the best of them must have been inspired by Dante’s
civic vision and the architecture of his poem. And a biography of Florence
Nightingale, the founder of the nursing profession, which notes that she
was born in and named for the city of Florence and was (like many civic-minded
Victorians) a lifelong reader of Dante. (On the other hand the
persistence of democratic ideas in English-speaking countries must have
something to do with the vital inclusiveness of Shakespeare’s language.)
And the memory of living in a rented apartment in the central district
of Madison, Wisconsin, where the streets, laid out around the Capitol,
are named for the delegates of the Constitutional Convention. It felt
like living inside a poem. Of course, the U.S. Constitution was the result
of a collective poetic effort; framed, too, in language, the language
of James Madison, that is a kind of neoclassical prose poetry.
As to corruption, we have already anticipated
Shelley’s definition of it. In a somewhat later passage he writes:
It is an error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages
to the Christian doctrines or the predominance of the Celtic nations.
Whatever of evil their agencies may have contained sprang from the
extinction of the poetical principle, connected with the progress of despotism
and superstition. [italics added] Men, from causes too intricate to
be here discussed, had become insensible and selfish: their own will had
become feeble, and yet they were its slaves, and thence the slaves of
the will of others: but fear, avarice, cruelty, and fraud, characterised
a race amongst whom no one was to be found capable of creating
in form, language or institution. [Italics in original]
Whether or not this passage accurately characterizes the centuries
after the fall of the Roman empire, it is clear that Shelley ascribes
the "extinction of the poetical principle" to the "progress
of despotism and superstition." Of course, since despotism is the
enemy of "love and imagination." Moreover, despotism does not
come simply from without; it is internalized as "fear, avarice, cruelty,
and fraud." Capitulation to force is intertwined with self-indulgence:
"their own will had become feeble, and yet they were its slaves."
"Superstition" can be understood as any set of ideas that tend
to reinforce despotism: not just fundamentalism, or belief in miracles,
but celebrity-worship, or gadget-worship.
Having set up this basic opposition between "the
poetical principle" on the one hand, and "corruption" on
the other, Shelley now proceeds to assert the "utility" of poetry.
He begins distinguishing "two types" of utility, of pleasure
or good,
one durable, universal, and permanent; the other transitory
and particular. Utility may either express the means of producing the
former or the latter. In the former sense, whatever strengthens and purifies
the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is
useful.
In other words, Shelley ascribes utility first to that which
sustains "the fabric of human society." On these terms, poetry
is the most useful of all human activities. But there is also a "transitory
and particular" utility, the utility of the "reasoners and mechanists,"
regarded as the only kind by those who have become "selfish and insensible,"
as he put it earlier, and pursue only particular interests:
But a narrower meaning may be assigned to the word utility,
confining it to express that which banishes the importunity of the wants
of our animal nature, the surrounding men with security of life, the dispersing
the grosser delusions of superstition, and the conciliating such a degree
of mutual forbearance among men as may consist with the motives of personal
advantage.
Shelley concedes that the "reasoners and
mechanists" have their function, namely to "copy the sketches
of (the poets’) creations into the book of common life." But they
must "confine their administration of the concerns of the inferior
powers of our nature within the limits due to the superior ones."
Science and technology, in other words, should be used to realize the
visions of the poet. (Once upon a time, children, it was believed that
technology by itself would end poverty and overwork.) If they are not
so used, but the "utility" of production is allowed to become
an end in itself, the social consequences of technology will be negative.
Whilst the mechanist abridges, and the political economist
combines, labour, let them beware that their speculations, for want of
correspondence with those first principles which belong to the imagination,
do not tend, as they have in modern England, to exasperate at once the
extremes of luxury and want. ... The rich have become richer, and the
poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between
the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are the effects
which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty.
And again, in a passage that requires little updating:
We have more moral, political, and historical wisdom than
we know how to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economical
knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce
which it multiplies. The poetry, in these systems of thought, is concealed
by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes. ... We want the
creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse
to act that which we imagine, we want the poetry of life: our calculations
have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation
of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man
over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally
circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the
elements, remains himself a slave. To what but a cultivation of the mechanical
arts in a degree disproportioned to the presence of the creative faculty,
which is the basis of all knowledge, is to be attributed the abuse of
all invention for abridging and combining labour, to the exasperation
of the inequality of mankind? From what other cause has it arisen that
the discoveries which should have lightened, have added a weight to the
curse imposed on Adam? Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money
is the visible incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world.
But Shelley’s accusation, it seems to me, is still intended
to express a hope: that if the "creative faculty" could once
again be cultivated in proportion to the "mechanical arts,"
we could set the house of knowledge in order and regain control over a
technological and economic process that seems to be running away with
us.
II.
So what now, today? One possible project, it seems
to me, would be to get the Left to admit that it has gone wrong, over
the last two centuries, by failing to understand and cultivate poetry.
The Left has by and large adopted the materialist philosophy, and has
made poetry at best incidental to its attempts to secure the rights of
the disadvantaged through power-struggles. The results have been what
Shelley, I think, would have predicted. We could say unto them:
The Muse’s majesty is not the power
Wielded by cunning brutes, and by the
abject
Coveted. Over both, her seedlings tower
From the twin stem of heart and intellect
To heights commanding a contemptuous
view
Of littleness that flatters every wrong,
Till the antagonists unite to hew
And harrow out the avenues of song.
Then some lament the blindness of their
fortune,
Whose eyes they have assisted to put
out
Because they would not bow to just proportion
But made a party-king, with ignorant
shout,
Of whosoever promised them the most,
Nor caring if the whole thereby be lost.
(EC)
That’s if we can shake off our twentieth-century inhibitions
about trying to tell anyone anything; if we can allow ourselves once again
to speak not only of what is "transitory and particular" but
of what is "durable, universal, and permanent."
But here I am conscious that the shade of Celan
(so careful, always, to anchor each poem in the transitory and particular,
so cautious in reminding his audience that "the poem speaks, after
all") bends a reproachful gaze on me. And likewise Shelley murmurs
that it was not for want of poems expressing admirable doctrines, that
poetry lost the public ear. We need to try something new.
This brings me to that quote, that one promising
clause which finally prompted me to read Shelley’s text: that great
poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind,
have built up since the beginning of the world.
I had hoped to find a development of that thought;
the "Defence" disappointed me. The above-quoted words are tucked
away at the end of that paragraph in which Shelley both criticizes and
defends the "erotic" poets of the Greek decadence. He ends by
recommending that we think of these late products not as "fragments
and isolated portions" but "episodes" in "that great
poem..." And then he goes on to talk about the history of Roman poetry,
leaving that beautiful thought hanging in the void. It is left for the
reader to make the connection with what Shelley has previously intimated
about the "order" to which poetry refers and looks forward.
Evidently if such an "order" exists, or potentially exists,
then every poem has something to do with this order manifesting itself
or becoming again concealed. Every poem can be read in that light.
For example: Celan’s poems have, individually,
a rather fragmentary appearance. In each poem something occurs and comes
to an end, surrounded by solitude and silence. At the same time, each
poem awakens echoes of other poems, and these correspondences create a
certain unity within his poetic oeuvre. I for one came to experience that
oeuvre as a single text, as a monodrama or a novel without a narrator.
Moreover, the poems contain quotations from a great many other authors,
and if you follow these quotations to their source the monodrama becomes
a conversation. He sounds more and more like the last voice to be heard
in a centuries-long symposium.
The end of his tragedy convinced me that the conversation
needs to reach some provisory conclusions, if it is to continue. In following
his thoughts to their sources, I came to Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, a
book about evolution and society which also contains some interesting
reflections on art:
Medieval architecture attained its grandeur - not only because
it was a natural development of handicraft; not only because each building,
each architectural decoration, had been devised by men who knew through
the experience of their own hands what artistic effects can be obtained
from stone, iron, bronze, or even from simple logs and mortar; not only
because each monument was a result of collective experience, accumulated
in each "mystery." Like Greek art, it sprang out of a conception
of brotherhood and unity fostered by the city...A cathedral or a communal
house symbolized the grandeur of an organism of which every mason and
stone-cutter was the builder, and a medieval building appears - not as
the solitary effort of which thousands of slaves would have contributed
the share assigned to them by one man’s imagination; all the city contributed
to it. The lofty bell-tower rose upon a structure, grand in itself, in
which the life of the city was throbbing - not upon a meaningless scaffold
like the Paris iron tower, not a sham structure in stone intended to conceal
the ugliness of an iron frame, as has been done in the Tower Bridge. Like
the Acropolis of Athens, the cathedral of a medieval city was intended
to glorify the grandeur of the victorious city, to symbolize the union
of its crafts, to express having achieved its craft revolution,
[italics added] the city often began a new cathedral in order to express
the new, wider, and broader union which had been called into life.
So, I began asking in the early 1970’s, what’s to prevent
us from organizing a "craft revolution" in modern poetry, to
express a vision of human community with poetry again at the center?
Of course there is inertia, which every new beginning
must contend with. And there is the Principle of Self, whose workings
in the very field of Poetry Harold Bloom traced with critical Schadenfreude
in The Anxiety of Influence (1973). Bloom asserts that poets conceal
their connections with their predecessors, misunderstand (or, to use a
word coined by the poet Eva Shaltiel, disunderstand) their contemporaries,
and disown the messages which their words convey to the reader. At one
point Bloom suggests that criticism can counteract this tendency among
creators by discerning "the roads that go from poem to poem"
- by discerning, in other words, that overarching unity of which Shelley
spoke. By constructing a map of understanding. But Bloom’s next
book, A Map of Misunderstanding, was again about the opposite.
I saw a plain with many houses built
Each on its plot of territorial ground,
The whole unpatterned, like a crazy quilt,
And yet within each little patch I found
Things organized upon a similar scheme.
"I am the sole creator" were the words
Etched upon every lintel, for a theme,
And, like so many beetles on their turds,
The maker’s statue crowned each little dome.
I thought, despairing, what they might have made
Had they brought tribute to a common home,
How graceful or how merry or how staid
Each statue might have seemed, if given to grace
A portal, or some soaring pillar’s base. (EC)
We as poets need to cooperate to make the "great
poem," the "great mind," the implicit order of poetry,
visible. We need to create a structure that will house our individual
works and wherein they will reinforce and amplify one another rather than
cancelling one another out. The present state of the art is chaos, advanced
entropy; but order is re-created when new energy is poured into the system.
Could an understanding of poetry’s central importance to human welfare
supply that energy?
That sounds too impersonal. So let me speak now
of something I’d made up my mind to discuss at some point, namely the
reason why I did not read Shelley’s "Defense of Poetry" until
recently. It had to do with an "epiphany" that occurred at Harvard-Radcliffe
during a freshman honors section meeting devoted to Shelley’s "Ode
to the West Wind." The instructor waffled; he felt the poem’s power
but was uneasy about liking a poet whose "stock," as I had been
told, was "down" (due to the New Critics). The students followed
suit. At last they came to the words "I fall upon the thorns of life!
I bleed!" - and with one voice, with a visible relief at finally
being sure about something, pronounced the line "embarrassing."
I looked around the table at the well-groomed young men in their suits
and ties pronouncing this line "embarrassing," and felt a chill.
Shortly thereafter I fled the English Department and went in for foreign
languages. It did not help; I only ended up writing a dissertation on
Paul Celan, who wrote quite a few lines like that, and who confronted
me even more drastically with the job of reminding people that love, after
all, is what this curious vocation is about.
Love is difficult to express in poetry these days,
that is, if one does not want to sound "unsmart" (Tony Whedon
used this word recently in a related context). Of course one can talk
about it, but always from a kind of face-saving distance. Oh hell! You
know what I mean:
Out of thy tomb as from the drying fountain
of human mercy, roll a few more tears,
toward the test-tubes of those alchemists
whose boilings will not find thy wisdom’s
salt. (EC)
- that’s a recent, mild example; I suppose I am getting inhibited
too. If, reader, you find this embarrassing, I implore you to ask yourself
why. "A Tear is an Intellectual Thing," as Blake said. If love
is "unsmart," why then does Dante speak of himself as
one who writes at love’s dictation?
Love is of course not only a topic of poetry.
It is the force that holds the words and images together in the poem,
the poems together in the oeuvre. And it does not have to stop at those
borders. "There will be a striding, a wide striding/ across the borders/
they draw for us" (Celan, Time-Croft). In reading Celan I
became conscious of symbolic correspondences, not only within his work,
but also between his work and my life. For a simple example, the geological
imagery attracted me because my parents were geologists. There were also
correspondences with the world of Sylvia Plath. Such perceptions seemed
to fit nowhere in the intellectual schemata in which I had been trained;
they were like those little coincidences on which my mother had been the
family expert (e.g. the fact that her parents both had first names that
meant "lion"). But it appears that these things are important,
very important, not as objective "proof" of anything, but as
tokens of our coherency, to be cherished as we cherish one another and
revere the pattern of which we are part. Since then I have experienced
similar things with other poets, none in quite the same degree. I think
the connections would appear more frequently if poets were writing in
a safer environment for the expression of emotion; they would then have
freer access to the level where the pictures of the things we have really
cared about are stored. "Visual" imagery doesn’t compensate
where this is blocked.
O Editors, on whose decisions so much of the character
of poetry today hinges: Please, please, please beware of professional
callousness! Don’t require of a poem that it should sound hard, "cool."
Let the offerings of love be acceptable in your sight. This does not mean
that you have to accept poetry that just emotes; a poem that is genuine
should be an expression of love not only for something in the world but
also for the hearer, for the language as vehicle and testament of human
communication - and, I would add, for those who have used the language
in the past, so that an occasional archaism, even an occasional "cliché"
(if so used that the reader is made aware of the meanings of the words)
should be tolerated.
But the poets also need, I believe, to rethink
their singularity. When one speaks to poets about "organizing,"
one immediately hears that the artist’s solitude is essential to his or
her creativity. True, one needs some time and space to oneself; one needs
freedom from such conventions and ideological commitments as would prevent
one from showing the world as one sees it. But with that reservation,
art has been and always is a social activity. The jazzman does not need
solitude to create, but the presence of other jazzmen. Emily Dickinson
didn’t socialize, but she wrote a lot of letters and corresponded with
many minds. Dante wrote from exile, but he belonged to an intellectual
community that extended beyond his city; and I’ve long suspected that
the real model for the Paradiso was that youthful exchange in the
circle of Cavalcanti. And Celan - I first heard him as an isolated voice;
but I heard him in the city of Berkeley in a time when the writing and
sharing of poetry was part of a community-wide "conversation about
the world," in my friend Ulea’s phrase, and eventually I learned
that he was a survivor of another such conversation, a better one beyond
doubt, that had flourished in Czernowitz in the ’20’s and ’30’s only to
be cut short by the Holocaust. And he missed that conversation; in the
end he could not do without it. Why not, then, acknowledge the conversation
as the matrix of all our creations, and try to see our own relations within
it?
A negentropic practice of literature could be
encouraged by a literary scholarship aware of "the roads that go
from poem to poem" and at work on the "map of understanding."
"Intertextual" criticism, certainly, makes a beginning; with
less jargon, more adding up of results, it could become a genuine science.
I believe that here something like objectivity, or at any rate intersubjective
reliability, is possible - that there is a sort of order in our literary
experiences which subsequent observations will go on verifying. I think
that Celan’s work and fate (the two so inextricably intertwined) offers
a kind of Archimedean point from which to look back on the Western literary
tradition and see its unity. The unity of the Western tradition (which
has counterparts in the other traditions with which, through the global
communication process, it has already begun to blend2)
cannot be separated from the history of the human species in its development
from hunting and gathering societies to large urban complexes unified
by global communication and global commerce.3
On the basis of these studies, a teaching canon
for future poets could be constructed. The beginning poet might be given
to understand, first of all, whatever can be objectively determined about
the physiological and social basis of our craft - the ways in which rhythm
and association interact with the central nervous system, the organizing
role which the poet plays in maintaining the fabric of society. Of course,
the apprentice would be made acquainted with the great visions of the
past, the major contributors to the Great Poem, and should understand
something about the relations among their poems. There could be some textbooks
written in plain language, pointing these relations out. Third, there
could be more anthologies compiled with the express purpose of teaching
the craft. There could be an anthology for each of the traditional forms
- ballad, sonnet, sestina, villanelle, triolet, ballade, pantoum, rondeau
- so that the student can see how the form works. And there could
also be an anthology organized not around form but around existential
concerns, to which each of the first generation of organizers would contribute
the poems that have meant most to them as individuals - the ones that
have stuck in their memory, that they know wholly or partially by heart,
that they have remembered at critical moments in their earthly pilgrimage.
Such an anthology would help the apprentice poets to begin a kind of "training
analysis," or training synthesis, that would integrate their
own life-experience with the text of the tradition. The sharing of the
results would help poets to understand one another and hopefully cement
the bonds among them.
Such a course of training could not guarantee
the appearance of a new Dante or Shakespeare. Original genius is by definition
unforeseen. But such a training could raise the baseline over which the
future summits of poetry would rise. Again, Dante and Shakespeare, and
in all probability also Homer, emerged in periods of intense exchange
among poets.
Another thing for which I would plead is a form
of exchange among poets that is poetically consistent with, true
to, the vision of a poetic order. This, I realize, is a hard sell
because of the current identification (not only in the artistic field)
of freedom with lack of commitment and affiliation. We live in a "free
verse" society, in which love and friendship fade from memory as
rapidly as lines that do not scan or rhyme or ring, while in the absence
of conscious commitments a deterministic and reductive mechanics takes
over and grinds everyone small. But recently there has been a slight movement
in the contrary direction, at least on the level of verse form. It is
no longer fatal to write a sonnet; form has even been found to be compatible
with spontaneity. It is an axiom of literature that no insight which
does not penetrate to the level of form can be considered as realized
in a work. Thus if we wish for a poetry that can again be visionary,
constructive, and effective, we can’t escape the task of building a corresponding
and appropriate form of exchange.
For some years the design of such a form has haunted
me with the insistence of a poem in the making. Perhaps the original suggestion
came from an episode which in Exodus ch. 18 is juxtaposed to the giving
of the Ten Commandments, but which has received less attention: Jethro,
Moses’ Midianite father-in-law, comes for a visit and sees Moses engaged
in judging the people all day. He protests ("you’ll wear yourself
and the people out") and urges Moses instead to group the people
in tens, fifties, hundreds and thousands and appoint leaders at each level,
who would transmit upward any questions they could not settle, till only
the most difficult would reach Moses. In my version of this advice, poets
would form groups of ten and share their work regularly. The Internet
offers a way to do this without coordinating meeting times, to meet without
restrictions of locality. Could this be an invention that might really,
as Shelley’s says, "copy" the vision of the poets "into
the book of common life"?
I always have been on the Internet.
Before they had the chips, the ISP’s,
I’ve always, always had you in my head.
Once for two hours I sat in jail, and read
the walls and bench, and scratched there, "Thoughts
are free."
I always have been on the Internet,
When I got up and when I went to bed,
Sitting at home or walking down the street,
I’ve always, always had you in my head,
I’ve heard your words and answered what you said,
known you were there although I could not see.
I always have been on the Internet.
That server can’t go down, though war and dread
sever our ties and slice the world in three.
I’ve always, always had you in my head
and you (unknowing?) stood me in good stead.
You’ve fought it, but we’re branches of one tree.
I always have been on the Internet.
I’ve always, always had you in my head. (EC)4
Granted, the Internet also has its misuses; and where these
are not guarded against, they make any Utopian expectations attached to
this medium look foolish. Participants would need to avoid discourtesy
and sensationalism, and speak out against them should they, despite all
understandings in advance, occur; for these would destroy the trust that
is necessary for the poetic exchange. There would also be no workshop-type
criticism in these exchanges: the participants in a substantive conversation
do not talk about each other’s accents. The messages passed back and forth
between group members would have the character of a conversation in
poetry. Poets would share a) any poems they happened to have just
written; b) any poems of which someone else’s poems reminded them (their
own or those of others); or c) they could write letters in verse (I write
a lot of them already) in order to comment or convey information. The
sequence of messages would be archived on each participant’s hard drive
and also in hard copy somewhere.
From time to time one member of the group would
converse with representatives of nine other cells, and so on for as many
tiers as necessary. These exchanges too would be archived. At the "top"
level, of course, there would be a "central cell" that could
keep a database on membership, and receive or formulate organizational
suggestions and transmit them to the "lower" levels. In all
these exchanges, the poems would not be judged so much as they would be
used to convey ideas, feelings and information. Poems would come into
the conversation to the extent that they occurred to the speaker. The
poems that would be transmitted would be those that remained in memory,
that found some application. From time to time anthologies might be made
of the poems that were most frequently recalled. But the great poem
would not be any single utterance but the exchange itself, the Greatpoem,
the life of which all would be part. To this poem every utterance would
contribute some impulse.
The hardest part of this "algorithm"
to execute without energy-wasting friction would probably be the selection
of coordinators. Perhaps this task could be assigned by lot or seniority
among those willing to assume it. There is also the question of how members
would be assigned to cells: by geographical area? by "karass"-type
affinities? by area of specialized studies (such as law)...? Each of these
methods would yield interesting combinations. I think there should be
a period of experiment, in which different designs should be submitted
from within the poetic community and tried out in turn. The first ten
poets to join on might become the "central cell" and the coordinators
for the next layer of ten cells, and so on. The "central cell"
could receive organizational suggestions and direct the experiments during
the first period of the organization’s development.
Finally, because as every critic knows archetypal
symbols are enormously helpful in unifying a work of literature, this
union of poets needs a Goal, a prize to keep its eyes on. In a poem called
"The Hexagon" (inspired by my first encounter with the Internet
as well as by the otherwise unprofitable experience of law school) I envisioned
an archive and meeting-place for poets as a concrete symbol of community:
In the middle of the city
Stands the house of song and story
Built of stone, its rooms are many [...]
Underneath the ground is hollowed
To one room, a mighty kiva,
Where, amid those pillars chiseled
In the likeness of great tree-trunks,
All the poets of the city
Stand at equinox and solstice
To hear read the formulation
Of each season’s task and tidings
And give counsel where they can. [...]
I firmly believe the thing could be built someday, if we poets
can get our act together.
Let me conclude with one further problem raised
by Shelley’s conclusion:
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration;
the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present;
the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing
to battle and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved
not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
It is a strange conclusion - a clarion call con sordina.
It sounds as though poets need to remain "unconscious" so as
to create, and if unconscious must of course remain unacknowledged! But
I think this is to confuse that contingent ignorance which is an
effect of repression, with the conscious mind’s essential incapacity
to know the infinite except in the symbolic forms which the elves of the
unconscious fashion while we are asleep. It is quite possible to take
out the mute and go back on the offensive, without falling from grace
with the Unexpected. The plan of the Commedia was evidently mapped
out in advance, just as the terza rima form was chosen at the outset,
but yet each canto gives an impression of spontaneity. So may it be with
us.
Notes:
1 I would like to thank Vera Zubarev (Ulea) for
her helpful comments and suggestions on this essay.
2 In particular, my understanding of these matters
was also catalyzed by rhe Tao te King and by Black Elk Speaks,
an account of a Sioux visionary’s experiences (though, since the account
was filtered through the mind of a Western poet, the degree to which it
is really a non-Western aource is uncertain).
3 This is discussed further in a related essay,
"Under Man-Made Stars: A Compass for Criticism."
4 This poem was published in the online journal
Melic.
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