csuf e457 british romantic literature spring 06

Week 01, Introduction to E457

2006-05-19T16:35:00.000-07:00

Welcome to English 457, British Romanticism
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 edition used for our selections is The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. E. 8th. edition.

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, Hogg

2006-05-18T18:26:00.000-07:00

Brief Notes on James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

One of our presenters, Charli Robinson, says it’s nearly impossible to resolve the accounts given us of the novel’s murder. How much is due to Robert Wringhim’s derangement, and how much is real, in the Gothic vein of dark happenings? We know that the events are real to Robert, at least. How are we supposed to understand Gil-Martin’s role? Is he a double? A projection? The devil or one of the devil’s agents? The novel itself isn’t clear about the whole affair, so how are we to become certain of anything? At the outset, as Charli says, everything seems clear enough, but by the end nothing is clear at all.

I would suggest that Hogg’s Scottish Gothic novel explores competing ethical and ontological narratives and that we need not come down on either side. At some point in the story, it becomes obvious that Gil-Martin has taken on the role of an Iago, turning the screws of damnation against Robert, who only half-realizes what’s going on. And he is seen by at least two eye-witnesses, not just by Robert, isn’t he? Well, Hogg seems to be exploring a split between “truth” and “reality.” Searching for truth may be a partial and by no means sufficient way of appreciating a fuller reality. To what extent are we to credit Robert’s lived reality with leading us towards a satisfactory account of the main events? The editor is smug—can you really write a scientific account, a history, of Satan? Robert, appropriately enough, gets the largest share of the novel’s time to tell his story. We may remember the conclusion of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, in which a psychiatrist steps in to explain to us the nature of Norman Bates’ mental illness. That explanation hardly seems to be the last word, or at least it doesn’t interest us very much: Norman’s tortured personal reality is far more compelling.

Edition: Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. ISBN 0192835904.

Week 15 Hazlitt and De Quincey

2006-05-11T18:26:00.000-07:00

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 14, Keats

2006-05-04T18:25:00.000-07:00

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.

Weeks 12-13, Shelley

2006-04-20T18:23:00.000-07:00

Notes on 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 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.

Post-It Notes on “A Defence of 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 veil of familiarity and 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 says something quite similar." Shelley also comments on rhythm versus repetition.

Post-It Notes on Various Poems

“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. This poem might be said to echo Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos of The Faerie Queene—Spenser laments that everything in nature must pass away, even the most beautiful things.

"Mont Blanc"

This poem asserts correspondent processes -- nature's creative power and Hume creative power. Nature talks to itself, and the mind has its own wildness and sublimity. The poem starts as imitative of natural process and landscape, but the poet's own spirit leads to a different kind of "imitation" -- his soul moves like nature, untamable and having no immediate source. Lines 78-83 show that the speaker is not sure which is true -- whether nature and mind are commensurate or not. In the fourth and fifth stanzas, glaciers overrun human endeavor, and the time frame of the glaciers swallows us up. This kind of sublimity is not comforting. By the conclusion, the speaker asks the basic philosophical idealist question -- what is nature without mind? I don't see an answer, although the Lucretian line "Power dwells apart in its tranquility" (95) is suggestive. Stylistically, the poem hides its subject, which seems to appear and disappear. What is the status of images? The point is mostly to convey the flow of feelings -- solemnity, wildness, etc.

“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.

“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.

“To a Sky-Lark”

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?

“Adonais”

1-8 Invocation and lament for Adonais

9-13 imagination's effects

14-21 Nature laments, then revives, leaving the speaker behind

22-29 Urania

30-38 The mourners and Shelley comes last.

39-46 Optimism—he doth not sleep. Brotherhood of poets.

47-52. Address to readers, Neoplatonic principle asserted.

53-55. Resolution = death.

Notes on Prometheus Unbound

Shelley implies in his Preface to this play that the best way to imitate the Greeks is to think and adapt as freely as they did from their own store of myths. He rules out what he considers Aeschylus’ cunning “political” reconciliation between the tyrant Zeus and the Titan Prometheus – it seems that the cycle of misery began with these two needing each other to perpetuate their respective regimes of terror and amelioration, so Shelley refuses to bring them together in his play.

Instead, Prometheus must conquer Jupiter by means of a reformation of will. He begins to let go of his death-struggle since actively defying that god only reinforces his power and delays the hour of victory. Prometheus uttered his curse in a state of profound error, stemming from his dismay at what Jupiter had done with the gift of power that Prometheus himself had given him. As in the work of William Blake, the physical state of things is a manifestation of spiritual error, of a failure of imagination. But also as in Blake, it’s necessary to image forth this internal chaos, lest it consume us and leave us with no way of combating the error.

Who exactly is the “He” in Demogorgon’s mysterious response to Asia in Act 2? We know that Saturn had denied men wisdom or knowledge and that Prometheus had invested Jupiter with power on the sole condition that humankind remain free. “He” is certainly not Jupiter; as Demogorgon says, “the deep truth is imageless.” There seems to be always a power in reserve behind all visible manifestations of sovereignty. Perhaps the now fearsome Demogorgon is a visible reminder of this power.

Jupiter’s moment of triumph turns out to be his utter ruin, and the consequent transformation of the human realm is described as a state in which the symbols of tyranny simply go unregarded. Those symbols of slavery and terror have been divested of their power. This description in Act 3 testifies to the “Eastern” quality in Shelley’s thinking – active rebellion isn’t the thing that brings about the great revolution; rather, it has been brought about by Prometheus’ recollection and recantation of the primal curse he had uttered against Jupiter. (The process resembles exorcism – image forth and speak out, then let go of what has been possessing one.) Of course, it’s also necessary that Prometheus join forces with Asia – I’ve read this marriage as consisting in something like the union of reason and passion or imagination, but perhaps the truth is less schematic.

Act 4 has sometimes been dismissed as airy doggerel verse, an excrescence on the brilliant first three acts. I wouldn’t be so harsh, although I can see why some react that way. “Love” is Shelley’s source of moral imagination and is what takes individuals outside of themselves. And Love is now shown to be at work everywhere, bathing everything in its radiant light so that the poem opens up on a bright future full of all kinds of regenerative potential. Prometheus and Asia withdraw to their Cave, which place has been variously figured as either a place of prophecy of as a representation of the inner workings of the human mind.

The Cenci

This play is one Shelley “ripped from the Renaissance headlines” since his fiction dramatizes an actual murder and trial. Count Francesco Cenci’s wickedness gives stage villainy a bad name, and such deep depravity in the patriarch makes it impossible for Beatrice and her accomplices to be any other kind of “hero” (if indeed that’s the right term) than they show themselves. Her act destroys the Count, but it also destroys her and everyone around. I suppose that on the whole, Shelley’s interest in the story stems from the romantic’s interest in the power of the individual, and Beatrice’s tragic demise (she takes on overtones of Titus Livius’ Lucretia of “let death be my witness” fame) shows the futility of active resistance against entrenched evil.

Weeks 10-11, Austen

2006-04-06T18:21:00.000-07:00

Notes on Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice

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.

Weeks 07-08, Byron

2006-03-16T18:19:00.000-08:00

Notes on Byron’s Manfred

596. Manfred rejects reconciliation with nature; humanity may be a microcosm, but we are not a harmonious mixture of elements. Instead, discord reigns. In this play, Manfred seems to dismiss any response to nature as irrelevant—at least, he rejects contact with nature when it doesn’t mirror or otherwise reflect his own internal discord. He dismisses equally the Chamois Hunter, or natural man.

598. Manfred envisions Astarte. Love here seems almost like narcissism—seeking oneself. But perhaps that’s an unfair reading—see, for instance, page 602, where Astarte is said to complement him.

599. No wonder Nietzsche respected Byron—on this page we can find something like a reference to “eternal recurrence” and “amor fati,” or acceptance of one’s fate as struggle, with no wish to make things easier. Manfred has come by some forbidden knowledge at great cost. But this isn’t “sin” in the Christian sense, even though Manfred’s language of despair and alientation is haunted by biblical cadences and parallels.

601. Here’s the Byronic Pose—the hero is elevated and remains aloof. He rejects his society and politics generally, instead seeking solitude and those extremes in nature that suit his own extreme states. Astarte a kindred soul in this sense as in every other way, it seems. One thing to emphasize is the potential for parody—for example, there’s Manfred at the top of a mountain asking why he didn’t go and stand under Mount Rosenberg when the landslide happened. And it’s a good thing for him that the down-to-earth Chamois Hunter happens to be up there rather than some jaded tourist from New York City. “Jump! Jump!”

604ff. Manfred refuses to pay homage to the spirit ministers. He won’t make Faust’s bargain with any infernal powers, and rejects the Christian framework that points to “the banality of sin.” Manfred never becomes spiritually dead due to such a repetitive pattern of sin; rather, there’s something almost “Greek” in his character—his greatest strength is also the source of his problems. He’s a tragic hero who never accepts the Cosmos as something he must bow down to and worship. Part of Manfred’s heroism, then, consists in his ability to bear the consequences of his prior deeds—his willingness to suffer without calling on supernatural powers to aid him in his final struggle.

Notes on Byron’s Don Juan

Canto 1

The plot is simple enough—it follows romance conventions. The questions might have to do with how the hero is chosen and how he behaves passively. But mainly, the poet-narrator’s intrusions, which are the real story anyhow. His assiduous and flippant cultivation of his readership, and his antagonistic remarks about Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey the laureate from 1813-43. Wordsworth was appointed as Southey’s successor, and then came Tennyson in 1850. I find that Byron has a tightrope to walk with his audience, and he does it with insouciance—they’re both “gentle consumers” and “in on the joke.” Byron, even by 1818, sees (along with Jane Austen) that romanticism is already a school that demands parody for its pretensions to epic status and messianic mission. Byron is being a romantic, we might say—a fiery individualist—in the sense that he has come to realize his own bent is C18-style satire and that he enjoys working with the stuff of old legends like that of Don Juan. The poem is “romantic” in its scope and methods, but the content makes fun of romantic passions and purposes. The feeling gives meaning to events, but that feeling is C18 whim, Shandean associationism. The legend itself seems to be watered down from the earlier ones by Tirso de Molina, Thomas Shadwell, and Mozart’s Don Giovanni. It was a well-worn legend graced by the versions of some famous artists, including a comic version by Moliere. The narrator is much like Byron, who—in spite of his own career and exile—still takes an interest in the young Don Juan.

Canto 2

Interesting how the ottava rima works well to convey disastrous events like Juan’s shipwreck—it both gives us a sense of the sweep of events, and reduces them to typicality. Reminds me of Candide in dealing with disaster epigrammatically. This canto revels in reduction to the primal level—cannibalism makes its entrance, with Julia’s letter as paper for the lots. Juan swims ashore alone, like Odysseus washing up on the Island of King Alcinous (Phaeacia) in The Odyssey. He meets Haidee after landing, and she is morality-free: no shame here, though she “blushes” innocently enough. Around stanza 186-87, the lovers kiss, and move beyond mere narrative’s power to describe. Here things focus at last in this wandering story. “First love” (189.1511) is the ultimate theme—not the Miltonic echoes throughout this love scene—no “shows, mere shows, of seeming pure,” as Milton would say. The narrator almost ruins it all with his bringing in of damnation, but then he returns to the primitivist and archetypal strain, redeeming time when we think least he will: Haidee watches the sleeping Juan, and this is the sum of all raptures. Byron has been schooled in erotic poetry by John Donne, it seems—“this cave” becomes an everywhere. In the end, the narrator waxes philosophical about “inconstancy,” declaring that admiration for the real, the flesh, is merely a “heightening of the beau ideal.” The narrative is as capricious as Juan, who seems to have forgotten his Donna Julia already in favor of Haidee.

Canto 3

The pirate-father returns, and much of the canto is about the tragic qualities of love. Long digression on the vulgarity of public taste—the penchant for romanticism, that is. Byron turns the tables on his fellow romantic poets—they are now the authors whose works signal the nadir of public taste’s degeneracy, taking the place of the “gaudy and inane phraseology of many modern writers” Wordsworth had identified in his “Preface.”

Canto 4

Much of the pathos in this “innocence will be crushed by the world” canto lies in the need to get rid of the noble and pure Haidee, whose innocent sexuality can hardly be other than charming. But the narrator himself is devoted to forging ahead, and he must follow his own whims and be true at least to the erotic adventurism of the original Don Juan legend. So in a sense, his narrative is one with the hypocritical and shallow world that it condemns, giving the narrator a feeling of guilt.

Week 06, Coleridge

2006-03-09T18:19:00.000-08:00

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.

Weeks 04-05, W. and D. Wordsworth

2006-02-23T18:17:00.000-08:00

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 1792-94), 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.

Notes on The Prelude

Book 1

How to read a long work like The Prelude: the text – even as we have it in relatively short selections from all fourteen books, can be something of a challenge for those used to enjoying Wordsworth’s shorter poems. A work of such length, as Coleridge might remind us, is bound to contain some rather prosaic material along with its most excellent flights of verse. I tend to think Wordsworth is at his best when he’s waxing philosophical, so that’s what I most enjoy in The Prelude. Many of the epic’s passages in this vein are as fine as anything in “Tintern Abbey” or “Intimations of Immortality.” I suggest that if this is your first acquaintance with The Prelude, you might do well to read each one with a yellow marker close by – it is easy to get lost in reading a long work, and reading without marking off favorite passages and jotting down your best ideas is not much better than not reading the work at all.

In this opening book, the poet’s vocation is, of course, already clear – his difficulty lies in the exact choice of subject: will he write a traditional epic about high things in English history (the sort of thing that Milton considered in his youth), “a Tale from my own heart” (222), or “some philosophic Song / Of Truth that cherishes our daily life” (229-30). Well, thanks in part to such musings, the subject has already begun to define itself – this epic will conjoin the two latter possibilities: it will be a philosophical poem about the development of the author’s poetic powers, both from their native source in infancy and nature and with an eye towards the way they have been both challenged and enhanced by the pressure of circumstance and maturity. To put the matter somewhat humorously, The Prelude will be a long work of poetry about how the author came to write a long work of poetry. There’s nothing unusual about that for a romantic artist whose understanding of art is primarily genetic and expressive: what is the source of poetry, and how does poetic inspiration or feeling come to be “expressed” to others? Further questions to be explore are, What limitations always seem to be threatening to make an end of the mind’s imaginative acts? What difficulties might the poet have in harmonizing inspiration and utterance – feelings and language? Where to begin, and where – if at all – to end? The best romantic poetry seems insistently to turn its own medium into an object of reflection and to question its own assumptions about the representation of space and the flow of time. Wordsworth will be doing plenty of all that in The Prelude.

Book 2

This book reflect on the stages of a child’s developing relationship with nature – if I read him correctly, the speaker describes how he went from glad animal sensations in nature’s presence to seeking out and loving nature in a more devoted manner. The speaker says that at first he loved the sun not because of its symbolic suggestiveness as “a pledge / And surety of our earthly life” (179-80), but instead because, while in a state of pure joy, he had seen the sun “lay / His beauty on the morning hills” (183-84). The scene and the joy here seem to be reciprocal – nature hasn’t been singled out for its own sake. This reciprocity preserves the infant’s fundamentally creative first perceptions of the world, as the speaker describes them from 256-264.

When the somewhat older youth begins to seek out nature and treats it with religious devotion, the relationship becomes still more complex: it might seem that nature is now sought “for its own sake,” but I suspect such a phrase needs qualification – the speaker has become so devoted to nature because he senses an affinity with or reciprocity between his own aspiring imaginative powers and “that universal power / And fitness in the latent qualities / And essences of things, by which the mind / Is moved with feelings of delight” (325-328). Nature itself “feeds” this growing “religious love” in the young Wordsworth, as he explains from 353-59. This book’s account of the speaker’s developing relationship nature is sophisticated, and I don’t know that I can do it justice here. But in general, I find that Wordsworth is cagey in speaking of this relationship between the natural and the human – he isn’t shy, at philosophical culmination-points in his lyrics and narrative poems, of privileging the imagination over the matter with which it works – but my sense is that he writes such passages with such confidence because he knows they must be placed in context with other, less “us-exalting” stretches of his verse. He’s been accused by no less than John Keats of falling into the “egotistical sublime” mode of poetry, but when I read him, I tend to think that “fair and balanced” is his overall line with regard to the alliance between mind and nature.

Wordsworth’s caginess might be explained (if a bit too easily) by reference to one of the standard things critics say about romantic doctrine both British and Continental; namely, while we can acknowledge nature as a source, we shouldn’t lose sight of our prime directive as human beings: to make something of what we have been given, to transcend our source in nature without disrespecting or abandoning it. Humility must walk beside advancement. Mankind, the idea goes, is not alien from nature but is instead best understood as “nature becoming fully conscious of itself.” We alone can self-consciously praise and admire the excellence of what nature brings forth. In On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature, Friedrich Schelling refers to a “bird that, intoxicated with music, transcends itself in soul-like tones” (Hazard Adams, Critical Theory since Plato, revised ed. San Diego: Harcourt, 1992. 459), but it takes an appreciative human being to grasp the bird’s transcendence.

Of further interest in this second book is the confession that even though The Prelude is an imaginative reconstruction or history of “the growth of a poet’s mind,” we can’t really know everything about such a development: “Who knows the individual hour in which / His habits were first sown, even as a seed?” (206-07)

Book 3

The young Wordsworth comes to Cambridge, and it all seems like a dream to him. At this point he retains his full power to walk with nature, something that helps to keep at bay his feeling that this isn’t the time or place for him (81-82). But the withdrawal into his own mind can’t last because there’s too much experience ahead, and his “heroic argument,” which is ultimately not of this world – “Not of outward things / Done visibly for other minds” (176-77) – must nonetheless embrace this world and all its variety, its outward forms, it call to society, etc., in order to return to the meditation on genius and imagination that constitutes the heroic argument. The yield for this necessary detour will be a certain socialization of the individual powers Wordsworth celebrates – his particular gift will be more easily shared with others once this return is completed. His own personal gifts will be rendered paradigmatic and universal; they will become models for emulation and vehicles for the enhancement of spirits other than his own.

Book 4

The speaker half-laments, half-explains, his youthful “inner falling-off” (278) from purer communion with “books and nature” (299) in his even younger days. The close alliance of books and nature is interesting and very sensible – there’s no doubt that when we are very young, a book “sinks in” and influences us, influences the very formation of our identity, in a way it probably wouldn’t later in life. So a work of imagination – a Shakespeare play or something of similar quality – might well operate with almost as much power as haunting or breathtaking scenes in nature. A child is delightfully serious about “make-believe,” and doesn’t know how to maintain a barrier between “fact” and “fiction” the way adults do. In any case, trivial social pursuits become the order of the day for an adolescent Wordsworth. This is represented as a loss, but not a complete loss, as we can see from the episodes that follow: on his way home from a dance, he intuits his future vocation as a poet. Then he meets a poor discharged soldier – one of the human faces he will later learn to appreciate fully as something of even more value than physical nature, and converses with this figure of solitude, who tells him without apparent feeling a story of great pathos. The soldier’s response to concern for his safety comes straight from the Gospel – we recollect Jesus’ advice in Matthew 6:34: “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

Book 5

As for “the dream of the Arab,” Wordsworth’s speaker is reflecting on the different kinds of knowledge promised by science (Euclidean geometry) and poetry – the stone and the shell, respectively. The stone represents geometry’s power to create a world all its own – mathematics is its own truth, we might say, and it brings people together and commands their assent in the realm of pure reason. But the Arab says that the shell’s poetic utterance is “something of more worth” (90) – it has the power to prophesy destruction and to bring calm to the human spirit. The shell is a physical, natural thing that generates effects far beyond the physical realm – it replicates the suggestive power of ocean waves. So there is here both relationship and transcendence – a contrast with the abstract realm of mathematical truth. The imaginative book has a power that Euclidean geometry lacks.

The Arab is also Don Quixote himself. The knight-errant awakens from his madness only to die peacefully as a good Christian in his bed, an event that comes to pass since Cervantes is out, he says, to put an end to the foolish prating of books about such knights. Here in Wordsworth’s dream, which has arisen from his reading of Cervantes’ epic, Don Quixote flees before the deluge that will engulph the world. I’ve read in deconstructive criticism how this episode might be interpreted – the idea is that Wordsworth’s meditation on the fragility of the vessel that must bear poetic inspiration – books – involves an admission that ultimately all such inspiration must submit to transmutation into writing. We notice that at the end our selection, the speaker awakens in terror, and the two things he sees are the Sea and the actual Book (Don Quixote) that he was reading when he fell asleep. What’s the suggestion in all this? Could it be that the speaker’s dream betrays genuine anxiety that his claims about “the mystery of words” – their power of bringing home to us a genuine feeling of contact with the divine—is just such a delusion as beset poor Don Quixote? If the flood of time, or the damaging effects of the written form of language, is bound to erase the poet’s gains, what’s the point of the whole endeavor?

As for “the Boy of Winander,” the speaker relates a remarkable experience on the boy’s part wherein he calls to the owls, and nature does not respond as he expected – he hears not owls but silence, and then “the voice / Of mountain torrents” (385-86). Quite abruptly, his death is announced, and he becomes an invisible object of the speaker’s contemplation. The Village Church and its Thronèd Lady are heedless of the boy’s passing; they hear only the glad noises of living children at play. The speaker’s optimism is for the race of innocent boys like the Boy of Winander – “May books and nature be their early joy!” (425) The passage is optimistic and moving, but I’m reminded of Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H., where the poet in his grief addresses an “Old Yew, which graspest at the stones / That name the underlying dead.” Wordsworth understands as well as Tennyson that Nature is “careful of the type” or species, and “careless of the single life.” The optative voice in the Winander passage is perhaps not quite convincing; it may even suggest what we can infer from Tennyson’s poem—a wish to become as unconscious as the Yew Tree, or, in Wordsworth’s case, the Village Church and its decorative Lady. We will have to wait for Book 14’s philosophical claims about the power of imagination and “spiritual love” to reconcile all that seems unfortunate in human affairs (and all that seems terrible in nature) with joy and beauty.

Book 6

This has the “Simplon Pass” episode. The movement begins with disappointment at nature’s failure to match our imaginative vision, and the failure of experience or action to yield immediate understanding. Mont Blanc isn’t as sublime when you actually see it as when you imagine it or read about how others have imagined it and described it. Neither do you realize the significance of an event like “crossing the Alps” while you’re accomplishing it. “Meaning” or significance is an after-the-fact construction. But as always with Wordsworth, “for such loss” comes a reckoning of blessings and a declaration of “abundant recompense.” The poet recovers from the Peasant’s disappointing announcement (he’s sort of like that messenger in Oedipus Rex, isn’t he? – or he would be if the poet didn’t overcome his tragic recognition of human finitude). He goes on to bear witness in a magnificent passage about “woods decaying, never to be decayed, / The stationary blasts of waterfalls,” etc. All that appears and occurs in the natural environment turns out to be an integrated set of “types and symbols of Eternity.” Nature had seemed to disappoint – but the disappointment is overcome by an imaginative burst and a reflection upon that burst, which results in a sublime passage that combines description, typology, and prophesy. We might say that imagination and then poetic utterance have rescued nature from its own limitations and finitude, or perhaps that imagination and poetic utterance have reoriented us towards the proper way of perceiving and communing with the natural world. Is this a way of saying that “in our life alone does Nature live,” to borrow a line from Coleridge’s “Dejection: an Ode”? The entire episode may be cast as a meditation on sublimity: and the poet’s romantic realization is Kantian in its implications – sublimity’s seat is in the human mind, not in nature itself. But Wordsworth, being a poet of nature, of course, and not a philosopher like Kant, gives more credit to the natural environment: if you recognize the source of sublime experience, nature will respond; she will show you and tell you what you want to see and hear. Kant implies a correspondence between mind and natural things that accounts for our capacity to render the world intelligible, but in a poet such as Wordsworth this correspondence is treated in a vital manner, given more of an emotional emphasis.

I recall that deconstructive critic Paul de Man reflects on the way Wordsworth’s “romantic rhetoric” tries to overcome the effects of time and space and suggest a sense of eternity and infinitude in nature’s processiveness – but in the end a careful reading shows that his verse re-invokes what it would banish. The simple point is that it’s inevitable we should confound language and “the world,” supposing that our efforts in language have somehow explained and exalted the realm of things. Part of the poet’s strategy of overcoming is to displace his experience in nature to sublime words, which become the object of meditation and sustenance, the source of romantic optimism about man and nature alike. The experience of nature (in perception and as event) then retains its value as the source, in turn, of this “transformational translation” from things to words, simultaneously canceling and preserving what has been displaced.

Book 7

How to make sense of London’s barbarous din, its riotous sights, sounds, amusements? It takes a poet to raise a village into unity, according to this selection. Wordsworth’s eye construes the scenes – all that human diversity in appearance, a maelstrom of incompatible desires – with the kind of eye he describes in “Tintern Abbey” (one made steady and tranquil by Nature). Partly what’s interesting about this passage is its affinity with Baudelaire’s ideas in The Painter of Modern Life about the artist’s need to venture into the crowd, and catch a sense of permanence from ephemeral sights and sounds. What allies both authors is the belief that an artist shouldn’t reject the human world for the solitude of nature – this isn’t something new to the immediate precursors of modernism; we can find it as an element in the British romantics. Even so, of course, it’s also clear that with Wordsworth and his colleagues, the master of clarity and the repository of the eternal and infinite isn’t London; it’s the natural environment that primarily and most intensely inspires us, sustaining us when we venture into great cities. But a question to raise might be, “what about the ‘lower minds’” who are experiencing the whirl of Bartholomew Fair pretty much “as-is,” without the steadiness the speaker brings to his experience? What do they get from it all? Something like animal pleasure? Certainly not intelligibility or a sense of unity, to judge from this episode. The oneness available to them, I think, is that of “trivial objects, melted and reduced / To one identity, by differences / That have no law, no meaning, and no end….” To look on that scene too long would “weary” the ordinary eye.

Book 8

The shepherd here appears as a purified type of humanity, though subordinate to nature in Wordsworth’s affections. Wordsworth often exalts imagination over nature, but on the other, he sometimes grants nature great significance, especially by comparison to his interactions with other human beings. The point here is that Wordsworth expresses his thanks that early experiences with other people came to him in the form of innocent shepherds, and this memory of a purer kind of humanity is something he finds sustaining later on. As always (see 342-47), the capacity to enjoy nature for its own sake isn’t so much a capacity we have at birth, but rather a capacity we develop as we grow up and begin to move away from thoughtless immersion in our natural surroundings – to appreciate “Nature … / For her own sake” requires that you be able to differentiate between your own self-absorbed pursuits and natural processes going on around you. As we begin to separate from nature, we may (if our upbringing and conditions are right) appreciate it all the more. This notion brings Wordsworth closer to Coleridge on the issue of philosophical reflection than is usually apparent: nature is a vision and an experience that is only fully appreciated at some remove.

Book 9

In this selection, Wordsworth moves to Paris just in time to sample the revolutionary ferment – it must be right before the massacres of September 1792. He becomes a patriot, supporting the ordinary people’s cause after having dabbled in high society for a time. His detachment from the great events is worth noting – Wordsworth is an Englishman sojourning in France during its time of promise and crisis, so it takes a while for his affections to take root in the common people’s cause.

Book 10

Here Wordsworth, by now a passionate supporter of the Revolution, must confront Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, culminating in 1794. It is a violent shock for a British citizen to realize that his country is at war with a nation whose ideals and promise he reveres; worse yet, that nation begins to betray its own progress, descending into giddy genocide. Wordsworth seems to experience the period of 1792-94 as one of deep personal crisis. He sounds alienated from his own countrymen and from France as well, where his favored Girondins have lost their battle with Jacobin extremists. Paris is “Defenceless as a wood where Tygers roam.” The phrase reminds me of Blake’s “tyger burning bright” – the Revolution has become a sublime terror from which Wordsworth withdraws into his own nightmares, his own anguished soul. The quotation from Macbeth at line 87 is apt—the Revolution is as starkly transformed at this period as is the character of Macbeth, whose violent act against Duncan transforms him all at once from a loyal (and rather introspective) thane with a great future before him to a cold-blooded murderer. We are confronted in the play, of course, with the Augustinian truth that “sin generates its own consequences” and traps the sinner in adamantine chains of spiritual error. By implication, there’s no more use for philosophical excuse-making – it will not reverse the chain of events; Macbeth’s own further introspections during his crisis do nothing to save him since his path is already set – blood draws on blood. Wordsworth experiences this in his nightmares – his “orations” (411) in the name of moderation and recuperation accomplish nothing but his own desolate confusion.

Book 11

Wordsworth describes the split psyche he experienced during the breakdown of the Revolution’s initial high hopes. He plays the critic with social theories, and for a time seems convinced that Reason must be abstracted into an isolated ground for faith in human progress. Reason, he comes to believe, must be separated from the passions and made an object of the passions. But that is an extreme position, and easily leads to advocacy of the greatest violence as in the case of Robespierre himself: a fanatic for Reason. The point, in any case, is that events warp a somewhat naïve Wordsworth’s ideas and feelings and lead him to a period of intense speculation, which ends only in despair – he abandons reason altogether when it is most needed. I think the movement is circumscribed as follows: initial denial of a conflict between ideals and events, and then a rather extreme flight into speculative fancy to deal with the conflict when it has become too obvious to ignore; finally, the radical poet throws up his hands over the whole affair because there’s no resting place in sight. At last, Dorothy comes to him at Racedown and reminds him that after all, his vocation is poetry, not political philosophy or direct action.

Book 12

Wordsworth returns to the blessings of the “correspondent breeze” (in its various degrees) that has been operating all through his life. Nature has always been a presence for him, a “counterpoise” (41), even when he was trying to get away from it by means of immersion in politics or grand philosophical notions, or foolish critical overemphasis on “the picturesque,” or when he was preoccupied or otherwise troubled with the world.

Wordsworth connects the C18 cult of the picturesque with the tyranny of the eye, “The most despotic of our senses” (129). In general – and before we move to the role of vision in art—why is the eye the most domineering of the five senses? Well, the simplest way to appreciate this claim is to point out that, if confronted with the hypothetical loss of any one sense, most healthy people will say they’re most afraid of losing their eyesight – losing our hearing, our sense of smell, tactile sensation, or taste, would be unfortunate, but we could still get by without one or more of them. Beethoven, after all, had gone completely deaf by the time he composed his Ninth Symphony. But take away our vision, and “how great is that darkness,” as the Gospel says! The point is that most of our sense of reality, of “how the world is,” comes from what we take in with our eyes. The empirical tradition from Sir Francis Bacon on through John Locke and afterwards posits that all of our knowledge initially comes from sensory perceptions – our senses give us “data” from a world that is what it is before we even come to it, and then our mind’s faculties set to work combining (“associating”) and arranging that objective data so that we can render the world intelligible. Simple perception lies at the basis of what we call “thought,” and our eyes are the most powerful data-gathering instruments our bodies have. Yet these instruments by no means rescue us from the dilemma that philosophers who find the empirical tradition oppressive identify: the eye is yet another mechanical device that remains entirely dependent on the external world for its information. Nature is the superior here – not human beings.

That sense of inferiority, that threat of being overwhelmed by the world or enslaved to it, can be overcome in part by positing that Reason raises us above mere nature, but such a strategy of overcoming seems to swing too far in the opposite direction – that is, it seems arrogant of us to be so dismissive of the natural world in order to privilege one of our own capacities. Lord Bacon was wise to call the grandiose thought-systems Reason builds up so many “cobwebs” to be cleared away before humanity could begin the search for genuine understanding.

But let’s move on and discuss Wordsworth’s problem with his brief infatuation with “the picturesque” in painting. The picturesque is, we might say, a gentrified or tidied-up version of sublime experience: to borrow from the framework of John Ruskin in Modern Painters (a good article on Ruskin and the picturesque may be viewed at http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ruskin/atheories/3.2.html; on the picturesque more generally, see http://www.laits.utexas.edu/sisterarts/picturesque/picPaintIndex.htm) the picturesque singles out certain kinds of “roughness” (of line and color, for example) in natural scenes; it glories in the broken or irregular places of nature, in the ruins of cottages and stately buildings, etc., making them pleasant objects of perception at an appropriately “aesthetic” distance. Furthermore, the artist and perceiver collaborate to blend in a degree of moral tone and sentiment with this prettified depiction of a rough natural scene. A well-done picturesque scene is certainly a fine thing to behold, but romantic authors like Wordsworth seem to dwell more upon what is lost than what is gained. Why? Well, because a picturesque painter seems to be drawing attention more to his own clever way of dealing with the rough places of nature and the quaintness of humanity than with the objects themselves – the picturesque, in other words, involves an essentially reductive “taming” of what is wild; it probably also amounts to a narrowing of vision to things that are only “a little bit wild” in the first place. (I’m not an expert on the visual arts, so perhaps someone who knows more than I do about picturesque painting would disagree on that last point.) It seems as if, however pleasantly the task is accomplished, picturesque art mixes rather reductive acts of “seeing” with already familiar ethical principles that are in turn linked to fashionable doctrines about the value of emotional response. None of this seems particularly imaginative, and even if the artist manages to overcome what might be disturbing in nature or in human scenes, the cost is explainable in the philosophical terms mentioned above: the painter of picturesques enlists “reason” as an instrument with which to subordinate nature, to “see” it in a way that ultimately isn’t seeing at all. The eye here is the slave of the intellect and its fashionable doctrines, with the appropriately sanctioned sentiments obediently coming along for the carriage-ride. The picturesque-seeking eye is tyrannous because it reduces the variety and uniqueness of natural objects to order, even if it admits a dollop of roughness to that order. We feel at home with a partially “methodized” nature; we feel superior to our surroundings without being truly creative.

The British romantics generally distrust such tidy ways of seeing. Blake says in his Annotations on the Work of Joshua Reynolds that a real artist must “look thro’ (i.e. “through”) the eye and not with it.” To look with the eye would be to accept the passive mind / objective nature scheme of the empirical philosophers, and we know that Blake is always taking aim at the Unholy Trinity of “Bacon, Newton & Locke,” whom he considers advocates of our enslavement to a dead world of “little things” and to an equally tyrannical and duplicitous agent of overcoming that world, Reason. To see rather through the eye, in Blake’s terms, would be to give imagination or truly poetic vision its due. When Coleridge writes in “Dejection: an Ode” that “in our life alone does nature live,” he must mean something similar – imagination brings an otherwise dead world to life; we realize the excellence and “unity-in-multeity” of nature, and thereby do something for nature that it cannot do for itself. A generous act of imaginative vision helps us to complete the creation God generously began, if we want to employ directly theological terms. And the same is true of the following fine passage in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” “we are laid asleep / In body, and become a living soul: / While with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things” (45-49). One cannot achieve this kind of epiphany with a merely empirical eye – with that kind, we see only in order not to see at all, to become comfortable with the world’s objects, to regularize them into familiar and useful constellations.

But to return to Book 12 of The Prelude, Wordsworth pays his respects to his wife, Mary Hutchinson (a companion since childhood), who, in the presence of nature, “welcomed what was given and craved no more” (158). Right afterwards, he explains how a properly functioning imagination sanctifies and “stores up” what is given to the eye – a process most unlike the merely picturesque: “there are in our existence spots of time” (208), writes Wordsworth, and he goes on to extol their restorative virtues and give a few examples of what he means. From around 225-71, he describes paired experiences that go together to make up a spot of time, or perhaps two closely related spots: first there is the haunted scene where a murderer was hanged long ago, and an impressionable young Wordsworth sees a girl straining to keep a pitcher upright as she makes her way through a strong wind. But later visits with Mary Hutchinson at his side make that same dreary place a cheerful one, and “So feeling comes in aid / Of feeling, and diversity of strength / Attends us, if but once we have been strong.”

It seems that both the “visionary dreariness” (256) and the subsequent “golden gleam” (266) are vital to Wordsworth’s imaginative fiber – both combinations of remarkable scenery and strong feeling will stay with him and remain associated agents of restoration for his soul. They are spots of time, I think, because they are so suffused with imagination and a sense of consequentiality that they stand outside the ordinary flow of temporality – in essence, Wordsworth is describing a religious moment of epiphany, an instant in which the usual limitations imposed upon us by time fall away and we make contact with absolutes, with the ultimate significance of our lives, even, perhaps, with God. From the ephemeral comes something permanent, and we hold on to it for the rest of our days. Perhaps this is another way of demonstrating our superiority to nature (the romantics are often accused of doing this at nature’s expense, or at the expense of proper regard for nature, to speak more accurately). But at least, Wordsworth, might say, it comes closer to being an earned superiority than the lesser and more contrived way of achieving it on display in the picturesque (which subordinates the scene to one-dimensional Reason and to trivialized sentiment – something like C18 “Chicken Soup for the Soul”). I’ll let Wordsworth speak for himself: the spot of time “This efficacious Spirit chiefly lurks / Among those passages of life that give / Profoundest knowledge how and to what point / The mind is lord and master – outward sense / The obedient Servant of her will” (219-23).

Book 12’s concluding spot of time (287-335) has to do with a prospect on a windswept summit only a short time before the schoolboy Wordsworth returned home from Hawkshead only to lose his sole remaining parent, his father. He had looked forward impatiently to spending the holidays at home, and had no idea what would await him not long after he made it there. The scene certainly speaks to what Dr. Johnson would call “the vanity of human wishes” – just the sort of sad uncertainty that the Preacher in Ecclesiastes keeps telling us is fundamental to the human condition. But at the same time, the scene and the strong feelings inextricably blended with it turn out to be “kindred spectacles and sounds” to which Wordsworth would often return and “drink / As at a fountain” (325-26). The tempest on that barren Crag is yet another one of the “correspondent breezes” with which Book 12 began, sustaining the speaker’s inner life with a mysterious kind of reciprocity: “thou must give, / Else never canst receive” (276-77).

Book 13

Wordsworth writes that nature gives both the energy to seek truth and the tranquility to receive it. It serves the religious function of attuning human ambitions to aims not discordant with humility (this is like Augustine’s notion of the need to align one’s will to god’s plan). Nature teaches us as well to value “a temperate shew / Of objects that endure” (31-32), which gives us our basis for a return to the human realm, knowing now what we are to seek there. Wordsworth’s clarification of his poetic task is as bold as Milton’s reorientation of his own task as an epic poet to the fall of Eve and Adam: “Argument / Not less but more Heroic then the wrath / Of stern Achilles” (Paradise Lost, beginning of Book 9), and the aim is similar: “That justice may be done, obeisance paid / Where it is due” (Prelude 13.236-37). Justice is to be done, that is, to the human heart itself, just as Milton meant to “justify the ways of God to men.” The vision of Salisbury Plain that follows (311 onward) is an instance of imagination working on ordinary things – in this case on ancient ruins; but most significantly, it is (as Coleridge had implied) an example of the particular insight and gift for which Wordsworth has been praying – he wants to speak and write like a prophet, and here he has brought the distant past to life, drawing an extraordinary and inspiring human vision from bare stone.

One other passage worth noting is 282-292, lines that prepare the way for Wordsworth’s declaration of his hopes for that special poetic gift. The speaker says that while the “visible form” of external things is mainly what passion makes of them, there is another, perhaps more Platonic, kind of form to be reckoned with: “the forms / Of Nature have a passion in themselves / That intermingles with those works of man / To which she summons him” (289-92). I find this passage similar in implication to what Wordsworth writes about “the beautiful and permanent forms of nature” in his “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.” These eternal and invisible forms mingle with the primary human passions and are indeed the source of what is permanent in us. As Wordsworth becomes more orthodox in his religious views, I suppose he would say that these forms are that element of nature in which God allows something of himself to be discerned, at least indirectly.

Book 14

The passages on the ascension of Mount Snowdon in Wales rivals in its implications and intensity that of Shelley’s “Mont Blanc.” The moon (and perhaps the roar of waters flowing down) is taken by the speaker to be “the type / Of a majestic Intellect” (66-67) reflecting on its own infinite and eternal being, and “transcendent power / In sense” flows without interruption, it seems, to “ideal form” (75-76). The whole scene is described as a “Resemblance” (89) of the power of sovereign human imagination, which seeks everywhere the image of itself. In this final book, there is no doubt that mind or imagination is superior to the world of nature; this statement of superiority encompasses the gentle reciprocity between mind and nature so often invoked at various points in The Prelude. Apparently, though nature is the source or our being, that being comes to supercede the source; only mind can truly appreciate the glories of nature.

Wordsworth also addresses in this book the relative value of the beautiful and the sublime, which he deals with by way of the terms “love” and “fear.” Nature gives rise to both feelings in its presence, but ultimately love subsumes fear and transvalues it – the Norton editors equate this movement to Milton’s justification of evil and pain by reference to the ultimate redemption of mankind. That makes sense to me since, at base, romantic optimism is recuperative. It teaches us to reorient our understanding of our relationship to the natural world. Both fear and love have taught Wordsworth not to stray too long or far from his source, which is nature. In the 1850 version, this source is allied with orthodox divinity. Imagination is vital to the “spiritual love” that arises when one experiences the most joyful events and scenes in nature, whereby we are raised to contemplation of our relationship with God.

Week 03, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine, etc.

2006-02-16T18:16:00.000-08:00

The French Revolution is a good place to start in studying romanticism—this was the central event of the age, and anyone with a claim to the title of poet or philosopher or statesman had to take up an attitude towards it. Is this a new dawn for humanity? Can we radically and rapidly transform our institutions to match our individual and collective aspirations? Or are such democratic, creative and imaginative experiments dangerous and doomed to failure, while older, more stable, principles respecting rank and order are bound to reassert themselves? All of the romantic poets wrestled with this issue, and most subsequent commentary on “romanticism” has seen the French Revolution as vital to an understanding of romantic poetics. The French Revolution brings to the fore basic questions about human nature and “the good society,” optimism and pessimism, reason and imagination and passion, the individual and the collective, love of innovation versus reverence for tradition. Next week, when we discuss mostly Blake, we will see him both exalting imaginative process and yet realizing that it has its dangers, too—so how best to deal with the dangers?

Edmund Burke Notes

122. Notice that Edmund Burke sees the revolution as something monstrous, chaotic and unpredictable. From the outset, for the terror has not yet begun, Burke sees this revolution has a field day for lower class rascals and crazy ideologues. He says that ignorant and selfish people most favor sudden, radical innovation. He defines nature as “wisdom without reflection, and above it.” It becomes clear that for Burke, following nature means following the laws of property and respecting the imperative of family and ancestry. Tradition is the human version of nature, and it must be respected, or the result will be violent instability. He dislikes all brands of absolutism—whether it be the Hobbesian type that favors absolute monarchism, or the French Revolution’s claims about Reason and Democracy.

123. Again, Burke says that we inherit our liberties and need not come up with philosophical abstractions to get behind this principle of inheritance. He insists that it is in our nature “to revere individual men” because of their age, and we should hold our civil institutions in similar reverence. Isn’t he suggesting, therefore, that Great Britain should be a government of men, and not of laws? The point is that laws, and civil institutions, for Burke, do not deserve reverence because they are the glorious products of reason, but rather because they are honored by time and observance. We will find Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine mocking Burke because they say he turns this principle of reverence for tradition into an absolute in its own right.

Notice the phrase “conformity to nature in our artificial institutions.” Burke says that civil institutions are in a sense artificial, man-made, but that we should not consider them simply the products of rational schemes. Evidently, since Burke supported the American Revolution in 1776, he believed the Americans somewhat respected the imperatives of tradition and were not trying to set up a crazy radical experiment in the New World. Little did he know…. Anyhow, the French revolutionaries, in his view, are trying to impose completely artificial notions derived from an arrogant exercise of reason upon an ancient and well-established, if by no means perfect, way of life. He sees the French revolution as “reason gone wild.” It would be too easy to say Burke has simply dismissed the French Enlightenment with its optimistic claims about the power of reason – most of the Enlightenment philosophers wrote and talked a good deal about the necessary role of the passions, our emotional side, in everyday life and society. He is probably arguing instead that the revolutionaries overemphasize the power of reason and think they can radically alter human civilization to suit the dictates of reason. They are, in a word, unbalanced in their view of humanity’s key elements. Notice that at the middle of the page, it would be easy enough to translate what Burke says into Sigmund Freud’s later conception of the superego – the parental figure that is always looking over our shoulder and keeping us from doing shameful things. For Burke, tradition takes on this role, and we should not set up against it our juvenile faith in “feeble contrivances of our reason.”

Towards the bottom of the page, Burke insists that he is not against change; he is saying that change should come about organically, over time rather than overnight. The French revolutionaries have set up what he calls “false claims of right” and then demanded instantaneous social change. So much for immediate demands in favor of “liberty, egality, and fraternity.”

124. “All men have equal rights; but not to equal things.” Burke has the same antipathy to French claims for equality of status and for social justice (as we would call it today) as Americans in the middle of the 20^th century had for communist assertions that property should be held in common.

Burke accepts that there will be inequality amongst people in terms of rank and wealth, so he has no patience with long lists of claims based upon what he considers a bogus and completely artificial theory of “natural right.” If you were to say to him that such distinctions are not fair because they are not reasonable, he would say the basis of society is not reason in the first place. As JFK is reputed to have said, “so who said life is fair?” So it isn’t only conservatives who accept that it is impractical to demand absolute equality for everyone. Burke does not come right out and say it, but property rights and, in our time, the demands of capitalism, mean that there will be winners and losers – anyone who claims to support the principle of aristocracy or the capitalist order must confront that simple fact. If you weren’t born into the nobility, too bad; if you have no capital and can’t afford the finer things in life, too bad. Social and economic systems tend to generate inequalities, and even seem to require them to thrive. You cannot have order, Burke suggests, if you insist upon absolute equality.

Burke considers natural rights a fantastical concept -- it derives from reason gone wild. In other words, the very conception of “Nature” in the hands of French revolutionaries is the most artificial construction of all. It is okay to say that the law should treat people fairly in the courts – that is a glorious English custom, after all – but evidently he thinks it an entirely different thing to start talking about our innate or God-derived abstract rights as human beings.

124-25. Burke provides a tableau contrasting the vicious ruffians who assaulted the king and queen of France with the nobility and grace of those two personages. This is obviously an emotional appeal – we are expected to be outraged at this insult to civility and the bygone age of chivalry. What takes the place of the nobility as governors? Why evidently, ruffians, sophistical speakers, economists, and the lower orders in general – a mishmash of contradictory impulses and desires. This is a recipe for chaos, in Burke’s opinion. It can never lead to stability.

126. This is where Burke propounds his doctrine of “this mixed system of opinion and sentiment” originating in the feudal period. What did chivalry provide? Well, it provided “the decent drapery of life” that our new proponents of the “Empire of light and reason” would strip away, leading human society naked and therefore obscene. Essentially, feudalism made the strong submit to regular forms and even added a touch of elegance and grace to and otherwise harsh way of life, in Burke’s view.” Without force, or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power.” Burke therefore is not supporting tyranny or the divine right of kings – he is after all, at least early in his career, coming from the Whig tradition, which by no means wants to give absolute power to the monarch. I think Burke is suggesting that chivalry may have been something of a fiction, but it was a fiction hallowed by time and that led to a workable way of life for the English people. As he says at the bottom of 126, the French revolution can lead to nothing but a mechanical kind of society in which there is no human connection between one person and another. There will be no “love, veneration, admiration, or attachment.” Only an isolated group of people pursuing their own individualistic, selfish, incompatible goals. This is the basic contrast in metaphors between Edmund Burke and the radical members of the French Enlightenment: the organic entity versus the machine. Understood in this way, we can see that there is a conservative side to what we have come to call romanticism. The early usage of this word generally meant something like “old-fashioned and not very realistic” – something from the age of chivalry. Think of any “romance epic” or a novelistic romance – if you read this sort of thing, you are not looking for realism but rather for excitement, passion. In a sense, therefore, Edmund Burke might be labeled a romantic in his belief that human society must be appreciated as an organic entity. It is not a machine that we may tinker with lightly, but a tree-like organism that should grow slowly until it becomes magnificent and beautiful. But again, Burke would be careful not to offer us a radical and total set of claims about “nature.” That would put him on the side of the French revolutionaries who are abhorrent to him. Perhaps he is suggesting that you should use your metaphors carefully and not put too much stock in them. We are creatures of reason and passion, the artificial and the natural, so we should remain humble about the province of both.

127. “Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle.” Burke accurately predicts, without of course knowing his name, the advent of Napoleon Bonaparte. In the first full paragraph, Burke says “power, of some kind or other, will survive the shock in which manners and opinions perish; and it will find other and worse means for its support.” If you destroy the old power structure, what you will get is not liberty and order but a new assertion of power. Napoleon put an end to the period of near anarchy in France, but only by declaring it and empire and taking the country to war with the rest of Europe to support the very ideals it had begun to abuse itself. Remember that Burke published this tract well before the period of terror, which only started in 1792 – so he looks almost like a prophet in this prediction. Rebellious France begot Napoleon, and all Europe paid the price.

127. During the feudal age, learning went hand in hand with power, argues Burke. Religion supported learning, and learning in turn supported the cause of order. The nobility and the clergy worked together in this regard. If we wanted to relate this passage to a view of literature, I suppose we could say that Burke would fold it back into the concept of learning, in his conservative definition – the arts should not overturn society, in other words, but should rather reflect its most stable values. That is of course a common conservative view of art.

Mary Wollstonecraft Notes

Wollstonecraft considers natural rights to be common sense—not a radical abstraction as Burke would have it. Reason is the natural gift of God, so why shouldn’t we use it? And if we look around, see massive injustice that could be fixed with a dash of reason, why not make some rational changes? We make our own institutions based upon God’s gift of reason—so we can change what we made to suit the present time. She considers Burke’s entire argument irrational, scarcely worthy of the title “argument.” She accuses him of being more or less a ranting lackey who will support any tyrant over the dictates of reason. It takes “courage to change,” as Bill Clinton would say, and Burke is a blubbering coward. W accuses his reverence for the English fathers as nothing more than love of brute power. Everyone knows that chivalry, with its niceties, was a fraud that covered up what was essentially a society of slaves and masters. Art and social elegance should not serve as beautiful masks for something ugly! (If there must be ugliness, give it to us straight, like whiskey—then we can know where things stand.)

Wollstonecraft assumes that if you give uneducated people freedom, they will know, or at least quickly learn, how to maintain it. But you owe them a chance at self-determination, as she says concerning women in her other great work on The Vindication of Women. Burke, by contrast, apparently sees nothing inherently progressive about democracy. People will just pursue their selfish individual desires. Some modern thinkers such as Matthew Arnold would say much the same thing—right will prevail eventually, but “force till right is ready.”

The argument about nature: Wollstonecraft says reason is central to human nature, so why condemn its productions as dangerous fantasy? Why must we think the end result of rational process will be an unnatural monstrosity? But Burke emphasizes rank, gradation, and similar concepts. He trusts in the process that leads to a system of social ranking, and he insists that this process is analogous to nature itself. So he invests social rank -- titles, inherited property, etc. -- with inherent, essential qualities, and will have none of the revolutionaries’ absolutizing of such concepts as “nature.” We must not govern ourselves by abstract concepts, but rather by traditions. Wollstonecraft says that amounts to advocating slavery, with custom (the dead) as our masters. Which, to her, sounds like outright insanity. “What exactly are conservatives conserving?” she might ask. Paine says the same thing—the past is nothing to us. Wollstonecraft suggests that no matter how cautious Burke tries to sound in his advocacy of custom as “natural,” he is an essentialist at heart, investing stale tradition with the power of a living organism. And if there’s anything Wollstonecraft can’t stand, it’s an essentialist—that is what irritates her most about men’s opinions concerning women. Men keep telling women what they are rather than listening to them and giving them a chance; here we have Edmund Burke pulling the same shoddy stunt on the whole human race.

Our authors show that both sides—the radical revolutionists and the conservatives—lay claim to key terms like “Reason” and “Nature.” Those terms may seem self-evident, and are certainly important, but they are contested terms. Questions crop up along with these terms—should we say that Reason is itself “natural” to us, or that it actually sets us apart from anything in the natural world? Was there ever a “state of nature” for humanity, or were we “always already” social animals who never lived by the simple arrangements animals arrive at by means of evolution and instinct. Or should we say, like Rousseau, that civilization is something artificial that has corrupted our better instincts towards free expression, true cooperation, and regard for our fellows? Any position you take up on such grand matters is likely to be full of problems, and yet it seems necessary to have a position on them.

Will add notes on others if time permits....

Week 02, Blake and Robinson

2006-02-09T18:15:00.000-08:00

Introduction to Course

Insofar as there is one theme running through this course, it is that romantic 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.