An Apology for Poetry (Part 3)

(Pictured: The Green Knight.) As I wrote in my introduction to Part 1 of An Apology for Poetry, after a rather long hiatus in my postings on Tradition Restored, I thought that it might be helpful to the reader to re-publish the first three posts of Tradition Restored, which, beginning in the August of 2016, I posted as an introduction to the blog. I offer them again considerably revised.

These three posts served to introduce the many posts that have followed them. I intended the three as an orientation, a kind of container or point of reference by which all those that follow them might be ordered in the mind. The Apology is a commentary on my long poem, “The Young Poet’s Elegy to the Court of God,” in which many years ago I was bold enough (or presumptuous enough) to set forth a theory of poetry and what I rather briskly considered deviations from the recommended path. It is upon the foundation of this theory that I based my plays, The Tragedy of King Lewis the Sixteenth, Dido: The Tragedy of a Woman (both available at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble), and now The Tragedy of Orpheus and the Maenads (available at Arouca Press, Amazon.com, and Barnes & Noble). The “Elegy” will be found in the book including and entitled, The Tragedy of King Lewis the Sixteenth, and appended as well after the text of Orpheus and the Maenads. I hope that readers who do not share my Catholic faith, which is herein implicit, may yet feel that they derive some benefit or stimulation from my thoughts. The discourse on Thomistic angelology, for example, may serve to shed light on the nature of man and the consequent nature of poetry. Part 3 is as follows:

Romanticism and Beyond

The romanticist prefers the wonderful to the probable (i.e., relating to normal human experience). He finds the normal sequence of cause and effect to be oppressive and would be off on adventures—an endless quest for the strange, the unexpected, the intense, the unique, the extreme. Irving Babbitt, a master of Socratic definition, distinguished three varieties of romanticism: (1) the romanticism of action, (2) the romanticism of intellect, and (3) the romanticism of feeling. 

1. Romanticism of Action

The romanticism of action may be seen in mediaeval romances, which are largely series of fantastic episodes linked with little regard for probability or necessity. Where the story should lead is a secondary concern; what matters is to surprise the reader with wonderful enchantments along the way. Such works are largely harmless; they do not pretend to be more than they are: simple entertainment. And, after all, they do glorify heroic deeds and more or less noble loves. 

2. Romanticism of Intellect

The romanticism of the intellect, nowadays usually goes by the name Mannerism, which flourished between the High Renaissance and the triumph of the Baroque in the seventeenth century; it was extensively studied in the last century by the art historian, Arnold Hauser, who wrote a monumental study of it, entitled Mannerism. For the mannerist, “Nothing is what it seems to be. All is illusion, and there is no hope of escaping from it.” The movement is the expression of a restless anxiety born of an overriding doubt that truth is attainable. There is neither conviction of truth nor falsehood; all is doubt. Those enmeshed in it tend to a kind of scrupulosity that reveals itself in the tortured dialectics of “antitheses, pros and cons without resolution, and paradox.” Emotional life was repressed, and intellectual complexity was indulged. Mannerism can be seen in the the work of the “metaphysical” poets of the Renaissance (e.g., John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Luis de Góngora, Giambattista Marino). It may be found in men as various as Shakespeare, Cervantes, Michelangelo in his later years, Montaigne, Maurice Scève, Tasso, Machiavelli, and Andrew Marvell. It may also be found the Imagist school of poetry, typified by Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens, who flourished in the twentieth century. Hauser speaks of “the accumulation of comparisons, metaphors, conceits, antitheses, plays on words, and jeu d’esprits of all sorts. . . .” There is a “juxtaposition of relatively independent motives.” In describing the work of the Italian poet Giambattista Marino (1569-1625), Hauser says “everything is a pretext for piling image on image, metaphor on metaphor, conceit on conceit. The impressionistic effects, the musical cadences of the language, the sound and colour of the words, the fireworks of wit and paradox, are momentary in impact, and the structure is always atomized. The poems consist of a hardly harmonisable mosaic of particles. . . .” 

3. Romanticism of Feeling

Finally, the romanticism of feeling has provided a very extensive and overall melancholy prospect of itself over the past two centuries. In revolt against the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the narrowness of the contemporaneous neo-classicism, men simply enthralled themselves to “the despotism of mood,” as Babbitt puts it—made themselves the passive playthings of temperament and fate. (In music, there is a preoccupation with Fate from Beethoven to Tchaikovsky.) The French philosophe, Diderot, a precursor of this kind of romanticism, described himself as living at the mercy of his diaphragm. The atomistic impressionism here is one of sensation, rather than wit. Gefühl ist alles—feeling is all—as Goethe said in the romantic period of his life. Wordsworth defines poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” and decries reason as “the false secondary power by which we multiply distinctions.” His predecessor, Rousseau, the great headwater of romanticism, says in a famous phrase, “The man who thinks is a depraved animal.” “I threw reason overboard,” he says, “and consulted nature.” To him, as to his innumerable followers, outer nature became an object of worship, not as a thing apart, but as a projection of one’s own primitive and spontaneous instincts. The poet romantic in this way sings the delights of revery. If he tells a story he is not so much interested in the culmination or purpose of the story and linking the events that lead up to it as he is in the “incidents and delights of the journey,” as Babbitt says. “Poetry thus understood is less a progress toward a specific goal than a somewhat disconnected series of beautiful words and beautiful moments . . . ” [The New Laokoon]. The early nineteenth-century German poet, Friedrich Novalis, an extreme exponent of sensuous romanticism and a precursor of late nineteenth-century Symbolism, writes thus: “One can imagine tales without more coherence than the different stages of a dream, poems which are melodious and full of beautiful words but destitute of meaning or connection; at most comprehensible here and there, like fragments of perfectly unrelated things. This poetry can of course have only a symbolic significance and an indirect effect like music.” [The New Laokoon] Eventually, the ideal experience aspired to was synaesthesia, glorified by the French founder of Symbolism, Charles Beaudelaire as follows: “O mystic metamorphosis!/My senses into one sense flow—/ Her voice [of a visiting “demon”] makes perfume when she speaks,/ Her breath is music faint and low!” “Always be drunk,” he writes in his appropriately entitled poem, “Drunk.” Anna Balakian in her book, The Symbolist Moment, says that synaesthesia was a state to which the transcendentalist romantic thought he could only aspire—a state only to be enjoyed in the life to come. It was a heady brew that he might write about conceptually and emotionally, but that he could only hope to sip in the hereafter. Thus, the Transcendentalist generally contented himself with finding correspondences between outer nature and abstract qualities. He wrote in direct discourse and represented simple emotions, exaggerated or violent as they might be. It was for Beaudelaire to stumble upon the technique of achieving an earth-bound synesthesia of the here and now. He effectively provided a key to lock the trapdoor leading to the bottomless pit of the Symbolist decadence. In the spontaneous association of ideas typical in stream-of-consciousness writing, in which, to quote P. E. More, “[r]ational selection and spiritual authority have been repudiated.” More continues, “Sheer ugliness and morbid perversions prevail in this stream from the bottom of man’s being. With Proust this meant that the ultimate reality of human experience is reached in the horrors of sadism and masochism. In Joyce’s Ulysses, perhaps owing to the hang-over from a more religious training, perhaps to other causes, these vices are not conspicuous; but the root of ugliness is there and constantly recurring hints of sexual abnormality of another, if less cruel, sort.”

Passion, a being acted upon, replaces action; men fall under the “despotism of mood.” The engagement of one man with another in society is gradually abandoned; and the artist eventually retires to the tower of ivory, whence he warbles the state of his nerves to others like himself. The horror of ennui forces him to pursue an endless quest for novelty; the inner experience he tries to convey becomes more and more strange and evanescent. But, finally, in this rake’s progress all attempts at communication must fail, since what is purely individual and peculiar is by nature incommunicable. Poetry must become what the English literary critic Graham Hough wrote in Image and Experience (1960): “it is hard to believe that poetry in the future can make any further progress in the Imagist-Symbolist direction. If it were to remain in that mode it would lead a fading invalidish life and then die altogether, or become an esoteric plaything.” Certainly it has become an esoteric plaything in the obscurities of the Post-Modern Language poets, who invite the reader to bring meaning out of their works—no easy task. Like the Mannerists of the seventeenth century, Post-Modernists, in their rejection of Modernism, call objective reality into question, many of them setting about to “deconstruct” it. Like them, they are given to punning and other wordplay. However, like the mainstream poets and thinkers dating from the mid‑eighteenth century, the Post-Modernists are self-willed radical individualists, impatient of any restraint. Of note, for all that, are the New Formalists, who since the 1980s have returned to metrical, rhymed, and narrative verse.

Appendix

Lyric Poetry [Academy of American Poets]

“Lyric poetry refers to a short poem, often with songlike qualities, that expresses the speaker’s personal emotions and feelings. Historically intended to be sung and accompany musical instrumentation. . . .”

Symbolism [Encyclopaedia Britannica]

“The Symbolists wished to liberate poetry from its expository functions and its formalized oratory in order to describe instead the fleeting, immediate sensations of man’s inner life and experience. They attempted to evoke the ineffable intuitions and sense impressions of man’s inner life and to communicate the underlying mystery of existence through a free and highly personal use of metaphors and images that, though lacking in precise meaning, would nevertheless convey the state of the poet’s mind and hint at the “dark and confused unity” of an inexpressible reality.”

Surrealism [Academy of American Poets]

“Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.” 

Surrealism [Pediaa]

“Inspired by Dadaism and the writings of Sigmund Freud, Surrealist poets give the imagination and dreams as much precedence as logic and reason. The writers use the unconscious mind to explain rational life. To free the imagination, poets use a variety of techniques that liberate the mind of conscious control.”

“a mystical metamorphosis of all his senses into one.”

The Development of Sacred and Hieratic Languages [Unable to retrieve the source of the following. Implicit in it is a devastating critique of the pedestrian texts of the Novus Ordo Catholic Mass, as well of the prosaic and sometimes vulgar diction of much modern poetry, i.e. post-1914.]

“The development of sacred and hieratic languages for liturgical use has been studied in considerable depth by Professor Christine Mohrmann [Christine A. E. M. Mohrmann (1903-1988), Dutch specialist in early Christian Greek and Latin, vulgar and medieval Latin], probably the most outstanding contemporary authority on this subject. Professor Mohrmann highlights an area of misunderstanding which is fundamental to the question of a vernacular liturgy, one which concerns the nature of language. She explains that the general view today is that language is no more than a vehicle for conveying information as simply and efficiently as possible. Since her book was published in 1957 this view of the purpose of language has gained even wider acceptance as we enter the age of computerization and micro-technology. Professor Mohrmann writes:

‘We are obliged to record that, under the influence of positivism, people, especially people in nonprofessional circles, are still inclined to regard language as pure communication, as a utilitarian instrument, as a means of social intercourse, as language par excellence and as the only real linguistic phenomenon. Or, to put it another way: every linguistic form of expression is examined and judged according to its social utility and the ease with which it can be understood. The colloquial language is the language; the ideals of efficiency and intelligibility, the idea of language as communication, dominate the conception of language as a human phenomenon.’

“Professor Mohrmann explains that language also has a role as a medium of expression:

‘Linguistic form is then no longer chiefly and exclusively a medium of communication but rather the medium of expression of a group living according to a certain tradition. In such cases linguistic usage is often deliberately stylized, and there exist language and style forms, transmitted from generation to generation, in which people deliberately deviate from language to communication, as current in everyday life, in order to obtain a certain artistic, religious or spiritual effect. Here we have the very opposite of the matter-of-fact development of languages as media of communication as they are so rapidly evolving in our times.’ “