csuf e212-r british literature since 1760 spring 06

Home Page for E212-R

2006-05-19T10:50:00.000-07:00

Welcome to English 212-R, British Literature since 1760
Spring 2006 at California State University, Fullerton

This blog will offer posts on all of the authors on our syllabus. It contains two kinds of notes: general and page-by-page. Both kinds are optional reading. While the entries are not intended as exact replicas of my lecture notes (and in fact, they cannot include an important part of the class sessions since each student will offer a few in-class presentations), they should prove helpful in your engagement with the authors. They may also help you arrive at paper topics and prepare for the final exam. Unless otherwise noted, the editions used for our selections are as follows:

Abrams, M.H. et al. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vols. 2A-C. 7th ed. New York: Norton, 2000. ISBN 2A = 0393975681, 2B = 039397569X, 2C = 0393975703.

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Oxford: Oxford UP, repr. 2005. ISBN 0192802380.

A dedicated menu at my wiki site contains the necessary information for students enrolled in this course; when the semester has ended, this blog will remain online, and a copy of the syllabus will remain in the Archive menu.

Week 16, Rhys, Graves, and Pinter

2006-05-18T15:29:00.000-07:00

Please check back in future. I did not get around to posting material on this author during the semester, but will post an entry when I have time to transcribe and edit my notes.

Week 15, Yeats and Eliot

2006-05-11T15:28:00.000-07:00

Notes on William Butler Yeats

Introduction.

Yeats was a poet of many phases, not as clearly marked as critics imply: romanticism and symbolism, Irish politics and folklore, aristocratic values, Modernist stylistic compression and an interest in poetic texts as containing entire symbolic systems. But he never left behind his early phases even after moving on from them. Yeats was always concerned with the power of art in relation to other areas of life, with poetry’s status as expression, with its approximation to religion and the stability and ultimate insight religions offer. His poetry becomes more and more complex in its investigation of all these matters. ‘‘A Vision’’ is his prose attempt to create, in the manner of Blake and Swedenborg, an integral system, a mystic yet accurate way of dealing with change in individual identity, the collective unconscious, and world history. Whether all his talk of “gyres,” “will/body of fate,” “creative mind / mask,” and so forth makes a theosophic system is beside the point: the whole affair is a vehicle for his poetry. His complex mature period blends with the ~np~Anglo-American~/np~ Modernism of Eliot and Pound, among others. Take the Symbolist insistence that art constitutes a higher reality all its own, add the allusiveness and integrative power of myth, the spiritual imperatives of mysticism, a paradoxical yet genuine engagement with politics, and a willingness to question his broadest claims for poetry’s truth-status and relevance—and you get Yeats the High Modernist. There is a certain aloofness in Yeats’ manner, an aristocratic contempt for those who want nothing but pleasure from art, as if, to borrow from Bentham, pushpin were as good as poetry. Like most Modernists, Yeats despises middle-class materialism, preferring the genuineness of the poor and the nobility alike. This carries forth a long romantic and Victorian tradition—recall Carlyle’s thundering at “Bobuses” who think of nothing but upward mobility and their stomachs.

But then, the argument over whether art should simply please us or improve us into the bargain is an ancient one; most critics and artists, even the most defiantly aloof among them, have implied that it should be a force both for social cohesion and for spiritual realization and transcendence. The Russian Formalists’ watchword “make it new” isn’t so new, and Modernists believe that art is a powerful shaping force over the spirit and intellect, even if they don’t trust themselves entirely when they say such things. The notion that Modernism doesn’t trust itself calls for an explanation: Yeats, with his occult and elitist tendencies, knows the risk he runs of his art collapsing into aestheticism or romantic solipsism. He’s fashioning a holy book out of his own semi-private symbolic language, a Book that promises special insight to the initiated. Even his use of the past’s myths and history throws down the interpretive gauntlet to us as readers—Yeats is a difficult poet who demands that we turn away from ordinary notions, step out of our individual selves, and understand him on his own terms. The self and the ordinary are cast as barriers to understanding and connection with others.

Yeats’ hero Blake wrote about religion’s tendency to become the province of an evil priesthood, a cynical hieratic class that feeds on the mysteries it propagates and guards. Mystery at its best—even the kind of manufactured mystery we see in the Victorian sages—can flow from genuine wonder at the complexity of humanity and the cosmos; but it can also take its origin from fear, ignorance, and misinterpretation, with consequent need for priestly elites. Modernist myth-making could easily amount to ideology in the service of somebody’s politics. ~np~Anglo-American~/np~ Modernists seem to know this, and yet they find it necessary to offer us a religion of art. Yeats is a man of dilemmas—he’s all for universal myths, yet remains an Irish nationalist; he’s deeply personal and subjective, yet breaks down the barriers of selfhood. And above all, the phrase applied to Tennyson in the nineteenth century—“Lord of Language”—is just as appropriate to Yeats among his twentieth-century peers.

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”

An early poem, symbolist. The speaker will remove himself from the everyday world and hear what the “deep heart’s core” has to say; this alternative reality will have an order and a peace all its own. The poem has the force of a decision: “I ‘‘will’’ go to the place that’s calling to me.” He hasn’t done it yet, and the chant itself is part of the process whereby he will convince himself to go. There’s some genuine pastoral imagery, a touch of romanticism’s descriptions of beautiful things in nature. Innisfree is symbolic—it is at least as much a state of mind as a real place, perhaps more so. The poem speaks the reality that calls the poet forth, so language participates in the making of something real, whether a state of mind or an actual place.

“Easter 1916”

Yeats here treats an act of Irish nationalism and martyrdom as a work of art, something that transfigures even those participants he didn’t get along with. But in the final stanza, doesn’t Yeats also bring up the dangers of nationalism? See his line, “Too long a sacrifice…” Nationalism is a temporary tactic; Yeats never supported violent revolution, and shows a preference for art and myth as shaping and continuity-providing influences in collective life.

“The Second Coming”

The Russian Revolution occurred in 1917; a new world is being born, and it seems neither rational nor predictable. The Sphinx Riddle, at its core, concerns human nature, and the Oedipus myth turns on a series of outrages against a civic order taken as natural or in alliance with nature. Oedipus commits the scandal of incest (incest is both a universal taboo and yet a local violation, so it is scandalously natural and cultural—see Claude Lévi-Strauss). Will this new world be like the one ruled by Shelley’s cruel Pharaoh Ozymandias, whose image remains to glare at us as a recurring possibility even though the artist mocked him? An Egyptian tyranny? Yeats is drawing upon his own and on the collective European symbolic system to describe the birth throes of a new age. In uttering his prophecy, he rejects optimistic C19 narratives about progress and the upward march of the spirit. Change is inevitable, but not necessarily change for the better. The “rough beast” stalks obscenely into the world, its crude sexuality reminding us that we haven’t left behind the worst in ourselves or in history. History has been called “the pain of our ancestors,” and here is some new monstrosity shaping up. Yeats’ imagery comes from ancient myth and religion; history is disjunctive. It proceeds by terrible leaps and thunderclaps. So we need the artist as a wielder of myths new and old to make the world intelligible again, to whatever degree possible. This is a claim that High Modernists have adapted from romantic poet-prophets like Wordsworth, Shelley, and Blake.

What is intelligible may not comfort us, but we are responsible for confronting it in any case. Yeats had read Nietzsche on eternal recurrence—can one face all but unbearable realizations, yet remain willing to do it all again? Here we are confronted with our own recurrent power to tyrannize, setting up fear and dread abstraction as our gods (recall Blake’s “hapless soldier’s sigh” that “runs in blood down palace walls” in the poem “London”). And his ideas resemble Jung’s notion that there’s a collective unconscious—Jung was going beyond Freud’s psychology, which was centered on the bourgeois individual. Yeats’ accomplishment is to wield Jung-like collective myths with the fiery individualism of Blake: “I must create my own system or be enslaved by another’s!” Not that his is a narrowly self-based poetics; Yeats isn’t a romantic creator pure and simple—notice that he often writes as if he were being dictated to by a medium, an automatic writing that wells up from the collective unconscious, an archetypal image bank that comes from the ‘‘Spiritus Mundi.’’ Neither does he try to play the stage father with the meaning of his poems—he respects their status as words to be interpreted. His emphasis on the subjective side of existence is characteristically Modernist: they privilege impressions, subjective responses.

“Sailing to Byzantium”

How to cross over into what lasts? Yeats’ speaker explains why he has come to Byzantium, abandoning the boundaries of his ego and traveling to a region where he hopes to metamorphose into an eternal life in artistic form. This is truly a religion of art. Yeats refashions ancient symbols, grants us a vision of the Holy City, which is not Jerusalem in this poem but rather a decadent-phase Byzantium, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. The poem alludes to the poetic process itself, the magical hammering out of a world of eternal aesthetic artifacts. Like a Byzantine goldsmith’s handiwork, the poet’s sacred chant and symbolic system spanning many texts would fashion this world by what Shelley calls “the incantation of this verse.” But I’m not sure such claims for an eternal unchanging state of things suits Yeats’ theosophy in ‘‘A Vision,’’ as it emerges later. It seems to me that everything is dynamic in that explanation—Yeats, after all, borrows from the Pre-Socratics who are always talking about change as the only constant.

Stanza One: A personal poem about growing old and facing up to what one’s art has meant to oneself. The claim is that art transcends the “mire” of the material realm and human desire without simply rejecting them. Well, the first stanza rules out remaining in the world of natural generation, void of subjectivity. This kind of harmony and music don’t satisfy the self-conscious speaker about to pass on. Nature is “careful of the type, careless of the individual life,” as Tennyson writes in ‘‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’’

Stanza Two: Notice the incantatory power here, the ordering power of rhythm: song of a different sort overcomes the mortal decay implied by first stanza. Byzantium is in its decadent phase, a self-referential city wrapped up in artistic processiveness, in aestheticism. But Yeats is drawn to this beautiful solipsism, a place for intense concentration on what is eternal. This is not irresponsibility, I believe, but honesty—the speaker is old. Therefore, not having found his answer in physical nature, he has crossed waters, symbolizing creative power and life, and has come to this holy city. An old man must escape his dying self and enter into a different creative process—art.

Stanza Three: This stanza shows a turning away from the body and towards the forms of the sages on the Ravenna frieze mentioned in the Norton Anthology note. He prays to the sages, who have themselves been transformed into a work of art. He wants to be in the phase of existence they have reached, not remain where he is. His prayer is itself an outflowing of the phase in which he now finds himself.

Stanza Four: Once he has made the transition to a new world free of dying nature and the body, the artist will be wrought into his own artifice and become eternal. This poem confronts mortality, but not by reaffirming selfhood—instead, he confronts it on the grounds of his symbols and artifice, measuring his own endurance by their lasting power. A wish to merge with them. But will that be granted?

“Leda and the Swan”

Here the speaker handles poetic insight into history as a violent and dangerous gift. The rape of Leda engendered Helen, the Trojan War, and European history. What price insight? Many of the ancient prophets—Tiresias, Cassandra, Orpheus, gained their powers as compensation for terrible loss, or suffered for what they had been granted. Poetry is not merely pretty words. It is allied with prophecy and divination, and has been at the heart of civilization as a human task and process. The Modernists often describe poetry as an inseminative, male power. But is Zeus the only poet here, or is Leda also inspired? Does myth or poetic insight allow us to control such a process, or only describe it and face up to it spiritually? Coming to terms with the violent but necessary transitions from one epoch to the next seems to be the current poem’s task. This demands that we not dismiss the violent past, but try to make our knowledge of it worth something in the present—if that’s possible. Nietzsche says in “Homer’s Contest” that if we understood the Greeks “in Greek,” we would shudder—certainly Yeats’ choice of myths here doesn’t place him among the calm C19 Hellenizers. He says that the politics went out of the poem when he began to write it, but it still asks about the relationship between art and a given political order, indeed any political order. To what extent is poetic insight and language complicit in the violent events and transitions it presents? Leda and other myths, after all, were how the Greeks understood their own history and culture—at least early in their history, until C6-5 BCE, they lived within the framework of their myths. It is only with the presocratics that they begin trying to explain natural phenomena in scientific terms. Different cultures will read the same myth differently; the myths recur but are subject to reinterpretation.

“Among School Children”

Here “the child is father of the man,” as Wordsworth wrote. But Yeats may not draw as much consolation as Wordsworth did in his “Immortality Ode.” The romantic poem cheered up the speaker, but Yeats’ speaker tries to reassure children that he’s not such a frightening schoolmaster or old scarecrow. His smile is a mask, like a Gno-mask, a conventional role. Hollow, he wants to fulfill his public office, which entails one generation’s responsibility towards another.

Stanza 5: Refers to the ancient myth of metempsychosis, as in Wordsworth’s line “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” See also Plato’s ‘‘Symposium’’ and ‘‘Phaedrus.’’ Is the pain worth it?

Stanza 6: What is real? Philosophers sought abstract wisdom, and can’t tell. They propagate Bacon’s Idols of the Theater”—the strange errors that come with the territory of philosophers bent upon explaining the world with the help of huge thought-systems. Yeats’ autobiography ‘‘A Vision’’ shows his dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy. Much philosophy is an attempt to capture the relationship between self and world, to build up a vast framework for arriving at what is ultimately intelligible and enduring. It comes to seem a vain and self-isolating endeavor. I think Yeats is making the traditional complaint that philosophical explanations don’t ‘‘move’’ us, don’t make us able to act in the world and bear up under its stresses as they occur.

Stanza 7: Here a different relationship between thought and object emerges: images that move us.

Stanza 8: The reference to the chestnut tree is pure romantic organic metaphor—you can’t dissect a living thing without killing it. The whole is more than the sum of the parts, and you can’t divide up a person easily into the Seven Ages of Man. Neither can we “know the dancer from the dance.” This is a complex metaphor—the point in reference to Yeats’ theories in ‘‘A Vision’’ that states of mind, acts of will, etc., are not separable from the particular phase in which a person currently is. So the Yeats-like speaker is an older man, still somewhat wrapped up in his own subjectivity. He does not see the huge and luminous world of the more objective-phase child. So his poem is a product of where he is in terms of spiritual phase. His final words may seem like romantic poetry in the optative mode, as in “if winter comes, can spring be far behind?” But the trouble is that he ‘‘isn’t’’ dancing, that he cannot reenter the thoughts and dreams of childhood. He can only reflect upon his past, but the activity is not necessarily a comfort or a useful thing to him—he’s trying to come full circle, reflect back on his childhood and draw sustenance for his old age, wrap his mind around his life as a whole. But that kind of reflection is in itself Hamlet-like, and leads to further alienation, not to recuperation of the past. And so he remains distant from the children even in the midst of them.

“Byzantium”

What’s happening in Byzantium once the pilgrim arrives? We find spiritual transcendence being wrought from matter, from Roman “mire” and centuries of more vital history. Art and death have come together productively. Byzantium, in Yeats’ description, has become a place of transcendence, not the practical, political world of the Roman Empire.

Stanza 1: What has been made by human hands withdraws, disdains its makers and their mixture of mud and spirit. The domes and cathedrals are pure, illumined with celestial, not human, light.

Stanza 2: Mummy-cloth… is the winding path death? Is that the way out of mire?

Final Stanzas: Yeats was never satisfied with nature as an answer to the problems of self-conscious humans. You can see from “The Wilde Swans of Coole” that he aspires to a higher vision than nature could ever afford us. So here we find images begetting images, generating an alternative world, or a state that differs greatly from the unhappy one in which the speaker apparently finds himself.

Eliot Notes

From Ritual to Romance, by Jesse Weston.

Eliot’s debt to the book From Ritual to Romance (1920) is significant. And here are the notes on that book:

Jesse Westin quotes Sir Francis Bacon: the soul should expand to meet the fullness of a mystery; mystery should not constrict itself to the limits of the soul. And that will be the point when T.S. Eliot uses myth—to go beyond the bounds of the individual ego and force the modern reader to confront his inability to appreciate the ancient myths by which people once lived meaningful lives.

Jesse Westin wants to go beyond and before the grail legend as we now have it—she is interested in finding out what lies behind the explicitly Christian and Romance or Arthurian versions of the grail quest. And throughout her book, she finds that ancient fertility myths are the source of the modern grail legend. She wants to trace the evolution of religious consciousness or at least to find out what lies at its base. She insists against Ridgeway that religion has always been more than simply ancestor-worship; it has always been connected with something beyond the individual self and immediate family relations. It has been about the relationship between divinity and humanity.

So that is one interest T.S. Eliot might take in Jesse Westin—the way in which genuine religious consciousness connects us to some realm beyond ourselves.

Moreover, Westin says that the ancient myths are life-myths—they are about the cycle of death and rebirth, and of course they are connected with seasonal change.

So Eliot wants to tap into this kind of imagery and significance in his poem.

Jesse Westin mentions several versions of the grail legend, and in some of them the sick or dead Fisher King is responsible for the desolation of the land, while in others the questor himself fails to answer the question properly and soul becomes responsible for the desolation of the land. Westin finds that the first version is the more genuine and ancient, but I am not certain that Eliot really cares about which came first—it would make sense for him to pose responsibility or agency as a legitimate question in his poem. For us, this means we must ask about the extent to which the poem itself is complicit in the condition it describes and in this way responsible for its perpetuation. What then would the punishment be? Would it have something to do with incoherence?

Westin describes the grail legend as follows: the main object is the restoration to health and vigor of a King suffering from infirmity caused by wounds, sickness, or old age. Further, it seems that the King’s illness has caused war or blight. The hero must “restore the waters to their channel,” and make the land fertile again. So the hero must restore the land to its previous condition, and most importantly make the King healthy again. Castration is sometimes the wound alluded to—loss of generative power.

Westin says that the Aryans believed in sympathetic magic. They believed in prayer and supplication, but also that they could stimulate divine activity. According to Sir J. G. Fraser, these ancients believed that the animal and vegetable world were bound together and that the same principle of life and fertility was at work in them both. Anthropomorphizing nature is one way of showing this. Life cults evolved beyond a belief in the vivifying power of water to recognition of “a common principle underlying all manifestations of life.”

Jesse Westin comes around to saying that the wasteland is central to an understanding of the entire myth cycle.

The grail is not a horn of plenty—it does not seem to be the case that we actually feed from the grail cup. Rather, it is a kind of magic artifact.

The four symbols are cup, lance, sword, dish. They correspond to the pack of cards as hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs. The taro pack seems to have been introduced to Europe from the East.

The fish as a symbol predates Christianity. It has to do with the origin and preservation of life since it is commonly believed that all life comes from water.

Section I. The Burial of the Dead.

Major themes: London is an unreal city, a place where myth seems to have no meaning. It is as if the city represents the death of the human. There is an obvious reference to the disjointed nature of seasonal cycles; April certainly should not be the cruelest month. The cosmopolitan figure Marie represents the kind of decadence that led to the first world war—Marie is among the living Dead of London. There is no sense of place, origin, or tradition for her or for London. Madame S. is a bogus mythic consciousness, not the genuine myth underlying Arthurian legend.

What Eliot introduces us to in this first section is a Dante-world in which individuals are profoundly alienated from themselves and from one another and from any system of meaning that would make sense of their lives. In order to be reborn, a person first must die a genuine death, but that kind of death seems to be denied the characters whose voices we hear in the wasteland.

I would like to introduce the problem of narrative unity. How are we to construe the speaker of this poem? Is there one? Would it make sense for there to be only one speaker in the context of T.S. Eliot’s poetics? He firmly rejects what he considers romantic egocentrism—the poetry of pure self-expression—but he also rejects Matthew Arnold’s version of disinterested objectivity, as well as the Victorian Sage writers and their strategies for garnering authority. I don’t think we are going to get a final version of the truth from any single narrative voice.

I see several voices emerging in this first section. The first voice is that of Marie, an alienated aristocrat. She speaks of fragmentary childhood experiences that she cannot put together or properly interpret. The imagery itself as well as the comments she makes bespeak frustrated desire, desire frustrated by the world in which she lives. The setting of the poem seems to be post WWI Europe, most particularly London, but the reminiscences of Marie refer to a time before that. She introduces unwittingly the theme of descent into an underworld, which for her seems to be nearly a frustrated sexual desire—a world in alliance with what Eliot might call deaths dream kingdom, a division that stops short of full spiritual enlightenment. She or her interlocutor—it is difficult to see which—claims to be delayed neither living or dead, and looks into the heart of light uncomprehendingly. She is the hyacinth girl, and this may be a reference to the fertility myths that T.S. Eliot got from Jesse Westin—the cult of Adonis employed the hyacinth flower to mimic the blood of the dying God. But the hyacinth girl does not seem to understand her relation to this mythology. Moreover, this imagery appears in other of Eliot’s poems—a male figure meets a young girl who is holding flowers. Perhaps Dante provides a clue to the meaning of this symbolism: in purgatory, Dante has a vision of a young woman named Matilda, who is in Eden. This vision of Matilda eventually gives way to the higher vision of Beatrice, so Matilda is a lower-level figure for Dante. She gives him a lecture on the properties of seeds—in Eden, things grow with unbelievable ease; there is no question of sterility or painful birth into the light of day. In the next canto from 28, Dante exhibits some resentment of what he has seen—thanks to Sinful Eve, he cannot carry in Eden. Now, generation is no easy matter. The references to Tristan reinforce the theme of frustrated desire.

But of course in between these passages where Marie and a lover speak, we are treated to the language of biblical prophecy. What is the function of this kind of language? Dryness, drought, predominate in this passage, and it is possible that the references to “something different” refer to Christ. Or perhaps it simply refers to death, which Marie and her lover cannot comprehend because they are neither living or dead. The kind of desire they exhibit is bound to fail them in age, for it leads nowhere beyond the boundaries of the self. They are self-isolated characters. Prophecy of radical change is no shelter or comfort for them.

Immediately following this voice or interrupting it rather we find a reference to Ezekiel. Perhaps these references are meant to remind us of the deeper significance missed by people like Marie, but as a scholar of Victorian literature however, I would have to add that biblical prophecy is one of the more common strategies employed by the Victorian sage-writers. So I am not certain that I trust this style, which Eliot as a modern author is almost bound to reject, simply as a marker for deeper significance in the poem. In any event, the prophetic voice challenges us with the fact that we know nothing but broken images and that drought is the prevailing condition of life. It is clear that what the Hindu texts call “the freeing of the waters” cannot yet occur.

Madame S. is a fake prophetic voice, and she is not even certain that she can transmit the insight she believes she has to offer—one must be so careful these days. The taro pack she wields seems to be somehow related to the fertility cults or life myths, at least indirectly. She refers to a drowned sailor, telling her interlocutors that this is their card. So the theme here is drowning, immersion, transformation. Is the hanged man the Fisher King that she cannot see? In any case, I don’t think we will get the answer from her, though her reference to the need to fear death by water is interesting because this sort of death amounts to a genuine “sea-change,” genuine death and transformation.

This final paragraph of section one is probably the most complicated: it associates London with Dante’s Inferno, referring explicitly to that work. Of course, this first paragraph justifies the title of the first section—what we have seen so far is characters who are among the living Dead.. This first section is a descent into the underworld. At 71, the theme of death and regeneration surfaces. Ask students what they make of the statement—what would it mean if the corpse were to sprout? The dead here seem resentful, sterile—it would disturb them to bloom.

Refer to my statement below concerning Charles Baudelaire—this poet and critic concerns himself with a teeming city of anonymous souls wrapped up in themselves and not connected with the bustling life around them. Yet, Baudelaire sees the necessity not to deny the present state of affairs. He is someone who could immerse his language and himself into a bustling urban environment and not get lost.

Comment: Dante, the prophetic authors, and the Hindu holy texts and Charles Baudelaire have something in common—they are able to immerse themselves in an environment and return alive, not as mere shades. The point is to immerse oneself and yet return with insight to offer others. They at least know where they stand, at least after going through a poetic or other process. Does the Fisher King get to this point by the end of the wasteland? Well the poem ends with a question—shall I set my lands in order?

What has emerged from my reading of Northrop Frye? One thing is that in the wasteland, the characters do not seem to know their situation; they are uncomprehending, neither living nor dead. They cannot even die, as we find in the first part of the poem.

II. A Game of Chess.

It seems to me that 2 main voices are heard in this part—an upperclass voice and a lower class voice. Sterility is common to them both. The first is shot through with ornate poetic references, one to Cleopatra and her splendor, and the other to Philomel, who was forced by the barbarous King and turned into a nightingale. This is a legend about swallowing one’s own increase, as the King was made to do. But here, there is no mention of a tapestry telling the whole story—the nightingale sings, but dirty ears do not understand.

A closed car at four seems to me very important line because even if rain came, the speaker would not allow it to penetrate. There is a total absence of any inspiration or genuine life in this section—the wind stirs, but to no real effect. And the culture of the past, most particularly Shakespeare, is turned into a silly ragtime hit. Fire is mentioned, but it is not the kind that purifies leading up to the releasing of the waters. The lower class voice Bears children and has abortions, and both acts seem to be about the same to her. From this will come no regeneration at either the individual or societal level. The reference to Ophelia at the end of this part underscores the craziness of the sexuality alluded to.

As Northrop Frye says, the title of the second part may well referred to Shakespeare’s play the Tempest. They are, of course, the issue is whether Ferdinand and Miranda will marry and help regenerate the social order. Certainly, the women in this second part have little in common with Miranda. But the stakes are high, even if they don’t know it.

III. The Fire Sermon.

Autumn, nadir of poem, physical and spiritual regeneration has been denied.

Of course, this part hardly sounds like a sermon, but it teaches us by the light of a mythic synthesis—Tiresias, Buddha, Augustine. So what is the point? Something seems to be happening because at 173, we here at “the river’s tent is broken.” The River Thames is flowing to the ocean, carrying no more filth with it. But the entire section seems to be about seductions, and the poet works in previous references to Philomel as well as Sweeney, the low and sensual man. The prophet Tiresias has been both a woman and a man, so he can judge the scene he describes. In his note, Eliot claims that Tiresias is central to the poem, but that needs explaining. I’ve heard it said that the poem’s references to sexual sterility are to be replaced by poetic engendering or reproduction—the capacity of poetic language to reshape the cultural heritage just at the point when all seems lost and irretrievably alien, fragmented. But that sounds a bit too optimistic for this poem, doesn’t it? It sounds like a concerted effort to make the poem offer a standard modernist thesis about poetic language. I don’t think Eliot is necessarily offering us one big claim about art’s regenerative power.

The typist allows herself to be used like a public urinal. Obviously this is sterile. Perhaps the point is that these lurid images and references must be worked through for purification to occur. Note the reference to St. Augustine, who dwells much upon how trapped we are at first in our senses, and how God needs to move us beyond him. And Augustine went from Carthage to Italy to become a Christian.

Edmund Spenser also makes a cameo appearance in this part—there is a reference to his Prothalamion, or song in preparation for the marriage of the Earl of Worcester. In that poem, the nymphs are all just like brides. The poet asks, not commands, that the Thames River runs softly until he finishes his poetic task.

IV. Death by Water.

Frye says that this refers to physical death, just as burial means physical life but spiritual deadness. But in any case the Phoenician here seems genuinely to die, forgetting everything. And perhaps forgetting is in itself a kind of purification, given where the scene occurs in the poem. Perhaps the passage indicates a drowning to ordinary life—the life of commerce, awaiting spiritual sea-change. And of course Carthage was a Phoenician colony, a place Aeneas needed to leave in order to found a new order in Western history. Rowe says that this section may refer to a baptismal immersion in culture and history, a purgation of the ego that makes way for a more genuine self rooted in interconnection with other members of a community. Perhaps, but again that seems to me rather a theoretical imposition on the poem’s immediate matter.

V. What the Thunder Said.

Frye refers to the voice that emerges in the final few paragraphs as fallen Adam, the does not have the power to regenerate what he has destroyed. But JC says that the voice emerging is the poet himself, as both madman and Fisher King. Hieronymo in The Spanish Tragedy used his madness as a tool to get revenge on a world that betrayed him.

Well, that last the torrent of rain comes from the sacred Indian River. It seems to me that the line “thinking of the key, each confirms a prison” means that a new way of escaping from the predicament of a decadent Europe and egocentrism. That is probably why the sacred river and the sacred Indian texts come into play here. But I’m not really certain that this poem achieves any solution—it is easy to read it in light of the poet’s conversion to Anglican religion in 1927, but that would be anachronistic. A speaker has gone through the chapel perilous, and the waters are now free, which indicates at least directionality towards progress. A new birth should be possible from this point on. It may be that the attempt to put together the fragments is in itself the healing answer. But the poem ends with an untranslateable Hindi quotation, really a magic incantation, somewhat like poetic incantation. I don’t see that the poem offers any final resolution to the situation it has described and participated in. Perhaps all that can be offered in some indication of how to proceed, how to undertake the journey. Or we might even want to compare the overall effect with Yeats’ “Second Coming,” where the old cycle is ending and the new one is coming, but we aren’t quite sure what the new cycle is going to be. The bottom line may be, either be like Tereus and swallow your own past and future in an act of uncomprehension, or take an active part in working with the fragments of culture and history, trying to make something new come of them. Perhaps the story of the loss is itself the stuff of a new mythology and a new quest, for which the Waste Land provides a path.

Notes on “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

1093. The past is altered by the present. We might consider this simply good neoclassicism—the past is a stable entity, yet it is not unattainable for us. It seems to me that for Eliot, European literature is one large lyric poem, unified like the poetry that Cleanth Brooks and other New Critics consider autonomous. Eliot means by historical sense something very different from historicism. It isn’t so much that ideas become obsolete, but rather that conditions render us unable to act or appreciate the relationship between past and present. It seems to be a perceptual problem brought on or intensified by material developments.

1094. In fact, says Eliot, only the present can render the past intelligible. So how is this idea different from the romantic pursuit of ever-greater self-consciousness? The infinite march of reflective understanding, or the infinite regression of acts of self-consciousness—only not at the individual level.

Where does the individual poet get the ability to tap into this tradition? Well, see Matthew Arnold, who says that the man and the moment are necessary to genuine creation. Arnold says that we need a current of true and fresh ideas. Eliot seems to think that there is not such a current in his own day, so the poet becomes rather a bookish creature. The poet, that is, must be difficult in this modern age.

1094-95. Eliot uses the term depersonalization. We might look at this demand of his from a few different perspectives. Northrop Frye, for example, says that Eliot is interested in eastern mysticism and religion. In such religious contexts, one achieves a sense described by the phrase “thou art that.” The terms karma and atman come to mind—karma is due to selfishness or desire, and atman is a kind of identification with the world without completely losing one’s individuality—it is a “total self.” And of course, this is what romanticism is always trying to accomplish—recovering a loss unity between mind and nature, between an individual and all others. Well, we might also bring up Matthew Arnold, who writes about the need for disinterestedness, the ability to remain aloof from the goings-on of the world in all its self-interested frenzy. Arnold’s term refers to criticism, of course, not so much to poetry, but the point is that one needs to get outside one’s ordinary skin and achieve a certain degree of objectivity about the object of one’s attentions. Like Matthew Arnold, Eliot offers a formulation that betrays a certain pathos, a personal need to escape from personality. Notice that Eliot uses terms such as self-surrender. Perhaps his scientific metaphor of platinum covers up this romantic pathos. Indeed, we might compare his metaphor to romantic inspiration theory. The mind of the poet serves as a catalyst for language drawn from tradition and culture; tradition itself speaks through the poet. In a sense, then, this is an expressive theory—but what is expressed is not the poet’s personality but rather something much larger than himself. The poetic process is rather like the achievement in Hindu religion of “atman.” It is fair to remind ourselves that romantic theorists do not necessarily advocate simple theories of self-expression—they capture the complexities of language as a medium for spirit, and it makes sense to describe romanticism as an encounter between language and the poet, not simply as self-expression. In any case, the reward for readers is a truly new, authentic experience with art.

1096. The poet has an experience with language and tradition, and is not simply expressing desires that flow from autonomous consciousness. Language and tradition use the poet; they express themselves through poetry. Again, it is worthwhile not separating Eliot entirely from romantic theory. Do good poets ever simply express their feelings? Oscar Wilde points out that “all bad poetry originates in sincere emotion.” When Eliot uses the term “fusion,” there is something in that term of the romantic symbol. The metaphor is scientific, but it carries theological overtones. The romantic symbol fuses things that were disparate, overcomes the gap between subject and object.

See the nightingale reference—this is a concrete image that serves as a focal point for disparate feelings. A complex, traditional literary image of this sort has the power to unify and embody otherwise disjointed feelings. So the poet is a medium who wields such images, he is not a personality that needs to express itself. His primary task is to combine images and words drawn from the literary tradition.

1097. The New critics claim that poetic context warps ordinary or denotative meanings to suit the context of the poem. On this page, Eliot refers to emotion in this way. He rejects Wordsworth’s theory that emotion is recollected in tranquility, favoring instead a different kind of concentration. He seems to like the older or combinatorial terms of faculty psychology—for an author like Sir Philip Sidney, remember, originality was not the point of writing poetry.

We should mention imitative theory—the poet does not imitate but rather serves as a catalyst for the past, for tradition. Repetition is not the goal, but rather a scientific version of poetic creation comes to the forefront. It is as if Eliot is trying to achieve a balance between neoclassical respect for culture and modern faith in “making it New,” with a trace of romantic creative pathos thrown in for good measure. Eliot does not assume that tradition is simply stable, so pure imitative theory would not make sense for him. I don’t think he would agree that we can simply point to touchstones, as Matthew Arnold would call them.

1098. Eliot calls emotion impersonal, and he means that emotion is embodied in the poem and sustained by its contexts. Up to now, we have listened to Eliot offer advice to the poet, as many poet-critics have done. But let’s ask at this point where the reader fits into Eliot’s scheme. The implication of what I just said about emotion getting embodied in an image or in the poem is that the reader, like the poet, must go out of himself and be willing to engage in a certain kind of transaction with language. So reading a modernist poem like The Waste Land turns out to be a very difficult endeavor.

The Metaphysical Poets

2402. What if Eliot’s main demands for metaphysical poetry is that it draws out a figure of speech as far as ingenuity can carry it. He also mentions rapid association of thought. It makes a lot of demands upon the reader, as well as telescoping of images and multiplied associations. So the point seems to be that metaphysical poetry is very far from rhetorical smoothness or romantic one-liners in isolation from context. Metaphysical poetry taxes language heavily, makes something new out of what was ordinary, and draws the reader out of himself. Eliot mentions Samuel Johnson’s criticism that “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” But he does not approve of Johnson’s criticism, and in fact implies that Johnson was a product of dissociation of sensibility so he could not understand metaphysical poetry.

2404. Eliot does not find metaphysical poetry unclear; in fact, he says it is quite clear, and the complex structure of its sentences is more faithful to thought and feeling than smoother rhetorical poetry could ever be.

2405. The metaphysical poets as well as the Elizabethans and early Jacobians, were able to be both learned and passionate at the same time; they could think and feel in one act. As Eliot says, that ability is exactly what we find in John Donne. Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning could not do the same thing—they are more reflective and intellectual, and cannot feel their thoughts. Eliot says that a thought to John Donne was an experience.

2406. Here Eliot makes an important distinction between the mind of the poet and an ordinary person’s mind. Ordinary people, he says, cannot bring together the fragments of their experience into an intelligible unity. Evidently, they never have had this experience or this capacity. As Eliot says on 2406, the metaphysical poets “possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience.” So the point is that certain poets can deal with experience in a deeply productive manner. Implicitly, and at times even explicitly, Eliot takes aim at the romantic poets, who follow upon what he calls the sentimental age, a revolt against reason and mere description.

2406-07. The poet of today, apparently, is the man for the moment. Eliot says that modern civilization is extremely variegated and complex, so poetry comes from a sensibility refined by this complexity. Simply put, modern poetry reflects the difficulties of modern life, so it must be difficult. Eliot makes a further point, which is that poets must manipulate or force or dislocate words to mean within the contexts established by the poet. I think that here he makes something like the new critical point about poetic language being essentially connotative rather than denotative.

2408. One must not simply look into the heart and write, but also into the brain, the nervous system, and the stomach. In sum, I think that Eliot is trying to describe an affinity between the metaphysical poets and modern poets like himself, Certainly, The Waste Land shares some of the characteristics Eliot gives to metaphysical poetry. He says that properly understood, metaphysical poets are “in the direct current of English poetry.” They are part of the tradition within which the poet must write, so we will have to reclaim them as members of the tradition.

Final thoughts: even though Eliot opposes the romantic poets, it seems clear that the modern poet as Eliot describes him is involved in a recuperative effort. A phrase such as “dissociation of sensibility” implies that we should recover a lost unity between thought and feeling. So my question to you is whether The Waste Land actually tries to put thought and feeling together or whether it challenges us, confronts us, with the fact that we cannot do so and neither can the poem itself.

Week 14, Voices of WWI

2006-05-04T15:26:00.000-07:00

Notes on Voices of WWI

On World War I poetry generally, see Paul Fussel’s book ‘‘The Great War and Modern Memory.’’ Introduction—why WWI poets as modernists? Well, they write of ghastly contexts that outside audiences can’t or won’t understand. So the WWI poets adopt a defiant stance, trying both to remain true to their experience and insight while at the same time realizing that experience is already subject to discursive construction and ideology. Simply conveying “experience” is not simple. Unpleasant reality doesn’t necessarily sell, especially if it runs counter to people’s strong need to see anything but “the way it really is.”

The WWI poets found themselves stripped of the old illusions about war and about civilization as a necessary and inevitable movement from the low to the high, the barbaric to the sophisticated. It isn’t easy to see how we can “let the ape and tiger die” when we—people from the same European background—are stabbing and gassing one another by the millions. So the WWI authors sometimes alienate their audiences, defy them. A great burden is on the reader, as in much modern art. Then, too, WWI authors find that they themselves must deploy the metaphor and myth of older times to describe present horrors, knowing the risk of complicity they run. One cannot simply leave the linguistic and cultural past behind, and yet one cannot simply accept it, either. They want to validate their intense individual experience, claim poetic authority on that basis, but the experiences themselves don’t necessarily allow them to offer up a usable past or present, an intelligible pattern to live by.

Siegfried Sassoon

“Rear-Guard”

Eerie changes in perspective—disorientation, deprivation, vague shapes and cracked mirrors: a world Sassoon struggles to represent. The speaker strives to keep moving forwards, up, out, anywhere. All is ghostly, like the dead solider, humanity can’t “keep up,” can’t adapt. Evolution doesn’t make us passionless moles in a few years. Sassoon deals with the increasing, and already deep, disjunction between military technology and strategy (mass movement, mechanized war, with consequent death of the heroic ideals of war) and the human psyche and body. The Allies won, but at great cost and without assurance that anything would change in future. A peaceful order did not emerge from this first world conflagration, and in fact perhaps even that title is misleading, since the Napoleonic Wars were similarly grand in scope.

Another problem comes with trench stalemate: this introduces a need to ideologize and aestheticize violence. The military must lie to people, heroize a struggle that actual participants see as nothing but inane butchery. Glorifying wartime violence makes us forget that it amounts to a collective human failure. After all, was war ever purely heroic? Many vets point out that jingoism is a mistake—see, for example, Studs Terkel’s ‘‘The Good War’’ or Paul Fussell’s ‘‘The Great War and Modern Memory.” The latter (himself a veteran of WWII) says the problem isn’t that we can’t describe wartime violence at all; it’s that people don’t want to hear it as it is. Voltaire’s quotation comes to mind: it goes something like, “Murder is always severely punished—unless it is committed in vast numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”

“The General”

The brass and the enlisted men don’t operate at the same level; bureaucracy seeps in. Patton is good example from WWII: he supposedly wanted to relive Hannibal’s strategy in crossing the Alps, at considerable cost to the grunts on the ground. Alexander and Caesar were in the fight with the soldiers (even if their doubles rode about attracting attention away from them); war was not so technologized then.

“Glory of Women”

Gendered perceptions are at play here. Sassoon’s speaker is bitter at Victorian “Angels of the Hearth.” Gender construction correlates with war ideology, and there’s a feminine jingoism to go along with machismo on the homefront. Sassoon brings up the threat of emasculation—something ignored by both feminine and masculine rhetoric about war.

“Everyone Sang”

This poem is about the Armistice, but almost has the flavor of a fictional event, after all that’s happened, and given Sassoon’s attitude about war generally. The poem seems to describe a moment of spiritual epiphany collectively accomplished. But does the speaker imagine that he shouldn’t overplay the optimistic narrative here?

“Menin Gate”

Words here function as “forgetting” devices. As Nietzsche says, much of civilization thrives on cruel forgetting. Sassoon’s speaker condemns memorialization. At Menin Gate the problem seems to be civilian willingness to reduce everything to a simple lesson. The names have been lifted from one institutional moment (birth) to another (death in war), effacing the humanity of the dead. We have gone from baptism, the giving of identity, to a simultaneous transformation and stripping of that rooted human identity, a turning of it into martial shadow for propaganda.

“They”

Who are “they”? Ideologues treat soldiers en masse, but people experience war as individuals. They are dutiful and follow conventions, but are also scared, angry, confused, horrified, bored, intensely alive. See Tim O’Brien’s ‘‘The Things They Carried,” which explores this issue about individual perception and experience. Isn’t “experience” already a reflection and subject to reconstruction, falsification, etc? Experience is not a real-time or given event. We can’t know its significance real-time; it is discursive, ‘‘ex post facto.’’

War poems question definitions as well as the relation between individual and conventions or types. Aristotle defined courage as a mean between recklessness and cowardice. Many WWI vets thought their losses pointless. But bravery is no less worthy when based on adherence to conventional notions of the “war hero.” One can inhabit roles genuinely. (A modern journalist says that military bravado is a mask—yes, but there’s truth in masks, as Wilde says.) That’s why Sassoon and Owen can expose the absurdity of militarism while not putting down the common soldier, who has little choice but to bear up.

“Still”

Sassoon points out here the mind-over-body assumptions made during war, the ideological “aestheticization” and spiritualization of violence.

Notes on Wilfred Owen

“Apologia Pro Poemate Meo”

War forges another language, another kind of experience—at least in part. The poet’s words can’t, or won’t, fully translate that experience. The risk Owen explores here is that war poetry is solipsistic, bound to mislead, but also that those who hear his insights are not worthy of them: the poet wants to be a prophet and sage, a diviner of sublimity and ultimate meanings. Owen’s poem may remind us that the WWI poet feels kindred anxiety to what the romantics felt for the burden they placed upon language as a conveyer of divine inspiration, an asserter of human community. Here we are dealing with an awful kind of experience that may not be intelligible to anyone but the person who experiences it. Owen separates his speaker from the civilian audience, and claims that he at least has drawn beauty from battlefield experiences and relationships. But the final stanza’s question has to do with whether or not his transcendental rhetoric—“I saw God through mud”—is as satisfying to him as others might think. With what insight has he emerged from hell, Dante-like? The poet’s lived experience must be conveyed in an almost private language—the aesthetic terms have been transformed and revalued by the experience itself, and this transformation can’t be passed on to us.

“Miners”

Similar to Sassoon’s “Rear-Guard.” Brute labor, by a process of forgetting, seems magically to generate a finely lit, civilized world. And that fine world has long been our dream: to rise from our materiality, letting “the ape and tiger in us die.” But somebody has to do the dirty work—coal-mining, war, etc.

“Dulce et Decorum Est”

This poem seems straightforward enough; but let’s ask here how directly this poem conveys experience. It’s a nightmare vision even at the most direct level—he sees the “drowning” man through a glass darkly—his gas mask’s glass, that is. And then he relives this dim vision in his dreams again and again. This is a decidedly anti-heroic poem. It is one of Owen’s modes to convey grim battle realities in the direct language of disease and disfigurement. Here he resents most of all the civilians’ tidy and rhetorical way of describing such experiences, as we may gather from the Horatian line “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori….” (“Sweet and right it is to die for one’s country.”)

“Strange Meeting”

It’s been said that Owen sometimes clings to the beautification of war. I hardly think so—he’s struggling with a problem I’ve already described: namely, we cannot simply dismiss all previous notions. War may “strip away the film of familiarity” in a shocking manner, but we must cover the abyss with language we know to be inadequate. That’s part of being human. That we know we engage in illusion-making doesn’t mean we can stop doing so altogether. So Owen is wrestling with the difficult relationship between his poetic language—eloquent stuff, not the sometimes strident tones of Siegfried Sassoon—and his raw experience.

What is he doing to that experience in trying to convey it, as of course he must? So here he invents a dream like the reality of war, lending the former equal status for the time being. And he forces himself to confront the man he has killed, not accepting the obvious excuse that he has been commanded to kill. After all, it is wartime. And the dead German speaks to him—what is Owen accomplishing here? Is his language expiatory? Cathartic? Can we guess the speaker’s attitude towards these questions? All language falsifies what it describes, but how, if at all, may we falsify in good faith? Myth, aesthetic dreams, even cast as confrontations, may deepen the speaker’s complicity in the act he has already committed. Owen won’t excuse his own poetry, won’t take flight in gritty realism or shrill declamation, a refusal I find decent in him.

Week 13, Pater and Wilde

2006-04-27T15:26:00.000-07:00

Pater’s “Preface” and “Conclusion” to The Renaissance, “Style” from Appreciations

Pater’s argument regarding the prosaic excellence of some poetry and the poetic qualities in fine prose, as well as his remarks about historiography, partially anticipate very modern notions. With the advent of structuralism and so-called post-structuralism from the 1960’s onward, it has become difficult for critics simply to assert that this or that literary genre should be rigidly defined and that individual works should then be judged on how well (or badly) they adhere to generic conventions. Neither would most 21^st-century historians claim too boldly that they are “simply telling us how things actually happened.” That sort of objectivism has gone out of style, and has come to seem presumptuous: history, as Pater suggests with his mention of Livy, Tacitus, Gibbon, and Michelet, is as least as much a “story” or narrative as it is a recounting of actual events. In this sense, the historian’s task resembles that of a fiction-writer – he or she must arrange a set of incidents and thereby tell a credible and compelling story about certain events and characters. Hayden White makes that point very well in his book Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe.

Pater’s point, however, is hardly what some take to be the lesson of postmodern literary theory– he isn’t offering us an almost nihilistic pronouncement on the impossibility of making judgments about literary works or historical events. (That view of contemporary literary theory is not very perceptive since, after all, the best work in the field doesn’t so much celebrate “indeterminacy” as explore the potential for harm by those who boast of a premature and unearned self-certainty in matters of literature, historical discourse, or politics. Humans have been destroying themselves and others for millennia, it might be argued, in part because they have a perpetual and almost infinite capacity to dupe themselves and then to act upon their false suppositions.) Instead, Pater offers us a sophisticated model of the impressionist critic – his critic is someone whose temperament and sensibilities are finely attuned to making relevant distinctions and discovering the various excellences in any medium of art, or in any kind of non-fiction work, for that matter.

The “aesthetic critic” he favors is sometimes considered rather an elitist and rarefied purveyor of literary comments – a person who sees art as something far removed from ordinary life. Pater himself was, of course, a quiet Oxford Don whose secluded and relatively uneventful life exemplified that quintessential British quality, “reserve.” Even so, we might make a case for a kinder reading of Pater’s critical emphasis – his insistence that prose and verse, fiction and real life, are not so far apart as some would make them can be read as a call to extend a sensitive, yet critical glance across the full spectrum of human experience. The sharp perceptual abilities and refined powers of discernment of the art critic, that is, might serve us well in matters extending beyond art.

Notes on Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest

The structure of Shakespearean romantic comedy according to Northrop Frye and M. H. Abrams:

Leave the corrupt city > go to the forest, the magical “green world” > return to the city

As You Like It Arden >

The Tempest Island >

In tragedy, things start out well and then decline. The aim for the protagonist is that he or she should gain some perspective on the tragedy that has occurred and what brought it on.

In comedy, whose basic aim is to amuse the audience, things start out badly and end well. The deeper aim is broadly social: the kingdom or other city space is at first badly ruled or in turmoil for some reason—perhaps the values and institutions of the citizens and/or rulers are in need of some re-examination. What is the basis of those values and institutions—can people live comfortably or at all within them?

Next, the main characters leave (willingly or otherwise) the city setting and wind up in the countryside, in a pastoral setting. This setting is often a kind of enchanted, magic space that allows for the necessary reexamination of values and social roles. Magical transformations of characters occur; they are put in situations that could not occur in the city or the kingdom; the forest or countryside’s magic opens up new possibilities to them. Abrams 25: “The problems and injustices of the ordinary world are magically dissolved, enemies reconciled, and true lovers united.” After this reappraisal and readjustment period has been completed, the main characters come together—the young by marriage, the foundational institution of the civil order and its only hope for regeneration.

Finally, the characters return to the kingdom proper or are about to return when the play ends.

The key to Shakespearean comic structure is political and social regeneration, continuity for the ruling order. The question to be explored is, “How does a given society preserve order and its values from one generation to the next?”

Satiric Comedy: “Ridicules political policies or philosophical doctrines, or else attacks the disorders of society by making ridiculous the violators of its standards of morals or manners” (Abrams 25). Greek playwright Aristophanes is the first great satiric comedian, while among the Elizabethans Ben Jonson, especially in Volpone, is perhaps the greatest satirist in comedy. Things end badly for Volpone, the play’s main character, but the play as a whole is still comic because Jonson has (after some initial identification) made us despise Volpone, not sympathize with him. So the aim in satiric comedy is mockery of a given society or of those who break its rules.

Comedy of Manners: This kind of comedy is the one that best describes The Importance of Being Earnest. The original proponents of this “New Comedy” were the Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence, and later versions of it occur in Shakespeare (cf. Much Ado and Love’s Labour’s Lost) and in the comedies of the Restoration after 1660. Molière also excelled at this kind of play--see Tartuffe, for example. The Roman comedies “dealt with the vicissitudes of young lovers and included what became the stock types of much later comedy, such as the clever servant, old and stodgy parents, and the wealthy rival.” English comedies deal with “the relations and intrigues of men and women living in a polished and sophisticated society, relying for comic effect in great part on the wit and sparkle of the dialogue—often in the form of repartee, a witty conversational give-and-take which constitutes a kind of verbal fencing match—and to a lesser degree, on the ridiculous violations of social conventions and decorum by stupid characters such as would-be-wits, jealous husbands, and foppish dandies” (Abrams 26). Some major authors of English comedy of manners are Congreve, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Pinero.

Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. This play follows the basic structure of romantic comedy (as do many other comedies of manners) in that the play begins with the characters in the city, moves them toward the countryside to straighten out the mess they’ve got themselves into, and points them toward city life once again by the play’s end. As usual in comedy, events turn upon the attempts of the play’s lovers (there are three couples in this one) to get together and on the many obstacles they must first overcome. So the structure of Wilde’s play is traditional.

As for the play’s subject matter and dialogue, they certainly meet Abrams’ criteria for comedies of manners: IBE takes for its most basic subject “the relations and intrigues of men and women living in a polished and sophisticated society”—indeed, Lady Bracknell calls the late Victorian Era “an age of surfaces.” The dialogue also largely fits the bill: the play is full of “wit and sparkle,” and it has its fair share of what Abrams would call repartee: “a witty conversational give-and-take which constitutes a kind of verbal fencing match.” Many of the characters box their way through the play with quick linguistic jabs, some of them sounding suspiciously like the kind of sharp, opportunistically intelligent remarks that made Wilde himself London’s social lion until his downfall in 1895.

Structurally, the play is traditional in yet another sense: it follows the basic setup of a Terentian drama in general, whether comic or tragic:

a) first comes the protasis, in which the basic characters and situation are established

b) then comes the epitasis in which events and characters are interwoven and complicated

c) next comes the catastasis, in which the plot reaches a false climax—comedy is deceptive.

d) last comes the real climax, the catastrophe.

Week 12, Rossetti, Hopkins, Fitzgerald

2006-04-20T21:20:00.000-07:00

Notes on Christina Rossetti

"Song—She sat and sang alway" (1584)

A lot of poetry places a great deal of stock in memory and hope, but in this poem, it’s suggested that they shouldn’t be given too much importance, or thought to contain or promise more than they do.

"Song—When I am dead, my dearest" (1584)

This is a wistful poem coming from a devout Anglican, but it’s appropriate in theological terms, I think. The speaker is perhaps just saying that there’s no point in becoming obsessive about states after death, especially is that obsession attaches to the departed person’s “final resting place.” The speaker will be elsewhere anyhow. Doctrinally, the point is that to mourn excessively is to show that one was attached to the most perishable component of a person (whether we mean the body or the personality), not the one that a Christian considers immortal.

"After Death" (1585)

Death lends perspective on relationships. Does the speaker gain release from what constrained her in life? She seems concerned still with the lover or husband’s thoughts about her. That isn’t always the case in Rossetti’s poems—see, for example, “Sleeping at Last.”

"In an Artist's Studio" (1586)

The speaker finds Elizabeth Siddal and meditate on the difference between her and the one ideal (in many guises) of an aesthetic, sensuous medieval lady. Christina distances herself from the Brotherhood. She refers to the relationship between Siddal and Dante Gabriel. It may be that all erotic relations involve a degree of objectification of the other, but the Brotherhood carries this tendency much farther than necessary.

"Winter: My Secret" (1588)

As Isobel Armstrong writes in her book Victorian Poetry, the poem “turns on the refusal of expression. It is about and is itself a barrier” (357). The speaker refers to wraps and masks, coverings that are also representational. Rossetti plays with the image of a spinster with a secret of some sort, possibly one about love. Armstrong says that the poem is concerned with the way “the sexuality of the speaking subject is created and bound” (359), but I don’t think that need be the case—it seems more carefree than that kind of heavy framework suggests. It’s been said that a person with no secrets has no self, that a secret is the core around which personality is built.

"No, Thank You, John" (1601)

This witty poem makes fun of the stereotypical male “puppy dog” sensibility about relationships: obsessive, jealous, possession-oriented. I don’t suppose Christina Rossetti would have agreed with Stendhal’s dictum that “In love, possession is nothing; it’s enjoyment that makes all the difference” (En amour, posséder n’est rien; c’est jouir qui fait tout). Here, the offer is friendship of a rather businesslike sort—which of course the immature male addressee seems unlikely to consider worthwhile. Friendship requires reciprocity, whereas the kind of “love” this particular male wants is reductive, based on simple object relations.

"Sleeping at Last" (1604)

Compare this poem to earlier ones about death.

A Few Other Poems (Not Assigned):

“Up-Hill”

This poem is a mini-allegory of the sort we might find in John Bunyan or George Herbert. It stems from the traditional Christian theme of life as an arduous journey on the way to death. Is the path’s end death, or the life to come in heaven? The latter, ultimately; the voice promises hope and it answers all questions, but not in a facilely comforting way. The “beds” promised are graves—cold comfort, at least in the short run.

“Goblin Market”

This long poem has the ambience of a Grimm’s fairy tale—they often have to do with sex, violence, and death, as did a fair number of children’s tales in the nineteenth century. (See George McDonald’s novel At the Back of the North Wind.) Where are the parents here? How old are Lizzie and Laura? What is the season and the place? The poem’s context seems ambivalent—it’s a jumble of references that bewilder rather than clarify. The poem sounds like a “heard” tale, not a written one.

Laura buys fruit not with money but with a piece of herself—a lock of hair. She pines because her desires can find no object to satiate them. The fruit has been removed completely, and she can’t even express what the fruit looks like or tastes like.

What are the barriers to expression in this poem? It seems to be a feminine discourse of sacrifice, repressions, and denial. Laura and Lizzie are doubles. Expression seems to require barriers. Conventional ethics would require that Laura accept the constraints others place on her. She will grow up to be a proper Victorian matron. But notice how the cure takes place—she assents to the overwhelming power of the fruit. She enters a second innocence by accepting sexuality. But all it does is allow her to survive. From an adult perspective, what is celebrated here is also to be feared: temptation, and overflowing of sexual and expressive power.

“A Triad”

Love is cast as central to life, yet frustrating. Even married love falls short, but the other two alternatives—renunciation and shame—fall short as well.

“Echo”

Compare this poem to Ovid’s “Echo and Narcissus”; he scorned her and others, and then fell in love with his own image in a pool. He pined away and was transformed into a flower. Echo had already pined away into a voice. But this Echo can speak independently, even if she needs the lover to visit her in dreams, her “pool.” The question is whether even the physical contact the poem may suggest was a full meeting of spirits. The Echo and Narcissus story is about barriers keeping one human being from another—it’s about isolation and solipsism.

Below are some introductory remarks on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. There are a few references to material we haven't studied because this was originally written for a Victorianist seminar at Chapman.

Introduction and Cultural Context: The PRB, which formally lasted only a few years around the beginning of the mid-Victorian Period and included painters such as DGR, Holman Hunt, Edward Burne-Jones and John Everett Millais, is an early form of aestheticism or “art for art’s sake,” so it makes sense to connect the PRB to the 1880’s-90’s movement including Pater, Wilde, Beardsley, and others.

Both the precursor movement and the later flowering of aestheticism amount to a rejection of bourgeois sensibilities in art—a rejection of the facile demand that everything should “make sense” and be “realistic” in the contemporizing and vulgar sense of that term. The aesthete’s disgust at artists who copy mid-to-late Victorian “reality” and reflect back to the middle class what is already familiar to it may be seen in Wilde’s delightfully elitist comment that “in art we do not wish to be concerned with the doings of the lower orders” or his infamous quip about the public’s anger at certain caustically realistic works of art being no more than “the rage of Caliban seeing his face in a glass.”

This context should remind us that like its offshoot or revival later on, the PRB movement may be placed in the tradition of semi-romantic or “conservative” reactions against modernity. Consider the writings we have studied so far: Newman, Carlyle, Ruskin. Despite their differences, all are lovers of mystery and the realm of spirit, and all strongly oppose what they see as misguided modern demands for facile clarity and pointless precision, for vulgar materialism and soulless instrumentalism, for a world increasingly designed to fit a radical and artificial conception of human nature and not an organic one. They see all this as the breakdown of any true principle of authority by which ordinary people and their governors may be guided, and in reaction these “conservatives” attempt to reconstruct what they believe are more workable and truer principles by which to live. While the PRB does not voice such grand claims as the mid-Victorian sages, certainly their rejection of modernity stems from the same kind of discontent with the status quo.

The PRB rejected the Royal Academy’s conventionalism, which was allied with the rules (privileging “rationality, selective verisimilitude, simplicity, and balance”) proffered by High Renaissance painter Raphael (1483-1520). Ruskin-like, they see Raphael’s theory of painting as an indicator of spiritual and cultural decline, and want to turn back the literary and artistic clock. They adopt as their models the medieval painters who lived around the time of Dante Alighieri, and also draw sustenance from religion and literature—Dante, Shakespeare, Keats, Tennyson, and Arthurian romance. DGR in particular liked the richness of color, the vividness of imagination, and the intensely spiritual rendering of the human body one can find in these painters. It is as if Giotto and others of that time would agree with Wilde: “those who find any difference between spirit and body have neither.” (You can see some fine examples at the Getty Museum and online at Olga’s Gallery.) Here’s a good online definition of Pre-Raphaelite painting:

The Pre-Raphaelite painters insisted that a painter should paint whatever he sees, regardless of the formal or academic rules of painting. The effort at fidelity to nature and experience was manifested in clarity, brightness, and sharply realized details in their paintings. However, despite its use of naturalistic detail, Pre-Raphaelitism in both painting and poetry turned away from realism, the ugliness of modern life in the 19th-century industrial society in England. The Pre-Raphaelites took no account of the life of contemporary England; instead, they turned to a heroic and decorative world of the Middle Ages, the art of which was destroyed by Raphael and the Renaissance. (http://www.music.indiana.edu/~u520/rossetti.html)

I think that Herbert Tucker and Dorothy Mermin are right in pointing out the tenuousness of the “transcendence” and mystery they want to see in nature, but let’s supplement this with something that shows the PRB exhibiting a bit more of the “courage of other people’s convictions.” I’ll refer to the aesthetic critic Walter Pater’s analysis of the poetry of DGR:

Walter Pater characterizes “The Blessed Damozel” as follows:

[I]n The Blessed Damozel, written at the age of eighteen, a prefigurement of the chief characteristics of that school, as he will recognise in it also, in proportion as he really knows Rossetti, many of the characteristics which are most markedly personal and his own. Common 205 APPRECIATIONS to that school and to him, and in both alike of primary significance, was the quality of sincerity, already felt as one of the charms of that earliest poem—a perfect sincerity, taking effect in the deliberate use of the most direct and unconventional expression, for the conveyance of a poetic sense which recognised no conventional standard of what poetry was called upon to be.[…]—an accent which might rather count as the very seal of reality on one man’s own proper speech; as that speech itself was the wholly natural expression of certain wonderful things he really felt and saw. Here was one, who had a matter to present to his readers, to himself at least, in the first instance, so valuable, so real and definite, that his primary aim, as regards form or expression in his verse, would be but its exact equivalence to those data within. That he had this gift of transparency in language—the control of a style which did but obediently shift and shape itself to the mental motion, as a well-trained hand can follow on the tracing-paper the outline of an original drawing below it, was proved afterwards by a volume of typically perfect translations from the delightful but difficult 206 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI “early Italian poets”: such transparency being indeed the secret of all genuine style, of all such style as can truly belong to one man and not to another. His own meaning was always personal and even recondite, in a certain sense learned and casuistical, sometimes complex or obscure; but the term was always, one could see, deliberately chosen from many competitors, as the just transcript of that peculiar phase of soul which he alone knew, precisely as he knew it.

One of the peculiarities of The Blessed Damozel was a definiteness of sensible imagery, which seemed almost grotesque to some, and was strange, above all, in a theme so profoundly visionary. The gold bar of heaven from which she leaned, her hair yellow like ripe corn, are but examples of a general treatment, as naively detailed as the pictures of those early painters contemporary with Dante, who has shown a similar care for minute and definite imagery in his verse; there, too, in the very midst of profoundly mystic vision. Such definition of outline is indeed one among many points in which Rossetti resembles the great Italian poet, of whom, led to him at first by family circumstances, he was ever a lover—a “servant and singer,” faithful as Dante, “of Florence and of Beatrice”—with some close inward conformities of genius also, independent of any mere circumstances of education. It was said by a critic of the last century, not wisely though agreeably to the practice of his time, 207 APPRECIATIONS that poetry rejoices in abstractions. For Rossetti, as for Dante, without question on his part, the first condition of the poetic way of seeing and presenting things is particularisation.

As you can see from what I’ve quoted, Pater casts Rossetti as an impressionist, a painter and poet true to his own internal impressions.

General Notes on Gerard Manley Hopkins

In the anthology I used as a beginning student of Victorian literature (Victorian Poetry and Prose), Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling suggest that Hopkins is a late-romantic poet, a practitioner of the poetics of grand failure. They suggest that he regrets the loss of a strong Christian world view and that he is an isolated aesthete trying to reappropriate the ancient religion’s framework. But even in the so-called terrible sonnets, which, if I recall correctly, Bloom and Trilling describe as stormy Byronism, Hopkins is not necessarily a self-divided romantic. Instead, it might be better to see him as working through his isolation within the much larger theological framework available to him—he is dramatizing a spiritual problem, not complaining about it to himself. Ultimately, the differences between Hopkins and Keats or Byron or Wordsworth seem more important than the similarities.

As a nature poet with great regard for the particularity of things, Hopkins follows Keats to some extent, but the medieval author Duns Scotus provides Hopkins with the theological support for his interaction with nature. Humility in the presence of nature is important to Hopkins, but this humility is of a Christian sort and does not amount to Carlylean self-annihilation. Rather, this Christian poet aims to experience and to convey an experience of being as grounded in God. We can experience our existence in this manner when we observe the natural world, although that is only one way it can be experienced.

Hopkins may follow Keats and Tennyson, but he rejects sensuous simplicity and smooth rhetoric. His poetry is memorable but can be difficult going. It reflects a complexity of language and mental process chosen to honor the particularity of each natural thing and made appropriate to the difficulty of salvation. The act of seeing is redemptive, and redemption is not easy.
Hopkins’s journals show his concern to clarify and refine his impression-taking powers. “Cleansing the doors of perception” is a romantic formula that applies well to Hopkins—the world of objects is dynamic without being unstable, but Hopkins often dramatizes the way the human mind fails to appreciate nature’s energy. We simply do not see what is really there.

Hopkins tasks words with marking, catching, and celebrating the particularity of things, most especially the particularity of classes of things. He often speaks of nature in the plural—dappled things, brinded cows, dragonflies, and so forth. The goal is not to dominate natural things or annihilate them, not to assert our raw power over the creation. Doing that would be impious—the Bible explains that humanity long since tried to do it in the most disrespectful manner, with disastrous consequences, and we might infer the lesson that our failure to cherish the natural world is part of the pattern of our sinfulness. Hopkins apparently considers precise impressions of things respectful towards God; imprecision of speech testifies to the roughness of the eye that perceives. To see something correctly is at least partly redemptive—Hopkins does not aim to describe abstractions, and does not give us a vague sense of mystery—”a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused.” Rather, each thing, to borrow a phrase from Martin Heidegger, “stands into the lighting of Being.” It catches God’s energy as it goes about its business, a phenomenon Hopkins calls “selving.” The beauty of God exceeds change, but he has suited the human mind to the minute apprehension of particularities.

The Norton editors provide an excellent gloss on Hopkins’s terms inscape and instress:

Drawing on the theology of Duns Scotus, a medieval philosopher, he felt that everything in the universe was characterized by what he called inscape, the distinctive design that constitutes individual identity. This identity is not static but dynamic. Each being in the universe ‘selves,’ that is, enacts its identity. And the human being, the most highly selved, the most individually distinctive being in the universe, recognizes the inscape of other beings in an act that Hopkins calls instress, the apprehension of an object in an intense thrust of energy toward it that enables one to realize its specific distinctiveness. Ultimately, the instress of inscape leads one to Christ, for the individual identity of any object is the stamp of divine creation on it. In the act of instress, therefore, the human being becomes a celebrant of the divine, at once recognizing God’s creation and enacting his or her own God-given identity within it.

Hopkins’s terminology allows him to move beyond a romantic emphasis on the isolated individual. He is a Christian nature poet who turns Romantic particularity back towards God’s language, the “syllables” of God, to borrow a phrase from Coleridge. Since Hopkins is writing from a theological perspective, it helps to include the Catholic Catechism’s statement on humanity’s relationship with nature:

Catechism of the Catholic Church, Part One Chapter 1/IV.40-43

IV. HOW CAN WE SPEAK ABOUT GOD?

40. Since our knowledge of God is limited, our language about him is equally so. We can name God only by taking creatures as our starting point, and in accordance with our limited human ways of knowing and thinking.

41. All creatures bear a certain resemblance to God, most especially man, created in the image and likeness of God. The manifold perfections of creatures—their truth, their goodness, their beauty—all reflect the infinite perfection of God. Consequently we can name God by taking his creatures’ perfections as our starting point, “for from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator.”

42. God transcends all creatures. We must therefore continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, image-bound or imperfect, if we are not to confuse our image of God—“the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable”—with our human representations. Our human words always fall short of the mystery of God.

43. Admittedly, in speaking about God like this, our language is using human modes of expression; nevertheless it really does attain to God himself, though unable to express him in his infinite simplicity. Likewise, we must recall that “between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying an even greater dissimilitude”; and that “concerning God, we cannot grasp what he is, but only what he is not, and how other beings stand in relation to him.”

Hopkins’ favorable view of Duns Scotus is often mentioned, so I will include here a summation of that theologian’s differences with the even more influential Saint Thomas Aquinas. I draw from David Walhout’s fine essay “Scotism in the Poetry of Hopkins” (113-132 in Saving Beauty: Further Studies in Hopkins, edited by Michael E. Allsopp and David Anthony Downes. New York and London: Garland, 1994.) Walhout identifies nine areas in which Scotus differs substantially from Aquinian thought, but here are the ones that seem the most significant, along with my paraphrases of his explanations:

1. The priority of singulars as objects of knowledge (Thomism = universals, not singulars)

Scotus says that sensory experience gives us not simply raw data but “genuine objects of cognition.” Thomism says we do indeed begin with particulars, but we need to make abstractions or general concepts to think. We cannot grasp particulars directly as objects of understanding and knowing.

2. The priority of intuition in cognition (Thomism = abstraction, not intuition)

The second doctrine is that Scotus says we know singulars by intuition not abstraction. Knowing is not necessarily mediated through universals or concepts. First we know things by intuition and then we make abstractions and concepts, judge and reason about things.

3. The reality of the individual essence (haecceitas) (Thomism = general essence)

The third doctrine involves haecceitas, which refers to the idea that the individual essence is just as real as the generic essence in things. The individual essence is not one property among many in the object but rather the overall uniqueness or individuality of the thing.

6. The primacy of the will (Thomism = intellect as primary)

The primacy of the will is the sixth doctrine and it means that divine will is the supreme executive attribute in God, with reason knowing its prescriptions and being its repository of truth. The notion is that the will guides and reason assists—the same would be true for humans. Moreover, without the assistance of the will, the intellect cannot conceive the infinite. But we are made for the infinite, so the will expresses the whole man: first because it is free and secondly because its proper object is the infinite.

7. The unconditional freedom of the will (Thomism = qualified freedom)

The seventh doctrine concerns freedom of the will: St. Thomas says that when the highest good is presented clearly the will chooses and loves it necessarily. Scotus would deny this. See Hopkins’s letter to Robert Bridges of 4 January, 1883. He says that while the intellect may see necessity, the will remains free to acknowledge or apply a truth.

9. Incarnation as cosmological directing power (Thomism = … as a response to sin)
The ninth doctrine involves the incarnation of Christ. Scotus treats this cosmological doctrine as implying that Christ wasn’t just incarnated into a body but into the whole of the creation. Evidently God had meant to redeem the world even before the contingent historical event known as the Fall. For Hopkins this means there’s a “cosmic energy center” that activates other “centers of energy” impelling creatures to realize the individuality of their being.

To sum up this introduction to Hopkins as a nature poet, I should add that Hopkins’ nature poetry, in which his subjectivity is so finely attuned to the world’s particularities and so sensitive to beauty, is not so much idealist as realist—nature is there, and what the mind does is use its god-given powers to actively catch or instress the inscapes, the dynamic “thisness” of the natural world. There’s no need, in his view, to replace God or to say that the mind spins reality from itself. Hopkins’ patron saint Ignatius, the 16th-century Spanish founder of the Jesuit order or “Society of Jesus” (see his biography at http://www.luc.edu/jesuit/ignatius.bio.html), writes at the outset of his Spiritual Exercises,

Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.

And the other things on the face of the earth are created for man and that they may help him in prosecuting the end for which he is created.

From this it follows that man is to use them as much as they help him on to his end, and ought to rid himself of them so far as they hinder him as to it.

For this it is necessary to make ourselves indifferent to all created things in all that is allowed to the choice of our free will and is not prohibited to it; so that, on our part, we want not health rather than sickness, riches rather than poverty, honor rather than dishonor, long rather than short life, and so in all the rest; desiring and choosing only what is most conducive for us to the end for which we are created.

http://www.ccel.org/i/ignatius/exercises/exercises.html

By implication, nature is worthwhile so long as it is useful to the soul’s salvation and the greater glory of God, but otherwise it is to be dismissed. It is a means to an end, and one must dismiss it brusquely if some other means would serve the end better. This imperative is softened somewhat by Hopkins’ favorable reading of Duns Scotus, as discussed above, but the poet’s late work shows that it was not forgotten. And it is to that later work that we turn to conclude this introduction. Hopkins is among those Victorians (like John Henry Newman) who responded to Victorian doubt by affirming their belief in traditional Catholicism. Hopkins was subject to periods of deep depression and was most likely afflicted with the cyclical illness now called “manic depressive disorder” (see Kay Redfield Jamison’s book Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Free Press, 1996). As his depressive episodes worsened, Hopkins seems to have found that his first priority was no longer the bond with external nature but rather his own spiritual state, his inner being in its relation to God. There is no need to suppose that he felt any disappointment in the beauty of the natural world or even that he lost the ability to respond to it—though severe depression can surely have that “anhedonic” effect on a person. Neither need it be thought that Hopkins is in a state of despair that causes him to defy the universe in Byronic fashion.

Instead, in the dark depressive sonnets, what sounds to many modern readers like suicidal despair follows the well-scripted lines of St. John of the Cross’ “dark night of the soul” and the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. Christian meditative practice is quite familiar with depressive episodes, and knows how to embrace them and work through them. Christ’s life ends on the Cross, after all, with the scriptural echo from a Psalm of David, “why hast thou forsaken me?” One would have to presume that the expression was both genuinely human and at the same time an acting-out of human anguish for the edification of sinners who need a pattern to follow. Hopkins’ darkest poetry imitates this final utterance, at least to some extent. So it isn’t prideful isolation, mere hopelessness, or even doubt that we find in his poetry. Hopkins never seems to have doubted God’s existence or benevolence, as so many of his contemporaries did, and his career as a poet might be construed in strictly theological terms as his particular “way of the cross,” his imitatio Christi.

Notes on Hopkins’ Poems

“God’s Grandeur”

The poem’s first verse is perhaps the key to much of Hopkins’ nature poetry: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” This poem shows nature energized, crackling with directionality from God’s primal love, or what Dante calls “il primo amore.” Nature does not need the human mind to animate it. It is already charged like a battery, and Hopkins’ sonnet sets forth images of gathering force pulsing through the world, the Holy Spirit as creative power rising with the dawn. The problem is that individual human beings in their repetitive, self-isolating actions do not perceive nature’s variety and therefore fail to celebrate God. Human beings set up a dull, self-regarding rival order that contrasts with divine particularity, with the diversity and fullness of creation. In Hopkins, spiritual error and perceptual error are closely intertwined, as are their healthy opposite states.

“The Starlight Night”

Usually, astronomy is an attempt to derive intelligibility from the stars. But there is perhaps a different motive in this poem, with its concentration on the far recesses of sky, distant points of light. The poem celebrates the power of God’s energy to excite wonder. The point doesn’t seem to be logical consistency or the reduction of things to order. Instead, it represents a person’s excited mind patterning the stars and appreciating the grandeur of God.

“As Kingfishers Catch Fire”

When the sun glints upon the wings of a dragonfly or a bird, the animal catches divine energy simply by acting out its “thisness.” Each animate thing as an individual follows the pattern of its species and is validated as an individual thereby. The purpose of each living thing is to be what God intended it to be, whether it knows that or not. Human beings are at the top of the hierarchy because they have been given the gift of choosing to celebrate and worship God. They do so in many ways, and the expressive act we call poetry is one of those ways. Hopkins put away his poetry writing for about seven years after he went into the priesthood, but the relative approval of the church made him go back to it, and I suppose the relation of humanity to nature alluded to in the present poem must have been sustaining as well.

“Spring”

The regenerative power of nature strikes the soul; the poem tries to capture the energy, the movement, the “juice” or overflow from Paradise to earth. In the second stanza, the implication is that nature offers us a glimpse of Paradise; children experience a brief time of innocence, and should grasp the significance of such times and scenes. Victorians generally treated children as if they were little adults. This poem cuts both ways: children are invoked and asked to understand something we might think most appropriate to adults, yet at the same time the freshness of perception evoked belongs to children in the fine tradition of Blake and Wordsworth.

“The Windhover”

The material world provides an analogy for spiritual splendor. Compare this poem to Tennyson’s “Eagle” or George Herbert’s “Affliction.” In the context of the poem, “to catch” means to instress the bird’s inscape. The bird is not turned into a direct emblem of Christ (Hopkins does not write allegorical or emblematic poetry; he is inclined to respect nature enough not to subsume it too easily into his symbolic system), but Christ is obviously in the background as the chevalier, the hero-king and sacrificial sufferer whose splendor flashes after his redemptive deed. The speaker “catches” the bird, and then it catches him up in its amazing plunge. The plunge may allude to Christ’s incarnation and consequent heroic suffering; as the next-to-last stanza suggests, Christ himself is “a billion / Times told lovelier,” like the fire that breaks from the bird during its lightning-fast approach to earth.

Christ is often depicted in terms of light, as when he sets out in his flaming chariot in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book 5. There is also in this poem something of John Donne’s way of describing God’s effect upon the human spirit in violent terms, as something that brings hearts “out of hiding.” How does the final sestet complete the poem’s meaning? I would suggest that the references to the well-worn plough and the ashes falling upon the ground point to the idea that a thing is most worthy of apprehension, is most itself, just when it is about to pass away or just when its fundamental task is achieved.

“Pied Beauty”

This is another poem that underscores the ability to appreciate nature’s “thisness,” and it seems important to the speaker that we not superimpose a domineering or romantic self-consciousness upon nature, saturating it with ourselves and tamping it down with our problems. Refraining from such impositions is in part an atonement for causing the fall that alienated us from nature.

Nature is not simply our expressive vehicle; instead, we should appreciate it as God’s free expression. We should appreciate nature’s sheer diversity as a kind of joyful excess. God creates because he wants to create, not because he must—the central concept here is Christian charity, generosity. Understanding nature this way turns it into a door that opens to Christ, not a mirror that reflects back to us our own self-division, alienation from others, and alienation from God. The grammar in the final line—whether it be set down as a “:” or a “;”—implies that all of the dappled things lead up to the simple statement “Praise him.” This is all the explanation that is necessary for nature’s diversity. And the term “dappled,” of course, has Impressionist overtones.

“Hurrahing in Harvest”

The line, “These things, these things were here and but the beholder / Wanting” emphasizes Hopkins’ tact: again, nature is already alive and does not need us to make it come alive. Our task is to appreciate; Hopkins would probably say that is our way of helping to complete God’s continual acts of creation, as he allows us to do.

“Binsey Poplars”

The failure of those who have cut the trees down to “instress” the stand of trees denies God’s creative power, his stamping of a thing with its own living individuality. The final stanza sets forth contrasting repetitions—the strokes of the saw and the speaker’s own laments over what has been done. The felling of trees in this manner is yet another effect of the Fall, and something has been permanently taken away even from the speaker who actually appreciates nature as he should.

“Duns Scotus’ Oxford”

The ugly buildings put up around Oxford seem to have instilled in Hopkins much the same agony as the Italians’ treatment of their cultural heritage created in John Ruskin. Once upon a time, the natural environment and the college town made up a unit of mutually reinforcing or complementary inscapes. But modernity confounds our ability to instress this land-and-cityscape, and, by implication, it keeps us from understanding Duns Scotus’ insight into the individual vitality of natural things as a kind of energy that praises and returns to God. Hopkins casts Duns Scotus as a bygone hero. To a limited extent, this gesture links Hopkins to Thomas Carlyle, the greatest Victorian proponent of hero-worship. As for architecture, Hopkins’ notion is similar to that of John Ruskin—buildings express the spiritual state and aspirations of an entire people.

“Felix Randal”

This poem is a meditation on the brevity of life and the need to “look to end things”—not something that would have been easy to do for an active man like Felix Randal the blacksmith. The priest-speaker reflects on his relation to this former parishioner, now that he is gone and there is time to do so. One seldom thinks in this way when in the thick of life.

“Spring and Fall”

Hopkins wrote this poem when he was in Liverpool; the observations probably express his own feeling that the place was “museless.” The speaker addresses Margaret’s eventual fall into adulthood, when she will experience the dark side of symbolic meaning. As Margaret will see herself in the decay of nature, the speaker expresses grief at his own mortality. We will come to correlate death in the natural cycle with our own demise.

“Carrion Comfort”

This is a sonnet of desolation because of its near assent to spiritual death. The poem flows from Hopkins’ propensity to blame himself for his depressive states—we have far less control over our “affective will” than our “sheer will,” but still bear some responsibility in both cases. Here, the speaker seems to have just emerged from a severe depression, and begins to will his assent to God’s plan for him, however feebly. He has at least taken on the burden of ceasing to struggle against Christ—the blame gives way to bleak affirmation in hopes of regaining his energy, that “primal love” sent by God.

“No Worst, There Is None”

The speaker is in a hell of his own making, and his grief brings on still intenser grief, with no catharsis in sight. What serves as comfort “in a whirlwind”? Only the statement that “all / Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.” This “comfort” is as grim as the comfort King Lear derives while exposed to the storm, or Swinburne’s pagan speaker derives from the sentiment that “There is no god found stronger than death, / And death is a sleep.” But this isn’t a view to which Hopkins could subscribe. The point seems to be that there really is no ordinary comfort in the face of death—nothing in nature, anyway; only Christ will serve that end, and at present the speaker isn’t able to feel the connection to him that he should.

“I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day”

This poem works from the traditional exploration of “The Dark Night of the Soul,” as in Saint John of the Cross. Hopkins certainly understood the psychology of profound depression. The speaker addresses his own emotions, which have a life all their own and which therefore generate inner discord. He is in a hellish state of his own making, or at least that’s the way he interprets the problem. The third stanza implies a threat that the speaker’s body has become worse than nothing—it has become a “sign” leading nowhere, and the same might be said of his words, which only turn back in upon his anguish and do not help him reconnect with Christ. In the final stanza, the speaker compares his state to a Dantean Inferno, wherein God’s primal love is experienced in ever-more perfect degree as pain and anguish appropriate to the sinner. The speaker experiences this energy as profound alienation, and suffers the intensification of his “self-taste,” the taste of his own unhappy inner self. This is not mere apathy he’s describing; it is suicidal near-despair. To experience despair is perhaps not to lose the desire for salvation, but rather to lose all hope of it and to believe that relief will never come. In this situation, the spirit turns back upon itself, isolating itself from God in destructive fury. The speaker apparently feels trapped in himself, and since suicide is against God’s will, he may be angry with God, too. It isn’t possible for him to say, as I recall Cesare Pavese wrote just before he died, “No more words—an act.” What is the point of writing a poem like this? Does it bring relief? Clarity?

“That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection”

Light and shadow, earth, air, fire, and water, are all in play here. The Resurrection of the Dead will put an end to natural history and human history, swallowing up everything that is suffering and mortal in one grand “wildfire” that will “leave but ash” of materiality’s dead clay. The energy flowing through nature in the poem’s first half is thereafter described as flowing through the soul, and the speaker’s aim seems to be to align his desires with this “being-towards-destruction” of fallen nature. He can do so because he trusts that God’s will is being done. The pressure of suffering, the constant “imitation of Christ,” will at last turn the soul to “immortal diamond,” just as carbon turns to this gem under great pressure over vast stretches of time. This is a very Augustinian poem—there’s no point here in trying to salvage nature or anything earthly; it must all be burned in the end time to make way for the grand spiritual consummation. That this should be the case with “manshape” seems contradictory to the speaker, but he knows he must embrace contradictions in order to transcend them.

“Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord”

This poem was written in Ireland, where Hopkins felt out of sorts. This isn’t so much pure lyric expression as performance, a dramatized expression that lends the speaker some perspective on his state of mind. The quotation from the Latin or Vulgate bible suggests as much, as I’ve found in the criticism on Hopkins’ poetry—the speaker in Jeremiah’s prophetic book is foolish to question God, and by implication so is the speaker in Hopkins’ poem. But the final triplet seems intimate and in its way legitimate—I don’t read it as merely the acting-out of a wrong-headed speaker.

“The Wreck of the Deutschland”

What lesson is the speaker trying to learn from the tragedy he recounts? The first part of the poem concerns the manner in which he was called to the Catholic faith, while the second part deals with the shipwreck itself. Five Franciscan nuns were among the passengers aboard the Deutschland; they were leaving the persecution of Catholics in Germany and heading to America, but the ship sank in the Thames River during an awful storm.

In the midst of his reflection on such a disaster, the speaker turns to an imaginative projection of one who suffered and died in it to answer his own question, “How do we know God—or do we know him at all?” See Stanza 24, where the Nun invites Christ to “come quickly.” She heroically sees the shipwreck as hastening her union with God. Imitatio Christi is the traditional pattern: life as preparatory suffering. The speaker, too, is trying to come to grips with the event and unite in sentiment with the nuns against the storm’s terrible destructive power. Hopkins hadn’t written any poetry for seven years, thinking it not right considering his vocation as a Jesuit priest. But a superior told him he should write it after he heard about the wreck from a newspaper account. Traditional Christian theology describes nature as a hostile, alien element, though Hopkins usually doesn’t treat it that way. In this poem, nature is full of fury and confusion that might make it seem pre-eminent, but at the center of the storm is the wonderful clarity of the Nun who sees it for what it is.

Week 11, Mill, Ruskin, and Arnold

2006-04-13T15:25:00.000-07:00

Notes on John Stuart Mill’s “What is Poetry?”

1045. Mill starts with the standard view that “the object of poetry is confessedly to act upon the emotions,” as an initial statement to be refined into a more supple, accurate explanation. That, he says, is the way genuine philosophy deals with the categories of popular thought.

1046-47. Mill is careful to distinguish sharply between narrative or “story” and poetry. The former, he says, is essentially descriptive; it gives “a true picture of life” when it’s done well, and appeals most strongly to children and primitive people. Poetry, by contrast, aims “to paint the human soul truly.” This is true, he writes on 1047, even of descriptive poetry, which gives us landscapes and so forth “seen through the medium and arrayed in the colors of the imagination set in action by the feelings.” The language Mill employs is mimetic—poetry represents something, but it represents something inward: the movements of the human mind, or the play of deep emotions.

1048-49. But more refinement is needed in defining the nature of poetry, and Mill achieves it by distinguishing poetry from oratorical eloquence. It’s well and good for Ebenezer Elliott to says that poetry is “impassioned truth” or for the Blackwood’s writer to characterize it as “man’s thoughts tinged by his feelings” (1048), but that only goes so far. Why might not a great speech be described in exactly the same way? Mill’s point is that a speech is designed first and foremost to be heard, while poetry is overheard. Poets are talking to themselves: “What we have said to ourselves we may tell to others afterwards . . . . But no trace of consciousness that any eyes are upon us must be visible in the work itself” (1048). This way of talking about poetry resembles Wordsworth’s theory in his “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, 1802, where he describes poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, recollected in tranquility.” That is, poetic composition is a species of meditation, with its primary subject being the emotions of the person doing the meditating. Mill is so taken with his distinction between oratory and poetry that he applies it to music: there is the outward-tending, “garrulous passion” of a Gioacchino Rossini, and there is the brooding, sometimes stormy, introspective “poetry” of the romantic composer Beethoven. (Mill mentions Mozart in the same sentence as Beethoven, but I would describe the effect of Mozart’s music rather differently than he does.) In contrast with his distinction between story and poetry, however, Mill’s differentiation between poetry and eloquence is hardly a slight to either mode. After all, some of Rossini’s work is supremely beautiful: “grief, taking the form of a prayer or of a complaint, becomes oratorical” (1049), and in this light he mentions some of that composer’s best work.

1050-51. Sculpture, too, says Mill, has its oratory (sculptures made “for the purpose of voluntary communication”) and its poetry, wherein the maker works as if “unconscious of being seen.” Finally, Mill employs this distinction to make a value judgment, at least with respect to historical painting, a popular variety of painting in England in Mill’s time: “Who would not prefer one ‘Virgin and Child’ of Raphael to all the pictures which Rubens, with his fat, frouzy Dutch Venuses, ever painted? (1051) Why so? Because, says Mill, Raphael the Renaissance artist’s single figures are intensely poetical and therefore worth looking at in their own right, while Rubens’ individuals are made to subserve the needs of the particular grouping in which they are found. When it comes to historical painting proper, the problem is more pronounced, says Mill, and in some cases the enterprise degenerates into “corrupted eloquence.”

Notes on John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty

In On Liberty, Mill asks the fundamental questions of social and political science: 1) what is human nature? 2) how can we best educate and develop it? 3) what is the ideal society? 4) who can lead us towards this ideal state of affairs? He proposes a model of development, so he must specify the agent that will change things as they now stand. What forces are repressing liberty and impeding progress today? That’s the question of the hour.

1051-52. Mill quotes Wilhelm von Humboldt on human nature: “the end of man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal or immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole....” This is a reformulation or modification of Greek and Renaissance ideals about self-development. It is not a formulation that Dickens’ rigid utilitarian Mr. Gradgrind in Hard Times would understand. Mill continues, “Nobody denies that people should be so taught and trained in youth, as to know and benefit by the ascertained results of human experience. But it is the privilege and proper condition of a human being, arrived at the maturity of his faculties, to use and interpret experience in his own way.” Mill of course favors education, but insists upon specificity with regard to the goal towards which the educator should strive. Ultimately, he wants balance in all things, and education is a central way to achieve that goal.

1052. Mill seems to agree with John Milton’s claim in “Areopagitica” that “reason is but choosing.” He says, “The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice.” Custom is the enemy of genuine individualism. Again, “He who lets the world... choose his plan of life for him has no need of any other faculty than the apelike one of imitation.” To what extent, we might ask, would Mill countenance the consumer model of bourgeois liberalism? It seems clear that he challenges this model, whereby we link our sense of self to material objects, and mistake the accumulation of owned objects for true progress, and reduce originality to mere imitation and “fashion.” (On the paradox of all things and places fashionable, it’s hard to beat Yogi Berra’s comment about some gathering place, “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.”)

1053. Mill insists that “Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.” As he said just above, a perfect society built by automatons would not be a good thing. Humanity is constituted by potential that requires experience to realize and actualize itself. This basic romantic principle cuts against liberal economics, and certainly opposes the atomistic and mechanical conception of human nature we find in Jeremy Bentham.

1053-54. As for our emotional side, Mill writes as follows: “Yet desires and impulses are as much a part of a perfect human being, as beliefs and restraints: and strong impulses are only perilous when not properly balanced... It is not because men’s desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.” Mill demands the same freedom and exercise for impulses and desires that William Blake does. He is all in favor of “energy,” but with the addition of a need for balance. Mill defines the word character as belonging to a “person whose desires and impulses are his own.” He refers—probably consciously—to Thomas Carlyle’s phrase “steam engine universe.” Then he goes on to criticize Carlyle rather directly, if politely: “In some early states of society, these forces might be, and were, too much ahead of the power which society then possessed of disciplining and controlling them. There has been a time when the element of spontaneity and individuality was in excess... To overcome this difficulty, law and discipline... asserted a power over the whole man... But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.” Therefore, Carlyle’s feudalism is anachronistic and cannot supply the needed pattern for contemporary life—it proposes to deal with inauthenticity by imposing an anachronism on everyone.

1054. “In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, everyone lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual or the family do not ask themselves—what do I prefer?... They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? What is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? Or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of the station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary.” Middle-class conformity is the enemy—the same bourgeois attitude against which Carlyle takes aim. But the idea is that this middle-class has come by a much more radical and effective means of control—not violent repression but the persistent and forced internalization of socially acceptable thoughts, until it is no longer necessary to think at all. So much for romantic interiority. Mill continues with his critique of Carlyle, saying that such conformism is only acceptable on the “Calvinistic theory.” In that theology, “the one great offense of man is self-will.” So Calvin stands in for Carlyle here—Mill’s criticism is largely against Carlyle’s social vision in Past and Present.

1055. According to Mill, “‘Pagan self-assertion’ is one of the elements of human worth, as well as ‘Christian self-denial.’ There is a Greek ideal of self-development.” This kind of statement seems to flow from Mill’s understanding of Goethe—a modern kinsman of the classical humanists. Pericles is the ideal—full development of all the person’s faculties, all human potential. Mill says that “In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others.” His social theory argues that richer “units” will lead to a richer mass of people. This brand of individualism takes account of larger social needs, so while Mill is not a collectivist like Carlyle, he by no means ignores “the many.” Furthermore, writes Mill, “To be held to rigid rules of justice for the sake of others develops the feelings and capacities which have the good of others for their object. But to be restrained in things not affecting their good, by their mere displeasure, develops nothing valuable, except such force of character as may unfold itself in resisting the restraint.” Mill opposes the excess of restraint for social conformity, though he recognizes that such restraint is a powerful force to be reckoned with. The need to resist unnecessary constraints, Mill would agree with Sigmund Freud, accounts for a lot of misdirected individual and social energy. Of course, it’s true that since Mill promotes self-culture in England’s capitalist economic and social milieu, his theory is more or less bound to be taken as one idea among others in the marketplace of ideas. That is a very difficult problem to resolve, and one that Oscar Wilde summed up brilliantly in his quip, “A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.” The quest for genuine originality and authenticity is rather easily commodified and broken into an endless series of poses.

1056-58. Custom, insists Mill, turns us into machines: “Persons of genius…are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom” (1056). Genius is something that Mill insists upon “emphatically”; it requires freedom and variety as its atmosphere, while the middle-class’ public sphere thrives on middling intellects, on comfortable mediocrity (1057). This is hardly an argument invoking the potential of “mass culture,” and it differentiates Mill strongly from Carlyle, who shows little interest in the concept of genius—his heroic ideal isn’t about genius but about the worship of force and personal charisma or energy. On 1058, Mill says that he will have none of Carlyle’s hero-worship; all the eminent thinker may claim is “freedom to point out the way.” Mill is more genuinely indebted to the romantic authors he has been reading. Well, fashion is one major challenge to this organic model of genius and development. Fashion links individual expression to an ever-recyclable system of objects—generating a sense of self that stems from endless repetition and consumption. We identify with an image of ourselves, and take all necessary (economic) steps to conform to that image, but the image keeps giving way to another one. This model of the self mechanizes and harnesses the old romantic “problem of desire,” stripping it of its link to organic theory, to three-dimensional humanistic conceptions of human nature. Mill is concerned about the broad social forces bearing down upon us all—public opinion is like fashion, only in ideas. There is much inventiveness in fashion, inventiveness in “retailoring” what is out to make it in again. Carlyle responds against flunkeyist “fashionism” on its own terms, and thinks that his Clothes Philosophy provides a “recycling” alternative to flunkeyism, but how accurate is that faith?

1059-60. “The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people; and the spirit of liberty, in so far as it resists such attempts, may ally itself locally and temporarily with the opponents of improvement…The progressive principle, however, in either shape…is antagonistic to the sway of Custom. . .” (1059). Mill doesn’t see liberty and improvement as necessarily opposed. The enlightened person should always be aiming to improve. The important thing is to oppose complacency. In his book, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, C. B. MacPherson points out that there is nothing inherently developmental about bourgeois liberal democracy. The accumulation of objects is not development, and so liberal democracy all too easily betrays its foundations in Whig gentility, whereby society is something like a gentlemen’s agreement to let progress take its slow course towards the spiritual and intellectual betterment of all. Materialist capitalism annuls this kind of “slow time” in favor of perpetual immediacy. Mill’s borrowings from the romantics may commit him to the infinite deferral of improvement, and to a tacit cultural elitism. I should end by mentioning once more the system of self-object identification inherent in fashion-based consumer culture, and suggest that perhaps we need not stress Mill’s concept of “genius” and “character” (admirable though they are) so much as insist that we must think our own thoughts even as we are subjected to others’. This is something like Greek strength as a model of resistance and progress, and I would have to admit that it largely cedes the possibility of rapid and massive changes in the social order. But that seems unlikely anytime soon. My point is that rejection of consumer culture may not be very convincing or effective. Probably the best you can achieve is inflection with a balanced sense of self as the goal. But it’s fair to say that Mill sees democracy as something people need to work at, not as an already perfect system. That is a point in his favor.

Notes on John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women

1063-64. In general, Mill’s position agrees with that of George Eliot and other notable feminist authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft before him and, say, Simone de Beauvoir or Betty Friedan long after him. Mill decries the hypocrisy involved in a progressive age’s ignoring the “woman question.” Why have there been so many reforms, and yet women are still treated as second-class citizens? We see the same emphasis on the bad faith and selfishness men show when they educate women, or rather fail to educate them. As Mill writes, because men have long wanted more than mere obedience from women, the latter have been “brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others” (1063). In a few words, they are expected to live not for themselves but for men. That’s the way men have schooled or conditioned women to regard themselves: the best way to get people to conform is not by physical brutality; it’s much easier for the masters if their servants internalize the most convenient definition of themselves and the rules they’re supposed to obey. But as Mill points out, modern times run against this kind of conformism: “human beings are no longer born to their place in life . . . but are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable” (1064).

1065-67. With so much social and economic mobility in Victoria’s England, why are women still chained within an archaic notion of marriage? Marriage should imply mental equality, not servitude. Let competition decide what the future status of females will be. Mill rejects outright the notion that the alleged “nature of women” is anything but an artificial construction of men’s making: “I deny that any one knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another” (1065). Furthermore, he writes, “Of all the difficulties which impede the progress of thought, and the formation of well-grounded opinions on life and social arrangements, the greatest is now the unspeakable ignorance and inattention of mankind in respect to the influences which form human character” (1066). The whole affair of defining the qualities of gender takes on the cast of a badly conducted scientific experiment, with the observers’ biases, desires, and expectations contaminating the results from the outset, and no hope at all for an objective assessment of any differences there may be between men and women. Mill deserves full credit for making such a bold assertion nearly 150 years ago, when it must have been an affront to the sensibilities of a great many men. He points out, by way of elaboration on 1067, that the only woman with whom most men have any real acquaintance is their own wives: hardly a large enough “statistical sample” from which to make generalizations about women in general.

1069. As a utilitarian philosopher, Mill is (in most of his writing, at least) partial to the ideology of the market, with its law of competition working to satisfy human needs and desires, and he puts this terminology to good use in favor of women’s freedom of opportunity: “What they can do, but not so well as the men who are their competitors, competition suffices to exclude them from; since nobody asks for protective duties and bounties in favour of women; it is only asked that the present bounties and protective duties in favour of men should be recalled. If women have a greater natural inclination for some things than for others, there is no need of laws or social inculcation to make the majority of them do the former in preference to the latter. Whatever women’s services are most wanted for, the free play of competition will hold out the strongest inducements to them to undertake.” So are women most suited to be wives and mothers? Well, says Mill, you’d certainly think so, to hear men talk. But how should they know? Like Wollstonecraft, Eliot, and Fuller, Mill believes that marriage should be a reciprocal undertaking governed by genuine conversation; he argues that submission and false gender-definitions deprive both partners any chance to achieve this. All in all, Mill believes he has history on his side, and he is willing to challenge a powerful mid-Victorian consensus about the nature, limitations, and value of women. His wife Harriet Taylor surely had much to do with the strength of his stance: by all accounts, he treated his wife with tremendous regard, not as a servant or a sheltered “angel of the house,” to borrow a phrase from the famous poem by Coventry Patmore.

Notes on John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography

1071. “From the winter of 1821, when I first read Bentham, and especially from the commencement of the Westminster Review, I had what might truly be called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world. My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object.” In the beginning, Mill pursued a vague, general object—reform, the happiness of others. In the midst of his depression, the following question occurs to him: “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And of course the answer is no. The negation here is similar to the effect of Carlyle’s steam-engine universe rolling through Dr. Teufelsdröckh’s inner being. Mill says that he had nothing left to live for when he heard his own version of the “Everlasting No,” and he must have felt that he had lived as an automaton. His foundation for personal happiness was only an abstraction; it was what Francis Bacon would call a philosophical cobweb, and what anyone not in the thrall of Benthamism might well consider a utopian vision based on a mechanical view of human nature.

1072. “My course of study had led me to believe that all mental and moral feelings and qualities, whether of a good or of a bad kind, were the results of association; that we love one thing, and hate another... through the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those things, from the effect of education or of experience.” James Mill had taught his son that the goal of education was “to form the strongest possible associations of the salutary class; associations of pleasure with all things beneficial to the great whole, and of pain with all things hurtful to it.” James Mill followed a scientific model of the individual, and utilitarian education presupposes that character develops along the lines of mechanical association. If you identify your personal happiness with the general good, the idea goes, so long as you are working towards the general good you will be happy. But this plan leads to nothing better than middle-class conformity. It is not the way lasting human connections are made, and instead requires a shallow, flattened notion of human happiness and individuality.

1073. “Analytic habits may thus even strengthen the associations between causes and effects, means and ends, but tend altogether to weaken those which are, to speak familiarly, a mere matter of feeling.” It was not so much what Mill read but how he was taught to read it. The word “analysis” can mean “freeing up” the object of study, but that is not usually how we understand the term. The ordinary understanding is closer to the one Wordsworth condemns—”We murder to dissect.” The young John Stuart Mill seems to have been a victim of what T. S. Eliot (in an essay on the metaphysical poets) calls “dissociation of sensibility.” Helping others is not a bad object, but you must first determine the grounds of human connection—they are organic, not mechanical. You cannot superimpose upon the natural passions a scientific utopian scheme and expect anything but misery to result.

1074. “I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel’s Mémoires, and came to the passage which relates his father’s death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to them....” Spontaneous emotion proves to be the key to Mill’s recovery. He describes a Wordsworthian moment in the form of an accidental encounter with a literary text, an autobiographical text written by Marmontel. This accidental encounter escapes Bentham’s and James Mill’s scheme concerning the formation of salutary associations. So the example is a rebuke of straightforward Benthamite utilitarianism—the young Marmontel made a key emotional bond with others, forgetting himself for the moment. What we find described is not a mechanical “I ought” but a genuine outpouring of sympathy. Mill says that after reading this passage, he never again reached the depths of depression he formerly experienced.

1074-75. “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it...” happiness is still important here, but it is not to be directly pursued. The point is to stop analyzing happiness and start working on something you find meaningful for its own sake. It is best not to think of everything you say and do in light of ultimate purposes or end-states of consciousness. Mill has learned to ask Walter Pater’s question—”what is this activity or thing or person to me?” It is not good enough to pursue some abstract notion of the general good and to claim that you are achieving an equally abstract kind of happiness by doing so; the activity must be meaningful to you personally prior to the attachment of any such abstract notion. Mill has not rejected the idea that happiness flows from activity, but it makes all the difference in the world whether that activity is do-gooding or intrinsically and intimately valuable to the individual pursuing it. For example, if I have an inclination to tinker with computers, building them from scratch and solving whatever problems come up as I do so, I may by such means become happy, at least for a while. The same goes for things like reading a Jane Austen novel—you don’t sit down to read thinking, “my goal in reading this book is to be happy.” If you did, you would become morbidly prone to checking your emotional state every other sentence to register your level of happiness or unhappiness. This kind of obsession resembles both heavy Puritan examination of the state of one’s soul and the associational theory of happiness promoted by Mill’s father and his tutor Jeremy Bentham. It is best to allow your consciousness to be directed towards an object other than your own interior states.

This is profoundly good advice, but if we want to criticize it, we might say that it is an evasion of romantic troubles concerning the problem of desire. It is this problem that caused Carlyle to reject happiness altogether in favor of self-annihilation leading to meaningfulness, awe, and collective belonging. Don’t we invariably reflect back upon our states of consciousness, whether we mean to or not? And if we cannot avoid doing so, the kind of happiness Mill describes will not satisfy us for long—human beings even get tired of being happy after a while. In any case, on the same page Mill emphasizes the need for balancing the sway of our faculties. Feelings and intellection are both important: “I had now learnt by experience that the passive susceptibilities needed to be cultivated as well as the active capacities... The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties now seemed to me of primary importance.” A many-sided personality needs many-sided experiences to develop and be free. Feeling is not mechanical, not associational. The self is not an isolated atom but rather an organic construct. Happiness comes from pursuing intrinsically meaningful activities and from allowing “passive susceptibilities” to operate freely. By this term, I believe Mill means self-culture, the patient development of our individual potential until we achieve a balanced, harmonious sense of who we are and what we are about.

Further reflection: Mill is right to say that if you have to ask whether you’re happy, you won’t be happy for long or perhaps even at all. But saying this doesn’t mean we won’t do it: isn’t it almost impossible not to assess your experiences even as you undergo them? Ideally, I suppose, we would be able to shut off the flow of annoying self-consciousness-tending thoughts. That’s what most meditative techniques seem to be designed to help us do. Imagine walking along a beautiful, deserted beach—the ideal would be just to let nature draw you outside of yourself, all your self-consciousness evaporating with the salt spray and disappearing into the wet sand, the sound of the ocean replacing your thoughts. But something always brings us back to ourselves: that’s the romantic dilemma, and I don’t see that there’s anything but the briefest respite from it. Even so, Mill is surely right that obsessing about your own happiness right here and now is destructive and counter-productive. Happiness isn’t a permanent condition, and it evaporates when you try to treat it as a solid. “Meaningfulness” is perhaps less fleeting, but even that isn’t exactly guaranteed. Buddhists seem wise in their praise of self-surrender: shut down the self to the extent of time and the degree possible, and the world opens up to you: they’re after clarity, sharp awareness without the constant burden of self-referentiality and personal concern. As the Hindu god Krishna would say, redefine the little-s self to embrace the big-s Self, and quit trying to own the consequences of your actions. I think Mill the reformer has come round to that very insight: he still thinks it’s good to help other people, but not simply to make himself a happier man while he’s doing it. That kind of philanthropy is essentially selfish: as Jesus says, “whosoever will save his life shall lose it” (Luke 9:24, King James Bible).

1076. Mill reiterates the point he made earlier about basic utilitarianism’s unbalanced, mechanical view of human nature—simply rendering people “free and in a state of physical comfort” and removing all hardships from life really would not make a community happy. Then he goes on to discuss Wordsworth’s significance for him: “This state of my thoughts and feelings made the fact of my reading Wordsworth for the first time (in the autumn of 1828), an important event in my life.”

1077. “What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought colored by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connection with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind.” Wordsworth teaches John Stuart Mill the true sources of happiness, and shows him the value of contemplation, of “wise passiveness” as a corrective for the analytic habit, which in modern times has reached the level of an obsession. And since Mill supposes there are a great many people out there like him, Wordsworth need not be considered the greatest of all England’s poets to be the poet modern English readers stand most in need of reading. Mill says that without having yet read Carlyle, he adopted the anti-self-consciousness philosophy. And of course he literally “closes his Byron” and opens his Wordsworth. So Wordsworth is his Goethe, the man who makes it possible to see that intellect and emotion can co-exist in a balanced individual, one capable of both self-cultivation and genuine desire to reform the world. Wordsworth’s view of human nature is holistic, not at all one-sided as later authors sometimes claim: he has nothing against action, but understands that unless it’s carried out by full human beings, it won’t achieve what it should. At least, that’s how the practical Mill reads him.

Ruskin’s Stones of Venice, “The Nature of Gothic.”

The Renaissance in Venice should serve as a warning to the British Empire: just as that sea empire fell because of its debased pursuit of wealth and soulless perfection, so will England if it continues on its current path.

Ruskin is a prophetic Sage-writer who alternately threatens damnation and promises redemption.

Gothic architecture expresses the workers’ mental tendencies. “Fallen” but humble laborers built cathedrals. The products of their labor served as expressive offerings to god and dwelling places for him as well as gathering places for the faithful who are the invisible Church, spiritual community. So this is labor directed towards the achievement of spiritual community.

Renaissance authors and critics such as Vasari condemned the Gothic as naïve and crude, stern and contemptible. But wildness is to be honored if it expresses spiritual striving. The fool sees not the same Church as the wise man sees, we might say after the manner of Blake. The Renaissance critics couldn’t see spiritual ramifications of labor; they gave in to the lust and over-refinement of the eye, which is to become blind.

Renaissance pride in perfection, then, is selfish—their buildings are not offerings to god but monuments to the architects’ and patrons’ egos. The Renaissance amounts to a Second Fall that tries to overcome by science and technological perfection the effects of the First Fall. Venice the sea-empire fell because of its pridefulness and greedy commercialism. England, too is promoting sensualism, mechanism, false individualism cut off from relation to God. It puts its hopes not in the New Jerusalem but in a false Capitalist Utopia.

Servile Ornament: worker is slave performing to low standards.

Constitutional Ornament: medieval worker free; imperfect striving in labor honors God.

Revolutionary Ornament: Pride reigns in Renaissance art: workers must all be experts in minor tasks. Modern version of this is industrial division of labor—bead-makers, etc. The English seek Greek perfection by means of machinery; this necessarily tends towards Renaissance revolutionary debasement. Important to say tends because there’s still time to repent.

Christianity values the individual soul; imperfect labor is an admission of one’s fallen condition, and valuing it shows right-minded criticism and a pure eye for expressions of spiritual striving. It shows that one’s priorities are straight: spirit before material perfection.

Perfect work is limited, and it indicates complacency. The flaws in a fine, imperfect thing link it to infinity. This is similar to romanticism and Christian theology: a fragment is greater than the limited, finite whole because fragment indicates striving and progress upward. Man is a fragment of the Divine. Ruskin as a Christian emphasizes not Byronic attempt at self-transcendence but humility. Acknowledge your imperfections and express yourself through the medium of that imperfection. This is humility towards God.

The body and the works of the body are finite; art/architecture are of value only insofar as they express the soul’s striving to break free, while still accepting that it cannot entirely do so. Mention Hegelian hierarchy of art, with music highest because most free of matter.

Clouds: reference to Turner. Clouds at once veil and bear the sun’s divine radiance. The worker’s failure, his limits (clouds), show his spiritual value. Clouds of any sort must be read, understood as semi-translucent markers of boundary between finite and infinite.

Class and hierarchy are not, for R, the cause of chaos and Mammonism. Neither even is distribution of wealth. The problem is lack of satisfaction in grossly material work in the service of a grossly materialistic society. Similar to Marx on alienation, dehumanization.

R says division of labor is division of human beings. R is not interested in accumulation or scientific progress; he largely rejects the whole Baconian empirical view of science as a handmaiden to humble amelioration of the human condition.

Social solution is to encourage invention, not finish or imitation. Our attitude towards consumption must change; supply will adapt itself to more spiritualized demands on the part of consumers. Example: glass bead manufacture is slavery / opposed to imperfect Venetian glass.

Work is the main human activity and source of value. Work must acknowledge imperfection; allow for expression of worker’s spirit, striving to please God. Work is an offering, a sacrifice, the law of fallen life.

It took a healthier society to make Venetian glass. The way glass is made shows how a society is functioning, what its priorities are. Venetian artisan infused his work with imagination; the modern worker is one tool among others. Thought and labor should not be separated, or else unhealthy class divisions become entrenched, antagonism rather than communal spirit animating noble hierarchy. Refer to Adam Smith on division of labor applying even to intellection.

Foxglove / Human Nature: Always passing from one state to another. Read typologically: law of fallen life is change, imperfection, striving. Christian teleology of the figure: decay > bud > bloom. Humans are always oriented towards the spiritual future. One’s works are “blooms,” indicators of healthy spiritual progress. The foxglove is an imperfect-seeming, rude plant that nevertheless is prized for its beauty.

No human work is perfect to god’s eyes. The effort, the attitude of the offering, elicits mercy. Recall the Cain/Abel story. Work must be imperfect to acknowledge that the human condition is imperfect.

Ruskin’s stress on imperfection / incompleteness is a critique of capitalist utopia and Marxist utopia alike. He favors REDUNDANCY (a law of his style, too) against philosophies of production and material abundance. Not accumulation of money but accumulation of detail (organized or not) is the goal. “There is no wealth but life.”

Architecture is a romantic expressive poem for an entire people. The Gothic is the product of “the average power of man.” Gothic’s changefulness expresses one truth about humankind: desire of change; it’s what supposedly sets us beyond animal nature. Imperfection is the other truth. Humans are spiritual, restless, incomplete.

Ruskin’s tradition is romantic expressivism—see Shelley’s “To a Skylark” and theory of poetic creation, which itself traces its notions back to biblical expressivism: work as expressive of spirit, an offering to god. R is almost utilitarian, oddly, in his emphasis on an economy of redundancy and richness: at least, the aim is pleasure.

Week 10, Tennyson

2006-04-06T15:24:00.000-07:00

“The Lady of Shalott”

This poem shows Tennyson as self-consciously late-romantic. The first several stanzas play with temporal and spacial references, but it is clear that “down” is the way to Camelot, the world of medieval romance and violence, of immersion in time as symbolized by the flowing river. The Lady will experience this immersion as a rupture. Everyone else’s life is her death, once she tries to make the passage from the island to the mainland. The poem raises the question of art’s relation to other areas of life, an issue of much concern to Tennyson himself. If poetry is a vocation, to what social end does one honorably pursue it?

Parts 1-2. Poetic devices involve us in the aesthetic way of perceiving. Early on the plot is enveloped by form; we are entranced by the Lady’s image-weaving, even though we “see” her images spun. The Lady weaves a magic web—is the text another such web? In the fifth stanza of Part 2, the Lady shows little regard for anything but her weaving, and is not yet troubled by desire, it seems. The metaphors of mirror and loom may refer first to the barrier between life and art, and second to the imaginative process. What is woven may represent the real world, but remains distinct from it. But Tennyson seems to be referring also to Plato’s Parable of the Cave, when he writes “Shadows of the world appear.” The Lady does not see the world outside directly—she sees shadows, just like Plato’s cave-dwellers.

The final stanza of Part 2 says the the Lady “still delights / To weave the mirror’s magic sights….” Refer to Freud’s essay “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” where he argues that art is mainly wish-fulfilment. Here the Lady weaves what appears in the mirror, so her web represents representations. What exactly are the “shadows” of which she is “half-sick”? Well, she is tired of seeing things at one remove, and wants direct access.

Part 3. Here the Lady gets her wish when Lancelot punctures the barrier, breaks the magic spell, with a riot of color and sound. The two young lovers in particular (of the final stanza in Part 2) have readied her for this intrusion. Towards the end of the third part, the magic stops, representation ends and experience begins.

Part 4. Publish and perish—the Lady writes her one poem on the prow of the boat that will carry her to her death; the poem is her name. The villagers hear her singing, and she dies “in her song” (this means that within the context of the poem, she “really” dies, but the phrase is slippery—what does it mean to “die in your song”? Doesn’t that mean you never existed outside of it since you lived in it too?) This leads to another reading of the poem as being about the wall between consciousness and the outside world—a more directly philosophical interpretation that might be taken as against romantic self-expression. Is it that self-expression can’t succeed because the self dies in the act of speaking, singing, writing, in the course of the poem? That isn’t a new idea, but the third part sets it forth strongly. On the whole, I’m inclined to read it in light of Pater’s comments about “that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.” The value of expression becomes central in that case—what good does it do? The Lady dwells in her own interiority and can neither remain satisfied with spinning her own world nor enter the world of time and experience.

The townspeople try to interpret the poem, but feel only dread. That’s one possible response to art; the other is Sir Lancelot’s more favorable one—he blesses her beauty and asks God to lend her grace for its sake. He does not, like the villagers, try to ward off the Lady’s effect on him as if she were a vampire—he welcomes her power even if he doesn’t fully understand where it comes from, the story behind the pretty but dead face.

“The Lotos-Eaters”

Refer to In Memoriam Lyric 5: “A use in measured language lies / …Like dull narcotics, numbing pain” (1234).

Odysseus joins his crew after only one line—they all “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” as Timothy Leary the 1960’s Professor of LSD Studies would say. He upsets rank and falls away from heroism into apathetic song. There will be no more heroism, no more need to remain obedient to the gods. The verse form brings home this worst possible peril for a Greek hero—who is, after all, responsible for standing up to his fate even though he can’t alter it.

Tennyson’s borrowings from Keats’ sensualism lend the poem its languidness: “A land where all things always seemed the same.” In Keats, we find autumn stillness, but here that stillness becomes trance-inducing stasis. Odysseus had sent scouts in Homer, but here it seems that the Lotos-Eaters themselves just show up with their magic plant.

Choric Song: What lesson do the Mariners learn from nature? Character isn’t set off from or challenged by nature, as it should be. Where are the gods? Words lose their proper orientation towards action, and the Mariners surrender to mellow nature. We find no striving, no wandering, no strength—only rhetoric that justifies inaction. The Mariners have become irresponsible poets, and Odysseus is one of them—in Homer, of course, the captain’s men served in part as foils for his heroic survival. By the sixth stanza, we can say, “so much for the homecoming.” Wandering has lost its purposive edge, and expression has become divorced from action.

The eighth stanza of the Choric Song shows a change in form—this part is deceptively translation-like since the lines are long enough to look like Homer’s dactylic hexameter. Homer kept Odysseus from spending much time on the Lotos-Eaters episode—he surely wanted to emphasize the danger that Odysseus might really have given in, and makes Odysseus conscious of that—he’s retelling the story as long past for his Phaeacian host Alcinous. When the Mariners refer to the “Gods together, careless of mankind (155), the line reflects Tennyson’s interest in the Epicurean notion of the gods set forth by Lucretius—they are said to be distant, not particularly active (they didn’t even create the Cosmos—random movement of the atoms did), and unconcerned with human affairs. The eighth stanza draws out into song the dangerous spiritual error that this dilatory poem has been exploring. Lucretian materialism is meant to bring comfort to humanity, taking away their fear of death and the gods. But Tennyson (who liked Lucretius) finds this un-Greek or unheroic. But perhaps the entire poem is psychological realism on Tennyson’s part—an admission that strong desires beget or are linked to strong counter-desires: authentic heroism is twinned with strong nihilism and the desire to forget.

“Ulysses”

Tiresias had told Odysseus that he must leave Ithaca one last time to propitiate the gods, so Tennyson’s idea comes from Homer. Here we find a modern mind confronting Greek striving. In Homer, all the wandering was for the sake of getting home and reestablishing order on Ithaca. But here the point seems to be wandering itself. Mixed in is a sad tone, almost Hamlet-like musing on the sum total of it all—I’ve done all these things, but what’s the point of it if they become only memories? Ulysses laments that he has “become a name”; his words are no longer oriented towards action, and he has to cheer himself and others up to find that sense of direction again. What he says about experience is almost Paterian—Ulysses, too, wants “to burn with that hard, gem-like flame,” to expand life into a continual moment of great intensity, blotting out the ordinary or transforming it. The second, more public, part of the poem—”This is my son, mine own Telemachus…” implies a rejection of the task Homer set for his hero. Tennyson isn’t interested, I suppose, in the historical element of Odyssean lore—the “task” of the Odyssey was to revitalize a more domesticated land with its former heroic values. But in Tennyson’s recasting, revitalization evidently means rejecting the domestic life and setting out again as a wanderer towards death. Ulysses stands apart from his son, to whom he would gladly cede the task of ruling over the human herd animals of Ithaca. When Ulysses addresses his old comrades, he sounds like Satan in Paradise Lost—his will is “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” This is a very general directive, not a call to strive towards some specific goal.

If you want to get beneath this poem’s Victorian call to heroism, focus on the subtler side of it—as with Walter Pater, desire for beauty and experience is the obverse of the gods’ absence and fear of death. Tennyson’s is an aesthetic sensibility inclined to escape from or transfigure the ordinary things in life, but not in a way that implies commitment to impending social change. He often comes up against the possibility that his poetry is bound to be received as a compartmentalized, special kind of labor. Does Ulysses’ heroic language differ from his internal dialogue? Is he a false counsellor to others, as Dante labels him in one of the later cantos of Inferno? The relationship between art and other areas of life becomes a problem to be explored, not something to be resolved presently. Exploring psychological states is one of Tennyson’s main enterprises, and one might say the same of Browning and some other Victorian poets. Refer to Isobel Armstrong’s thesis about poetry as an alternative realm where more nuance could be developed regarding the issues that prose authors were writing about.

In Memoriam A.H.H.

Structure

I. Drawing upon Tennyson’s remark that he had organized the poem by means of the three celebrations of Christmas it records, A. C. Bradley (“The Structure of In Memoriam,” in Robert Ross, ed., In Memoriam, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1973) and E. D. H. Johnson (“In Memoriam: The Way of the Poet,” in Robert Ross, ed., In Memoriam, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1973) pointed out the presence of the following structures:

1. (1-27) Despair: ungoverned sense (subjective)
2. (28-77) Doubt: mind governing sense, i.e., despair (objective)
3. (78-102) Hope: spirit governing mind, i. e. doubt (subjective)
4. (103-31) Faith: spirit harmonizing with sense (objective)

The four-part division in relation to Tennyson’s theory of poetry:

1. Poetry as release from emotion
2. Poetry as release from thought
3. Poetry as self-realization
4. Poetry as mission (or prophecy)

II. The poet also explained to a friend (Knowles) that the poem had nine natural groups of sections: 1-8, 9-20, 21-27, 28-44, 45-58, 59-71, 72-93, 94-103, 104-131. Can you sum up or characterize the organizing principle of each group?

III. Structure of motifs created by paired sections, such as 2 and 39, 7 and 119, and so on, and by repetition of images, metaphors, and paradigms, including hand, door, ship, time, and dream.

IV. Patterns of conversion, turning points, and climaxes: 95, one of the longer sections of IM, contains its most famous climax and moment of conversion, but it is only one of several, for those sections concerning poetry and the role of poetry, the fate of his sister, and the conflict of science and religion all have their contributory climactic structures.

V. Patterns provided by types, biblical and biological (see sections 1, 12, 33, 53-56, 82, 85, 103, 118, 123, 131). Playing upon two competing means of the term type, Tennyson parallels and contrasts the biological and the religious. Although he admits that man as a type (species) may well disappear like the dinosaur, a fossil in the iron hills, he finds in Hallam a type (prefiguration) of both the reappearance of Christ and of the higher form (species, type) of humanity--a reassurance that time, evolution, and human life have meaning.

The poet works on three main areas:

1. The need to find an appropriate way to express sorrow and hope—a way that will not trap the speaker in those states, but that will not deny their necessity, either. In Memoriam deals with romantic themes—grief, isolation, the poet’s anxiety over the expressive capacity of language. But Tennyson’s elegiac poem is highly structured and formal, too—a working-out of his emotions. Formal elegy (poetic ritual) helps him establish distance from the recurrent rawness of his grief, and affords him an opportunity to express and explore painful interior states. Wordsworth, too, saw meter and poetic devices as ways of establishing meditative distance, ways of blanketing otherwise too-intense events and feelings with a layer of unreality. (This insight is as old as Aristotle—he says we can contemplate things with pleasure in art that would cause us unbearable grief or horror if they really happened.) In Tennyson’s cycle, Sorrow will be personified, negotiated with, listened to, and overcome. But grief is not an easy thing to leave behind; its persistence is signalled by Freud’s phrase “the work of mourning.”

2. The need to wrestle with religious doubt, whether this doubt comes from the pain occasioned by the loss of a dear friend, or from what John Ruskin would later call “the dreadful clink of the hammer” in one’s brain—i.e. the chipping away of faith caused by the advancing sciences of geology (Lyell), biology, chemistry, etc. These sciences were at work even before Darwin’s theory of natural selection and evolution intensified “Victorian doubt.” Many Victorian intellectuals also had problems with the more severe formulations of Christian theology—Calvinist pre-election or damnation, and so forth.

3. The need to reconsider the “romantic” regard for nature’s value as a source of moral intelligibility and comfort. But the concept of nature is itself undergoing change—even Lyell’s uniformitarianism (the forces that shape the earth today have been shaping it the same way for millions of years) leads to a sense of “deep time” or “geological time.” The death of Hallam shocks Tennyson, but this long sense of time threatens to overwhelm any sense of human significance—see the fine set of lyrics 54-56 on this issue.

The Prologue

George Herbert’s poety is an influence on Tennyson. Herbert, like Milton and others, felt the need to justify his habit of writing poetry—is it a genuine calling, or self-indulgence? Refer to 1 John 4:21: “And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also.” The remark implies that it if poetry is to be an authentic use of one’s time, it should perform some social function—not just amount to private expression, venting, or some other selfish thing. Herbert also wrestled with movements of spirit that may be less than accepting of God’s will. This is not a matter of doubt, however, as it is with Tennyson—with Herbert, the issue has to do with the mind’s attempt to order contrary passions and align self and will with the will of God. In this sense, poetic language might serve to mediate between one’s better self and unruly thoughts and desires.

Stanza 1. The first stanza introduces a big issue—what is the relationship between faith and knowledge? Another eminent Victorian, John Henry Newman, captured this issue well whe he wrote that ther is “certitude,” and there is logical proof. In matters of faith, he suggests, the idea isn’t to look for scientific or logical proof—the right attitude has more to do with a deep feeling of certainty in the truth of Christian doctrine.

Stanzas 2-4. The speaker asserts that Providence (God’s plan) encompasses everyone and everything. He says that man “thinks he was not made to die,” and claims that he draws certitude from that. If we have such a strong feeling that something of us survives, well then, something must—why else would we have such a feeling? God made us, and must have given us the capacity for that feeling, so he will have the thing so. The third and fourth stanzas insist that despair—something IM explores, must be cast away along with sorrow.

Stanza 5. The speaker says, Carlyle-like, that “Our little systems have their day.” They are only “broken lights” of God’s divine and radiant Truth, so human knowledge will never replace God.

Stanza 6. The poem will make a search for the true ground of being and faith. The “beam” of light in the darkness could refer to any number of biblical passages, but Christ’s “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” would be a good candidate. (John 8:12)

Stanzas 7-8. Knowledge will grow until mind and soul, knowledge and faith, unite again.

Stanzas 9-11. The speaker apologizes for the torturous and “romantic” path of self-exploration and doubt that makes up the lyric progression of IM. He accuses himself of an excessive grief that might imply lack of trust in God’s plan. As Claudius says to Hamlet concerning his father’s death, “why stands it so particular with thee?” The speaker’s “wild and wandering cries” are, however, rhetorical and dramatic utterances. They explore, vent, contain and direct “powerful feelings.” Tennyson’s craft as a poet helps him arrange his emotions and gain perspective on them.

Lyric 1 (Stage 1 = 1-27, Near-Despair, ungoverned sense, subjective)

Loss should lead to growth, but perspective is an acquisition of time—a slow, sorrowful process. The speaker begins his exploration of sorrow’s psychology—grief is necessary and human. He rejects stoic indifference to grief—he is not yet ready for “calm of mind, all passion spent.”

Lyric 2

Over time, the tree obliterates the names of the dead, effacing our attempt to memorialize them. Nature envelops the person’s dust, and shadow envelops our entire lives. The speaker betrays a strong desire to put an end to answer-seeking and self-consciousness. Carlyle’s sense of mystery hovers over this poem, but provides no comfort. The tree itself is rooted in eternity, ultimate perspective. In the final stanza, the speaker wants to lose consciousness and merge with the tree’s mysterious presence. We might also say that the tree is one of Wordsworth’s “beautiful and permanent forms of nature.”

Lyric 3

The poem objectifies sorrow to gain perspective on it, but this tactic does not always work. In the first sent stanza, the speaker tries to gain perspective on his grief -- towards what path of thought will Sorrow lead the speaker? In the second stanza, Sorrow says we inhabit a blind, purposeless universe -- Carlyle’s steam-engine universe -- there is no Providence and no purpose to life. In the third stanza, she says that Nature is void of meaning or hope; there is no source or ground for being, no anchor for the expression of emotions. In the fourth stanza the speaker raises the possibility of rejecting the Wordsworthian religion of nature, but does not do so.

Lyric 4

This poem shows that the speaker has a divided consciousness.

Lyric 5

The speaker questions the expressive transparency of language, its ability to convey feeling. He questions romantic optimism about the vital role of language as mediator from one soul to another. But the lyric’s rhythmic language helps to still the speaker’s pain. It distances him from his own emotions -- but is a narcotic effect the same as perspective or therapeutic value?

Lyric 7

This poem explores the psychological state of disbelief, mourning.

Lyric 11

The speaker is out of joint with natural calm; his perspective does not match that of nature personified. Are we to understand calm here as the peace that passes understanding? The speaker also confronts in his imagination the still body of his friend. He is preparing to reckon with the body’s silence and its transformation into a thing of dead nature.

Lyric 14

In the final stanza, the speaker is again preparing himself to let go of Arthur’s life-image. Viewing the body is necessary if we are to accept death.

Lyric 15

In the third stanza, the speaker refers to the ship’s motion -- the apparition is the ship bearing his friend’s body. See Job 37:18. For the final stanza, see Revelations 15:2. Will the speaker’s interior state lead him to ultimate vision, to the meaning of Arthur’s passing?

Lyric 28

This poem, written early, marks the beginning of the second stage that runs through Lyric 77: doubt, mind governing sense, objective. The speaker is wrestling with doubt -- that eminently Victorian problem. In the second stanza, he hears the bells, symbols of religious faith at its simplest and finest, implying harmony among mankind. In stanza five, the bells recall him to a former state of simple faith, a sense that the world is morally intelligible. As in Wordsworth’s poetry, past feelings rekindle new emotions of a similar kind. But bells are not words. The last two lines reverse Shelley’s formula in “We are as Clouds” -- the bells bring “sorrow touched with joy.”

Lyric 30

In stanza seven, the speaker says that there is a spirit moving through the universe. The imagery here is similar to Dante’s, or to Shelley’s in Adonais. Is Arthur moved now by the divine or primal love? I should also check Lucretius’s references to the soul wandering into infinity.

Lyric 34

The speaker describes an alternate poetics -- your expression without the need for progress or arrangement of the passions to serve moral ends. But he does not embrace this alternate poetics, as we can tell from the conditional mood of the final two stanzas.

Lyric 39

This poem should be compared with Lyric 2. In the first stanza, the speaker sees the tree as truly animate -- it is part of nature’s regenerative cycle. But then Sorrow takes away the speaker’s believe in the regenerative power of nature, implying that the comfort we take is imported, a function of anthropomorphism.

Lyric 54

In the final stanza, the carefully ordered rhetoric of faith is described as a dream, and the poet’s language as a cry. But a cry does not give us the moral understanding we crave; we want to assert that purpose governs the universe.

Lyric 55

In the second stanza, the speaker asks if God and nature are at war with each other. He must be thinking of Sir Charles Lyell’s principle of uniformitarianism, which says that consistent forces operating over vast periods of time have shaped the earth. If the species or type is all that matters, what consolation is that fact for individuals? Can science offer us satisfying knowledge? Or even bearable knowledge? In the final two stanzas, the speaker sounds like Shelley in “O World, O Life, O Time.” Life is cast as an arduous path, with the speaker groping for purpose and meaning. Science has been destructive of faith, disintegrating the individual psyche and the sense of community.

Lyric 56

In the first stanza, Nature says she cares not even for the type -- geological strata convey in cold Stone the passing even of the species. Evidently, Nature can betray the heart that loved her. In the fourth stanza, the speaker says we trusted that love was God’s primal impulse and ordering principle -- Aristotle’s final cause (purpose) and first cause (God) conjoined. In the sixth stanza, the speaker raises the problem of self-consciousness. We “look before and after and pine for what is not,” as Shelley says. We try to establish a hierarchy of beings, but geological time does not respond to our efforts in a comforting manner. I recall Pascal’s remark that “the silence of these infinite spaces” terrifies him. Tennyson’s speaker says we cannot be satisfied thinking of ourselves in purely material terms -- it crushes our sense of worth and even humanity. The final stanza brings in a Carlylean sense of history again -- put on the veil and stop asking questions.

Lyric 75

In this poem, we find the Shakespearean theme of immortality through verse. This conventional sentiment leads us to the fuller transition of Lyric 78. The third stage through Lyric 102 is marked by Pope, with spirit governing intellect and doubt. It is a subjective stage, as was the darker stage one. With Lyric 103, the fourth stage arrives -- that of faith, with spirit harmonizing sense and intellect and feeling. It is an objective part of the poem.

Lyric 108

The speaker will seek solace in social interaction -- not in religious speculation. He has begun to pull back from Arthur, and there is a hint of a feeling of abandonment in the final stanza.

Lyric 118

In the second stanza, there is probably a reference to Jean LaPlace’s idea of the earth as a fiery discharge from the Sun. The rest of the lyric sets forth the idea of inner evolution -- the animal in us is chaos that must be overcome and left behind. Human nature is satyr-like, and requires acts of will, self-overcoming.

Lyric 123

These are very rhetorical poems with conventional themes coming to the forefront, along with a reassertion of the Carlylean sense of mystery. The theme is something like “life is a dream,” but the ordering power of the language works against that notion. In the final stanza, the speaker implies that to affirm the inconstancy of all things human, the delusional state in which we dwell, does not satisfy or convince. It is only the initial move on the way towards faith. God lies at the end of the path of doubt and faith alike.

Lyric 124

The speaker, in stanza 2, says that he does not find God in arguments about “intelligent design.” This is the sort of thing that abstract reasoning cooks up. In the final stanza, a sense of mystery puts an end to the speaker’s searching -- the light comes from darkness.

Lyric 126

This poem looks back to George Herbert, who sometimes portrays Christ as a great lord in a court. The “faithful guard” is the Church. The speaker begins to feel protected, encompassed by Anglican ceremony and faith.

Week 08, Carlyle and Newman

2006-03-23T15:23:00.000-08:00

Notes on Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus

Carlyle, who often serves as a survey course’s bridge between the romantic and Victorian periods, is a difficult writer, but his insights into literature, history, and politics make his eccentric books worth considerable patience. His style is designed to forge a relationship with an increasing, and increasingly skeptical, post-romantic-era public that is not easily satisfied by time-tested formulations about anything. But Carlyle himself was a complex man who wouldn’t fit comfortably in any era—for one thing, he was raised as a strict Calvinist and kept something of the Old Testament prophet about him even after rejecting the metaphysical tenets of this austere faith. Moreover, born in the same year as John Keats, he was by nature a moody and “romantic” individual, which means that he found it necessary in arriving at his mature prose style and authorial stance to work through his own “storm and stress” tendencies before he could find out what lay on the far side of them. It seems he had to pass through Byron to arrive at the calm classicist humanism of his hero Goethe. (But Goethe, author of The Sorrows of Young Werther, had to do something like that, too.) His German Idealist Professor Teufelsdröckh is not Carlyle, of course, but at the same time, Sartor Resartus is part of Carlyle’s 1830’s project of working out a new and viable way to set himself forth as a writer and social critic. Carlyle is characteristically, if explosively, “Victorian” in his admission that art must reestablish its value anew in modern society—and, most particularly, that it cannot do so by reverting to a programmatically “romantic” set of claims about art and social cohesion. In sum, Carlyle faces a task not unlike that of the Anglo-American modernists who will write nearly a century after his time: how to take past ideas (literary forms, social philosophies, political ideals, etc.) and “make them new” to suit the present time.

In Sartor Resartus, that is what Carlyle, in creating his fictional Professor Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, is doing with regard to the “romantic” tradition to which Carlyle himself has strong intellectual and emotional ties. He cannot (and probably would not want to) play the romantic philosopher in his own person. “Dr. T” is Carlyle’s eccentric spokesman for the Idealism of the Continent and, to some extent, for the recent and increasingly defunct British Romantic movement. As you can see from reading Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Wordsworth and his contemporaries as well as the second or Satanic generation of Byron, Shelley, and Keats, had already come to be regarded as a “school.” And to belong to a school, of course, is to become subject to the inevitable sway of fashion and changed circumstances. Carlyle’s ironic but nonetheless respectful presentation of Dr. Teufelsdröckh’s romantic notions about self and society, then, amount to the author’s way of keeping the best in that tradition open for English consideration while admitting that he, as a modern writer, cannot return to the good old days of the nineteenth century’s first few decades.

What does Carlyle think is worth preserving about the romantic tradition of thought? Well, he is not a precise philosopher like Kant or Hegel; I think it will do here to say that he finds a couple of things worth maintaining: first, the sense that what binds people together is not so much intellect as passion. But perhaps even more important to Carlyle is that romanticism, in its way religion-like, asserts the primacy of spirit over materiality and brute fact. I don’t suppose Carlyle ever truly reconciled the Weimar or “Goethean” humanist promoter of self-cultivation in himself with what has sometimes been called the “prophet of self-annihilation” and, later in life, the “worshiper of force.” But perhaps that is asking too much of him—he is most consistent in fighting by any and all means the advent of a fully materialist, and materialistic, culture in the British Isles. And Carlyle’s “romanticism,’ as he makes Teufelsdröckh illustrate dramatically in Sartor Resartus, was a necessary phase through which he had to pass if he was ever to establish an authentic new voice for his contemporaries. Romantic poses and premises were an essential part of his makeup as a writer and as a social critic.

With the phrase “social critic,” we move on to Carlyle’s mature social philosophy and stance as an historian as they appear in the 1843 text Past and Present. Writing during the Hungry 40’s, when economic instability and discontent were a powerful and threatening combination in Britain, Carlyle decries the alienation capitalism has created amongst workers and employers and, in fact, everyone in Great Britain. In an analysis of labor relations that Marx and Engels would later praise, Carlyle argues that while labor should knit humans together into a social whole, work in industrial Britain is wage-slavery, and the ideology that supports it has the people “enchanted” by its abstract and mechanical conception of human nature and society. The factory hands perform their daily labor for the capitalist, but at day’s end, they have little to show for it in either pecuniary or spiritual terms. The products of the worker’s labor (called “commodities”) enrich the capitalist at the expense of any fair distribution of what has been produced.

This state of affairs, says Carlyle, is even worse than the situation in Europe during medieval times. Back then, at least, the relationship between peasant farmers, their landowning Lords, and the Church, however oppressive and hierarchy-bound, was at least an authentic relationship. That accounts for Carlyle’s praise of feudal society—notice his references to Gurth the Swineherd and his master Cedric the Saxon (characters from Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe), who is himself an underling to the Norman Conquerors. Feudal labor relations, the idea goes, provided both lord and serf with a reciprocal sense of duty toward one another and with some sense of belonging to a stable world order. But in nineteenth-century Britain, no such responsible relationship between the classes prevails, and nothing makes a dent in the Iron Law of the Marketplace. Everywhere, Carlyle explains, one hears only the sentence, “impossible” in answer to the cries of impoverished workers, the unemployed, and those people’s dependents. The false god of riches Mammon, aided by idle aristocrats (“Game-Preserving Dukes”), greedy factory owners, machine-like workers with their demands for the cash that enslaves them, and political economy’s cant about “free trade” and “laissez-faire,” stops cold every attempt to end Britain’s chaos.

In our chapters, “Democracy” and “Captains of Industry,” Carlyle tries to redefine what is meant by key concepts such as “freedom” and “aristocracy,” in effect recycling them so that they will turn into solutions and not perpetuate the agony of the masses as well as the rule of the ne’er-do-wells. I call Carlyle a recycler of outworn concepts and systems because it seems that his advice isn’t to do away with the flawed, yet dynamic, capitalist order and return to an earlier time. His agrarian “feudalism” is an ideal construction, not something he sets forth as a viable way of life for the present. Rather, Carlyle wants to retain the basic form of capitalist production and even to hold on to the hierarchical relationship between the working and capital-owning classes. If all goes according to plan, there will be no need for another French Revolution—the big industrialists, properly spiritualized by the remnants of Carlyle’s Calvinist belief in the saving power of order, work, and duty, will become “Captains of Industry” and take control of a threatening situation. They will become the new Norman Lords. What the workers need, thinks Carlyle, is not the vulgar, anarchic democracy for which they presently clamor; it is work under the supervision of the newly responsible employer-class. Freshly recycled and spiritualized capitalists will take on the duties of a true aristocracy. Like the original conquerors who came over with William of Normandy in 1066, they will set to work with the materials at hand and build a stable order. They will organize (not reject) production and distribution in the machine age for the benefit of workers and themselves. In sum, they will lead Britain as no other class presently in it can, and thereby provide an answer to the ‘sphinx riddle” of just relations between human beings. That is Carlyle’s answer to what we generally call the Condition of England Question.

Finally, it might be argued with justice (and was so argued by Marx and Engels) that this solution requires the great capitalists to do something that isn’t in their interest: why should they do anything but what fills their coffers with more capital to invest? In sum, it might be said that what Carlyle advocates goes against the operation of a market economy, wherein employers takes on workers for as little as they can pay them, and gets them to do as much “surplus labor” as possible to generate capital. The system itself is the most powerful disincentive to change—it benefits those who are already poised to benefit. What Carlyle is arguing against is, quite simply, the brutal fact that a “system” (economic, social, micro or macro) can function robustly for a long time even though the mass of people who make it work don’t benefit from its continuance. And there is nothing within the system itself that tells they winners they should care about this ugly fact—the will towards a moral “fix” has to come from beyond the system, at least initially. Capitalism isn’t so much immoral as purely economic and amoral. It is entirely capable of solving the ancient problem of production, but when you assail it for not solving the equally ancient problem of distribution, it has nothing to say—that is no concern, properly speaking, of the economic system. Those who have money (congealed, abstract labor power, to borrow from Marx’s terminology) can buy all the things they want; those who have no money can starve unless someone (for religious or other extraneous moral reasons) decides to help them. That is what we call “private charity.” So long as capital keeps getting generated and commodities keep getting themselves produced and sold, the economy rolls along cheerfully—it doesn’t matter much whether one person buys 100 shirts or 100 people buy one shirt; in theory and to some extent in practice, the profits will be there for the taking. Those who are excluded from the magic circle of production, buying, and selling simply don’t count. But of course Carlyle understands that people usually do what is in their own selfish interests—especially when their utilitarian/market “philosophy” proclaims that they ought to do just that very thing. So how do you suppose he would respond to all this criticism of his suggestions? Do you find him anticipating such criticism in the chapters we have read from Past and Present?

Sartor Resartus Margin-Notes

1076. Regarding the portrait of Wordsworth, that poet’s glory or light faded into the light of common day; Carlyle writes that Wordsworth’s death was felt as the extinction of a public light. But this failure highlights Carlyle’s own problem – how to build and maintain his authority as a sage. How can he reintroduce spirit into the Victorian age? One might say that Wordsworth and Coleridge did not succeed permanently in their quest to do so for their own age. Or at least that what worked for them will no longer work today.

1078. “Have we not seen him disappointed…?” Such references point to the storm and stress movement in German literature, and in particular to Goethe’s book the sorrows of young Werther.immediately below, the author refers to Teufelsdröckh’s loss of faith, and then Deism comes in for criticism.

1079. “Foolish Word-monger….” Materialism and logic churn out false belief and offer false happiness. Carlyle and Teufelsdröckh oppose Jeremy Bentham’s radical utilitarian movement. Towards the bottom of the page, the narrator says that even doubt leads to God.

1080. “His heaven-written Law still stood legible and sacred there.” Quack muttering from a quack prophet – this will be a consistent theme. “Our Works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments.” Know what you can work at, says Teufelsdröckh. Work is of course a key concept in Continental philosophy, especially in Hegel and Marx. Perhaps Carlyle would agree with Oscar Wilde at least in saying that only shallow people know themselves, although Oscar Wilde would never posit work as the answer to this problem. “A feeble unit in the middle of the threatening Infinitude, I seemed to have nothing given me but eyes, whereby to discern my own wretchedness.” Teufelsdröckh is spinning his wheels on speculation not directed towards any object. He is an alienated intellectual. The steam engine universe threatens to run him down.

1081. “To me the Universe was all void of Life… it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.” This is a key passage. Materialism and logic lead to atheism, and Teufelsdröckh wrestles with spirituality and the meaning of spiritual language. He dramatizes the problem of materialism for us, providing distance from the raw emotion of his encounter with it somewhat as Wordsworth distances us from raw emotion by means of metrical verse. As for Carlyle’s style generally, he puts us in absurd situations, confronting us with the ugliness and cynicism wrought by unbelief and by the need to survive and render intelligible new environments.

1082. On this page, Teufelsdröckh is said to confront freedom and the casting out of Byron-Devils. Notice the mockery of Parliament as well. “Despicable biped! What is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee?” Where does defiance come from? Teufelsdröckh asserts free will to defy death; he takes up a stance against death. “The Everlasting No… pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being….” At this point, Teufelsdröckh confronts the threat of unintelligibility and the possibility that he has no true source. He will arrive at his spiritual rebirth by casting out “legion,” to do which requires experience, the great spiritual doctor. And this is where we come to the center of indifference. “For the fire-baptized soul, long so scathed and thunder-riven, here feels its own Freedom….” The doctor needs an object, he needs direction. He must cast away his romantic vagueness and stop reveling in his own isolation and alienation. He must work through, in both senses, this romantic defiance of his. Carlyle acknowledges the need to adopt a romantic pose to go beyond romanticism. The impulse must be redirected. His spiritual labor’s object is the casting out of Byronic devils. They must be made to depart into everlasting fire, as the gospel would say. His feeling of freedom is what he calls a Baphometic fire-baptism. Romanticism will be construed as a movement and a moment in a much larger historical and philosophical context. But at this point standing puzzled between us and Teufelsdröckh and his romantics is the editor, who is just trying to make sense of it all.

1083. So Teufelsdröckh will seek experience – he will go to see the visible products of the past. But already the reader is being led to the necessary Mystery that will make life supportable. At the bottom of the page, Teufelsdröckh questions government and laws. But his point here is allied to the doctrine of natural supernaturalism – even such mundane things as governmental practice and legal codification have their source in mystery. The goal is to recover a sense of the eternal in the temporal and ephemeral, to spiritualize ordinary things.

1084. “Books. In which third truly, the last invented, lies a worth far surpassing that of the two others.” Books last and can continue to generate values. They offer us organic ties to the past. They are things woven, and retain the power to produce new thoughts, new suits of idea-clothes. Refer to John Milton’s claim that “a book is a living thing.” Then Teufelsdröckh moves on to discuss the significance of the battlefield, war.

1085. War, “from the very carcass of the Killer, [can] bring Life for the Living!” Teufelsdröckh offers a meditation on war and on the folly of passions about it. This page shows the influence of Hamlet’s ideas about the same subject. “Thus can the Professor, at least in lucid intervals, look away from his own sorrows….” At least he can look beyond himself now, can turn his gaze outward.

1086. “All kindreds of peoples and nations dashed together….” Teufelsdröckh wanders through the landscape, and recovers a sense of mystery in historical process by meditating on the revolution. He moves on to discuss the significance of history’s great men, Napoleon in particular. This page also shows the author coming to terms with the great upheaval stylistically.

1087. “Of Napoleon himself….” Napoleon is here described as an enthusiast of the very sort he criticizes Teufelsdröckh for being. Next the professor is off to the North Cape where he confronts a Russian smuggler. This passage is important for its style – Carlyle combines the sublime and the ridiculous in his representation of the northern landscape. It is a romantic symbol for regression into self-consciousness, with the ice reflecting itself to itself. But Teufelsdröckh is not allowed to remain in this place for long. The Russian smuggler brings him back to earth again, and in doing so he typifies Carlyle’s method.

1088. “How prospered the inner man of Teufelsdröckh under so much outward shifting?” It is time to cast out legion, or the Satanic school of romanticism. This will bring the professor to the Center of Indifference. He muses much like Hamlet about humanity’s pretensions.

1089. “[W]hat is this paltry little Dog-cage of an Earth….? The professor is still isolated and apathetic; he has merely passed through his objects of exploration. It is time to apply himself directly to an object – labor is central to Carlyle as it was to Hegel and will later be to Marx. We produce ourselves and find freedom and meaning in work.

“Temptations in the Wilderness!” And “Our Life is compassed round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life no other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force….” These pages prepare the way to the everlasting yea with preliminary definitions and injunctions. Here the injunction is to work in well doing. Once asserted, free will must turn itself towards work. For Carlyle, that seems to be what replaces God. But the basic point is one made by moral conservatives in many ages. Here is what Pope John Paul II said in 1979--”Nowadays it is sometimes held, though wrongly, that freedom is an end in itself, that each human being is free when he makes use of freedom as he wishes, and that this must be our aim in the lives of individuals and societies,” he wrote in 1979. “In reality, freedom is a great gift only when we know how to use it consciously for everything that is our true good.”

1090. “So that, for Teufelsdröckh also, there has been a ‘glorious revolution’.” In the middle of the page, the narrator or editor breaks in to end the professor’s over-reaching. Self-annihilation is announced as the first necessary accomplishment. The professor has now achieved it.

1091. The editor says that in Teufelsdröckh, “there is always the strangest Dualism….” That is a good description of Carlyle’s prose style. First the professor responds to nature, and then to his fellow human beings. “Nature! -- or what is Nature? Ha! Why do I not name thee God? Art not thou for ‘Living Garment of God’?” Here the editor describes Teufelsdröckh applying the metaphor of clothing to nature. And then comes an important moment: “The Universe is not dead and demoniacal….” This universe is Teufelsdröckh’s source and connection to others. Everyone is a wanderer like him, so he serves as a model.

1092. “Man’s Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness....” Carlyle uses the example of the common shoe black to illustrate the problem of desire: and the problem is that desire is infinite; it is based upon perpetual lack. I like the sentence “Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.”

1093. “The Fraction of Life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your Numerator as by lessening your Denominator.” If you set the denominator to zero, anything will yield infinity. On the same page, the doctor says “Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.” Do away with excess, and devote yourself to balance and calm. The key to life is not the pursuit of happiness -- renunciation is the key. Carlyle dismisses the utilitarian happiness principle. Carlyle insists that there is something “godlike” in humanity -- it is not something that the pursuit of happiness will bring out. The everlasting yea is “Love not Pleasure; love God.” The point is to walk and work in this kind of love.

1094. What does Dr. Teufelsdröckh need to do? The answer lies in his own statement, “Wilt thou help us to embody the divine Spirit of that Religion in a new Mythus, in a new vehicle and vesture, that our Souls, otherwise too like perishing, may live?” This will be his task as a philosopher and writer. The metaphor of clothing appears in this formulation – words spin new systems of thought and institutions.

1095. “America is here or nowhere.” The ideal resides within yourself. The doctor must produce a world from his own inner chaos. Carlyle reshapes the romantic conception of self so that the point is not infinite removal into isolated, alienated self-consciousness but instead to realize one’s divinity through work of whatever kind. Spirit must inform, give shape to, what the doctor calls the “condition” (by which he means material matter and circumstance). “Been no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce!” Extra: Carlyle is trying to align or balance the self-cultivating humanist side of himself with the one that is always thundering about the need for work. Carlyle’s gospel of work sounds like promotion of self-annihilation, but a lot of Sartor Resartus is about how his eccentric German Professor develops spiritually and intellectually. He comes to realize that “America is here or nowhere,” meaning that the Ideal (freedom, self-perfection, progress) is inside our own spirit, and we first need to understand that before we can actualize the ideal. (Romantic premise: spirit must move through matter to realize itself fully; and as Hegel would say, you only realize your individuality fully in the context of society--you can’t do it “all by yourself.”) The Everlasting Yea is to love God rather than pleasure: first put an end to stormy posing (like Byron’s Manfred on the Jungfrau mountaintop, above everything and everyone else, sublimely alone, alienated, dissatisfied), realize that your ideal or “America” is right at home, and then direct your actions to the world so you can actualize your ideal, make it real. So the task is to get priorities straight and plan to make life worth something. Carlyle is a Scottish man of letters making his way into the world of English literature and hoping to make a living. He has to work, too--only as a writer. But write what? And what good will it do? What’s the point of foisting a strange autobiography/biography like Sartor Resartus on thousands of English “blockheads”? This page is capped by a call to order and production-- work.

1096. Natural supernaturalism is Carlyle’s version of transcendental philosophy. I remember Henry David Thoreau’s sentence, “Time is but the stream I go fishing in.” time and space clothe the absolutes towards which the Professor has been striving. But now “the interior celestial Holy of Holies lies disclosed.” What is a miracle? That is the question the Professor must answer.

1097. The Professor quotes David Hume on miracles – they are “a violation of the laws of nature.” Well then, asks the Professor, “What are the Laws of Nature?” As for science, he has this to say: “These scientific individuals have been nowhere but where we also are; have seen some hand-breadths deeper than we see into the Deep that is infinite, without bottom as without shore.” Carlyle does not dismiss science, but puts it in its place surrounded by the framework of natural supernaturalism.

1098. “To the Minnow every cranny and pebble, and quality and accident, of its little native Creek may have become familiar: but does the Minnow understand the Ocean Tides and periodic Currents, the Tradewinds, and Monsoons …? Such a minnow is Man….” We are encompassed by something greater than ourselves, and our creek is earth and our own customs that limit our vision. The Professor says that custom tricks us, “persuading us that the Miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be Miraculous. True, it is by this means we live; for man must work as well as wonder….” This thought is similar to ones you can find in romantic treatises – custom is the film of familiarity, etc. Carlyle accuses philosophy – or at least utilitarian philosophy – of lowering itself to the level of vulgar materiality and of carrying blind habit even into the sphere of philosophy. The aim of philosophy is, as Walter Pater will later write, “to startle and quicken” our sensibilities and perceptions (1643). It should denaturalize our perceptions and make us perceive the world as a continual miracle. Philosophy should oppose whatever we have rendered natural and ceased to perceive accurately. In this way, I would add, philosophy allies itself with the concept of artifice, not nature. At least strategically, Carlyle as a Victorian sage accepts the division between life and art and philosophy. Philosophy should provide us with a radically altered vision that will allow us to return to life without being crushed by it and turned into machines. This thought is similar to the way Immanuel Kant and his followers resist allowing us to become enslaved to the concept of nature. For Carlyle, perspective, attitude, stance are central – he aligns his prose with strong acts of will.

1099. Language is like space and time in its ability to serve as a garment covering the celestial dimension. Space and time, Kant’s categories, are ultimately illusions. Memory and hope answer that the past is not annihilated and the future not a wisp of air. Memory and hope are mystic faculties connecting us to the past and stretching us towards the future. They weave continuity and meaning. Carlyle sets up these faculties as means of opposing the appearances time, space, and even language. To achieve the goal of belonging, we must accept the task of building connections to what we posit as transcendent. Carlyle resembles Nietzsche at least in his determination not to be overwhelmed by even the most destructive kinds of knowledge – but of course their way of maintaining perspective differs radically.

1100. The Professor insists that “only the Time-shadows have perished, or are perishable; that the real Being of whatever was, and whatever is, and whatever will be, is even now and forever… believe it thou must; understand it thou canst not.” This is an important passage for understanding Carlyle’s strategy – he simply asserts that there is a fundamental truth, that there is a spiritual or metaphysical dimension. He asserts the power of mystery as necessary for human life, and makes the assertion in biblical cadence. He reiterates that properly understood, even the ordinary is miraculous: “the true inexplicable God-revealing Miracle lies in this, that I can stretch forth my hand at all; that I have free Force to clutch aught therewith….” So even voluntary movement is a miracle.

1101. Christ goes in many directions for Victorian authors -- here he is like Orpheus working wonders, and Carlyle asserts the power of human will and labor over nature. Oscar Wilde says that Christ is the most perfect individual. Art is individualism, and individualism is “a disturbing and disintegrating force.” In the middle of the page, Teufelsdröckh says that “Nature, which is the Time- vesture of God, and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him from the foolish.” This is another passage in which reorienting perspective is central. Properly understood, we are spirits, Geist. “Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance, and that fade away again into air and Invisibility?” This passage is self-consciously romantic: seeing the eternal in and through the temporal, realizing the intensity of the moment and the immensity of “here.” Yet, Carlyle also captures the wistfulness of our feelings about such mysteries.

1102. Again Carlyle makes Teufelsdröckh assert that we are ghosts, spirits. The body is the clothing of the soul. At the end of this selection, comment on Carlyle as a Victorian sage. How do his assertions differ from earlier, romantic assertions? They have been unwoven and remade in a very open manner. Carlyle lets the audience in on how the transcendental sausage is made. That emphasis on the process of manufacturing transcendental ideals suits the journalistic nature of the times. Moreover, Carlyle rejects excessive emphasis on self and imagination. His path as an individual is self-annihilation, and work is the collective social solution to England’s problems. The world is already miraculous -- the first priority is to realize that fact.

Notes on John Henry Newman

will add when time permits....

Weeks 06-07, Austen

2006-03-09T15:21:00.000-08:00

Notes on Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion

Historical Note: the Regency Period lasted from 1810-20, with the Prince Regent becoming George IV upon his father George III’s death in 1820; he reigned until 1830, when William IV became king, and then comes Victoria in 1837.

The late Georgian period that marked Austen’s life (1775-1817) emphasized elegance in language, dress, and manners, but it was a period of revolutionary tumult on the Continent and of looming changes in British life-patterns stemming from the Industrial Revolution, which begins to take shape around 1780. Not everyone in England had a chance to realize the era’s ideal of gentrified elegance. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were marked by economic hardship and displacement for many ordinary people, and the signs of the times could be ominous: the “Peterloo Massacre” against working people that Carlyle reflects upon in 1843’s Past and Present occurred in 1819—workers were becoming dangerously self-aware of their class status and power, and England’s rulers began to fear that there would indeed be (as Carlyle later put it) “precisely as many revolutions as are necessary.” But Jane Austen is no working-class radical; her real-life world and the world of her novels revolve around intricate social rules (written or unwritten) and complex negotiations between men and women of respectable standing. Still, Austen doesn’t promote dull conformity to social norms just for the sake of “fitting in.” She is capable of examining her social system’s claims on individuals and couples as a detached observer—at least to the extent that anyone can be such. Her ability to reaffirm that system without simply propagating its most tendentious claims, in my view, puts her on a level with Shakespeare the royalist and bourgeois whose drama nonetheless cuts through a great deal of ideological hype. Moreover, while she is capable of describing a knave, she seems to be at her best when dealing with fine distinctions between characters who would strike less refined eyes as entirely good or entirely bad, and with customs that require a similarly refined examination.

While Austen, who died of Addison’s disease at 41 without having married, concentrates intently on courtship, marriage, and family relations in her novels, it would not be out of order to suggest that she has a touch of the feminist about her in an age that we, as inheritors of a long critical tradition, remember mainly for its male romantic poets. Austen is not a political revolutionary like her older contemporary Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Nonetheless, her views on men’s distaste for crediting women’s potential and accomplishments bear some similarity to Wollstonecraft’s. Anne Elliot’s pronouncement in Book 2, Chapter 11 of Persuasion that “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story” (188) is not the remark of an author who accepted the age’s more reductive claims about the relative value of men and women. Taking that idea somewhat further would yield Wollstonecraft’s or, later, Simone de Beauvoir’s, point that if it is hard to know exactly what women can do, that is because men have never really given them a chance to find out. To use de Beauvoir’s existentialist terms, men have always kept for themselves the status of authentic agents in the world, jealously guarding the right to prove themselves by physical and intellectual activity, while women have been assigned the status of the “inessential other” who exists as a necessary facilitator of male authenticity.

The Development of the Novel. The role of women such as Jane Austen in shaping the novel as a distinctive modern genre out of their immediate domestic milieu is itself an interesting story, and it is an instance of the kind of accomplishment that so many men have denied was desirable or even possible for women. Virginia Woolf’s treatise A Room of One’s Own makes this point at length, so I’ll just refer readers to it here. (It’s in the Norton Anthology, Vol. 2C.) The novel is an ancient literary form, if by “novel” we just mean “a long fictitious narrative of some complexity.” The Golden Ass of Apuleius or the Leucippe and Clitophon of Achilles Tatius would qualify as novels by that definition. But for the most part, we tend to deal with the genre as one that developed in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the first instances being Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Aphra Behn’s Oronooko, and thence to the great eighteenth-century rivals Richardson and Fielding.

With regard to the modern novel’s origins, the central opposition between romance and the novel is worth noting: the romance genre had been around throughout the medieval period, and it deals with chivalric knights carrying out quests for their ladies and the true religion. The Arthurian legends by authors such as Chrétien de Troyes and Thomas Malory are fine examples. There is also Cervantes’ ironic treatment of the romance genre in Don Quixote and Spenser’s use of it to immortalize Queen Elizabeth in The Faerie Queene. One characteristic of romance is that it is filled with the dilemmas proper to an entirely ethical universe—it matters very little where characters such as Spenser’s Red Crosse Knight are with respect to any particular locality—they can be in a mythologized or make-believe place with strong characteristics, in a never-never fairy-land only vaguely delineated, or somewhere in between—but it matters a great deal what choices they make and what actions they undertake. As the romantic-era satirist Thomas Love Peacock says in “The Four Ages of Poetry,” the Elizabethan dramatists (still fond of romance plots) used period and place merely because they couldn’t dispense with them altogether—because, as Peacock puts it, “every action must have its when and where.”

The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British novel, by contrast, comes into play at a time we might call the “early modern era,” and its main characteristic is realism—that is, it purports to represent faithfully the characters and social environment of the real people who are buying novels and reading them. The genre seems to have begun flourishing thanks to an increase in literacy and leisure amongst the increasingly powerful, though not necessarily ascendant, commercial or middle class in England. It is a kind of literature that could only succeed where the average reasonably comfortable individual’s sensibilities and moral assumptions are widely understood to carry weight, and where this class wants to see its operative assumptions mirrored back to it in works of art. Richardson’s heroines Clarissa and Pamela aren’t princesses or religious anchorites; they are ordinary “bourgeois” individuals. And that sort of person is beginning to matter, even if it won’t be until the mid-nineteenth century that they control the British government. The dilemmas of characters in many novels turn upon interrelated ethical, monetary, and class-based situations—for example, Richardson’s Pamela must worry about maintaining her honor in a world that seems always to be threatening the notion of chastity upon which it depends. And a male character is apt to face challenges to his respectability, his standing in the community. (The servant classes bring to mind fears of downward mobility—perhaps that is why they are sometimes treated with ambivalence by narrator and characters alike.) The bourgeois individual displays strong characteristics, but the concept itself is fragile—the modern individual is defined by threats even as he or she is proclaimed to be the center of the universe.

Jane Austen’s Emphasis. Austen gives us a variation on the emphasis I have described. She deals not so much with people who are “just like” the common early nineteenth-century urban reader, but instead with those a rung or two above them on the social ladder. Vivien Jones, author of the Oxford edition of Persuasion's Appendix B (214-17), describes Austen’s focus clearly: she doesn’t deal much with the greater landed gentry, but is instead “interested in the types of people who lived more precariously on the margins of the gentry proper, but whose connections, education, or role in the community gave them the right . . . to ‘mix in the best society of the neighbourhood’” (214). These individuals aren’t exactly great lords and ladies—they are on the outer edge of the gentry proper, and have to take up some stance or other towards that more privileged and stable inner group.

Jane Austen is too civil (and too respectful of the duties owed to a family patriarch) to condemn any of her patriarchs in the various novels. Still, these inheritors and carriers-on of the primogeniture system aren’t always paragons of masculinity; sometimes, as with the father of Emma Woodhouse in Emma, they are pleasantly ineffectual, while at other times, they are unpleasantly ineffectual, as is Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion. Then there is Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park, who is consequential enough, and neither all menace nor all kindness—he’s somewhere in between. I think the same might be said of Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice.

The romantic period and the Regency (1810-20) coincide, but most of the people who fit in with either term didn’t keep the same company. It strikes me that Jane Austen is interestingly “in the middle” here. One of the things romanticism reacts against is Regency high society’s emphasis on etiquette, lineage, and all the finely polished surfaces of life. Jane Austen doesn’t reject these things and is, strictly, no romantic. (In Persuasion, we can see from her representation of the romantic poets as the textual companions of the melancholy Captain Benwick that she thinks of them more or less as a “school,” the way we do, and that she is somewhat amused by the vogue of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron.) The finer things in life have their charm for Austen, but when taken too earnestly, they make for a brittle and heartless outlook on life. Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion is a parody, but a parody only makes sense if there’s something out there in the real world –a style, or a particular set of people—that readers recognize as genuine. And so he might well be understood as a vehicle for implicit criticism of a certain tendency towards hollowness and empty formalism in Regency values. Austen’s indirect criticism is a far cry from Carlylean thundering against “game-preserving dukes” and “sham aristocracy,” but it is criticism nonetheless. In Pride and Prejudice, again, she offers some pointed criticism of Mr. Bennet in the words of his daughter Elizabeth – in Vol. II, Chapter 19, the narrator says that “Elizabeth, however, had never been blind to the impropriety of her father's behaviour as a husband. She had always seen it with pain; but respecting his abilities, and grateful for his affectionate treatment of herself, she endeavoured to forget what she could not overlook, and to banish from her thoughts that continual breach of conjugal obligation and decorum which, in exposing his wife to the contempt of her own children, was so highly reprehensible.”

If Austen were around today, she would probably write sagely about the difference between people who choose their car, their mate, their neighborhood, their job, and their pets with concern for nothing but the opinions of like-mindedly snobbish people, and those who have a keen sense that while the fine things in life are indeed very fine, they should not be conflated with morality or human worth. She sets forth a rather gentrified version of the New Testament’s wisdom that “there where you heart is, will be your treasure” (Matthew 6:21). The good things in life matter, but how much you think they matter says a world about you—it’s a matter of degree. That this question of degree is partly decided for us by forces beyond our control is obvious—consider how Sir Walter must have grown up to be as oblivious as he is to any deeper concerns for the value of humanity; he is the product of an entire class, not a willful and perverse individual. Anne Elliot in Persuasion, as well, is shaped by her upbringing. Her early disadvantage in life isn’t (as it is for Fanny Price in Mansfield Park) a matter of coming from an impoverished family, but is rather the result of her heartless father’s incapacity to appreciate anyone of genuine merit. Because she is superior, Anne is treated as an “insignificant other” in her family circle—a situation that has produced a remarkably sensitive and wise individual, whose response to the challenge for mutual “persuasion” between herself and an equally remarkable former suitor it is Austen’s task to set before us and examine.

Austen as Psychologist. I find Adela Pinch an excellent critic of Jane Austen’s work, and in particular I like what she has to say about that author’s ability to render the “contents” of a person’s head without demanding—or even wanting—us to accept the character’s viewpoint as the simple truth. As Pinch says, even a direct quotation by a character is no guarantee that we are getting the unvarnished truth or the purely accurate perception; instead, we are being invited to examine the thought process involved and the statements made. Austen is interested in the intricacies of what we call personal identity. This is a genetic concern that allies her with the male romantics, no doubt, but the milieu within which she explores subjectivity formation and perpetuation gives a different flavor to her work than we find in, say, Shelley or Wordsworth. A heroine like Anne Elliot in Persuasion, or Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, or Fanny Price in Mansfield Park isn’t formed by the mountains and lakes as Wordsworth is in The Prelude, and she isn’t a self-absorbed, wistful philosopher as the Coleridgean poet-figure tends to be. Neither do we get the sense of that ineffable pre-existent and pre-linguistic “self” we can derive from a poem like Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality.” I can’t imagine Jane Austen spinning a fiction around the notion that “trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home.” Instead, for Austen, while there may be some nameless, pre-existing core of identity that we call a “self,” her emphasis is on her characters’ ceaseless interaction with their environment and with other characters. This need not mean that the person who develops out of this process isn’t strong—Anne in Persuasion is one of Austen’s most sympathetic and moving characters; as Deidre Shauna Lynch writes in her introduction to Persuasion, Anne is a rare kind of heroine in that she is not a foolish young lady who has much growing up to do, but a relatively mature woman who must come to terms with her own past in order to move forward with her life. She seems wise beyond her years, and much of her strength seems to come from having been forced to deal with people who have no idea of her real value. You may be special, but you can’t really escape what others think you are—especially if, as in the Regency milieu of Austen’s novels, you are largely dependent on those people for social and economic support. We notice that Anne continues to treat her flawed relatives with some regard even when a person of less maturity would kick them in their polished teeth. What we have in Persuasion, finally, is a slow, patient love story about two quiet, remarkable, reticent individuals: Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliot. They must reaffirm, if not really rediscover, the worth they saw in each other eight years ago, and reaffirm their “elective affinity” amongst so many one-dimensional herd animals or otherwise misguided people. The methods of “persuasion” involved in this victory for true companionship are fascinating to trace, and they don’t always, or even usually, have to do with outright words and deeds. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy must work through their own strong combinations of the title's two “qualities,” and it might be said that it is these very flaws that draw them together and allow them to overcome the more destructive aspects of both “pride” and “prejudice.”

Austen is always concerned with the intricacies of relations between the sexes, both before and within the institutional sanction of marriage. If any certainty is to emerge for the various novels' lovers, it will have to be wrought from the slippery “pseudo-gentry” environment in which they find themselves. The courtship process, if successful, results in an accord between them that essentially balances the tensions of this world—at least with regard to the characters around them whom they cannot avoid for long—and filters out what isn’t essential to their understanding with each other. On both the personal, familial level and on the larger collective, social level, Austen’s point is not to condemn people or the system, but to put all necessary factors in perspective. In Persuasion, Anne and Captain Wentworth must maneuver into a position where they can choose each other in their own right, persuade each other of their compatibility and mutual value. In doing this, they perform the Austen alchemy of transmuting the term “value” from its economic and class connotations into its more genuine sense rooted in fundamental human worth. How does one person come to know the value of another? What is balance between intellect and emotion in arriving at this estimation? In Shakespeare’s terms from The Merchant of Venice, “where is fancy bred, or in the heart, or in the head?” And at the societal level, what would it take to arrive justly at such a social order as we find in Regency England, with its fine manners and insistence on “fitness” in all things? There’s no evading the difficult attempt to supplement custom, rank, and easy grace with merit.

Week 05, Shelley and Keats

2006-03-02T15:20:00.000-08:00

Notes on Percy Bysshe Shelley

“A Defence of Poetry”

Shelley writes as the Vishnu and Shiva of romantic theory—he both preserves (Vishnu’s role) and destroys (Shiva’s role); he writes exquisite poetry and prose in the “romantic optative mode”—you can find in his poetry strong statements about poetry’s power to transform the individual and the world, a very high estimation of imagination and expression, and the great claims for the poet-priest-prophet who imagines and expresses more fully than ordinary people. Like Blake (and unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Keats), Shelley is a poet of the apocalyptic strain. And again like Blake, whom he apparently never met, Shelley is a prophet of Old Testament dimensions—he doesn’t so much offer predictions of things to come as express “firm persuasions” about matters both public and private. But at the same time, Shelley’s poetry and prose betray honest doubt, even anxiety, about his most optimistic ideas. His is often a poetics of isolation, alienation, and dark thoughts about what may be the incommensurability of words, spirit, and the world. So by way of helping us read the poetry, I will offer some thoughts about Shelley’s theories of inspiration, expression, and poetic prophecy as a means of individual and social renewal.

Wind Harps, Ocean Tracks and Fading Coals: Inspiration and Expression. Like many romantic poets, Shelley uses the Aeolian lyre or wind harp as a metaphor of poetic inspiration. In “A Defence of Poetry,” he writes, Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody. But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody, alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them (Norton 2A 7th ed. 790).

Lyres (and chimes) make lovely music, but it is a random effect. Of course, the randomness of such music is part of its charm (as in Coleridge’s “The Aolian Harp,” which I believe uses the lyre metaphor to refer to what STC calls “primary imagination”). But from sentient and particularly from self-conscious beings, we expect something more than this mechanical music. The imagination, explains Shelley, has the power to harmonize what is outside us with our mental and spiritual operations. So when the speaker of “Ode to the West Wind,” prays to the Wind (named Favonius in Roman mythology) to “make me thy lyre,” he asks not to be turned into an inanimate instrument over which the wind may play, but a living instrument that responds from within to what has been given from without. Shelley’s lyre metaphor amounts to philosophical idealism: whatever the nature of the external realm, the important thing is that we do something vital and creative with the sensations and impressions given to us: the mind makes not just melody, as it were, but harmony—something both beautiful and intelligible, something orderly and spiritual.

Perhaps this relation between the external realm of sensation and the inner world of imaginative process is all Shelley means to address with his metaphor. But at the same time, a metaphor that figures the mind as a living instrument over which the wind plays brings up the issue of spirit. As Shelley knew, wind has long been metaphor used to invoke the divine breath and actions of gods, not just “sensations from the external world.” So to bring up such a metaphor is to invoke the question of exactly what the ultimate source of poetic inspiration might be. Perhaps it’s best to suggest that Shelley—a man who once signed his name Atheos (godless or atheist)—leaves the question open-ended, especially if we consider his poetry and prose together. For example, I like Harold Bloom’s early borrowing from the theologian Martin Buber’s book I and Thou to explain “Ode to the West Wind”: Shelley, with his desire to become the Wind’s instrument, really wants an I/Thou relationship that implies reciprocity even as it acknowledges the necessity of death for the individual consciousness and its inspired expressions. Shelley’s poet-speaker does not want to become a mere “it,” a thing for the Wind to experience rather than relate to as a living being with his own “spiritus” (breath). When Shelley writes in “Defence” that “Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man” (799 bottom), it would seem that by “the divinity in man” he means “that within us which is divine” and not “visitations of spiritual exaltation from some external source, call it God or what you will.” But we should remember that claiming “all deities reside in the human breast” (as the narrator does in Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) risks collapse into solipsism or narcissism. And so our romantic authors—both in their poetry and their prose—are constantly generating strategies and language to image forth the workings of inner imaginative process, externalizing them as mythic figures, divine winds, and so forth, lest imagination itself become as a god and play the tyrant over us.

That Shelley is open to the dark side of his lyre metaphor is obvious from one of his finest early poems, “Mutability,” itself perhaps drawing upon Spencer’s pathos-filled Mutabilitie Cantos of The Faerie Queene. In “Mutability,” the lyre metaphor refers not to the glorious way we make music of the world but rather to the way that world tosses us about until we perish, ever unsatisfied and finding no stability: the second stanza describes human beings as “like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings / Give various response to each varying blast, / To whose frail frame no second motion brings / One mood or modulation like the last.”

Let’s move on to the metaphor of the fading coal Shelley employs to discuss the difficulties of poetic composition, or the creative process. He writes, “Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, ‘I will compose poetry.’ The greatest poet even cannot say it: for the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness: this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet. (798-99)

The central claim of this passage is that by the time the poet begins composing—which to the romantics usually means “in one’s head, before writing it down”—the inspiration has already begun to fade. The passage has a certain elegiac quality—it is not pleasant, I suppose, for a poet to admit that his original state of inspiration from within is “always already” in decline and that he can never, therefore, capture the inspiration in its entirety even for himself, much less convey it in full force to somebody else. As a theory of inspiration, this is a far cry from Plato’s Ion. In that dialogue, Socrates uses the metaphor of the magnetic Stone of Heraklea to suggest that poets receive their verses directly from the gods and then transmit their inspiration directly into listeners’ souls. This lack of directness in Shelley’s poetics is a troubling matter since, after all, any good romantic poet wants poetry to be as dangerous as Socrates considers Homer’s epics—the highest goal of romantic poetry is to transform the human spirit and, if possible, to change the way people relate to one another at the collective political and social level.

I don’t think Shelley would admit that his passage is an occasion for despair. He sometimes writes in a defiantly Satanic mode, and Milton’s Satan—if we misread him sympathetically enough—draws considerable strength from an assertion of personal autonomy and high aspirations even in the face of impossible constraint. One of Milton’s strongest descriptions of Satan in Paradise Lost may remind us of Shelley’s “fading coal” metaphor: “his form had yet not lost / All her Original brightness, nor appear’d / Less then Arch Angel ruind, and th’ excess / Of Glory obscur’d: As when the Sun new ris’n / Looks through the Horizontal misty Air…” (1.591-95, 1667 edition). Perhaps we are to understand that the poet’s mind, at the point of composition, has something of its own “excess of glory obscured.” In any case, the “fading coal” passage retains some elegiac sadness. We are led to contemplate just how frail is the power of one poet’s best efforts in the face of the limitations on conceiving and transmitting inspired states. And these limitations, in turn, can’t help but remind us of the loss of purity entailed in Adam and Eve’s fall from grace—I think it is true that romantic poetics is haunted by the loss of understanding and expressive power entailed in the Christian theory of “fallen man.”

What is a Poet? Shelley’s third inspiration metaphor follows soon after the “fading coal” passage, and it transitions us to his definition of the poet and poetry:

It [poetry or poetic inspiration] is as it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over a sea, where the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire. (799)

This is an interesting statement since, as Shelley has already written, the power to which he refers arises from within. Here, the trace left behind by the working of inspiration is subtle, like the sand-patterns that result from the shifting currents of water in response to surface winds. These are hidden from the light of day and from analysis—as Shelley says, we cannot command ourselves to write poetry; inspiration comes when it will and art does not have its source in conscious thought. A poet is a person “with the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination.” But given the elegiac and otherwise complex metaphors Shelley has used to describe inspiration, we may wonder how certain he is that a poet’s words will be sufficiently inspiring to move others and change the world. This is something to keep in mind while you read his poetry—Shelley’s poetry (like that of other British romantics) is often about poetry and its effects; to use a theoretical term, it is “metapoetic.” In the early stages of human society, it seems, there was no such doubt about the importance of artists and their work. Here is one of Shelley’s main statements about the development of poetry:

In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate natural objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a certain rhythm or order. . . . Those in whom . . . [the faculty of approximation to the beautiful] exists in excess are poets, in the most universal sense of the word; and the pleasure resulting from the manner in which they express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of reduplication from that community. Their language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things, and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become through time signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse. . . . In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word the good which exists in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression. Every original language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem… (791-92).

In the passage above, Shelley transforms mimetic commentary of the sort we can find in Aristotle’s Poetics—as when the ancient philosopher says people learn their earliest lessons by imitating the sights, actions, and sounds around them—into an expressive theory of art. Poets “express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds” in a way that pleases their fellows. But above all, Shelley’s passage describes a cyclical tendency in human language to move from initial closeness to certain primal feelings and experiences towards ever greater abstraction. In sum, we become more comfortable with broad concepts than with the instability and dynamism that comes from being too close to things in the natural world or to primal consciousness. Shelley is by no means alone in formulating this kind of vitalistic conception of primitive language—it was common in the 19th century. Poets bring us back to this more vital kind of language—the kind that can “mark…the before unapprehended relations of things,” and they can reawaken us to the dangers of our fondness for abstraction. The process Shelley describes is necessary, but has unfortunate consequences at both the individual and collective levels.

We have seen this claim in Wordsworth and Coleridge, and now we see it in Shelley: the poet can “make it new.” The vitality of language, if we can recover at least some portion of it through imaginative acts, should prevent us from plastering over the continuous miracles of humanity and nature for the benefit of the power-hungry, the comfortable, and all who have no higher desire than to get by. This is no idle connection I am drawing from Shelley’s passage: there is a deep connection, much explored in the 20th century, between language and power—most particularly the abuse of power. Read Orwell’s 1984 for a distressing exploration of this problem: the express purpose of the Newspeak dictionary is to reduce the potential of language to express complex emotions and sophisticated, potentially subversive thoughts. What Orwell describes is different from the tendency towards abstract complexity Shelley and other romantics describe, but the result is similar: language becomes divorced from anything worthwhile in humanity, and becomes nothing more than an instrument. And if language is merely an instrument, so are the people who “use” it.

Shelley defines poetry, therefore,—at least in the infancy of human history—as a very broad phenomenon: primitive language is poetry; it involves an energetic thrust of the perceiving and feeling mind towards the world and other human beings. It is close to the vitality of nature and the human heart, to the deep bonds that tie human beings together and make them want to live together in a community. It is not as prone as our modern, sophisticated language is to alienate us from the truth we perceive. For early man, to be is to perceive, and to perceive is to feel and express. The early law-givers, the “founders of civil society,” etc.—these people all perceived the order of things and relations and were able directly to express this order, set it down, for the rest of their fellows. And when the setting down settles into stale codes perpetuating hierarchy and deadness to the world, it’s time for new artists, teachers, lawgivers. It is time for a new foundation.

But here we come to the problem. While the vitalistic conception of language I have described seems to be twinned with a cyclical conception of history—one that implies the perpetual availability of imaginative redemption—the modern artist is confronted with the linear march of bourgeois and industrial development. The romantics write near the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and witness the ascendancy of the middle class to social dominance. (Political dominance will come a generation or so later during the Victorian period). The romantic poet’s dilemma shows in Shelley’s famous comparison of the poet to an isolated songbird in the woods: “A Poet is a Nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the ability of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why” (795). It’s true that in this passage the bird has listeners, and that the primary meaning of the passage is to say that poets compose first and foremost for themselves, simply because they are moved to lyric utterance. But we can draw the implication as well that so far as the bird is concerned, it is singing to itself and is not even aware of the effects it has upon others. Shelley probably was not familiar with the work of Friedrich Schelling, but I am reminded of a passage from On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature in which Schelling refers to “the bird that, intoxicated with music, transcends itself in soullike tones” (Hazard Adams, Critical Theory since Plato, revised ed. San Diego: Harcourt, 1992. 459).

The comparison between romantic poet and bird is irresistible and revealing—it is perhaps the finest possible expression of artistic alienation and isolation. What makes it so revealing and attractive is that it is, in the deepest sense, false, as Shelley, author of “To a Skylark,” certainly understands. Unlike Schelling’s unselfconscious songbirds that can “bring about innumerable results far more excellent than themselves,” a human poet or singer is painfully aware, painfully self-conscious, and this self-consciousness brings with it a sense of the disjunction between conception, expression, and meaning (either to oneself or to others). The poet strives for the pure, unselfconscious expressive power, the one-to-one correspondence between heart and word, spirit and language, that a songbird has achieved without even trying. Human beings cannot achieve this kind of purity! The intelligent self-awareness we have makes us ask questions about being and meaning, and it is in the very nature of such questions to call for anything but satisfying, comforting answers. As John Stuart Mill later says in analyzing his spiritual troubles, “Ask yourself if you are happy, and you cease to be so.” (The same might be said of expression and meaning.) Self-consciousness is a great gift because it allows us to appreciate nature in a way that nature cannot and need not appreciate itself, but it is also a terrible curse that dooms us to perpetual deferral of any correspondence between expression and desire, between self and other. Shelley says it a lot better in “To a Sky-lark”:

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not—
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught—
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Yet if we could scorn
Hate and pride and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

Try listening to the beautiful music of a Nightingale or a Skylark—even in the pale form of an Internet audio clip (http://www.wildsong.demon.co.uk/LR/listening.html), and it is easy to agree with the pure romanticism of Shelley’s stanzas. Our poet-nightingale / skylark is a glorious failure in the human quest to transform the world with a song, and the inevitability of this failure prevents him from achieving even the initial goal of personal happiness. He must await the judgment of his peers, his fellow poets in times to come. This implies a paradox: the poet is isolated in his own time, but speaks for all humankind in all times. Wordsworth, you will recall, made somewhat gentler, but more immediate, claims about the universal and therapeutic value of poetry. Shelley, like Friedrich Schiller before him in Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, has here admitted the problem that we shall find Matthew Arnold exploring later in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” Namely, poetry, or culture more broadly, has great potential to improve and transform us, but when will it be able to do that? We can’t really say, and cynics will ask, “what good does it do to sing to yourself, or to perfect yourself, while the world suffers?” It’s always difficult to say, “don’t just do something, stand there.” That is a paradox that artists have struggled with at least since the end of the 18th century and on through the present. If you understand how deep this paradox is, you will find it everywhere in Shelley’s poetry.

790. The Aeolian lyre metaphor invokes the power of imagination. The power of harmonizing “external and internal impressions” comes from within. We are living instruments.

791. The language of the first poets is “vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things.” Shelley transforms the Aristotelian doctrine of art as imitation. Imitation itself becomes an expressive act—in a sense, Aristotle implied that, but Shelley makes it explicit. Poetic language cyclically revitalizes stale, abstract language.

792-93. Poets are broadly defined as the founders of civilization; they pattern the material realm after spiritual realization. The poet is beyond temporality and relativity.

793. Since the imagination produces language, language is the medium most free from material limitation. What about poetic meter? Well, it makes for “harmony” in which sound and sense are connected.

794-95. Narrative versus poetry. Poetry suits actions to universal human nature. It is not limited to individual expression—see page 795. Poetry un--distorts, overcomes time and fragmentation, the limits of ordinary language. (Compare to William Blake’s creative cauldrons of imagination.)

795. The poet is a Nightingale who sings to itself, but who also entrances human beings. We cannot judge a poet rashly—only time and peers should judge. Shelley acknowledges the difficult relation a poet has to his or her audience.

796-97. Poetry combines what seems to have been unconnected, lifts the veil of ordinariness from things, de-familiarizes and imaginatively re-creates and transforms what it represents. This is certainly no doctrine of imitation. Shelley believes in love and imagination as trans-subjective powers. He is not moralistic. (Refer to Thomas Carlyle’s clothing metaphor.)

797. Art offers the promise of the highest sustainable pleasure, and constitutes true utility—a term Shelley insistently redefines. But what is our melancholy “defect”—why is pleasure usually mixed?

798-99. Poetry “creates new materials of knowledge” and it aligns them with ideal beauty and goodness. Now more than ever we need its power to bring order and harmony. On poetic inspiration, contrast Shelley to Coleridge’s comments about secondary imagination. The metaphor of the fading coal implies that there is no direct communication of spiritual truth through words.

799. Poets are finely attuned, sensitive, and “delicate.” Poetry leaves a sand-trace of divinity from within. It is redemptive, and reminds us in successive waves of our own spiritual dimension.

800-01. Compare Shelley to Coleridge again—imagination unites otherwise “irreconcilable” things. I often use the reference to Wordsworth’s “Violet/star” comparison. A central statement: poetry strips away the film of familiarity, and does so whether it spreads its own curtain or removes the veil from the “scene of things.” Does that mean poetry gives us insight into ultimate reality? Poetry creates within us another being, and revives wonder at the universe as a continual miracle. (Thomas Carlyle later writes something similar in Sartor Resartus.)

“Ode to the West Wind”

Paragraph 1: The speaker personifies the wind and endows it with purpose. He prays to serve nature’s power and borrow from its permanence. The seasons (ancient vegetation myth) reveal a cycle beyond the individual and collective limits of humanity; winter prepares the way for spring, and sorrow prepares the way for joy, goes the assertion. The poem’s terza rima structure suits the impetuous subject matter and speaker. The point of this poem is to stir up and intensify passion, not so much to analyze a problem, although that happens, too.

Paragraph 2: The speaker links the landscape and the scyscape. The references to Bacchus drive home the speaker’s need to surrender his individual identity to the Wind’s power.

Paragraph 3: Earth, sky, sea, and fire—the elements sympathize with one another. Nature knows the Wind’s purpose and power, and “despoils itself.”

Paragraph 4: The speaker prays to become like the elements, and wants to act in harmony with the inspiriting wind. The poem, he admits, has been written from “sore need” and in a spirit of striving. He says he is too like the wind—why is that a problem?

Paragraph 5: The prayer works only if we see that the speaker wants to be a living instrument, that he prays for an “I/Thou” relationship with the wind. This relationship would be reciprocal, not passive and one-way. Inspiration and expression both carry death as their condition for effectiveness. The inspiration is always already fading, and the expression can’t equal even the inspiration. This is always the lurking reality in romantic authors’ use of the organic metaphor, and in fact even in its use by ancient authors: humans are born to die, or as Heidegger says, “Dasein” is constituted by “being towards death.” Prophets speak in hopes of spiritual regeneration for their people, but they speak only when their audience has become an abomination in the Lord’s sight. The optimism here isn’t, perhaps, owing to certainty that the message will get through in due time, but rather by the idea that the poet can at least be true to his own spiritual strivings, can become inspired and express these strivings. An interesting question: why will the sound in the forest become “Sweet though in sadness” (61)? The poem is so impetuous and oriented towards wildness that it’s surprising to see this elegiac note towards the end. Is this line analogous to Wordsworth’s and Arnold’s “still, sad music of humanity” that only the philosopher or poet can hear? Finally, the line “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” deserves attention: the poet is asserting his optimism for renewal in the bitter breath of late autumn. It is in fact going to be quite a while until spring follows autumn and then winter. There will be much death and destruction before the thaw.

Shelley’s poet strives to become one with the Wind. But we know that nature works on a vast scale of time, to which our “threescore and ten” is nothing. Wordsworth’s “correspondent breeze” implies a gentle kind of inspiration from nature. But Shelley’s source of inspiration is much less comforting—consider his references to the Wind and to the seasons. The spring can’t be far behind, but complicating this season-motif is its relation to the simultaneous “preserving” and “destroying” power of the gods Shiva and Vishnu. The Wind is both inspiriting and destructive—perhaps inseparably so. Moreover, Shelley “strives” with the West Wind in his sore need; he prays that the Wind will make him its lyre, and then even prays that it will become him. If you take on the power of the Wind as a poet, wouldn’t that mean you borrow the same dual power of preserver and destroyer in matters of the spirit and language? Poetic utterance is a troubled bearer of spirit. Shelley’s “dead-leaves” metaphor (like his “fading coal” and “sand-track” metaphors in the Defence) is at best ambivalent regarding the potential for transmitting one’s inspired feelings and thoughts to a reader or listener. Words, be they written or spoken, are only the markers of an absence—the decaying, crumbling material remains of something spiritual and whole. Yet, this medium is the only way to pass along inspiration from one soul to the next. Death is the condition of rebirth, both in organic nature and in the realm of poetic meaning and inspiration. Poetry bears the great burden of prophetic, revolutionary promise. The verses Shelley speaks are incantations—ritualized, sacred utterances meant to effect something magic in the human spirit. And yet they are ashes, sparks. They are the trumpet of a prophecy, not the prophecy itself—an image that only reintroduces the whole question of the relationship between message and medium. On Hindu mythology: “The triad of the great Hindu gods which proceeded from the world-egg deposited by the supreme First Cause: Brahma, the Creator; Vishnu, [male also] the Preserver; and Shiva, the Destroyer…. The third deity of the Hindu triad of great gods, the Trimurti. Shiva is called the Destroyer, but has also the aspect of regeneration. As destroyer he is dark and terrible, appearing as a naked ascetic accompanied by a train of hideous demons, encircled with serpents and necklaces of skulls. As auspicious and reproductive power, he is worshipped in the form of the Linga, or phallus. / Shiva is depicted as white, with a dark-blue throat, with several arms and three eyes. He carries a trident and rides a white bull. His consort is Parvati (Devi).”(www.pantheon.org/articles/s/shiva.html)

“To a Skylark”

Stanzas 1-6: The bird and its song are described as pure spirit. The song is direct, untroubled expression. The bird soars above sight into the blue empyrean (azure, in Shelley, is often a term implying “clarity” or “translucence”). It soars beyond the eye’s passive-making tyranny. We remember Wordsworth’s call for “an eye made quiet by the deep power of joy” so that we can “see into the life of things.” The bird seems to be a perfect union of body and soul; as such, it is a miracle in ordinary, a little bit of natural supernaturalism. When its song overflows heaven, this is the same thing that happens when, as Blake says, “one thought fills immensity” or the Highland Lass’s song in Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper” overflows the deep vale, provoking us to our own flights of imagination and bringing home to us that the imagination can go well beyond the limits of materiality.

Stanzas 7-12. So this series of similes (the romantic-era “like”) are bound to fail in describing the sky-lark. They are too much like analysis, which can only murder to dissect, or word-painting that puts up graven images in place of ineffable Jehovah. The bird exceeds the power of language (even “poetic language”) to define it, so metaphor and simile must fail. At best, they amount to something like “negative theology,” where the point is to know God better by enumerating a great many things He is not. But imagination shouldn’t try to tame the excess or mystery of the natural world. As the Blake character says, “How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way is a world of delight closed to your senses five”? We can’t account for the bird’s effects on us. Refer to the poet-as-Nightingale simile in “A Defence of Poetry.” In lines 59-60, the bird’s clarity and joy sum up and exceed that of all nature; its song is the ultimate romantic music. As Walter Pater will say more than half a century later, “all art is constantly aspiring to the condition of music.” The birdsong’s beauty is not marred by any resistance from a material medium like wood or stone, or, for that matter, even the human burden placed on speech. Here art really has transcended itself and become more, even, than philosophy. One can only imagine what Hegel would say to that proposition!

Stanzas 13-20. Now the bird is asked to teach us the secret of its joy. What it unselfconsciously possesses is better than any human song or wisdom or institution (weddings, martial glory, poetic genres, etc.) So what is the source of this song? Well, if you have to ask, you’ll never know. And since you’re human, you have no choice but to make a question of it. As J.S. Mill later writes, “Ask yourself if you are happy, and you cease to be so.” The bird’s song doesn’t come from sad necessity (“sore need”), from self-consciousness, from “experience” in the human sense. Friedrich Schelling writes in “On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature” that the bird brings forth something more excellent that it knows, and I would add in romantic fashion, it brings forth something more excellent than it needs to know. Schelling’s point is mostly that humanity is higher than “bird-consciousness” because a human mind is needed to appreciate the beauty and excellence of the bird’s music. The self-positing human being (“I” see a tree – even such a simple act of perception requires us to posit a self that perceives, over against the thing or being that is perceived.) But even if we take Shelley’s poem as optimistic, I don’t think Schelling would carry him along on this point of elevating humanity above nature—at least not in the context of this particular poem. The emphasis seems rather to be on the fact that humanity is by its very nature riven with deep contradictions (self/other, self/self, desire/realization of desire, etc.), and that we are, as the Greek gods call us, merely brotoi, they who die. So hope, in this context, seems like the obverse of elegy—it does not stand on its own or in all its purity. The bird is its own source of divine inspiration, and it need not prophesy, call for social renewal, or anything of that human sort. Our intelligence and self-awareness drive us to ask questions the very asking of which dooms us to failure. But the poem’s stubborn optimism remains; the poet can listen to the bird and find a correspondence between his own spirit and the bird’s song. We have to go with our desires because that’s all we have. And it’s fair to say that half of infinity yields infinity—as in “Teach me half the gladness / That thy brain must know.” Remaining just as stubbornly alongside the optimism, however, is the fact that the poet’s song flows from and (indirectly) speaks to a human world of need and pain. Can the poet’s song transmit his inspiration to us? The bird has no need of the poet’s fall/recovery, limitation/transcendence game—perceived rightly, its limitation is itself transcendence. But can we, as human beings, ever transcend our condition? Or does the fact that we are complex enough to need to transcend it mean that we will never be able to do so?

Again, the theme is failure, though tinged with optimism. Optative poetics. Shelley is not the skylark, but the poem competes with the bird’s song. The bird is unconscious, not painfully self-conscious as we thinking creatures are—it does not “look before and after and pine for what is not.” It does not experience desire for that from which it has become alienated. The bird is the summation of mystery in nature through its clarity and joy. Nature is the model of inspiration and pure expression—the bird is not “imitating” anything with its unpremeditated art. (Milton’s “unpremeditated verse” is something altogether different….)

The bird is a natural musician--in a piece of music, all you have is a pleasing succession of notes that don’t point to anything in the real world, that don’t imitate an object in nature. That’s why music comes to be a favorite trope for C19 artists—Pater says that “all art aspires to the condition of music.” That’s because music, being immaterial and purely formal, is in such a view less captive to the material world than other kinds of art associated with earlier stages of civilization—the jagged symbolic striving of primitive art forms, which shows the alienation between spirit and matter, and the classical perfection of Greek sculpture, which finds an adequate way to embody spirit. As Georg Hegel will put it in his Lectures on Fine Art (post-1818), in romantic art, which he identifies with music, the point is that “art seeks to transcend itself through itself.”

So if we borrow loosely from this Hegelian formulation and replace Hegel’s imperative towards the march of self-consciousness with Shelley’s agonized treatment of self-consciousness—for him it’s as much a curse as a blessing—the bird is a better musician—a purer expressivist and the creator of something more formally beautiful—than even the finest human composer. I think it was Schelling who said that a nightingale “brings forth something more excellent than it is itself aware of having produced.” The bird’s mating call, we are to suppose, is completely “ignorant of pain,” unburdened by human-like “being towards death.” This is truly an impossible standard of purity and joy—as far from us as heaven from this material earth. Human language could never give us access to such perfection and joy because, the idea goes, it doesn’t come from there in the first place….Perhaps, the hope runs, it can at least point towards this infinitely higher realm of happiness and perfection, by kindling the emotive and imaginative powers that alone can make us strive for such things.

So the poem recognizes the present failure of the human voice, of speaking and writing (a medium which makes obvious the loss of control implicit but elided in speech), but still conveys a tone of excitement and optimism. The poet has been inspired by the unseen bird to write the poem we are reading. He reads the bird as possessor of a kind of harmony and simplicity lost to humankind. The romantics tend to reject the theological trappings of “original sin,” but it turns out that they generally work with the idea that we are somehow “fallen” from what we ought to be. The optimism is put in terms of a conditional sentence: if the bird will agree to teach the poet its secrets, the world will then be as enraptured at his song as the poet is by the bird’s. So the question is, what does this poem claim for the poetic word? Can it help us overcome the effects of the fall? Unite us?

Two major themes: hope invested in poetic language; romantic revolutionism. The flip side of these themes is tendency to dwell upon failure of imagination and poetic language, withdrawal, in some cases, into the self and from political commitment in the wake of the French Revolution. But all these themes must be questioned constantly. The English romantics are gloriously inconsistent.

“Ozymandias”

The poem sees are as an attempt at rebellion, in this case not a successful one. How much good did the sculptor’s attempt at mockery do? Rebellion usually remains tied to what it opposes, and ends up repeating the very structures it means to destroy. Prometheus Unbound explores that problem well, as Prometheus makes no progress until he recalls his own curse against the tyrant Jupiter. This is a poem about ruins, fragments that remind us of the whole. But here that “whole” or historical context reminds us that tyranny is always a threat, in any age. Destruction and cruelty are always in the offing. Pharaoh is dead; long live pharaoh.

The halted traveler or witness reports his observation as something to be wondered at, considered in its mysteriousness and persistence. I saw this human fact—what do you make of it? What Sphinx- riddle does the head of Ramses II hold for us? The riddle of human cruelty, mastery, pride, power inequalities, political and spiritual oppression. The sculptor rebelled, mocked Ramses 3000 years ago, and the Hebrew God defeated Ramses, hardened his heart, etc. But the cruel expression and “sneer of cold command” outlived all of this, and here it is confronting us again in a work of art. So has Ramses won after all? Still, the statue does not mean quite what Ramses wanted it to mean. We do not despair because he built a monument to himself; that material thing is not important. His cruelty and oppressiveness, his hardness of heart, are still around, however—that is the problem, the reason for our despair. Why does blank Nature recede? It is blank and pitiless, gives no answer. The traveler thinks he has brought home to us something exotic, a little picturesque fragment from an ancient time, But he has brought us home to the same old passions, the same political and spiritual riddle of human nature—which of course Shelley would have no trouble discussing in terms of England during the repressive time of the poem’s composition. How much good or evil can the artist do? How much control do artists have over the meaning of their expressions? If art—or perhaps more broadly not just poems and statuary but the imaginative powers they testify to and elicit from us—can change anything, what would be the time frame for change to happen? In “Ode to the West Wind,” Shelley’s poet wanted to be like the Wind—but we know also that nature works on a vast scale of time, to which our little “threescore and ten” is nothing.

“Mont Blanc”

The speaker asserts correspondent processes – nature’s creative power and human creative power. Nature talks to or communes with itself, and the mind has its own sublimity and wildness. The poem begins as imitative of natural processes, mimetic description of landscape. But the poet’s spirit leads to a different emphasis—his soul moves and operates like nature – wild and unsourceable. From lines 78-83 the speaker isn’t sure whether nature and mind are commensurate or not. Towards the poem’s end, the glaciers overrun human endeavor and even createv—only to destroy—a simulacrum of human structures; the glaciers’ time frame swallows us up. As usual, sublimity isn’t comforting. The speaker concludes with an idealist question – what is nature without mind? No answer is given (although the Lucretian line 95, “Power dwells apart in its tranquility,” is suggestive.), and it’s reasonable to suppose that the question isn’t merely rhetorical: what if the speaker actually wants to know the answer, and doesn’t know what it is?

“Mutability”

The poem is almost “eastern” in its admission that self-certainty isn’t to be found. It eludes us whether we turn to reason or to passion. Change is the only constant, but it is an abstraction, not a substantial reality or a fixed ground. Expression—at least in the context of this poem—doesn’t result in a stable identity. But what is western enough about the poem is its pathos over what is felt as a loss or absence. Eastern philosophy isn’t elegiac about self-annihilation, though perhaps the notion of instability is more complex there. This poem might be said to echo Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos in The Faerie Queene—Spenser laments that everything in nature must pass away, even the most beautiful things.

The mind or spirit wanders as it will, to borrow from the language of the bible. We would have to compare this early poem to the concept of Necessity that develops in Shelley’s later work, most notably in Prometheus Unbound and the fragment “The Triumph of Life.” Shelley isn’t a determinist, but he’s also not a promoter of the power of human consciousness to effect change by a simple act of will. Freedom isn’t freedom from a “necessity” or causal chain we can’t control. Shelley apparently came, somewhat like Blake, to consider “evil” a kind of mental distortion or error that leads us to set up material dragons outside ourselves and slay them, futilely enough. He wants to invoke powers beyond simple constructs like human will or mind, but doesn’t want to invoke the same old Gods that have always stood for this power beyond the self. While this early poem can be appreciated in its isolation as a wistful statement of life’s transitoriness and of how all our plans blow hither and thither aimlessly, Shelley’s later poetry wrestles with the deep problem of how we can or cannot come to understand why we live and relate the way we do, and whether, and how, the current unhappy state of affairs might change. The kind of change Shelley is dealing with in “Mutability” isn’t something we can do much about—life triumphs over us from within.

Notes on John Keats

“St. Agnes’ Eve” (834-44)

Comments by Professor Albert O. Wlecke in a lecture from the 1990’s at UC Irvine:

“The Eve of St. Agnes” constructs a world of medieval romance and ritual. St. Agnes dreams of her future husband. It is a world of feuding families.

“Angela” is a rather ironic name for the old woman in “St. Agnes.” Angela tells Porphyro what Madeline is doing. She is supposed to protect Madeline, not lead the man to her. We get rather erotic descriptions of Madeline’s rites and dreams and of Porphyro’s entering into them, etc.

A central theme for Keats is that of the figure of the dreamer and the critical moment upon awakening. Reality is not the same as the dream; thus, Madeline’s tears. Porphyro is “pallid, civil, and drear” in comparison to the dream image. We can see a counter-movement here: reality works against idealization. In the dream, Porphyro is said to be possessed of “looks immortal.”

See Stanza 36: Porphyro is “beyond a mortal man impassioned far,” and he melts into Madeline’s dream. This act makes for an interesting blend of reality and the dream. The wind blows, and the moon sets. Nature, then, cooperates in the moment of consummation.

Throughout “The Eve of St. Agnes,” dreaming and idealization have been associated with freezing, with being frozen in opposition to the real world. Melting, therefore, is a crucial image here. The dream melts into reality. See Stanza 32: The speaker calls Madeline’s dream “a midnight charm/Impossible to melt as iced stream.”

So the setting of “The Eve of St. Agnes” is that of a cold, frozen night because it is a night for dreams, for practicing old traditions and rituals. The poem’s setting is oddly antithetical to the real world of human passion. Madeline’s first desire on waking is to return to the ideal or dream world, and, at that moment, to “enter” Porphyro. At this point, we are dealing with a world of process and becoming.

It is possible to take two different views of “The Eve of St. Agnes.” The first is that Porphyro is a bad man who takes advantage of Madeline. The second is that he is a hero who rescues Madeline (the damsel in distress) from a world of frozen fantasy, helping her to leave behind the castle and its inhabitants.

In conclusion, “The Eve of St. Agnes” claims that dreams do come true—the dream lover does indeed become Madeline’s husband; however, the whole poem suggests that we should be skeptical about dreams. Madeline may be a naïve fool, but she gets exactly what she wants.

“To a Nightingale” (849-51)

Comments by Professor Albert O. Wlecke in a lecture from the 1990’s at UC Irvine: “Ode to a Nightingale” investigates the fundamental opposites of the ideal world of art and the empirical world of human experience. Notice the speaker’s strong imaginative response to the nightingale’s song, a song that brings to him an ideal world. The bird is “immortal,” and the speaker wants simply to disappear into its world. Nonetheless, the speaker is always held back in his attempt to join the bird. Stanza 3 shows his desire to dissolve into the immortal world, but then a long list of this world’s trials follows. The key reference here is to the poet’s death.

Thinking itself, in fact, produces sorrow. We cannot help but see the negative things inevitable in the world of experience. There is no way to “quite forget” this world. At this juncture, the speaker is an escapist because he wants to escape from the world below. The fourth stanza of “Ode to a Nightingale” refers not to wine but to the wings of poetry that the speaker wishes would carry him away to the ideal world. Imagination is the way to get to the ideal world, but the dull brain perplexes and retards the flight. The phrase “Already with thee!” signals an apparent moment of success, but the triumph does not last.

Stanza 6 of “Ode to a Nightingale” shows the speaker’s recognition, by contrast to his desire to escape, that such an attempt may be seeking a kind of death. Is all the foregoing in the poem no more than a death wish? If so, the bird may sing eternally, but he [i.e. the speaker] will be dead to that singing. The speaker is confronted with the split between the real world and the ideal world.

Al Drake’s additional comments on “To a Nightingale”: it’s worth contrasting Keats’ attitude towards the bird with that of Shelley in “To a Sky Lark.” While the latter’s relation is one of striving with the songbird, it seems that Keats neither vies with his nightingale nor “envies” its purity – he is “too happy” in the happiness of the bird: it just isn’t possible to stay with the nightingale in its happiness for the eternity the speaker would like to remain with it; indeed, this wish gives way to a wish for death itself, for absolute forgetfulness and nothingness. But he is left alone and “Forlorn” as the bird flies out of hearing range, and must return to his own sad thoughts and longings for forgetfulness. Imagination is at best only a temporary escape from these things, and “To a Nightingale” testifies to the limitations of poetry as an accomplice of imaginative liberation.

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” (851-53)

Pastoral is a sophisticated genre, one that has long attempted to remove desire to an ideal world beyond ordinary experience and mortality. The genre speaks to our “desire to desire” (to borrow a title phrase from critic Mary Ann Doane), and it seems to have been sophisticated even when Theocritus composed his works in the 3rd Century BCE. In Keats’ poem, the pastoral genre itself has become an object of critical reflection, almost as if it were an art object to be contemplated in splendid isolation. What is the purpose of pastoral representation—what does it do for us?

Keats’ urn represents scenes from ordinary life (from high erotic passion to daily activities and religious rituals). We don’t know whether the urn’s creation was an expressive act or simply something done to make a living. Yet the images themselves have the power to “eternalize” intense feelings and interesting scenes for us as objects of contemplation, frozen in space and detached from the decay inherent in the passage of time. The isolated art object provokes contemplation, and makes us study the emotions and events of human life in a detached way. What does this contemplation yield? The urn remains silent and “cold,” offering no answers to the questions it provokes. The real things, of course, must pass, and only the artistic representations can last forever. So which matters more—us or the works of art we create as acts of representation or expression? Even answers like Horace’s “art is long; life is short” don’t really answer this question, and in any case we seem compelled to keep asking it.

It is hard to believe the final lines about the equivalence of truth and beauty—”Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”—are meant to initiate an abstract philosophical debate. By “truth” here the urn may refer generally to a felt sense of reality or authenticity, or even to “context.” The beauty of the work doesn’t lead you back to the motives and methods involved in its making. All you have is what you can see in front of you and your experience with the visual object. Keats brackets out all surrounding considerations and (perhaps—depending those much-debated quotation marks) personifies the urn, making contact with it as if it were another consciousness. And it seems to speak briefly to him, rebuffing him with enigmatic, chastening words about the limitations of his knowledge. When the speaker says to the urn, “Thou . . . dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity!” he implies that the urn promises a glimpse of some ultimate truth or reality beyond time, beyond language and humanity. But the poet must return to the vicissitudes of language and “expression” since he can’t bear the silence of the realm that the art object offers. Like so many romantic poems, then, “Grecian Urn” is about its own failure to achieve an impossible task—the speaker has been trying to follow the urn where it would lead him, but in the end he must return to the realm of words, and the result we get is the poem. Art has great powers of suggestion, and its capacity to provoke the same unanswerable questions is infinitely repeatable, but in the end a work of art doesn’t offer us permanent escape from life’s cares or from the burden of being merely human. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect it to do that anyway, and should be satisfied with the urn’s statement about the kind of “truth” that is possible for us to live with. In a sense, the urn’s advice amounts to no more than “Hush!”—impossible as that command is for us to obey.

Further thoughts on “Grecian Urn”: What about the status of the urn as a work of art? Probably the thing was a commodity produced for sale at the local “pottery barn.” If I recall correctly, Keats was originally looking at a vase in a museum—most likely a work of art taken by the British from Greece around the time Lord Elgin took those famous fragmentary sculpture pieces from Greece in 1802. Elgin, as British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire fighting Napoleon alongside the British, managed to get permission to take casts of the Parthenon’s fine friezes and stand-alone statuary. Then he took the real objects, ruining some in the process, and shipped them back to England, wrenching them from their proper cultural context.

The plastic art medium contemplated by the speaker should be contrasted with music; music is sometimes praised by romantic poets as the best kind of art because it is pure form, or perfectly formalized expression. In a piece of music, all you have is a pleasing succession of notes that don’t point to anything in the real world and don’t imitate an object in nature. The composer may have poured his or her soul into the melody, but what is that to the listener? All the auditor has is the succession of notes and the pleasure they provide. Keats’ urn reminds us, I think, that other kinds of art are difficult to enjoy in such purely formal terms: the urn, even if intact, is a temporal and cultural fragment, an object that evokes the ruin of a glorious ancient culture. It’s hard to bracket out that kind of information. You see a piece of shaped pottery, and it leads you to wonder about the hand that shaped it, and why.

The kind of art object Keats has chosen poses a challenge to our formalist instincts. Perhaps, however, Keats is suggesting that the aesthetic appropriation of an object means detaching the thing from its original context as a social product and endowing it with a new and possibly more interesting meaning. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing to do—I don’t see anything inherently wrong with aesthetic contemplation. Still, to refer to contemporary arguments about the status of aesthetics, there is always a danger that aesthetic appreciation may slide into obliviousness to the bad things that may have been associated with an object’s production. In this instance, the bad thing probably has to do more with how such art objects ended up in Britain. A beautiful object can hide a multitude of sins. Walter Benjamin wrote in the 1930’s that the Nazis’ success lay partly in their ability to turn politics and violence into aesthetics, thereby disabling people’s ability to contextualize and criticize what was happening. The formal study of aesthetics has long been reproached by people who insist that art is always the bearer of ideology and that it must, therefore, be dealt with in a manner that allows us to “demystify” the sway beautiful objects have over us. The issue can become tiresome, but it is an important one: is the usual relationship between art and individuals simply a matter of escaping from “real life” into a make-believe world where we can dwell in isolation from other people and larger concerns? If so, what are the ethical implications of such escapism? Is it, for example, a necessary and healthy thing to do, or does it make us culpable indirectly for the evil others do in our name?

Notes on Selected Letters by John Keats, from the Norton Anthology of English Lit., Vol. E, 8th. edition. (Not all of these are assigned.)

“To Benjamin Bailey. The Authenticity of the Imagination, Nov. 22, 1817.”

“What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not.” Here is perhaps the meaning of that famous line in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” about the oneness of beauty and truth. Keats is suggesting that we live by what our imagination produces, first and foremost, just as surely as Adam “awoke and found [his dream] truth.” In this sense, I suppose, imagination might even be prelapsarian, something not subject to the Christian doctrine of the Fall.

“O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!” This statement marks Keats’ way of being a romantic poet as different from the ways of Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Shelley. It isn’t even so much what he says here as what most of us will take as the tone or attitude of his statement, especially when combined with the vision of an earth-like paradise that follows the remark: “we shall enjoy ourselves here after by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tone and so repeated.” There doesn’t seem to be a tone of wistfulness here, but rather a palpable excitement—maybe it is possible to come close to this ideal life of sensuous and sensual delight, the feeling seems to run.

For someone we think of as a tragic youth, Keats shows a remarkably sunny, even dispassionate quality in the second half of this letter: “I scarcely remember counting upon any Happiness—I look not for it if it be not in the present hour—nothing startles me beyond the Moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights—or if a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.” And further, “I sometimes feel not the influence of a Passion or Affection during a whole week.” So much for Wordsworth’s ideas about the key role of the deepest passions in life. Keats is as happy as a lizard skipping around on a warm day, or a bird hunting for treats. What other Romantics consistently agonize over—their desire to escape from the curse of human self-consciousness—Keats suggests he is able to rid himself of, at least to a satisfying extent and for short periods. It seems to me that his attitude shows an understanding of nature’s power to draw us out of ourselves, and a healthy disregard for our need to come back to ourselves in some exalted or improved fashion. Nature, he says, simply “set[s] me to rights.”

“To John Hamilton Reynolds. Wordsworth’s Poetry, Feb. 3, 1818.”

“We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & obtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.” Keats simply doesn’t care for poetry that is mostly self-expression, especially if it calls attention to itself as such: Byronism, the Wordsworth of The Prelude (had Keats or the public known of this epic since it wasn’t published until 1850, after the author died), etc. This is rather an extreme statement since a fair amount of poetry is moral or has some design on us, yet pleases many: Milton’s Paradise Lost, for instance, is both deeply imaginative and yet determined to convey the author’s religious convictions. And John Bunyan is didactic, but no slouch as a writer of fiction. Understood generously, however, Keats’ remark makes good sense: we come to art expecting to be set free, liberated from harsh necessity or stultifying doctrine, not preached at.

“To John Taylor. Keats’s Axioms in Poetry, Feb. 27, 1818.”

I like Keats’ axiom that poetry should “strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance.” This suggests that poetry is all about our highest aspirations—it speaks to desire, but not in a condescending way. The author and reader are very close together, in this view, and the latter has a creative role to play in the after-making of the poem. Then, too, there’s a sense on this page that poetry is not so much good for inculcating feelings of sublimity or maddening suggestiveness or mystery as of spreading sunshine into our very being: “Its touches of Beauty should never be half way thereby making the reader breathless instead of content.” That’s a fine thought. No need to make it an all-encompassing model, but an excellent idea all the same.

“If Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.” It’s easy to interpret this as a silly pronouncement reducing to, “never revise.” But that’s perhaps not what Keats means. He may mean the remark in something like a Coleridgean sense: a poem is like a living being; it grows organically from successive and interrelated acts of imagination. In other words, one shouldn’t write poetry “by the rules” any more than one should paint by numbers and expect to be considered a great artist.

“To John Hamilton Reynolds. Milton, Wordsworth, and the Chambers of Human Life, May 3, 1818.”

Keats says he is able to describe only two chambers in life’s “Mansion of Many Apartments.” The first is the “infant or thoughtless Chamber,” and the second is the “Chamber of Maiden-Thought.” The latter is initially delightful, all light and atmosphere, but in this Chamber we also learn much about the “heart and nature of Man,” which causes us to become fixated on the world’s high quotient of “Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness, and oppression.” On the whole, at this stage we cannot see our way clearly; there seems to be no way out of our dark confusion, and we are caught up in the unhappy rhythms and dilemmas and burdens of life. Keats recalls Wordsworth’s line about “the burthen of the mystery” from “Tintern Abbey.” On the whole, Keats uses the distinctions he has made to praise Wordsworth, but only because that later poet’s depth is given him by the times in which he lives. Milton was a man of his era, and so is Wordsworth.

“To Richard Woodhouse. A Poet Has No Identity, Oct. 27, 1818.”

“As to the poetical Character itself . . . it is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion poet.” Evidently, Keats would more or less agree with Oscar Wilde that “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.” Art isn’t a species of moral discourse; art is simply art, something that is bound to “end in speculation” rather than action. And again, art isn’t primarily self-expression for Keats; it isn’t about shoring up our morals or our sense of self. It is about exploring our relation to objects, to the world beyond our solitary selves.

“To George and Georgiana Keats. The Vale of Soul-Making, Feb. 14 – May 3, 1819.”

Keats opposes moral abstractions of any sort: he construes life not as a “vale of tears” as in traditional Christian thought, but instead as a “Vale of Soul-Making,” where the main thing is to learn about the human “heart.” This line of thinking is in part a call for an almost pagan “openness to experience”: he writes that “Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine.” We may be reminded of Imlac’s remark in Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, “To a poet nothing can be useless.”

“To Percy Bysshe Shelley. Load Every Rift with Ore, Aug. 16, 1820.”

Keats seems to be saying to Shelley regarding his play The Cenci, “more rich matter, more drama, and less morality, please.” Keats says an artist must, in a sense, serve not God (purpose) but Mammon – the particular needs of the work of art at hand. The Cenci is a play with an exciting Renaissance subject, so it should honor those qualities.

Week 04, Coleridge and Robinson

2006-02-23T15:19:00.000-08:00

Notes on Coleridge's Poetry

“The Eolian Harp” (420-21)

The poem’s ruling thought (culminating in the statement, “what if all of animated nature / Be but organic harps diversely framed”) is a note from “philosophy’s aye-babbling spring,” and the speaker lets this idea wander around as if his own mind were being played upon by a wind-harp. The thought is just passing through his mind, unbidden and un-detained. The poem’s setting and form echo the ruling idea. The metaphor of a wind-harp allows something external (currents of air) to serve as a source of inspiration, but not in a domineering manner. Ordinarily, the intellect or the imagination assert their superiority to nature by making harmony out of the random notes given to perception. See, for example Shelley’s “Defence” page 790. But here in this poem, Coleridge makes the principle of order come from Christian theology, as figured by the un-approving gaze of Sarah. The poem’s flirtation with pantheistic thought is “guilty,” and the only thing that would not be guilty is praise of God. The poet must learn to be happy with a much narrower circuit in which his intellect may roam. The only true rest is with God.

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (422-38)

The poem is about humanity’s relationship with nature, of course, but it also seems to be a meditation on evil and on our need for “enchantment.” Blessing and dread are both experienced as a kind of demonic possession -- we don’t understand the “why” of our relationship with nature. Why does the Mariner shoot the Albatross? And why does he bless the sea snakes? The Mariner himself does not seem to know the answer to these questions, though I think he has a better handle on the second one. There seems to be a fundamentally destructive, de-creative impulse behind the shooting of the Albatross -- this impulse comes from within, but we do not experience it that way. The capacity to bless nature comes from God, we might logically infer; it is possible to read the poem with reference to Saint Augustine’s notions about human depravity. Namely, sin punishes itself and fallen humanity remains mystified about itself. Only Grace (the Albatross, the Polar Spirit, etc.) can intervene, seemingly for no reason. But the reason may really be set down to God’s generosity.

What is the Mariner doomed to repeat? He is doomed to repeat his dreadful story about the need to be generous towards his fellow creatures, which amounts to an injunction to praise God’s generosity and creativity. In the end, we learn by sad experience, and the Mariner’s story recounts a sad experience. He must employ enchantment because it is necessary to tear readers away from their ordinary, everyday contexts and bind them to the story itself. In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge discusses the purpose of his contributions to Lyrical Ballads, saying that his task was to make the supernatural an object of meditation. He wants to induce a state of “poetic faith” (478) a “willing suspension of disbelief.” We are not to scoff at Polar Spirits and other such entities, but should rather regard them with awe for their supernatural qualities. The Mariner’s penance begins when the Hermit demands that he reveal “What manner of man” he is. What is his nature? Well, he is inexplicably destructive and de-creative. The Mariner’s evil act, to put the case somewhat humorously, may remind us of those occasional stories in the newspaper that describe how some damned fool simply shot a California Condor or a bald eagle for no reason whatsoever. Sometimes we just do things “because we can,” perhaps because we take delight in destroying things—one recalls that when Milton’s Satan loses the War in Heaven, that becomes his task: to frustrate God’s generosity by tearing down everything he has accomplished.

“Kubla Khan” (439-441)

What is the source of poetry? How is poetry composed? What is the value of expressive acts? The impossible dream here is to make the inner workings of the mind available to the waking self and other people. To borrow a term from the Twentieth Century, can the Unconscious become available to the conscious mind? Freud would say, “well, no, except that we can make inferences based on certain screening, masking, and distorting devices that keep unpleasant emotional and psychic events hidden from us. We are always “translators” when it comes to understanding the mind, and what we must work with is always fragmentary or somehow distorted.

In Coleridge’s context, the Man from Porlock represents the world noisily breaking in and preventing us from accessing the Imagination (in the form of Kubla Khan the poet-emperor.) Kubla seems to be a god-figure who simply speaks, and the thing is done; he decrees that a Pleasure-Dome be built, and it is built. Kubla is close to the source of unconscious creation, which, I think, is figured by the sacred river Alph. (The Norton notes suggest that the word comes from the Greek river-god Alpheus, but I can’t see why it shouldn’t be the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, “Aleph.”) Coleridge treats the Man from Porlock as an external nuisance, but his arrival just in time to shatter the poet’s attempt to write down his vision intact points rather to a need that he should show up. Perhaps, then, the Man is an internal mechanism that maintains the barrier between the dream world and waking consciousness. To break down that barrier permanently or entirely would almost certainly result in madness. In the prose preface affixed to his poem, Coleridge indicates a perfect kind of poetic composition: images rise up as things, and the right words (“correspondent expressions”) come just as automatically to the dreamer. There seems to be no need here for what Coleridge describes in the Biographia as Secondary Imagination’s coexistence with the “conscious will.” In other words, we are dealing with automatic writing rather than conscious acts of will directing the crafting of a poem.

But this perfect way of composing is not to be, and so the composition we see consists of written fragments on the printed page. In this sense, perhaps the Man from Porlock is ultimately writing. A dream vision, to be communicated as a poem, will have to be written down, and thereby comes a second and irretrievable loss.

Well, what does the written fragment dwell upon? Mostly it dwells on the river Alph, the chasm, and the fountain. Kubla is mentioned twice—first when he decrees the Pleasure-Dome and then when he hears “ancestral voices prophesying war.” The miraculous Dome itself can’t be fully represented by Coleridge the poet, it seems. Well, what would the result be if the poet could build the Dome in writing? We would, he suggests, have to build barriers around him and treat him as an object of holy dread: he would be a direct co-emperor of Kubla’s Empire of Imagination, I suppose: “weave a circle round him thrice.” But given what we actually, have, it appears that poetry’s chief power lies not in delivering such magical realities, but rather in suggesting them. That is what Mary Robinson’s “To the Poet Coleridge” identifies as the chief value of “Kubla Khan.”

“Frost at Midnight” (457-58)

The poem suggests that the mind seeks an image of itself everywhere, seeks correspondence between mental/spiritual activity and natural process. As a child, Samuel Taylor Coleridge had to make his search more or less in a domestic setting, with objects like the bar of soot fluttering at the fireplace grate. But his child Hartley will “read” God by way of the echoes and mirror-images he has placed in the Book of Nature. What is the Ministry of Frost? It seems to refer to nature’s healing power, to the way it mysteriously assists the seeking process described above. As with so many conversation poems, the speaker ends where he began—quietly sitting with his child and musing on nature and spirit.

“Dejection: an Ode”

The speaker’s imagination (his “genial spirits”) has failed. He can “see, not feel” how beautiful nature is, and such a failure stems from both depression and a certain philosophical tendency whereby self-consciousness makes itself sick and alienates the individual from nature and other human beings. Some lines make it sound as if nature is dead unless a human mind animates it. From the speaker’s morbid perspective, that is true, but it may not be what Coleridge, as an admirer of Schelling, would say in the final analysis. In an 1807 essay, Schelling says that the artist must grasp and emulate the inner creative power of nature; nature isn’t really dead, but our failure of imagination makes it seem so to us. So for practical purposes, nature might as well be dead because we are dead to it. What else, in such a state, could an artist do but accurately see and describe how beautiful a landscape is? Painting a picturesque scene isn’t the same thing as to feeling nature’s beauty and being able to create art in the same way nature creates its beautiful forms. “Joy,” for Coleridge, is something like Schelling’s natural energy. An analogous Christian term would be charitas—this impulse flows from the intuition that something binds all of God’s creatures together into one community. All true being is grounded in (has its source in) God. The romantics—though not necessarily Coleridge, who was always a theologian, first Unitarian and then more conventionally Trinitarian—tend to replace this figure with Nature itself. The speaker arrives at a resolution by passing along the hope of regeneration to Sara Hutchinson—he derives some comfort from this, but his blank depression complicates the idea that the poem achieves an “affective resolution.” The depressive episodes to which Coleridge was prone tend to recur, in cyclical fashion, so the resolution would seem temporary. Serious depression almost forces a person to imagine a state of permanent freedom from sadness—something none of us can have—and cruelly and daily denies that freedom.

Introduction to Coleridge's Prose.

The work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) shows the influence of Continental thinkers such as Kant, Schelling, and Schiller. English Romanticism is often cast as a strong, if at times complicated, reaction both against the materialist aspects of British empiricism (the doctrine that all knowledge derives from simple sensory experience), and especially against French rationalism (which suggests that that knowledge derives from reason, not sensory experience—“I think; therefore, I am”). Coleridge, like many of his contemporaries, opposes the mechanistic world view of Newtonian physics and the passivity of the psychological doctrines of Hobbes and Locke, according to which the mind, like a soft machine, merely receives and combines sense-data. For Coleridge, imagination is more than the faculty of combining ideas derived from sensory perception, just as memory, for his friend William Wordsworth, is more than Hobbes’ “decaying sense.” It isn’t that Coleridge or the other romantics have anything against close observation of the world around them; rather, they refuse to accept the notion--which could be derived from Blake’s unholy trinity of “Bacon Newton & Locke” if one were to read them unsympathetically--that mind is no more than mechanism and that nothing exists beyond the material world, leaving us with nothing but a contemptible “universe of little things.”

Coleridge tries to overcome the rift between mind and matter implied by the formula, cogito, ergo sum, positing a more vital and interdependent view of science, history, nature, artistic creation, and human potential. Since his thinking is indebted to many of the German idealist philosophers, it makes sense to offer a sketch of Immanuel Kant’s most important ideas. Kant (1724-1804), was born in Königsberg, Germany, in which city he remained to study mathematics, physics, and philosophy at university, and later to profess the latter subject himself. Although a quiet, untraveled man whose Enlightenment emphasis on reason hardly qualifies him as a romantic, he nonetheless provides later thinkers with the foundation for a fully romantic outlook. Kant is determined to avoid extreme tendencies in any brand of philosophy, whether that extremism comes in the form of radical skepticism or empiricism, absolute rationalism, or the metaphysical word-wrangling of the medieval scholastic philosophers. In Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781), he synthesizes the empiricism and rationalism that influenced his early thinking into a coherent theory of knowledge (that is, a coherent epistemology). Kant argues that humans have no direct access to the outside world. Presumably, there is a world out there, a “noumenal world,” but we have no direct knowledge of it, and no right to claim that we do. So much for the cruder type of empiricist who assumes too easily that he really does have some direct link with material objects; so much, also, for those who argue that there simply is no outside world. So how do we perceive things and know things? That question occupies the whole of the Critique of Pure Reason (often just called The First Critique), but I’ll only examine a few paragraphs from Kant’s Book I, “Transcendental Aesthetic”:

In whatever manner and by whatever means a mode of knowledge may relate to objects, intuition is that through which it is in immediate relation to them, and to which all thought as a means is directed. But intuition takes place only in so far as the object is given to us. This again is only possible, to man at least, in so far as the mind is affected in a certain way. The capacity (receptivity) for receiving representations through the mode in which we are affected by objects, is entitled sensibility. Objects are given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone yields us intuitions; they are thought through the understanding, and from the understanding arise concepts. But all thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
In the transcendental aesthetic we shall, therefore, first isolate sensibility, by taking away from it everything which the understanding thinks through its concepts, so that nothing may be left save empirical intuition. Secondly, we shall also separate off from it everything which belongs to sensation, so that nothing may remain save pure intuition and the mere form of appearances, which is all that sensibility can supply a priori. In the course of this investigation it will be found that there are two pure forms of sensible intuition, serving as principles of a priori knowledge, namely, space and time. (trans. Norman Kemp Smith. New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1965.)

Kant says here that his analytical task is to strip away particular, everyday mental operations in order to isolate “sensibility”—the “capacity . . . for receiving representations through the mode in which we are affected by objects.” Having performed that reduction, Kant believes that he can posit “pure intuition” and its “forms of sensible intuition,” the categories space and time. He wants to show that these categories exist a priori (i.e., before any empirical experience) in the mind and that they necessarily structure the reception of objects. In Critical Theory Since Plato (Harcourt: San Diego 1971; the more recent edition does not contain the language below), Hazard Adams clarifies the Kantian transition from simple perception to higher thinking:

[Kant] proposed the existence of the “manifold of sensation,” the raw data collected and organized by the mind through the creative power of the sensibility. The sensibility abstracts from the manifold, formulating the world intellectually according to space and time, the a priori forms of consciousness . . . . we cast all our perceptions into the forms of space and time, which are the spectacles we all wear but can never remove. At a higher level, further removed from direct sensation, the power of the understanding comes into play and schematizes our sensible experience according to “categories”—unity plurality, totality, substance, causation, and so on. These categories govern our conceptual thought. (377)

This cautious formulation will have profound effects on later thinkers. In a sense, Kant is the Milton of philosophy—the figure whom interested parties will have to take into account when they set pen to paper concerning epistemology (the theory of knowledge).

We might make the same statement about Kant’s status in the branch of philosophy known as “aesthetics,” the study of the beautiful. In his third Critique, the Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant argues that when humans make judgments about beautiful objects, they do not make them with reference to any external standard or determinate purpose. So referring a pronouncement on natural or artistic beauty to some theory of imitation or to moral concerns will not do. Rather, a judgment that, say, a rose, a building, or a work of art is beautiful must be made with unbiased or disinterested satisfaction. Here is how Kant explains his point:

If anyone asks me if I find that palace beautiful which I see before me, I may answer: I do not like things of that kind which are made merely to be stared at. Or I can answer like that Iroquois sachem, who was pleased in Paris by nothing more than by the cook shops. Or again, after the manner of Rousseau, I may rebuke the vanity of the great who waste the sweat of the people on such superfluous things. In fine, I could easily convince myself that if I found myself on an uninhabited island without the hope of ever again coming among men, and could conjure up just such a splendid building by my mere wish, I should not even give myself the trouble if I had a sufficiently comfortable hut. This may all be admitted and approved, but we are not now talking of this. We wish only to know if this mere representation of the object is accompanied in me with satisfaction, however indifferent I may be as regards the existence of the object of this representation . . . . We must not be in the least prejudiced in favor of the existence of the things, but be quite indifferent in this respect, in order to play the judge in things of taste. (Adams 379-80; the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism pg. 506 offers a different translation of the passage.)

To say that a rose is beautiful, then, is fundamentally different from saying that it is good or sensually gratifying or useful. Such a judgment does not accord with the kind of moral condemnation of art we see in Plato, who claimed that artists, in copying “mere appearances” rather than authentic Forms, misled deluded spectators and listeners. (Plato’s epistemology is closely related to his ethics—to mislead a person’s eyes or senses is also to corrupt that person’s morals and citizenship ethos. For Plato, we arrive at truth not through the senses but through internal reflection, i.e. through the dialectical method of argumentation, and through recollection of ideal, eternal Forms.) Neither does Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment accord well with certain moral defenses of art—the Elizabethan Sir Philip Sidney’s, for example, which posits (drawing from Horace’s Ars Poetica) that the “speaking pictures” artists create fill us with the desire to behave virtuously. But in Kant’s view, we must judge of the beautiful with respect only to our disinterested pleasure in the presence of the thing we call “beautiful.” Without resorting to further technicalities, we can say that for Kant, what happens when we make a judgment that something is beautiful is that we experience what he calls “purposiveness without a [determinate or specific] purpose.” Aesthetic judgments offer us a way to experience the mind’s power over material nature and the allied realm of necessity, but without simply abandoning nature and taking flight into an arrogant overemphasis on the power of mind. In plain terms, aesthetic experience lets us take pleasure in a kind of freedom; it is a valuable part of life because it’s something we can do simply for its own sake, and not because it leads to some benefit such as profit, moral improvement, or anything of that sort. We don’t even have to desire that an aesthetic object exist to take pleasure in it—in fact, such a desire would disqualify our judgment of the thing as beautiful at all.

We can sum up as follows the threads in Kant’s philosophy later to be exploited by the romantics: firstly, Kantian epistemology, while making no attempt to bridge the gap between mind (subject) and world (objective realm), nonetheless concentrates acutely on the mental constructs whereby humans perceive and know. Without sacrificing the validity of the external world, Kant focuses on the constitutive power of mental experience. The mind actively construes what we call “reality,” whatever the ultimate truth about “reality” may turn out to be. In terms of aesthetics, Kant’s emphasis on the special quality of judgments about the beautiful opens up for later theorists an important claim—namely, that both art and the artists who create it deserve consideration because they have and provide access to a kind of freedom, a kind of autonomy, lacking in more immediately practical areas of life—politics, religion, economics, and so on. Art will soon be taken up, credibly or otherwise, as a means whereby rifts in the individual and in human societies may be made whole. Imagination, for Kant, may be straightforwardly “an active power or ability to structure the particular features of . . . [an] intuition in accordance with the structure of the concept [that it matches]” (Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987, pg. xxxv), but men like Schiller, Schelling, and Coleridge will soon argue that imagination is a truly creative, dynamic power which does not merely structure reality for the perceiving subject but which, to some extent, makes it, or at least participates in its making.

That comment brings us back to Coleridge’s speculations, most specifically to his ideas about imagination in Biographia Literaria, Chapter 14. The book as a whole is a sprawling masterpiece of the sort that only Coleridge could have produced. It contains much material assimilated from several Romantic authors—amongst them Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Schiller. Most instructive for us is the following passage, in which Coleridge goes far beyond Kant’s modest claims about the creative powers of the mind:

The imagination then, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am. The secondary imagination I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. // Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. (Norton Criticism 1st ed. 676-77, Norton English Lit. 2A 7th ed. 477-78.)

Here Coleridge appears to be identifying as the “primary imagination” the basic capacity of the mind to participate in the creation of the world around it. In order to see how Coleridge has expanded Kant’s term “imagination,” we must examine that term in a little more detail than we have yet done. In his “Introduction” to Critique of Judgment, Werner Pluhar explains the Kantian imagination’s function:

If an empirical judgment consists in the awareness that an empirical intuition matches some concept, how did that match come about? The data we receive passively through sensation are structured in terms of space and time and thus become an empirical intuition. If this intuition is to match a concept, we must have an active power or ability to structure the particular features of that intuition in accordance with the structure of the concept; this power is what Kant calls our “imagination.” The imagination “apprehends” (takes up) what is given in intuition and then puts together or “combines” this diversity (or “manifold”) so that it matches the concept. (xxxv)

The Kantian imagination, then, allows us to verify that there is a basic harmony between mental categories and, if not the “real world,” then at least our sensory experience of it. Coleridge’s imagination, however, gives us access to something more: it reveals that the mind participates in the creation of the world. While Kant had implied that “one can neither think without an object nor prove that objects in themselves exist independently of thought,” Coleridge comes much closer to saying that imagination can, at least for an instant, overcome the distinction between self and world; it can fuse subject and object into a unified whole. Coleridge describes the “primary” imagination as “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am.” God, the infinite Mind in Coleridge’s view, is pure Being. In Genesis, God’s creation of the universe is cast in terms of a grand perlocutionary “speech act” (“Let there be light,” and so on). The world was spoken into existence, and its continued existence implies that all creation is the perpetual unfolding of God’s Word.

Consider also how God, in Exodus, answers Moses when the latter asks how he should speak of God to the Israelites: “And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you (3:14). So God has given his answer to a question of self-consciousness. He says that he is pure existence. He thinks about himself, engages in an act of self-consciousness, and says, “I am that I am.” On our less exalted, finite scale, we can say that in any act of perception, imagination is involved—something creative happens. Whatever John Locke and other empiricists may have thought, even the simplest kind of perception is not passive. Imagination is the creative, synthesizing power that operates in all human perception. Take this sentence: “I see a tree.” The positing of the “I” is an act of self-consciousness. The subject is aware of itself as it confronts an object of experience (such as a tree), and in fact the initial distinction between subject and object, between (in Emerson’s terms) the “me” and the “not me,” is vital. A fully human perception requires a synthesis of subject and object. Perhaps we can say, therefore, that the primary imagination is the miracle of consciousness itself, which, for human beings, turns out to involve self-consciousness as well.

But what about Coleridge’s “secondary imagination”? We recall that he writes in Chapter 13 of Biographia Literaria of two kinds of imagination, not just one:

The secondary … [imagination] I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealize and to unify. (Norton Criticism 1st ed. 676, Norton English Lit. 2A 7th ed. 477.)

The secondary imagination is the poetic imagination. It is a purposive, directed “echo” of the primary imagination’s power, and it works creatively upon phenomenal experience to generate new meanings. Poetic imagination "dissolves, diffuses, and dissipates in order to re-create" something genuinely new. (In this, it differs markedly from the operations of the “fancy,” which only rearranges prefabricated, stale perceptions into predictable patterns, in accordance with the empirical view that ideas are mechanically “associated” with one another to form complex combinations.) A concrete example of Coleridge’s “secondary imagination” will serve us best: how about a few of Wordsworth’s short lyric poems? Consider “She dwelt among the untrodden ways”—the speaker describes Lucy as “A violet by a mossy stone, / half hidden from the eye, / Fair as a star, when only one / is shining in the sky.” Wordsworth has placed two very different natural phenomena alongside each other, but now we understand that something vital connects them—the earthly flower and the heavenly star share something with each other. They shared something with Lucy, too, when she was alive, and they come together again in the speaker’s imagination now that Lucy is gone. In Coleridge’s view, a poet like Wordsworth can “dissolve, diffuse, and dissipate” our ordinary ways of looking at objects and even human beings, encouraging us to see that the world need not be thought to consist of an aggregation of lifeless or self-contained objects with no connection to one another. Some critics have even said convincingly that Coleridge’s terminology is partly drawn from the ancient language of alchemy, whereby ordinary matter is transformed magically (by incantation and ritual) into precious materials such as gold. Another example of this romantic alchemy would be Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper,” where the song of an ordinary Highland Lass commands the speaker’s attention, and, “the vale…overflowing with the sound” of her unselfconscious voice serves as the vehicle for the speaker’s own exotic flights of imagination into distant lands and strange, yet appropriate, comparisons between the human voice and the sounds of the natural world. At his best, Coleridge might say, Wordsworth breaks up, conjoins, and reconciles disparate categories of perception, feeling, and experience. The result is a fresh new way of understanding ourselves and the world around us.

In both poems that I have mentioned, the poet has made free choices; as Coleridge would say, the secondary imagination coexists with the conscious will. This does not necessarily mean that the source of poetry is available to us—a reading of “Kubla Khan” should convince us otherwise—but rather that this power operates alongside of the conscious will. The esemplastic (“molding into one,” Coleridge’s coinage from the Greek) or imaginative power generates complex unities but does not simply cancel distinctions -- good symbolic language depends upon dynamic tension, as the New Critics or formalists say. The poet’s imagination brings together and synthesizes ideas, emotions, and sense perceptions, and integrates them into an organic whole. Lucy is a star, a violet, and just Lucy all at once, and not simply in a mechanical way. The poet’s imaginative act generates a Lucy-star-violet, and we, as well, can understand and feel what Coleridge would call the "multeity in unity" of such a new symbolic creation.

Ultimately, with regard to “secondary imagination,” it might be said that the creative acts of the poet’s mind do not merely imitate the processes of external nature; those creative acts actually repeat natural—i.e. divine—process. We are no longer dealing, as in earlier times, with a merely mimetic, mechanical doctrine about art; there is an organic likeness between art and the divine processes of nature. When Milton’s Satan says early in Paradise Lost, “The mind is its own place,” the context makes it clear that Milton puts the statement down to heresy; when Coleridge makes a similar point, we take him as a romantic theorist.

If Coleridge ascribes such creative power to the poetic imagination, what of the written works poets create? This question brings to the fore two central issues in romantic literature: what is the relationship between imaginative acts and language (both spoken and written), and what is the communal or social value of the British romantics’ favorite kind of art, poetry? The two questions turn out to be related, but let’s begin with Coleridge’s commentary on the symbol. In The Statesman’s Manual of 1816, Coleridge makes a key distinction between mechanical allegory and living symbol:

Now an allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses . . . . On the other hand a symbol . . . is characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative. (Norton Criticism 673, Norton English Lit. 2A 7th ed. 490)

The example Coleridge gives is as follows: “Thus our Lord speaks symbolically when he says that ‘the eye is the light of the body’” (Norton Criticism 674, Norton English Lit. 2A 7th ed. 490). That sentence is from the Gospel According to Saint Luke 11:34-35 , and the King James version runs, “The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is evil, thy body also is full of darkness. / Take heed therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness.” The “eye” here is obviously no mere body part—Jesus apparently means that the material eye is a spiritually energized, organic part of the living human body: if your spirit is unwholesome, you will pursue unwholesome objects; you will do evil with the body as your vital instrument. And as for the “translucence of the Special in the Individual,” one of my old professors’ favorite examples is drawn from Coleridge’s lecture on Romeo and Juliet in Volume 2 of Literary Remains: “The character of the Nurse is the nearest of any thing in Shakespeare to a direct borrowing from mere observation; and the reason is, that as in infancy and childhood the individual in nature is a representative of a class, just as in describing one larch tree, you generalize a grove of them,--so it is nearly as much so in old age” (Project Gutenberg edition). So the talkative, antic Nurse is both an individual and yet the very type of all nurses—she is fully individualized, and at the same time represents the species of nurses. That’s something we can probably say about a lot of Shakespeare’s characters and, by the way, I would recommend Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare highly—they remain wonderful reading and remarkably insightful criticism.

While allegory’s operations call to mind the associational epistemology of John Locke, who argued that all knowledge arises from, and then builds upon, sensory experience in combinatory fashion, the symbol appears, in Coleridge’s definition, to be invested with a being, an “ontological status” of its own. The poet’s imagination literally brings something vital into being—the linguistic symbol and the work of art as a whole. Only the symbolic work, in fine, puts readers in touch with an otherwise inaccessible reality; readers learn through poetry the power of their own minds to overcome the distinction between self and world outside, between the individual’s temporal limitations and eternity. In this way—through the symbolic poem—implies Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria Ch. 14, “[t]he poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity” (Norton Criticism 681, Norton English Lit. 2A, 482). Coleridge’s emphatic claims that the poet’s creative imagination serves as a unifying force for other human spirits, we can see by now, go much further than any of Kant’s remarks about the importance of aesthetic judgment in human affairs.

But what about the specifically linguistic quality of imagination’s products? What about the fact that a “poem,” by the time it gets to us, has gone from what the romantics generally call the stage of “composition” (by which they usually mean not writing the poem down but rather the act of original conception in the mind—as when Wordsworth says in his notes to “Tintern Abbey” that he composed the entire poem on his way home from his perch overlooking the Abbey and only later wrote it all down) to the different status of written language? Well, herein lies the rub of romantic poetics. A “symbol,” for Coleridge, isn’t just a lonely word, a closed and final unit of corrugated speech. It is not any dead thing, as a word tends to be considered in the classical disciplines of rhetoric and grammar. In rhetoric, the point is to arrange words into pleasing and convincing patterns—thus the division of rhetoric into ceremonial, forensic, and deliberative branches, depending on whether the speaker’s motive is to praise, to prove innocence or guilt, or to help others decide what course of action to pursue.

When we hear the term “symbol,” we tend to think of an emblem—as when we talk about “symbols on cave walls,” or of a standard literary device, as when we explain metaphor (or, more accurately in this case, simile—a close comparison between two things) by quoting the Robert Burns lines, “O my love's like a red, red rose / That's newly sprung in June.” We get it—lover = rose; something ineffable like the spiritual essence of one’s beloved is being compared to something we understand—a rose with its charming color, its beautiful form, and its pleasing perfume. In this way, a classical metaphor (even a fancy metaphysical one like John Donne’s “If they [our souls] be two, they are two so / As stiff twin compasses are two, / Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show / To move, but doth if th' other do” in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”—is an explanatory device, not a profound, higher synthesis that reconciles “opposite and discordant qualities” into a dynamic symbolic unity. The fact that a simile by Burns is so commonly used as an illustration of metaphor drives the point home: in classical terms, the two serve much the same purpose of comparing unlike with like.

The Coleridgean symbol purports to be a living thing, if indeed we insist on calling it a thing at all—Coleridge writes that the symbol “is characterized by a translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative.” As Gerald Bruns explains in his book Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language: A Critical and Historical Study (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1974), romanticists construe language as a function, not a collection of isolated words, whether written or spoken. At their most optimistic, the romantic theorists tend towards an Orphic explanation of the word as a primal poetic utterance that reaches out to join the world and by no means simply describes inert external material things. So when, as in “Dejection: An Ode,” Coleridge says, “O lady, we receive but what we give / In our life alone does nature live,” we might well take “language” as integral to what Coleridge means by “life.” A symbolic utterance doesn’t refer to reality; it is indissolubly part of the reality it speaks; it has authentic being and isn’t just a dead code that points towards real beings. What language must express, therefore, is the inner workings of the imagination itself, the spiritual and vital dimension of human being.

Like most European philosophers, Coleridge privileges the notion of language as voice, as an utterance that remains close to the source of authentic being as grasped in continual and creative acts of self-positing. But we should—as the British romantics often do—acknowledge the doubt that shadows such radiant notions of self-present truth as their obverse: writing. Here we can borrow from the thought of Jacques Derrida, whose first major work, Of Grammatology, remains one of his most insightful and accessible alongside much excellent later work. As far back as Plato, the written word has been taken as subordinate to the spoken word, and the reason for this, though hard to accept, isn’t far to seek: it is painfully obvious that “texts” (even romantic ones about sky-larks and crumbling abbeys) are not in our control once they reach the handwritten or printed page. What Socrates says in the Phaedrus about the written word is true: it is always subject to an interpretation that has little or nothing to do with what we, the authors, originally meant, and if questioned, our written texts just go on repeating themselves in code-fashion—the same words in the same order, with the repetition getting us no closer to the writer’s intention than before. A written piece of language is rather like an orphaned child that doesn’t know its parents; it cannot offer you a further explanation if you should desire one. But if you ask the “parent” of a spoken utterance for clarification, you might get your wish. (See Phaedrus paragraphs 275-76 especially.)

The point is that the aristocratic philosopher Plato has found out the promiscuity of written language—it slips away from us all too easily and goes on signifying things we never meant it to signify. Just as the demagogues in Athens used to stir up the people and get them to betray the noblest political aims for crass self-interest and pleasure, so does the written text desecrate the carefully constructed temple of meaning: consciousness itself. The insight Derrida brings to this analysis of the relationship between speaking and writing is that what Plato wrote about writing is just as true about speaking: both are haunted by an absence at the very moment when the full presence of meaning seems nearest: the spoken word is no closer to an originating truth residing in human consciousness than is the written word. “Language” is something that, as a broadly accessible code, goes well beyond whatever is occurring in the head of the individual who speaks or writes. So the privileging of voice in philosophical discourse is symptomatic, we might say, of a deep need to repress a disturbing insight about our relationship to meaning that applies equally to what we write and to what we speak. The same would be true of romantic poetry, where so often the scene of writing is effaced and we are supposed to think of the poem as an actual utterance spoken by a lyric voice, as if the speaker or the author were actually here and talking conveying the words right into the depths of our souls. This insight makes for an immense complication of the entire philosophical project to build up systems of truth—something that Derrida, as he gladly admitted, is hardly the first person to have noticed.

If all of the above sounds rather abstruse, try the following generalized “consciousness experiment”: see if you can wrap your mind around your own thought processes of any complexity. I defy you to do it—you have no idea where your thoughts come from or why they come. Shelley’s wistful poem “We are as clouds” is right: in the revolutions of thought, “no second motion brings / one mood or modulation like the last.” You can hardly begin to control the process whereby thoughts present themselves to your consciousness, if that phrasing even makes sense. You have no more control over what goes on in your head than Plato says our author has over the texts he or she has written. What we mean by “meaning,” I suspect, is that ex post facto we interpret prior thoughts and say we “meant” such and such. And on the process goes, with no real beginning or end. We can find no originary source for our meanings—at least not one that comes from us as self-conscious, thinking individuals. And in Derrida’s view, there isn’t one in “language” as a supposedly integral system of meanings, either. For language isn’t such a system at all—construe it as the evidence of one gigantic superhuman consciousness as we will, language won’t deliver to us the full presence of consciousness to itself or a self-verifying, stable system of meaning; it never delivers on what we take it to promise: endless deferral and difference is our reward. This “reward” is by no means to be despised but in deconstructive terms, it remains our burden to admit that consciousness, far from being the cause of anything, is itself an effect of something we find very difficult fully to explain. That isn’t an invitation to cultivate the worship of mystery; it’s a challenge not to get trapped into taking our explanations about consciousness, truth, or language for the last word.

But let’s return to Coleridge’s notion of the symbol—it makes sense to admit that the above problem is exactly what Coleridgean symbolism is determined to bury. The symbol retains the power of voice that is in turn linked to unitary consciousness, or—since Coleridge was a Unitarian minister and no nature-worshiper—to the Truth we mean when we say “God.” I mentioned earlier that romantic poetry tends to efface its status as written word in favor of lyric utterance. This isn’t just a polite convention as perhaps it is for, say, Sidney or Wyatt when they create their anguished semi-Petrarchan speakers; the romantic symbol or poetic word is to work its magic upon our spirits, carrying alive into the heart the poet’s passions and expressive truth. The therapeutic power of romantic poetry depends largely on their validity of their model of consciousness and speech. Words bespeak our humanity in the deepest sense, and have a vital bond with the natural world. Imagination and symbol are beyond our ordinary relationship to consciousness and to language (respectively), and they have the capacity to revitalize and refresh those relationships, which, ultimately, the romantics hope will lead to renewal on both the individual and collective levels—and at the broad social level, we might just see a more harmonious society for all, without oppression, false distinctions of class, race, or gender, and without fanaticism or bigotry. “Meaning,” if we want to call it that, would become an agent of our liberation, not a vehicle for the perpetuation of social injustice and self-alienation. None of this is meant to carry forwards some naïve view of the romantics as gloriously optimistic children of hope and light—that isn’t what I find interesting about them at all; it is more a construction of modern critics (perhaps themselves a little naïve?) than the product of attentive reading of the major British or Continental romantics. What I find most wonderful about Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats is that in their respective ways, they all “know better” than to give us the sort of simple “primitivism” or poetic optimism we sometimes say they give us. Can you think of anyone who questions simplistic notions about language, consciousness, or social harmony more insistently than those same romantics? I find it hard to do. Nobody writes more eloquently about the brightest prospects for humanity’s future than, say, Shelley in Prometheus Unbound; but at the same time, nobody asks more searching questions about those prospects and the processes and media by which we set them forth, I should think, than did the romantics themselves. Both are good reasons—preferably taken together—to enjoy romantic poetry.

Week 03, William and Dorothy Wordsworth

2006-02-16T15:18:00.000-08:00

Notes on William Wordsworth

The French Revolution. Wordsworth, like Coleridge, Blake, Southey, and many other democratic-spirited Englishmen, at first enthusiastically welcomed the French Revolution, and believed that it would amount to a “new dawn” for humanity. The Revolution (http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/) flowed in part from the Enlightenment ideal of progress, of the good life here and now: not in some displaced fantasy afterlife, not from the crumbs tossed our way from the king’s table as if we were dogs. If we have made our institutions, the idea goes, we should be able to change them at will and for the better. But in the wake of the extremist period of the Revolution (the Jacobin-inspired “Terror” of 1792-93), it became increasingly difficult to believe that the French upheaval was such a positive affair.

It has often been said that Wordsworth and his fellow poets didn’t really abandon their democratic hopes, but instead turned to their art as a way of expressing them, and even placed a great deal of emphasis on literary art itself as one of the main vehicles for promoting change. I think there is some justification for that understanding of British romanticism -- Wordsworth himself, in the Prelude, offers many a verse observation that confirms it, at least with respect to his own development as a poet. If, in fact, the romantics more or less internalize the ideals of the revolution, weave them into literature, and then expect literature to help effect change (to put it baldly), it almost goes without saying that such a formula doesn’t solve the difficult question of how human societies make progress: do we start with the individual, or is that a bourgeois notion since progress can only happen when a mass movement or a revolution gets underway, as with America in 1776, France in 1789, Russia in 1917, or the recent anticommunist turnabouts in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall? Can any force short of a French Revolution influence the sensibilities of large numbers of individuals, and so help bring about eventual change? Let’s turn to Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads to see what he has to say about the relationship between literature and the prospects for meaningful change.

Literature and the Reformation of Taste. It has long been noticed that Wordsworth’s poems flow from a new, fundamentally democratic sense of life: his experimental Lyrical Ballads demand that we pay attention to a variety of humble people and outcasts who don’t come at us with a pinch of snuff and fancy aristocratic titles -- the stuff of traditional poetry. “Liberty, equality, fraternity” are still Wordsworth’s ideals even in 1798, though no patriotic Englishman would be caught directly supporting France by that date. In the Preface, we can recognize Wordsworth’s intent to address the major eighteenth-century concern over “taste,” usually expressed in terms of “decorum,” a commonly available set of rules according to which polite society perceives, thinks, and lives. This issue of taste is by no means trivial, as we sometimes take it to be when we say, “there’s no accounting for taste.” Underlying notions of taste are notions of how people are to get along with one another even though they may not agree on everything.

Wordsworth as a reformer of the public’s taste in literature shows disdain for old-fashioned aristocrats, but also finds distressing the still relatively small but growing urban population of readers. The aristocrats -- aside from their blatant adherence to an unjust and inadequate system that awards people for high birth rather than merit, are too favorable to the decorum-laden “poetic diction” that would abstract even the most particular individual fish into a card-carrying member of the “finny tribe.” This kind of language merely dulls the senses and removes us farther than ever from the material world and from healthy, pure perception of the breathing world. It turns poetry into a concept-making-machine instead of a means by which to connect with nature and other human beings.

But the urban multitude comes in for some sharp criticism, too -- Wordsworth has no patience with these seekers of “gross and violent stimulation” and admirers of “sickly and stupid German tragedies.” They are the early romantic period’s equivalent of today’s crime-show and reality-TV addicts, I suppose -- people who have become so desensitized to anything healthy (like nature and stories about good folks, for instance) that their minds don’t perk up for anything but lurid tales of wrongdoing and vulgarly competitive scenarios where people eat hapless insects and chase one another around on fake deserted islands. Our emphasis on these “Gilligans gone Wild” and on the misconduct of criminal brutes brings out the worst in us, one can hear him saying. Not to mention the ceaseless round of consumerist one-upmanship and all-around “fetishism of the commodity,” as Karl Marx will one day label capitalist society’s confusion over the relative value of people and inanimate objects. Wordsworth is no proto-Marxist, but his criticism of early industrialist culture has some affinities with later and more radical critiques: a commodity culture tends toward atomistic individualism and against social cohesion.

Poetry -- the Universal Orphic Song. What is needed? Well, in his Preface Wordsworth suggests a move away from a false urban and utilitarian interiority based on shallow pleasure-seeking and acquisitiveness and towards a more genuine, healthy interiority that brings strong individuals together. The latter kind of interiority helps us rediscover our connection to nature and to others; it gives us back our common capacity to feel uplifting emotions. Wordsworth’s poetics is universalist -- he takes it as a given that right operation of feeling and imagination is possible for all, and that it will lead to similarly positive results for the individual and for society. But the current urban public’s interiority is vulgar -- its immediacy is not that of self-presence and a sense of the deep universal truths of the human spirit; it entails only “instant gratification,” a mere object-relation that turns the object seeker himself into just another object. As Walter Ong might say, urban anonymity is that of mere facelessness in the crowd, and it actually keeps us from experiencing the deep nameless intimacy of the “I,” as opposed to the socially given attributes owing to our proper name -- John, Jose, Mary, whatever. The proper name is one compact but powerful instance of the “cultural scripts” that (from our very birth onwards) tell us what kind of beings we are, how we ought to relate to one another, what our relationship to objects and to nature ought to be, and so forth. We conceive of life’s purpose along lines fed to us by others. Shouldn’t we be able to erase the old scripts and replace them with new and better ones -- can’t we make our world the way we want it to be: peaceful and purposeful?

Implicit in what has just been said is that false language, false understanding, and false living go together -- problems with language are deeply implicated in broader problems of cultural coherency and change. As Gerald Bruns points out in his book Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language (New Haven: Yale UP, 1974), romantic theorists such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others assume that human language is to be understood as deeply processive -- words aren’t inanimate, discrete objects or “things” that we arrange into decorous patterns, as they are in ancient and Renaissance rhetorical theory. The romantic word doesn’t either stand in the way of truth or move out of the way so we can simply “get at” the truth. (The same conception of the word as an object can occur whether, like philosophical idealists, we mean by “truth” something in our heads -- i.e. prelinguistic images or “ideas” -- or whether with empiricists like Bacon we mean something “out there” in a world of objects independent of the human mind. Rather, language and truth are closely bound up together -- who “we” are and how we understand the world around us cannot be considered apart from the fact that we are linguistic beings. In Bruns’ terms, the romantics see words less a medium than as a function, a process, and this process connects us vitally to the world “beyond” language. In the most optimistic formulations of romantic poetics, he points out, the poetic word takes on an Orphic, almost magical quality to be part of the reality it speaks -- not just a set of symbols describing that reality.

If any such thing is the case, it is vital that we “get it right” in our relationship with language. If our language is false and corrupted, we will live and understand falsely and corruptly. Since we can’t wish language away, what, then, can purify our relationship with it? You guessed, it -- poetry. Wordsworth’s and Shelley’s and Coleridge’s kind of poetry, to be precise. At its best, and even if all writing amounts to a “cultural script,” romantic poetry is the bearer of a new gospel, a new and better “script” by which humans can live together. So when Wordsworth, as he says in his Preface, goes back to the rural countryside and listens to the speech of farmers, he’s doing it for philosophical reasons: the rustics are more sound in their ways and speech than city folk, so they have a living “script,” we might say, and not a mass of corrupted words with no relation to anything in the human heart or physical nature. Wordsworth really isn’t returning directly to nature, but rather to human nature in its best state.

Nature. I have placed this key romantic concern right after my comments on language to make a point. The point is that the romantics may privilege the human relationship with nature, but they are not (in the main) primitivists who think we can shed “civilization” the way a snake sheds its skin periodically. We can’t just “go back to nature.” Going to the countryside is good, of course, but when Wordsworth does this, there’s usually some human artifact (like, well, a ruined abbey) nearby. We can’t go back to nature in the simple sense because we were never really in it in the first place. Wordsworth doesn’t collapse “human nature” into oneness with the natural world of hills and dales, flora and fauna. He puts it into close affinity with the natural environment, but doesn’t say they’re exactly the same. His attitude is perhaps a kinder, gentler version of Ignatius of Loyola’s idea that nature is at best a vehicle for spiritual realization, at worst a hindrance. And Wordsworth finds that it isn’t a hindrance -- it’s a great help.

Further, you can see by Wordsworth’s insistence upon the principle of selection from “nature” -- from rural speech patterns and from the details of landscape, that is -- just how far he is from any doctrine of primitivism. Nature may be our original “source,” but we can only repair to it for a time, not stay there permanently. The closest thing to it that we can return to in a more or less permanent way would be those “rural speech patterns” and to the profound truths of the human heart, those “essential passions” with which they are so closely bound. To be fair, however, the “essential passions” are indeed closely allied with what Wordsworth calls “the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.”

All in all, I don’t mean to say that nature isn’t a profound concern for most of our romantic poets: Wordsworth and Coleridge, we might say, are in fact the first true “environmentalists,” and would in their own ways agree that the wilderness is what Thoreau later says it is: “the salvation of mankind.” They accept neither the medieval sense of nature as something fearful, hostile and alien, nor the industrialist instrumentalism that sees nature as a “resource” to be tamed and used as we see fit. They are much closer to the enlightened way of looking at nature some environmentalists promote today -- as something endangered, something that must be respected and protected rather than conquered and used. How about, “ask not what your countryside can do for you, ask what you can do for your countryside”? The romantics, writing at ground zero of the Industrial Revolution, knew this was a difficult argument to make, and it continues to be difficult today. Most environmental groups gear their rhetoric towards the idea that we should preserve nature “because it’s useful to us” or “for our children’s children’s great grandchildren’s grandchildren.” It comes down to the same thing -- for us, not for nature in its own right. What I have described may be a necessary rhetorical strategy, but it cedes a tragic amount of ground to crass Utilitarians who see only “timber” even in the midst of an old-growth redwood forest.

Science. Not all of the romantics are as scathing when it comes to science as William Blake, with his diatribes against the unholy trinity of “Bacon, Newton, & Locke,” but in general they interpret the advent of scientific discourse and practice disturbing. In his Preface, Wordsworth suggests that the poet’s song take us back almost to a new Eden, while the scientists labor in the fields, still with much of the sorrowful Old Adam and Eve in their hearts. Science, in Wordsworth’s view, “murders to dissect” -- it takes things apart in an effort to understand and control them. Those dominant powers Reason and Social Utility demand such efforts at mastery over nature. Sir Francis Bacon’s empirical project was by no means as godless as Blake makes it sound -- it follows the dual prescription of promoting god’s glory and ameliorating the human condition. But even in the Baconian emphasis on “experimenta lucifera” (pure science, “experiments of light”) rather than on “experimenta fructifera” (science for the sake of near-term improvement in living conditions), we can easily see the roots of romantic criticism against the scientific stirrings of their time: science, based upon building up knowledge from sensory observation and rational system-building derived from that observation, tends to become a pursuit for its own sake -- yet another “system,” as Blake might say, that becomes its own justification without regard to the human beings who are supposed to benefit from it.

All of the romantics take issue with science as tending towards this condition -- a snare for the naively optimistic rather than a vehicle for perpetual human improvement. They keep insisting that there’s something closer, more proper, to human beings than whatever lies at the far end of some grand march to knowledge and control. Perhaps what we really need “lies about us in our infancy,” and is never very far. The greatest wisdom is not to dissect things but to perceive their unity and not violate it. And how do we define progress anyway? Does it have to with production -- i.e. with clever new ways to satisfy old desires and even create new ones, to gain mastery over the natural environment, to amass huge stocks of quantifiable, empirically verifiable knowledge? It isn’t self-evident what “progress” is, and the issue will become a major one from Wordsworth’s time forwards.

Below are some thoughts on the status of the poet and on poetic process.

The Value of Creative Imagination. I should mention first of all Meyer Abrams’ excellent study The Mirror and the Lamp, which offers an exhaustive intellectual history about the difference between mimetic (i.e. imitative) neoclassical theories of artistic creation and romantic expressive theories that privilege creative imagination. The key difference is that the mimetic theorist believes art mainly copies the external world, while the expressive critic says artists mostly express (that is, externalize) inner feelings, thoughts, and memories. As Abrams’ metaphor implies, the lamp seems to burn from an inner source, while the mirror reflects an image from the world outside. Romantic poets, then make available to us the inner workings of their own being, and in this act of spiritual publication lies the real value of art.

As Wordsworth explains in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, the value lies here because expression is exactly the power that ordinary, unpoetical city folk have forgotten they possess, thanks to the “multitude of causes” (mainly the bad effects of living in a depersonalized urban environment and the political and military tumult of the late eighteenth century) that Wordsworth specifies in the Preface. There are many sophisticated formulations of what poets can do for us, but one of the most straightforward is Wordsworth’s claim in the Preface that the poet sings a song in which everyone can join. Poets are said to be in touch with nature and, therefore, with certain primal human passions, chief amongst them “love.” Poets are the individuals least “damaged” by modernity and the ones who can, therefore, think and feel in the absence of frenetic stimulation. They can still commune with the natural world and trace the unwritten laws of the human spirit -- this power gives the broadest possible scope, thinks Wordsworth, to the vital operations of the imagination, that binding capacity we all have, at least in potential, even if circumstance has kept us from honoring or encouraging the gift.

Wordsworth, like the other British romantics, is firmly in the expressivist camp, but offers an interestingly modified version of expressive theory. He implies that the healthy functioning of the imagination requires the mind (and body) to open up to a “wise passiveness” wherein the perceiver soaks in every sensation round about, without reflecting or intellectualizing it into a grand synthetic whole, a moral emblem, or anything else. There is a trace of good old-fashioned empiricism in the poetic practice and theory of Wordsworth.

By empiricism, I refer to the science-tending doctrine that says what we know comes first from our five senses -- not from abstract reasoning power all by itself. Imagination in faculty psychology terms is the image-making power; it’s the capacity that lets you see images even if there isn’t any direct sensory stimulus in your field of vision. If you’ve ever read Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, you might recall the villain Archimago -- the “arch image-maker” who keeps fooling Red Crosse Knight with all those false appearances. Well, empiricists like John Locke say that all our knowledge comes from sense experience: we see things that are out there in the world, and our simple perceptions get “associated” and combined into more and more complex, abstract, and general ideas. Memory stores all this idea-stuff, almost like a hard drive in our modern terms, and we can work with it and build on it intellectually, broadening our stock of knowledge. Locke is perhaps an early version of “information technology,” with the mind like a calculating machine with data storage capacity. The movement of information-processing runs from the particular to the general -- thus the validity on “inductive method” in empirical writers like Sir Francis Bacon. That’s the way the mind works, and that’s the way we should patiently build up systems of knowledge. It’s good to keep this in mind when we consider the way Wordsworth deals with his immediate perceptions of nature. But Wordsworth isn’t simply an empiricist -- what he suggests is that we “half create, and half perceive” (“Tintern Abbey”) the “mighty world of eye and ear.” Or as he writes in The Prelude, Book 11, the poets “build up greatest things / From least suggestions” (lines 98-99). Ultimately, and again in The Prelude, Wordsworth asserts the priority of mind over mere nature, and so in this way he approaches the proposition of Coleridge in “Dejection: an Ode” that “in our life alone does nature live.” What must the poet do for the people? By Book 13 of The Prelude (1805), the task is this: “Instruct them how the mind of man becomes / A thousand times more beautiful than the earth / On which he dwells….” However Wordsworth ultimately ranks mind over nature, his poetry promotes a gentle interplay between them. He is not suggesting that imagination creates new worlds in its own fiery crucible and that it takes us away from nature altogether into the exalted realm of free creativity. On the whole, Wordsworth talks about poetic creation and readerly pleasure in terms of a properly functioning mind, one in which sensory perception, memory, and the capacity to feel all work together. The result of this proper attunement is peace within oneself and harmony with others. Pleasure is the aim of life -- it alone signifies internal and external health. As Freud would tell us, if we can’t feel pleasure, there’s something deeply wrong in our emotional state.

Wordsworth’s Method of Composition: Meditation. “Meditative” is perhaps the best way to describe Wordsworth’s account of how poems get composed in the poet’s head and then written down. Much of Wordsworth’s poetry seems to be based upon long-standing Christian meditative practices, at least indirectly. Meyer Abrams describes the structure of Wordsworth’s great odes by saying they begin with a meditation on a particular place. This act of contemplation helps the poet to remember and analyze a problem that he or she has been experiencing, and finally an “affective” or emotional resolution is achieved. The pattern goes something like this:

1) Our senses and imagination stir up memories, not all of them good ones;

2) Our power of analysis sets to work on the problem at hand

3) Our rekindled emotions help us resolve the problem, or at least show the way.

You will find this an accurate description of poems such as “Tintern Abbey” and “Intimations of Immortality.”

What I have just described is similar to the structure of the Spiritual Exercises (http://www.ccel.org/i/ignatius/exercises/exercises.html) advocated by St. Ignatius of Loyola. Ignatius has exercitants begin with “the composition of place,” and through that vivid recollection or imagining of either a real place or one associated with the life of Christ, he expects that meditators will begin to understand the gravity and repetitive quality of their sinful ways, and finally that this awareness will lead to a colloquy with Christ, a dialogue that should leave a person with hope for the future.

The Spiritual Exercises are supposed to clear away the mental errors and worldly confusions that are getting in the way of salvation, which requires devotion to God above all else. Theologically, we could say that the exercises help realign the will away from “the world, the flesh, and the devil” and allow a person to follow God’s plan more closely. From this meditation should flow a sense of spiritual peace and devotion, as well as a clearer sense of one’s proper vocation. What profession to follow? Should I take holy orders, or go on living as a business person or whatever, only with greater charity towards others and a better sense that my own desires and concerns aren’t as important as I used to think? The choice will depend upon the individual.

Well, meditation’s goal is always something like that, with or without the specific theological trappings: we must withdraw into ourselves for a time, removing ourselves from the corruptions that have set in thanks to the badness of our society and our own inner failings, and through intense contemplation arrive at a state of emotional and spiritual health and equilibrium. Clarity of perception might be another benefit, if we want to speak less of emotion and more of intellection. Buddhist meditation, for instance, is largely about letting “unconfusion” happen, opening oneself up to the discovery of truths that have always been right next to us. Wordsworth’s “wise passiveness” in the presence of nature, his soaking up the sights and sounds around him, has something of that quality to it. Except that his own background is more Christian-tinged; he probably wouldn’t find Eastern “self-annihilation” congenial but might instead opt for the retooling of the individual self and its purposiveness. At this point in his career, of course, Wordsworth isn’t exactly talking traditional theology -- his God is “Nature,” and he isn’t trying to instill in us a sense that we have sinned against the light, either. I just mean that in general what seems to underlie romantic meditation is a long tradition of Christian meditative theory and practice.

The Status of the Poet -- Prophet or Merchant? Almost everyone admires the romantic formulation of why literature is (or should be) valuable not only to poets but to everyone else. But we should also keep in mind the unpleasant notion of Marxist critic Raymond Williams that this formulation of the poet-prophet healing the ills of the community is partly the effect of the very causes it tries to overcome. Williams’ idea is that the more threatened and marginalized literary artists became, the more insistent and even grandiose became their claims about the value of their activity. The point is, how does a poet respond to the threat of being either eliminated as silly and anachronistic, or forced to adapt poetry’s message to what the growing and economically powerful middle classes want, or having to play the isolated “voice crying in the wilderness” all the more defiantly for lack of an audience? None of the choices offer much consolation, it seems -- elimination, adaptation (i.e. selling out), or marginalization to a street-corner preacher in some dingy corner of London shouting at indifferent passersby, “what doth it profit a man if he gain the world, and lose his soul?” The father of capitalist ideology, Adam Smith (see his book The Wealth of Nations), predicted some such thing when he said that his principle of the “division of labor” logically applies to thinking, not just to physical employments. And if we can pay people to do our thinking for us, it makes sense to say as well that one day we will also pay people to do our feeling for us. In effect, that kind of statement acknowledges that even grand romantic poetry is one commodity amongst many others, and that as always in the marketplace, people will choose as it pleases them, for whatever reason or no reason at all. In a sense, art remains part of life, but by no means a privileged one -- there are plenty of other things to do out there in a modern urban community, especially in one that follows the utilitarian line that the goal of society is the pursuit of undifferentiated individual pleasure. Jeremy Bentham puts it eloquently: “all other things being equal, pushpin [a game less sophisticated than checkers] is as good as poetry.” Evidently, we aren’t the first society to say, “do it if it feels good” or “whatever turns you on.” Bottom line: in Williams’ view, the effect of capitalism is to marginalize, specialize, and commodify the act of writing poetry. The poet is a specialized worker, not an exalted demigod. Modern literature continually confronts this problem of “social value,” and the simple fact that people (critics, moralists, the public) come up to literature with their hands in their pockets and make such a demand shows that Williams’ claims about literary “marginalization” have some genuine explanatory power.

Week 02, Blake and Robinson

2006-02-09T15:17:00.000-08:00

Introduction to Course

Insofar as there is one theme running through this course, it is that romantic and Victorian poets lived through a “crisis of authority” and examined its political, cultural, and religious consequences. Imagination was the central power of the romantic era: great claims are made for it as an almost godlike agent of creation, of remaking the world anew and uniting the broken shards of self and community. We may find the Victorians more circumspect about such radical claims for imagination and the individual, but the romantics do not necessarily set them forth naively—that is a charge made partly by the Victorians themselves, and partly by twentieth-century critics. Nothing shows the complexity of romantic poetics more fully than reading William Blake. An extensive Introduction to C19 British Literature is available in the Guides section of our Wiki Site.

On God and Free Expression:

1) We shouldn’t assume rigidly either that God is a powerful authority figure outside of us, or that God “resides [only] in the human breast.” Both of these positions have negative consequences, intended or otherwise. We either cringe before a mysterious external authority, or we become arrogant and turn “Imagination” into a God with all the baggage of Blake’s white-bearded old God, “Nobodaddy” (a cipher who nevertheless wields the power of collective human barbarity). Instead, it would be best to say that “God” has to do with imaginative process—that the emphasis should lie on the necessity to externalize God in image and text and, even as we do so, to be constantly tearing our constructions down so they don’t become abstractions, parts of a rigid system of oppression. The building up and tearing down are one and the same act—look at the many strategems Blake invents to keep his texts from sounding like The Last Word on anything: outrageous comic-book-style parodic humor, self-parody, nearly constant self-referentiality with regard to the creative process, workings-out of the impossibility of beginning or ending texts, character-voices that seem to be privileged (like the Devil in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) and then turn out to be just as flawed as other voices.

2) Blake believes in free expression of all kinds, but the point of such expression isn’t to shore up a conception of the self as isolated from others. Expression should bring people together, not keep them apart. Blake may be eccentric, but he isn’t a “cowboy.” So the charge of solipsism (being wrapped up in one’s own head) would not make sense with regard to Blake.

Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Songs of Innocence was published in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. The Songs of Experience came out in 1794. They are separate but related works. Blake’s philosophy developed into what we see in Experience. But there is already a kind of “experienced” quality to the Songs of Innocence, as the ambivalent preposition “of” suggests. They are not childish or simple.

The title of Blake’s poems, Songs of Innocence & of Experience, reminds us of the Christian Fall and its notion of a prelapsarian and a postlapsarian state. But Blake’s terms are not the same because he isn’t setting forth a vision of the human condition before the Fall and then the human condition after the Fall. You can’t get back to prelapsarian innocence; you can, however, regard the concepts of innocence and experience as being in dynamic tension, with each commenting on the other. Even at birth, I think Blake would say, we have already entered into a state of experience. The important thing is not be subsumed and hardened by our awareness of that fact into cynicism and barren systemic thought.

Much of the action in Blake’s poetry has to do with what happens when characters get trapped by the production of their own minds or the productions of other people’s minds, right up to the level of society-wide practices and beliefs (religion, political economy, monarchism, etc.). As one of his characters says, “I must create my own system” to avoid being enslaved by anyone else’s. This does not mean that one should set up one’s own system and live by it as a rigid code—when Blake makes his characters address the creation of idea-systems, I believe we should understand him to mean that we are always simultaneously building up and destroying these “systems” of thought. The critical thing is that the imaginative process of creation and destruction seem to be one and the same imaginative act—they are not separate and successive acts, but one.

Why is that so? Well, I think it is because Blake has an uncanny insight into the way any product of human imagination, any practice, quickly becomes a trap—something that comes from us but that seems to have been imposed by some external authority figure, call it “God” or whatever you will. But further, it isn’t enough just to say, as a character says in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that “all deities reside in the human breast.” That kind of statement quickly leads to arrogant solipsism (as in, “I am God” or “I need not regard the ideas and needs of others”) or outright nihilism (“why believe anything if there are no external absolutes and everything is only a product of the imagination?”). Such a state of affairs is just as bad as setting up an external authority figure and then cowering under its dread pronouncements, its endless litany of “Thou shalt nots.” A tyrant in the human breast is just as bad as one on Mount Olympus or anywhere else. A central image in Blake is the human figure who has created an image or an idea from which he or she then shrinks back in mystified horror or awe.

Blake is profoundly spiritual and seems to have known the Bible almost by heart, but he doesn’t seem comfortable with the linear time scheme of Christian narrative. For Blake, the Fall is always happening, and so is Redemption, and his vision of Heaven is something he calls “intellectual conversation,” which is not lamblike bliss but rather intellect and emotion, reason and energy, existing together. That view is fully articulated in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. I think that in his view, to posit a one-time Fall that occurred some thousands of years ago in a certain garden would be a profound mistake--just the kind of narratival trap he wants to avoid.

Romantic Imagination and Childhood: So in Songs, while we are tempted to view childhood as pristine innocence, we should be careful. The Fall is essentially a drop into material reality, and since children are creatures of material reality, they are in the world of experience, too. Still, perhaps they can offer a perspective that will help adults break out of the stalest, deadened perceptions of themselves and the world in which they live, lest those perceptions become a trap. Children possess an abundance of imagination, and they seem less aware than are adults of the limitations placed upon them by physical reality, cultural strictures, repression of various kinds—fetters upon the human mind. In his poem “London,” he uses the apt phrase “mind-forged manacles.” Children at least trust that they can find a way out, and they are able to offer a spiritual, even optimistic, perspective on the fallen reality into which they have been cast. But this childlike state of optimism must pass through the fires of experience—the world will not leave it alone; purification is fiery, energy is vital. “Without contraries is no progression”: terms like body and soul, reason and energy, are not mutually exclusive; we must put them into dynamic conversation. Otherwise, you just end up “negating” both rather than marrying them in a fruitful union that moves human spirit forward. We must put innocence and experience together as a married pair of states. Blake never “gets around” intellectual difficulties—he confronts them head-on, putting seemingly contradictory terms right alongside each other and dealing with the implications and potentialities of such “marriages.”

Purpose of Songs of Innocence: It isn’t to tell us that we can simply become innocent again; but Blake will not violate Christ’s claim that to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, one must become “like a little child.” We must remain open to the possibility of Redemption, of the Eternal and the Infinite. We must be able to interpret the physical reality around us in a spiritual way. For Blake, Jesus is the Principle of Imagination and most perfectly realized imaginative existence. The philosophies of the adult world, Blake finds, are French rationalism, with its arrogant reliance on the self-sufficient power of Reason, and British empiricism, with its insistence that the mind is a passive recipient of sensory data and therefore mechanically “bound” to the natural world. Such philosophies lead us only to atheism and barren cynicism. The world of harsh reality and repression will become the grave of the adult’s spirit. I recall an idea from Jewish theology: philosopher Benjamin reminds us that for Jews, each moment is a portal through which the Messiah may enter. I find Blake’s view of redemption similar. Perhaps openness to that possibility is what Blake finds attractive about childhood: the capacity to imagine and feel one’s way out of the mind’s and the world’s snares. A child is at least in part capable of “looking thro’ the eye and not with it.” We are not reducible to fallen material reality, and not confinable to fallen temporal schemes—we are more than they allow us, and we must understand that fact. “Here and now” is our fallen medium; we must look into it through the eye and perceive the infinite and the eternal. To be in a fallen condition and not interpret our condition spiritually is to compound and perpetuate human error.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The Fall. The Fall of Satan and then of Adam and Eve should not simply be condemned, much less considered one-time events. Just as you can’t return to a state of innocence prior to experience, so you can’t return to some mythic state of prelapsarian (“before the fall”) life in the earthly paradise or (in Satan’s case) heaven. Heaven and Hell are contraries—they are perspective-states that require each other. The Angels tend to be creatures of reason, and the devils creatures of passion or energy—notice how Blake’s Devil describes the intimate relationship between the two qualities: “reason is the outward bound or circumference of energy.”

Emanuel Swedenborg. Delightful as his Memorable Relations are, Swedenborg the mystic resorts to mutually exclusive opposites in dealing with the eternal realms, and doesn’t grasp Blake’s notion of “contraries.” (A contrary like reason/energy is what it is because both sides of the term have something going for them and can be put in a meaningful relationship with their partner term. The interaction or marriage of contraries poses a challenge to the mind and works against passivity.) Blake’s narrator says that Swedenborg talked only to angels, so his visions came out one-sided. Blake, by contrast, doesn’t turn away from thoughts of Hell or conversations with “Satans” as Swedenborg does. But Swedenborg still has the right idea—he seeks to engage in conversation about the fundamental things, even if he comes up short. I think Blake makes his narrator underestimate Swedenborg somewhat; the narrator seems cocky in saying that Swedenborg talked second-rate rubbish. Blake’s own view probably differs—after all, why honor one’s predecessor with such parody? Any press is good press, we might say, and the C18 prophet is in good company, with the Unholy Trinity of Bacon, Newton & Locke, and, of course, Milton.

Digression. Blake dislikes Bacon and Newton because of their scientific mindset, and Locke because of his mechanical tabula rasa or blank slate conception of the mind. Locke, that is, says we get our ideas from sensory perception; simple perceptions are combined into ever more complex and abstract clusters called ideas and concepts, and finally these are used to grind out whole philosophical systems and world views. To Blake, this seems like atheism and a complete failure to understand the power of human imagination. And as for poor old John Milton, he has real genius but has somehow managed to turn the Bible upside down—his God is a vacuous, nattering patriarch, and his Devil has the self-respect to try to take him down. (Shelley reads Milton much the same way—see his “Essay on the Devil and Devils.” This is on the most obvious level a misreading of Paradise Lost, but it is what Harold Bloom would call a “strong misreading”—a misinterpretation that is necessary to overcome the “anxiety of influence” besetting romantic poets writing in the wake of such a towering pre-romantic godfather as Milton.)

Emanuel Swedenborg. One thing that Blake must have liked about Swedenborg is the exuberance of this religious enthusiast—see, for example, the outrageous snorts and declarations of the satan or adversary in Swedenborg’s Fifth Memorable Relation. The Devil sends up pious views about heaven and hell—well, so do Blake’s narrator and his own devils. Swedenborg’s methods and perspective may be limited, but at times the attitude of characters in his visions is right on target. Moreover, characters in Swedenborg—at least the satans—keep being reminded of things and then forgetting them because the things they are told don’t suit their nature. They just can’t retain the corrected perspective offered them by the angels and the narrator. Again, this is insightful on Swedenborg’s part, and I suppose Blake adapts the back-and-forth motions of intellect and spirit we find in Swedenborgian devils and in his visions’ very structure. What might be interpreted as a flaw in perspective—the fact that Swedenborg’s satans can’t arrive at a “true” contrarian view with which to oppose his angels--must be turned into a strength, a display of the need for contraries and perpetual conversation.

Swedenborg’s characters are too facile and fall too easily back into their erroneous views, which are something like “default buttons” for them. They confront and are confronted, but the results don’t really stick, so they go back to square one. Swedenborg’s devils and angels do not come together in genuine conversation; there is no play of contrary perspectives, and thus “no progression.”

Blake a True Poet and Therefore of the Devil’s Party? Anyhow, Blake reads the dialogue in Swedenborg and sees that while the Angels say the universe is spiritual and comes from God, and the Devils that it is reducible to nature (nature is its own author), we should accept neither of these positions as they stand—they must be put into conflict, “married,” as it were. The one side overemphasizes spirit at the expense of the body and nature, while the other makes the same mistake in reverse. But to make matters more complex, I should think that we are not to accept even the Blakean Devil’s view that “there is no spirit distinct from body.” It’s easy to see that he’s against simple-minded dualism (body/soul; mind/matter, etc.), but it’s also possible to see that assertions like “spirit and body are the same” can be set forth too easily. Wouldn’t getting rid of one of the terms put an end to the very idea that there must be conflict and not just reconciliation? You can’t have “contraries” without terms that don’t simply amount to the same thing. Blake knows this, but I’m not sure his devil does. The trick is not to let the terms wander off into mutually exclusive territory—saying body and soul are an undifferentiated unity might not be any better than privileging soul over body or body over soul. Either way, we would be letting abstract concepts tyrranize over us and paralyze us—”name your poison,” as they say.

In general, Blake’s Devil must think himself dreadfully clever with his Proverbs of Hell—it’s a kind of wisdom literature as in the Old Testament. But the Devil is perhaps too fond of having the last well-rounded word. He offers something like paradox, which certainly challenges the mind, but I’m not sure we are to trust his motives in challenging us. Blake’s narrator may be too close to him—I don’t know.

Infernal Suggestion. The way to read Blake is to “argue” with him, not to accept his words as making up a system of thought. If you’re not challenging his “diabolical” readings, then you’re probably going to arrive at mistaken views. I think the Devil’s voice has a certain priority in MHH, but it isn’t the last word. There isn’t any last word, so far as I can understand. For example, isn’t the idea of “corroding fires” that reveal the infinite contradictory? How can you invoke a medium (writing) and then say it opens out like a “cleansed” door of perception to the infinite? I think Blake knew well that the concept of a medium—even a clear one—always entails barriers to perception of the infinite and absolute. He struggles against this, but to say you can ever do away with the struggle would be simplistic. So we can’t entirely trust his narrator when he pictures himself propounding the Bible of Hell as if it were the genuine new article and the way to read everything. We have to realize that Blake is not his narrator—there are affinities between the Devils and narrator and Blake, but they don’t reduce to one another. The ending of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell goes against this reconciliation—Jesus, the principle of imagination, thrives on perpetual intellectual conflict—not reconciliation into undifferentiated unity and spineless agreement.

Writing with Corroding Fires. (See the interesting web article An Inquiry into Blake’s Method of Color Printing.) Since Blake comments on his own medium in MHH, we should realize that he never really trusted to any one medium. He is not strictly a writer, but a visionary who worked was apprenticed as an engraver—engraving or etching is a highly skilled endeavor that is sort of like painting on metal and sort of like writing. The word isn’t just “a word on paper,” but something etched with the assistance of acid, etc. This isn’t to say Blake believed he was transcending the very concept of “a necessary medium.” In fact, the communication between his figures and the etched words adds another dimension of complexity to what only appears as a “poem” when it’s printed in something like the Norton Anthology. What we really have is an argument between various media—not reconciliation into a perfect and transparent medium. Blake has that strange capacity to be both exuberant and cautious at the same time: as he is when he says “I stain’d the water clear” in the opening plate of Innocence. Does that mean that he is staining with his pen-reed something that was clear, though still an opaque medium as water is? Is writing not only revelation but also at the same time pollution? Those who dismiss such media-related problems and put all their eggs in one basket are fooling themselves, Blake would probably insist. The question is, what is the relationship between thought, language (written or spoken), image, and imagination?

Consider the relationship between engraved text and the accompanying images. The very first plate of MHH shows that the images can’t simply be “explanations” of the words. Otherwise, I suppose we would be treated to an image of Rintrah and the hungry clouds “swagging” on the deep, or successive images showing the developmental stages to which the words refer. (to swag = to sway from side to side, sink down, vacillate, etc.) But we don’t get that at all.