csuf e212 british literature since 1760 spring 05

Week 16 Rushdie and Desai

2005-05-19T08:42:00.000-07:00

Notes on Rushdie’s “The Prophet’s Hair”

Magic realism is an ancient genre, dating back to Apuleius and the Alexandrian novel, and of course most famous in relation to South American writers like Borges. It allows for radical, unannounced changes in perspective, and the kinds of exploration that sort of change makes possible. Apuleius, for example, makes his hero turn into an ass, and we learn a lot about human beings from that trick.

Why does Hashim deserve to find the vial? He finds it twice, in fact—that is supernatural. Once, maybe—but twice in the very same place? Well, he is a polite hypocrite. The Koran’s second book starts right out denouncing the kind of person who only pretends to believe in Allah. That’s pretty much Hashim’s camp. He does bad things and rationalizes them as good things—70% interest becomes, for instance, the means of making others “realize the value of money.” And the long-standing politeness of his household turns out to be a ridiculous fraud. He has a mistress and frequents prostitutes, despises his wife, considers his daughter a slut, and his son a “dope.” The vial of hair acts like a truth serum, forcing him to cough up all his secrets. So he becomes a creature of fierce extremes—devout in the formal sense, yet savage in his lack of consideration for his family and others. Perhaps this is the punishment for dishonesty.

The Prophet’s hair is a natural object with sacred properties, and it finds out those who are unworthy of it. It touches worldly people to their ruin. Notice that Hashim is a collector of rare objects—a fetishist. And that is what he does with his find. It’s probably true that Muhammad would be horrified to find his body being treated as a sacred relic, but Hashim’s veneration is anything but religious, that point aside.

Notes on Anita Desai’s “Scholar and Gypsy”

David must have everything on his own cultural terms. His unstated thesis must simply be ethnocentrism, backed up by an objectivity that presupposes it by way of denial. The author knows better than to set up a pristine “India” free of Western influence. The town they travel to is authentic not because it has some inner national essence but rather because it has something both American farm girls and Indian natives can appreciate. The town seems to invite a person in, but keeps its distance anyway. The villagers themselves are not selling out to the Anglo Americans. The people who come to the village must change and adapt, and it doesn’t work so much the other way around. But again, the villagers are by no means naïve or primitive.

I should also mention the point I make when teaching the Bhagavad-Gita. Eastern religion teaches that we gain knowledge by intuition, not by scientific discovery -- we must strip away or allow to be stripped away whatever gets between us and intuition. (Unforgetting.) David’s scientific way of understanding or perceiving and learning differs. Pat understands religion in an intuitive sense, and isn’t interested in erudite or doctrinal fine points. She doesn’t even care about the difference between Buddhism and Hinduism, which of course is a major point of contention in India. But it doesn’t matter, I believe, because she understands something far more important about religion. Her point about finding Buddha in a Hindu temple makes perfect sense, and it would make sense as well based on a reading of the Bhagavad-Gita.

The story is structured as follows, we find more indirect perspective and more from David, who is self-centered, while Pat speaks even to the end, she doesn’t say much. Perhaps that is because the change she has undergone cannot be fully conveyed in language. It may also be that the narrator tells much of the conclusion to reduce their argument to a conventional and abstract form -- it fits into the genre of the breakup due to irreconcilable differences.

A comment on science versus intuition: we go to a place like India looking for something based upon our own story; there is no culture duty-free India zone. There may well be something essential there to discover, but it is not “India.” A sociologist like David sets up elaborate schemes to neutralize Western bias, and probably the personal story he brings with him to India. But the act of neutralizing biases in this way is probably the most Western thing a person can do.

When the Indian tourists make fun of the Western hippies listening to a guru, are they correct or confused? Perhaps the hippies are confused in their own right and somewhat naïve or even essentialist, or perhaps not. This would be a good question to ask in class. I have asked before why it is that when traditional Westerners come into contact with Eastern culture and religion, some of them become almost fanatical in rejecting everything about Western culture. Why is that? Pat follows this pattern, but I’m not sure we are meant to take her as deluded or naïve.

Week 15 D. H. Lawrence

2005-05-12T08:41:00.000-07:00

Notes on D. H. Lawrence

“The Odour of Chrysanthemums.”

The chrysanthemums symbolize a series of “institutional moments” like marriage, but they’re an overdetermined symbol. Elizabeth has come to resent them, even if in the end she respects them, too. She picks them up when the workmen carrying Walter’s body knock them over. But the symbol must give way to the stark confrontation with Walter’s body, with his absolute “otherness.”

Walter had come to embody domestic obligations and little else -- he was a focus for Elizabeth’s sense of responsibility and her resentment, too, at the way he seemingly failed to live up to his end of marriage as a social contract. The body -- its silence, its separateness, forces her to confront the absolute, eternal otherness of Walter. The bible’s claim that in marriage, “a man shall leave his mother and cleave unto his wife, and the two shall be as one flesh” (a paraphrase) functions ironically here. But would understanding this have made a difference? Is the point that social forms result in a denial of individual life? This sounds like a main theme in Lawrence, and it is similar to Freud’s claims about civilization’s need to redirect the erotic energies of the individual towards larger, transpersonal, tasks. Freud writes of a need for “adjustment” due to the harmful effects of this need upon individuals, while Lawrence offers a spirited protest, perhaps even an outright rejection of it.

False relations entail consequences -- one must face up to them. Elizabeth recognizes Death as her “ultimate master,” but she will overcome the loss of Walter. Life is, after all, her “immediate master” (2330). I suppose Elizabeth’s voice is the central one, but Walter’s dead silence keeps her perspective from being the only source of significance, the only ground, for the truth-value of the story. There’s a stark sense in Lawrence that “truth will out,” and for him, truth seems to be equated with individual vitality.

“Why the Novel Matters.”

At base, Lawrence is defending the novel as a way of combating artistic specialization. He also sees the novel as opposing the division of individuals into job-doers of some sort or other, and opposing as well the division of the entire person into body, soul, and intellect. That argument stems from romanticism, and in particular from Emerson, who (in “The Poet” emphasizes authentic individual expression.

Lawrence’s theory implies an internalized kind of inspiration. The novel writer follows no external rules or generic conventions, but instead follows his or her own vital, organic impulses. The novelist writes as “man alive.” This defense of the novel is similar to that set forth by Henry James earlier -- James (in “The Art of the Novel”) writes that the novel should not be hemmed in by rules because it must remain free to embrace the whole of life, and not start excluding things on the basis of external conventions and narrow audience demands. Of course, the problem with arguments like that of Lawrence is that it is an ‘‘effect’’ of the very problem it protests against. I mean that Lawrence ascribes an almost magical power to the novel -- the novel alone, not any other form of literary art. Why does he need to constrict the efficacy of literary art to this one form? He speaks from the perspective and tone of a novelistic specialist -- something I believe Henry James largely avoids in the abovementioned essay.

Week 13 Wilfred Owen and W. B. Yeats

2005-04-26T17:45:00.000-07:00

Wilfred Owen Notes

On World War I poetry generally, see Paul Fussel’s book The Great War and Modern Memory.

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

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

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

“Strange Meeting.” It’s been said that Owen sometimes clings to the beautification of war. I hardly think so—he’s struggling with a problem I’ve already described: namely, we cannot simply dismiss all previous notions. War may “strip away the film of familiarity” in a shocking manner, but we must cover the abyss with language we know to be inadequate. That’s part of being human. That we know we engage in illusion-making doesn’t mean we can stop doing so altogether. So Owen is wrestling with the difficult relationship between his poetic language –eloquent stuff, not the sometimes strident tones of Siegfried Sassoon – and his raw experience. What is he doing to that experience in trying to convey it, as of course he must? So here he invents a dream like the reality of war, lending the former equal status for the time being. And he forces himself to confront the man he has killed, not accepting the obvious excuse that he has been commanded to kill. After all, it is wartime. And the dead German speaks to him – what is Owen accomplishing here? Is his language expiatory? Cathartic? Can we guess the speaker’s attitude towards these questions? All language falsifies what it describes, but how, if at all, may we falsify in good faith? Myth, aesthetic dreams, even cast as confrontations, may deepen the speaker’s complicity in the act he has already committed. Owen won’t excuse his own poetry, won’t take flight in gritty realism or shrill declamation, a refusal I find decent in him.

Notes on William Butler Yeats

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

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

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

A note on how criticism chooses its object: The major kind of criticism during the Modernist period was New Critical Formalism, which treated the poem as an autonomous object, its own linguistic system that privileged connotation over dictionary-style everyday denotation. That is, the New Critics (Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, and others) say that poetry is largely self-referential; it doesn’t and shouldn’t refer to the humdrum real world. In fact, the ordinary world – with its new technology and scientific dehumanization of all that is human – actually threatens art and humanity with extinction. So in this context, formalist insistence on the integrity of art, drawn as it is from a long line of philosophers and critics from Kant through Schiller and Arnold and Wilde onwards, and ending up with the Southern Agrarianism of certain American Formalists (See the anthology I’ll Take My Stand) amounts to an indirectly pragmatic defense of art. And it’s not hard to see why the New Critics respond best to romantic lyric and to High Modern symbolism and self-referientiality, even if they don’t go directly for Yeats’ priestly stance. The poem is its own priest, they would probably say – without quite believing in the implied metaphysics. The New Critics are too “scientific” and “objective” for that, paradoxically enough.

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

“Easter 1916.” Yeats here treats an act of Irish nationalism and martyrdom as a work of art, something that transfigures even those participants he didn’t get along with. But in the final stanza, doesn’t Yeats also bring up the dangers of nationalism? See his line, “Too long a sacrifice…” Nationalism is a temporary tactic; Yeats never supported violent revolution, and shows a preference for art and myth as shaping and continuity-providing influences in collective life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Additional Note on “Among School Children.” Paul De Man says that Yeats’s poem undercuts in its final stanza the possibility that art can overcome distinctions and disjunctiveness. This idea makes perfect sense — the speaker has been experiencing this disjunctiveness throughout the lyric, registering its effects in his consciousness. He is like Humpty Dumpty trying to put it all back together again – youth, old age, love, contemplation, etc. Yeats cannot judge what he was, or what the children now are, or Maud Gonne. But the problem is deeper than this – it sounds as if we have a man mourning for lost unity, after the fashion of the Romantic poets. The rhetoric of romanticism or organic rhetoric is an aesthetic act of overcoming or canceling disjunctions and distances. The final line of “among schoolchildren” seems to be declaring that the speaker cannot and will not try to separate the dancer from the dance. They are really one. This is the power of romantic rhetoric trying to overcome the agonized, felt disparity between two identities within the same body. The strategy would be the same even if it is unconvincing – we may still “gloriously fail” to achieve an impossible metaphysical unity as our goal, our stopping-place at a higher state of consciousness. But if we detach the final line from the romantic “split psyche” that we have built to utter it for us (lyric illusion), perhaps we shall get different results; the poem becomes not a passionate attempt to overcome a divided self or to illustrate the pathos of the human condition, but rather a meditation on the ways in which we can know the dancer from the dance. But in the final analysis, how different is that from the usual romantic rhetoric?

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

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

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

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

Week 11 Christina Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelites

2005-04-18T19:45:00.000-07:00

Notes on Christina Rossetti

"Song--She sat and sang alway" (1584)

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

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

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

"After Death" (1585)

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

"In an Artist's Studio" (1586)

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

"Winter: My Secret" (1588)

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

"No, Thank You, John" (1601)

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

"Sleeping at Last" (1604)

Compare this poem to earlier ones about death.

A Few Other Poems (Not Assigned):

“Up-Hill”

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

“Goblin Market”

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

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

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

“A Triad”

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

“Echo”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walter Pater characterizes “The Blessed Damozel” as follows:

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

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

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

Week 11 Gerard Manley Hopkins

2005-04-18T19:28:00.000-07:00

General Notes on Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV. HOW CAN WE SPEAK ABOUT GOD?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes on Hopkins’ Poems

“God’s Grandeur”

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

“The Starlight Night”

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

“As Kingfishers Catch Fire”

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

“Spring”

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

“The Windhover”

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

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

“Pied Beauty”

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

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

“Hurrahing in Harvest”

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

“Binsey Poplars”

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

“Duns Scotus’ Oxford”

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

“Felix Randal”

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

“Spring and Fall”

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

“Carrion Comfort”

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

“No Worst, There Is None”

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

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

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

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

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

“Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord”

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

“The Wreck of the Deutschland”

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

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

Week 11 Alfred Tennyson

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Notes on Lord Alfred Tennyson

“The Lady of Shalott”

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

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

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

Part 3. Here the Lady gets her wish when Lancelot punctures the barrier, breaks the magic spell, with a riot of color and sound. The two young lovers in particular (of the final stanza in Part 2) have readied her for this intrusion. Towards the end of the third part, the magic stops, representation ends and experience begins. Lancelot’s phrase “tirra lirra” has as one prominent possible source a song of Autolycus in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale 4.3:

Act 4.3 of The Winter’s Tale: the rascal Autolycus sings:

When daffodils begin to peer,
With heigh! the doxy over the dale,
Why, then comes in the sweet o’ the year;
For the red blood reigns in the winter’s pale.
The white sheet bleaching on the hedge,
With heigh! the sweet birds, O, how they sing!
Doth set my pugging tooth on edge;
For a quart of ale is a dish for a king.
The lark, that tirra-lyra chants,
With heigh! with heigh! the thrush and the jay,
Are summer songs for me and my aunts,
While we lie tumbling in the hay.

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

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

“The Lotos-Eaters”

In Memoriam Lyric 5 says that “A use in measured language lies / …Like dull narcotics, numbing pain,” a thought that seems apt when connected with the present poem. Odysseus joins his crew after only one line—they all “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” as Timothy Leary the 1960’s LSD guru would say. He upsets the principle of rank and falls away from heroism into apathetic song. There will be no more heroism, no more need to remain obedient to the gods. The verse form brings home this worst possible peril for a Greek hero who is, after all, responsible for standing up to his fate even though he can’t alter it.

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

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

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

“Ulysses”

Tiresias had told Odysseus that he must leave Ithaca one last time to propitiate the gods, so Tennyson’s idea comes from Homer. Here we find a modern mind confronting Greek striving. In Homer, all the wandering was for the sake of getting home and re-establishing order on Ithaca. But here the point seems to be that adventurism is its own purpose. Mixed in is a sad tone, an almost Hamlet-like musing on the sum total of it all—I’ve done all these things, but what’s the point of it if they become only memories? Ulysses laments that he has “become a name”; his words are no longer oriented towards action, and he has to cheer himself and others up to find that sense of direction again. What he says about experience is almost Paterian—Ulysses, too, wants “to burn with that hard, gem-like flame,” to expand life into a continual moment of great intensity, blotting out the ordinary or transforming it. The second, more public, part of the poem—”This is my son, mine own Telemachus…” implies a rejection of the task Homer set for his hero. Tennyson isn’t interested, I suppose, in the historical element of Odyssean lore—the “task” of the Odyssey was to revitalize a more domesticated land with its former heroic values.

But in Tennyson’s recasting, revitalization evidently means rejecting the domestic life and setting out again as a wanderer towards death. Ulysses stands apart from his son, to whom he would gladly cede the task of ruling over the human herd animals of Ithaca. When Ulysses addresses his old comrades, he sounds like Satan in Paradise Lost—his will is “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” This is a very general directive, not a call to strive towards some specific goal.

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

In Memoriam A.H.H.

Structure

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

1. (1-27) Despair: ungoverned sense (subjective)

2. (28-77) Doubt: mind governing sense, i.e., despair (objective)

3. (78-102) Hope: spirit governing mind, i.e. doubt (subjective)

4. (103-31) Faith: spirit harmonizing with sense (objective)

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

1. Poetry as release from emotion

2. Poetry as release from thought

3. Poetry as self-realization

4. Poetry as mission (or prophecy)

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

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

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

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

The Poet’s Three Main Areas of Concern:

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

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

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

The Prologue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lyric 2

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

Lyric 3

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

Lyric 4

This poem shows that the speaker suffers from a divided consciousness, as in Lyric 2.

Lyric 5

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

Lyric 7

This poem explores the psychological state of disbelief, mourning.

Lyric 11

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

Lyric 14

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

Lyric 15

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

Lyric 28

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

Lyric 30

In stanza seven, the speaker says that there is a spirit moving through the universe. The imagery here is similar to Dante’s, or to Shelley’s in his elegy for Keats, “Adonais.” Is Arthur Hallam moved now by the divine or primal love, il primo amore? Lucretius’s references in De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of the Universe) to the soul wandering into infinity may also be relevant here.

Lyric 34

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

Lyric 39

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

Lyric 54

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

Lyric 55

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

Lyric 56

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

Lyric 75

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

Lyric 108

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

Lyric 118

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

Lyric 123

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

Lyric 124

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

Lyric 126

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

Week 10 Thomas Carlyle

2005-04-05T18:11:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sartor Resartus Margin-Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Past and Present

1111. In the selection from the chapter Democracy, Carlyle opposes the doctrine of laissez-faire. He says that the times are unprecedented, “that in no time, since the beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now passing over us.” The Phalaris Bull anecdote is a metaphor of enchantment, externalizing the injustice of the times and reifying it into solid Law. But this kind of thing is bad if done unconsciously.

1112. The Irish widow who dies of typhoid fever shows that we are all linked together, all potential hosts for disease. This is a grotesque way of making a point that people will not accept in the ordinary way. The page offers grotesque contrasts between the savage and the civil, especially with the mention of Black Dahomey. Carlyle prefers feudal relationships over contemporary ones: Gurth the Swineherd “is not what I call an exemplar of human felicity....” Nonetheless, this bondsman’s master at least acknowledged a reciprocal human tie, and the relationship cannot be reduced to the cash nexus. What is libertine? “The true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in his finding out, or being forced to find out, the right path....” True liberty, therefore, it is the compulsion to work at what you do best. If you don’t like Carlyle, you might say this passage compares uncomfortably with George Orwell’s 1984 -- slavery is freedom.

1113. Who are the genuine aristocrats? Carlyle speaks for the wage-slaves: “if thou art in very deed my Wiser, may a beneficent instinct lead and impel thee to ‘conquer’ me, to command me!” Carlyle aims to preserve the principle of aristocracy rather than the specific class that now claims English titles; he asserts that there is an unconscious link in people’s minds to divine justice. “A conscious abhorrence and intolerance of Folly...dwells deep in some men....”

1114. William of Normandy contains both fire and light, but mostly light; “the essential element of him... is not scorching fire, but shining illuminative light.” Carlyle calls for a radical recycling of the aristocratic principle. His task is to perceive and make known the need and means for bringing order from chaos, productivity from idleness and anarchy. Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand cannot do the kind of work William the Conqueror could. As for revolutions, “Nature’s poor world will very soon rush down again to Baseness...” Revolutions are a sign of progress, but only an initial stage on the way to finding our true superiors.

1115. Finding those true superiors “is a work for centuries; to be taught us by tribulations, confusions, insurrections, obstructions....” In the section titled Captains of Industry, Carlyle addresses the significance of government: “Government, as the most conspicuous object in Society, is called upon to give signal of what shall be done; and, in many ways, to preside over further, and command the doing of it. But the Government cannot do, by all its signaling and commanding, what the Society is radically indisposed to do. In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom....” So the government gives signs and commands, but it is ultimately the symbol of the people. It is not the primary agent. Carlyle interprets raw capitalism as chaos, and says that “To be a noble Master, among noble Workers, will again be the first ambition with some few....”

1116. On this page, Carlyle addresses the ancient problem of distribution. Capitalism solves the problem of production, but not just distribution. There can be a noble industrialism and “Government by the Wisest.” These are the captains of industry who will fight chaos and necessity, making progress possible. The task of Carlyle’s prose is to align us with divine forces such as Justice. He means to spiritualize the debased, ordinary concept of work and return it to a place of honor. I would say that in this he looks back to German idealists such as Hegel and forwards to Marx. The Captains of Industry are as yet the unconscious masters, and the aim is to make them believe in themselves and to make us believe in them and align our wills with theirs. Carlyle attacks capitalist accumulation by comparing thoughtless capitalists to pirates and Choctaw Indians. Capitalists clothe their lust for money in ideological garments, but it is nothing more than aggression masked by false value systems. Carlyle makes a contrast between the real and the apparent, and he wants to reconstruct audibly (in part visibly, to but primarily Carlyle builds a sense of voice) the reality to which his readers must adhere in future.

1118. This final page ends on a note of energy and vitalism. “It is to you I call; for ye are not dead, ye are already half-alive: there is in you a sleepless dauntless energy, the prime-matter of all nobleness in man.” Carlyle has been trying all along to show how order can be brought from apparent chaos -- chaos is in the last instance intolerable, and he trusts that there is order underlying it, if only we could perceive it. The call to order involves an assertion of neo-feudalism. Carlyle’s wild and apocalyptic language is designed to allow us to encompass chaos, to surround it with a principle of divine order and tame it thereby. The very wildness of his prose seems meant to show that he is not afraid of anarchy -- “be not afraid,” as the Gospels say. Reducing social chaos to order, and re-spiritualizing the productive process will solve the problem of distribution -- an ancient dream come true.

Week 10 John Stuart Mill

2005-04-05T18:00:00.000-07:00

On Liberty Notes in the Margins (Norton Anthology 7th. edition, Volume 2B, Victorian)

Introduction. John Stuart Mill asks the fundamental questions of social and political science:

1) what is human nature? (Organic)
2) how can we best educate and develop it? (Freedom and variety of situations)
3) what is the ideal society? (One that embraces development and liberty)
4) who can lead us towards it? (Eminent thinkers)

Mill proposes a model of development, so he must specify the agent that will change things as they now stand. What forces are repressing liberty and impeding progress today?

1146. Mill quotes Wilhelm von Humboldt on human nature: “the end of man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal or immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole....” This is a reformulation or modification of Greek and Renaissance ideals about self-development. It is not a formulation that the utilitarian Mr. Gradgrind would understand. Mill continues that, “Nobody denies that people should be so taught and trained in youth, as to know and benefit by the ascertained results of human experience. But it is the privilege and proper condition of a human being, arrived at the maturity of his faculties, to use and interpret experience in his own way.” Mill of course favors education, but insists upon specificity with regard to the goal towards which the educator should strive. Ultimately, he wants balance in all things, and education is a central way to achieve that.

1147. Mill seems to agree with John Milton that “reason is but choosing.” He says, “The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice.” Custom is the enemy of genuine individualism. Again, “He who lets the world... choose his plan of life for him has no need of any other faculty than the apelike one of imitation.” To what extent, we might ask, would Mill countenance the consumer imitation model of bourgeois liberalism? It seems clear that he challenges this model, whereby we link our sense of self to material objects, and mistake the accumulation of owned objects for true progress.

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

1148. As for our emotional side, Mill writes as follows: “Yet desires and impulses are as much a part of a perfect human being, as beliefs and restraints: and strong impulses are only perilous when not properly balanced... It is not because men’s desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.” Mill demands the same freedom and exercise for impulses and desires that William Blake does. He is all in favor of “energy,” but with the addition of a need for balance. Mill defines the word character as belonging to a “person whose desires and impulses are his own.” He refers -- probably consciously -- to Thomas Carlyle’s phrase “steam engine universe.” Then he goes on to criticize Carlyle rather directly if politely: “In some early states of society, these forces might be, and were, too much ahead of the power which society then possessed of disciplining and controlling them. There has been a time when the element of spontaneity and individuality was in excess... To overcome this difficulty, law and discipline... asserted a power over the whole man... But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.” Therefore, Carlyle’s feudalism is anachronistic and cannot supply the needed pattern for contemporary life -- it proposes to deal with inauthenticity by imposing an anachronism on everyone.

1149. “In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, everyone lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual or the family do not ask themselves -- what do I prefer?... They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? What is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? Or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of the station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary.” Middle-class conformity is the enemy -- the same bourgeoisie against which Carlyle takes aim. But the idea is that this middle-class has come by a much more tear radical and effective means of control -- not violent repression but rather the persistent and forced internalization of socially acceptable thoughts, until it is no longer necessary to think at all. I am reminded of Marcus Aurelius’ comment in his meditations that it is necessary not even to think what would offend others in our inmost thoughts. So much for romantic interiority. Mill continues with his critique of Carlyle, saying that such conformism is only acceptable on the “Calvinistic theory.” In that theology, “the one great offense of man is self-will.” So Calvin stands in for Carlyle here -- Mill’s criticism is largely against Carlyle’s social vision in Past and Present. Further notes -- Friedrich Nietzsche shows much contempt and yet a certain admiration for this trickery whereby the human animal is branded into making promises and keeping them, and of perceiving things the same way everyone else does. It might also be worth mentioning Michel Foucault’s idea that it is not so much repression that makes societies go as production and enumeration or definition, with subsequent control and shape in a non-humanistic way.

1150. Mill says that “‘Pagan self-assertion’ is one of the elements of human worth, as well as ‘Christian self-denial.’ There is a Greek ideal of self-development.” This kind of statement seems to flow from Mill’s understanding of Goethe -- a modern version of classical humanism. Pericles is the ideal -- full development of all the person’s faculties, all human potential. Mill says that “In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others.” His social theory argues that richer “units” will lead to a richer mass of people. This brand of individualism takes account of larger social needs, so Mill is not a collectivist like Carlyle.

“To be held to rigid rules of justice for the sake of others develops the feelings and capacities which have the good of others for their object. But to be restrained in things not affecting their good, by their mere displeasure, develops nothing valuable, except such force of character as may unfold itself in resisting the restraint.” Mill opposes the excess of restraint for social conformity, though he recognizes that such restraint is a powerful force to be reckoned with. The need to resist against unnecessary constraints, Mill would agree with Sigmund Freud, accounts for a lot of misdirected individual and social energy. He promotes self-development, culture -- but thanks to the economic and social context in which he sets forth his theory, it will be taken as one idea among others in the marketplace of ideas. That is a very difficult problem to resolve.

1151. Custom versus genius: custom turns us into machines. “Persons of genius…are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.” Genius is something that Mill insists upon “emphatically”; it requires freedom and variety as its atmosphere. This is hardly an argument invoking “mass culture” as Walter Benjamin would, and it differentiates him markedly from Carlyle, who shows little interest in it—his heroic ideal isn’t about genius but about the worship of force and personal charisma or energy. Mill is more genuinely indebted to the romantic authors he has been reading. Well, fashion is one major challenge to this organic model of genius and development. Fashion links individual expression to an ever-recylable system of objects—generating a sense of self that stems from endless repetition and consumption. We identify with an image of ourselves, and take all necessary (economic) steps to conform to that image, but the image keeps giving way to another one. This model of the self mechanizes and harnesses the old romantic “problem of desire,” stripping it of its link to organic theory, to three-dimensional humanistic conceptions of human nature. Mill is concerned about the broad social forces bearing down upon us all—public opinion is like fashion, only in ideas. There is much inventiveness in fashion, inventiveness in “retailoring” what is out to make it in again. Carlyle responds against flunkeyist “fashionism” on its own terms, and thinks that his Clothes Philosophy provides a “recycling” alternative to flunkeyism, but how accurate is that faith?

1154. “The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people; and the spirit of liberty, in so far as it resists such attempts, may ally itself locally and temporarily with the opponents of improvement…The progressive principle, however, in either shape…is antagonistic to the sway of Custom…” Mill doesn’t see liberty and improvement as necessarily opposed. The enlightened person should always be aiming to improve. The important thing is to oppose complacency. In his book, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, C.B. MacPherson points out that there is nothing inherently developmental about bourgeois liberal democracy. The accumulation of objects is not development, and so liberal democracy all too easily betrays its foundations in Whig gentility, whereby society is something like a gentlemen’s agreement to let progress take its slow course towards the spiritual and intellectual betterment of all. Materialist capitalism annuls this kind of “slow time” in favor of perpetual immediacy. Mill’s borrowings from the romantics may commit him to the infinite deferral of improvement, and to a tacit cultural elitism. I should end by mentioning once more the system of self-object identification inherent in fashion-based consumer culture, and suggest that perhaps we need not stress Mill’s kind of “genius” and “character” (admirable though they are) so much as insist that we must think our own thoughts even as we are subjected to others’. This is something like Greek strength as a model of resistance and progress, and I would have to admit that it largely cedes the possibility of rapid and massive changes in the social order. But that seems unlikely anytime soon. My point is that rejection of consumer culture may not be very convincing or effective. Probably the best you can do is inflection with a balanced self as the goal. Mill sees democracy as work, not as a perfect system.

Autobiography

1166. “From the winter of 1821, when I first read Bentham, and especially from the commencement of the Westminster Review, I had what might truly be called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world. My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object.” In the beginning, Mill pursued a vague, general object -- reform, the happiness of others. I like the following passage: “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And of course the answer is no. The negation here is similar to the effect of Carlyle’s steam-engine universe rolling over a person’s inner being. Mill says that he had nothing left to live for when he heard this “Everlasting No,” and he must have felt that he had lived as an automaton. His foundation for personal happiness was only an abstraction, what Francis Bacon would call a philosophical cobweb. It was a utopian vision based on a mechanical view of human nature.

1167. “My course of study had led me to believe that all mental and moral feelings and qualities, whether of a good or of a bad kind, were the results of association; that we love one thing, and hate another... through the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those things, from the effect of education or of experience.” James Mill had taught his son that the goal of education was “to form the strongest possible associations of the salutary class; associations of pleasure with all things beneficial to the great whole, and of pain with all things hurtful to it.” James Mill followed a scientific model of the individual, and utilitarian education presupposes that character develops along the lines of mechanical association. If you identify your personal happiness with the general good, the idea goes, so long as you are working towards the general good you will be happy. But this is no better than middle-class conformity. It is not the way lasting human connections are made; it requires a shallow, flattened notion of human happiness and individuality.

1168. “Analytic habits may thus even strengthen the associations between causes and effects, means and ends, but tend altogether to weaken those which are, to speak familiarly, a mere matter of feeling.” It was not so much what Mill read but how he was taught to read it. The word analysis can mean “freeing up” the object of study, but that is not usually how we understand the term. The ordinary understanding is closer to the one Wordsworth condemns -- “We murder to dissect.” Bring up the famous definition of a horse in Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times: “graminiverous quadruped.” The young John Stuart Mill seems to have been a victim of “dissociation of sensibility.” Helping other people is not a bad object, but you must first determine the grounds of human connection -- they are organic, not mechanical. You cannot superimpose upon the passions a scientific utopian scheme.

1169. “I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel’s Memoires, and came to the passage which relates his father’s death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to them....” Spontaneous emotion proves to be the key to his recovery. Mill describes a Wordsworthian moment in the form of an accidental encounter with a literary text, an autobiographical text written by Marmontel. This accidental encounter escapes Bentham’s and James Mill’s scheme concerning the formation of salutary associations. So the example is a rebuke of straightforward Benthamite utilitarianism-- the young Marmontel made a key emotional bond with others, forgetting himself for the moment. What we find described is not a mechanical “I ought” but a genuine outpouring of sympathy. Mill says that after reading this passage, he never again reached the depths of depression he formerly experienced.

1170. “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it...” happiness is still the goal here, but it is not to be directly pursued. The point is to stop analyzing happiness and start working on something you find meaningful for its own sake. It is best not to think of everything you say and do in light of ultimate purposes or end-states of consciousness. Mill has learned to ask Walter Pater’s question -- “what is this activity or thing or person to me?” It is not good enough to pursue some abstract notion of the general good and to claim that you are achieving an equally abstract kind of happiness by doing so; the activity must be meaningful to you personally prior to the attachment of any such abstract notion. Mill has not rejected the idea that happiness flows from activity, but it makes all the difference in the world whether that activity is do-gooding or intrinsically and intimately valuable to the person pursuing it. For example, if I have an inclination to tinker with computers, building them from scratch and solving whatever problems come up as I do so, I may by such means become happy, at least for a while. The same goes for things like reading a Jane Austen novel -- you don’t sit down to read thinking, “my goal in reading this book is to be happy.” If you did, you would become morbidly prone to checking your emotional state every other sentence to register your level of happiness or unhappiness. This kind of obsession resembles both heavy Puritan examination of the state of one’s soul and the associational theory of happiness promoted by Mill’s father and his tutor Jeremy Bentham. It is best to allow your consciousness to be directed towards an object other than your own interior states.

This is profoundly good advice, but if we want to criticize it, we might say that it is an evasion of romantic troubles concerning the problem of desire. It is this problem that caused Carlyle to reject happiness altogether in favor of self-annihilation leading to meaningfulness, awe, and collective belonging. Don’t we invariably reflect back upon our states of consciousness, whether we mean to or not? And if we cannot avoid doing so, the kind of happiness Mill describes will not satisfy us for long -- human beings even get tired of being happy after a while.

In any case, on the same page Mill emphasizes the need for balancing the sway of our faculties -- feelings and intellection are both important: “I had now learnt by experience that the passive susceptibilities needed to be cultivated as well as the active capacities... The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties now seemed to me of primary importance.” A many-sided personality needs many-sided experiences to develop and be free. Feeling is not mechanical, not associational. The self is not an isolated atom but rather an organic construct. Happiness comes from pursuing intrinsically meaningful activities and from allowing “passive susceptibilities” to operate freely. By this term, I believe Mill means self-culture, the patient development of our individual potential until we achieve a balanced, harmonious self.

1171. Mill reiterates the point he made earlier about basic utilitarianism’s unbalanced, mechanical view of human nature -- simply rendering people “free and in a state of physical comfort” and removing all hardships from life really would not make a community happy. Then he goes on to discuss Wordsworth’s significance for him: “This state of my thoughts and feelings made the fact of my reading Wordsworth for the first time (in the autumn of 1828), an important event in my life.”

1172. “What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought colored by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connection with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind.” Wordsworth teaches John Stuart Mill the true sources of happiness, and shows him the value of contemplation, of “wise passiveness” as a corrective for the analytic habit, which in modern times has reached the level of an obsession.

My Lecture Notes--Long, But Perhaps Useful

Mill is criticizing some of the flaws in utilitarianism to save that philosophy from itself. Utilitarianism is the corollary of C19 market economics, so that’s the first thing to discuss. We know the basics: the philosophers of capitalism, going back to Adam Smith and beyond, say something like the following: Rather than try to centralize a nation’s economy, the rulers should allow ordinary people to exercise their own initiative in producing, selling, and buying the material things that improve their standard of living. The less interference there is—consonant with preventing monopoly—the faster the people’s standard of living will improve. Supply and demand regulate the social order—people will buy what they want, and there will be someone to sell it to them at the right price, thanks to competition.

Let’s give the theory its due. In Smith’s formulation, capitalism is an Enlightenment-based, optimistic way of viewing human affairs: the market will harness otherwise selfish desires for gain and pleasure, and, as by an Invisible Hand, arrange human affairs in the best and fairest possible way. You don’t need the King to do it for you—your own desires and choices will bring order from chaos. Maybe we can’t change our nature and become angels, but that need not keep us from producing and consuming our way to a free and equitable society. And we will have done it by our own efforts, not like immature dependents on the will of some god or monarch. Kant said that Enlightenment consisted in humanity’s growing up and taking responsibility for its affairs; that’s what Smith wants us to do.

In addition to helping us achieve the age-old dream of “the good life” in material terms, capitalism is admirable in creating a space where all the ancient prejudices no longer tyrannize over us, or cause us to tyrannize over others. Consider how apt a given society is to mistreat the few or the disadvantaged, to discriminate against people because they don’t look like the majority, behave like the majority in certain matters, share the same religion or even quite the same strand of a religion, and so forth. Capitalism doesn’t care about anything like that—if you walk into a big department store, the merchant only wants to serve you, deliver a product, and get some of your green money in return. It doesn’t matter what color you are, whether you’re straight or gay, whether you’re a Christian, Jew, Moslem, Hindu, or Buddhist. Everybody’s money looks and talks the same. At least in theory, a capitalist system should be absolutely amoral. (That is, so long as fanatics and ignoramuses don’t import their extra-system values into the market and use the market to enforce those values, as in “we don’t serve ‘coloreds’ in this here diner.” Inherited wealth is another possible problem—it promotes something like the principle of aristocracy by birth.) Money flattens out a lot other “values” to a single quantitative standard—it liberates us from belief systems long used to treat others unjustly and strip them of their freedom. In this way, capitalism is as dynamic and revolutionary in the moral sphere as it is in the material realm of production.

Utilitarianism, which Ruskin despises and Carlyle disdainfully calls “Benthamee Radicalism,” is the corollary of market economics. Utilitarianism agrees with Adam Smith’s capitalists that individual choice-making and pursuit of happiness leads to social harmony, which Benthamees call “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” It’s a philosophy for a society of individuals who produce and consume commodities for one another, gaining their happiness in large part through the satisfaction of desires for comfort, sensory stimulation, and so forth.

Further, in its promotion of self-gratification, utilitarian philosophy further legitimizes capitalism’s deep indebtedness to the realm of desire as the source of social order and progress. Why? Well, we can probably agree with Carlyle that even the humblest nobody—the shoeblack, for instance—in the social order just keeps on conceiving one desire after another right up to his dying breath. The brilliant thing about market economics is that it generates not only objects to satisfy basic desires, it generates or “manufactures” new desires at a really stunning pace. We in our so-called post-industrial, service-based, new-age, information-superhighway (use your own phrase) society and economy know this even better than Marx. It’s evident in the realm of fashion, which recycles old desires in new and exciting packages, or even comes up with altogether new desires, which we either indulge as “wants” knowingly, or mistake for absolute needs. Capitalism thrives upon turning what we want into what we need, or think we need. The whole system is based upon desire for gratification of one sort or another—if we all became ascetics and decided to avoid everything not directly related to our survival and lcd comfort, capitalism would collapse instantly. People made fun of Bush 41 as “King George” when he said people should fix the recession by “just buying something,” but in a sense his majesty had it about right. “O reason not the need!” as another famous king said….Or if you don’t like 41 or King Lear, how about Oscar Wilde? “It’s only the superficial things in life that matter—man’s deeper nature is soon found out.” In this view, life is all about how many ever-so-slightly different shades of peach lipstick you currently own, how many unnecessary creature comforts, what the tail fins on your car look like, what color your hair is this week, and so forth.

No wonder we worship Hollywood actors and sports stars. And no wonder sex (that multifarious set of practices that we decadent westerners especially engage in mostly for fun) is the vehicle that drives advertising—it’s only slightly glib to say that advertisers sell sex even more than they sell particular products. Convince someone that he or she will “get more” by using a certain toothpaste or buying a certain car or cell phone, and profits flow.

Well, Utilitarianism is the philosophical handmaid of capitalism’s egalitarianism and choice-maximizing. People make fun of Bentham for being a one-dimensional man and for saying that “pushpin is as good as poetry.” But that’s his genius: he refuses to go beyond mechanistic formulae and paeans to quantitative pleasure because he’s convinced that it’s none of his business what you’re up to so long as you don’t harm anyone else. Pleasure is pleasure. Some people like opera; others like world wrestling federation matches. Some like both. So what? Who is to judge “quality” here, without either an elite few tyrannizing over the majority of lowbrow pleasure-seekers, or the lowbrows tyrannizing over the high-cultures? The best society, for the utilitarian, can be arrived at by the operation of the market: lots of happy people possessing and doing things that make them as happy as possible, and not trying to prevent others from achieving the same goals.

As for politics, capitalism and democracy are said to go well together: the “rational consumer” model of subjectivity, with its utilitarian imperative of pleasure, posits exactly the kind of bourgeois, self-interested individual who demands the democratic right to have a say in the way the country is governed. A society based upon the production and consumption of gratifying objects requires maximum freedom to make choices about which objects gratify one. Coercion is, simply put, bad for business! Also, markets need the kind of “stable dynamism” that comes with long faith in the democratic process: you can’t fulfill your needs consistently under a Stalin or Hitler, even if they provide “order” of a static sort. Authoritarians tend to deemphasize the pursuit of pleasure and push the idea instead that we must work like slaves towards some allegedly higher goal, generally an abstraction like “the people’s good,” which sometimes, though not always, translates into a vile particular like “the ruler’s bank account.” (Generally, authoritarians preach self-annihilation, or rather they channel the individual’s unconscious and “libidinal” desires to belong to something larger than themselves—the Reich, Pol Pot’s agrarian utopia, whatever.)

Briefly, Marx’s critique of all this optimism about the market is as follows:

The human relation to commodities is “fetishism”—we produce material objects and invest the objects themselves with value, eliding the fact that human labor makes them valuable. When you make a fetish or totem object, you worship it and let it determine what you do and think because it somehow contains the power of dead ancestors, etc. So the commodity becomes the determining power in human life, and humanity is reduced to a bunch of little cogs in the great machine that produces commodities. The capitalist sees humanity in abstract and mechanical terms—we are merely production-units, and the things produced come “alive.” In this way, any pleasure we get from objects is purely incidental: the system exists to perpetuate and augment itself; it really doesn’t serve humanity’s needs in any but the most superficial way.

Marx’s view follows Hegel: we produce our humanity and our world through the labor we perform. As Carlyle and Ruskin would say, work is what binds us together into a community, and what gives us our sense of dignity as human beings. But under capitalism, work is not even something we want to do—the circulation of commodities is all that matters, and ordinary people remain profoundly alienated from the labor they perform and from the results of it. It is meaningless or worse, and keeps them from becoming fully human. Further, the system by no means creates equality: those who own the means of production have all the capital, and they hire the workers’ labor on very unfair terms, paying them about as much as it takes just to stay alive and bury their troubles in drunkenness. Indeed, the vision of utopia is cruel in that the ordinary man and woman see the great wealth they’ve helped to produce all around them, but they can’t share in the benefits. The coal miner heats the rich man’s home, but shivers in his own hovel when the winter comes. Immoral! Unfair! Class inequity in its most unsustainable and vicious form. And capitalist “free-market” ideology sanctions it all with pious hypocrisy, declaring that the losers deserve exactly what they’re getting, while the self-righteous winners enjoy the fruits of others’ labor.

Well, Mill offers his own criticism of Utilitarianism—he focuses on what he perceives as the inadequacy of the assumptions made by Bentham and his father James Mill concerning human nature. He demonstrates the effects of his semi-mechanical, if benignly administered, education. The result is a nervous breakdown and deep reexamination of the basis of human happiness. Happiness is still the aim of life, but the issue of quality now becomes vital. And along with it, of course, comes the whole issue of who gets to decide on quality. Who will tell us when we’re attaining the right kind of happiness by the right means? Evidently Bentham and James Mill were not setting forth a tenable path for their protégé. But Mill doesn’t have easy answers about how progress is to be made—certainly, as he points out in On Liberty, we don’t want the vulgar middle class to become absolute in their opinions, as they’re threatening to do. Neither do we want political authoritarianism. The best Mill can offer is the notion that “those who stand on the higher eminences of thought” might prove to be the agents of improvement and change. This is still a deep problem for us today—to what extent are we right to be dissatisfied with our culture and expressions of unenlightened political will? Who decides value? Is there any authority principle higher than “the people and their desires and tastes”? Does a society need to have a sense of direction, or is that actually a mistaken demand? But doesn’t a society tend to ratify its majoritarian values as the only possible ones, and insist that its directionality flows from such values? So then we would need critics to break up what Mill calls “the hostile and dreaded censorship” imposed by the middle-class bourgeois majority. He’s responding to the fact that just as monopoly is a dangerous tendency in capitalist economics, so is cultural monopoly a threat when one group begins to dominate the production and consumption of culture.

Week 07 Jane Austen’s Persuasion

2005-03-18T19:10:00.000-08:00

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.

Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion was written at the end of the Napoleonic Wars that ended with the Emperor’s exile in 1815. The 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—and 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 ideological hype of all kinds. Moreover, while she is capable of describing a downright 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.

A good example of this ability in Persuasion is Austen’s creation of the character Lady Russell—this woman reflects the best of the age, but very imperfectly. Her decision about Captain Wentworth was simply wrong and premature, but she manages to accept Anne’s second romance with him. Her concerns were legitimate, but she attached them to the wrong person. Anne even says she was right to do as Lady Russell said, just from loyalty to this parent-like figure. If there is an outright villain in this novel, it would probably be Sir William Elliot, who woos Anne for purely economic and status-related reasons. Most of the other characters are flawed in some way, but not to the extent reached by William.

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. In parrying wits with Captain Harville in Book II, Chapter 23 of Persuasion, Anne says of women, “We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions” (187). In our modern terminology, Anne’s plea is quietly “feminist”—the Captain should not dismiss women’s supposedly more persistent and loyal emotions as a thing of no value just because they stem from the possessors’ relegation to domestic life. Perhaps the novel’s ideal woman—aside from Anne, of course—would be Mrs. Croft (Sophy), the learned, well-traveled, elegant, and mature wife of Admiral Croft. She has been almost everywhere and speaks with self-assurance in the company of strong men, and remains devoted to her husband without allowing herself to be confined to the role of domestic helpmate.

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 would be a perfect example. 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’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. Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch Hall is a parodic member of the gentry class, but if we take away the absurd degree to which he values “good” birth, an admirably situated and finely furnished estate, beauty, and studied idleness, these values are fairly characteristic for the class of people about whom Jane Austen writes.

As for the term “parodic,” what I mean by it is that Sir Walter apes the manners and intensifies the obsessions of his favorite class to the point where he becomes ridiculous. The trouble with him is that, unlike some of the era’s great dandies—Beau Brummel being the greatest of them—Sir Walter’s imitation isn’t a self-conscious, risky “performance art” designed to criticize his betters while appropriate some of those betters’ advantages; it is mindless, slavish imitation. Jane Austen is too civil (and too respectful of the duties owed to a family patriarch) to condemn Sir Walter outright, but that he is an object of fun is hardly in doubt, especially when—as Austen forces us to do—we put his foppish manners and inane ideas alongside those of dashing Navy men like Admiral Croft or Captain Wentworth and his friends. Note: Jane Austen’s patriarchs, wielders 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. 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.

But what is the value of offering up a parody like Sir Walter? Well, it is sometimes said that the romantic period and the Regency (1810-20) coincide, but also that 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. (You can see from her representation of the romantic poets as the textual companions of the melancholy Captain Bentinck 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 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.

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, 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 gospel according to Anne”; 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 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, I get the sense that 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 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.

The match between Anne and Frederick shows that (as always) Austen is concerned with the intricacies of relations between the sexes, both before and within the institutional sanction of marriage. If any solidity is to emerge for these two characters, it will have to be wrought from the slippery “pseudo-gentry” environment in which they find themselves. The courtship process of Anne and Frederick will have to result 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. The two 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? The story of Anne and Frederick is one of Jane Austen’s ways of thinking this issue to its conclusion, and if I read her rightly, a big part of the answer is that there’s no evading the difficult attempt to supplement custom, rank, and easy grace with merit.

Week 06 Shelley and Keats

2005-03-07T16:11:00.000-08:00

Notes on Percy Bysshe Shelley

“A Defence of Poetry”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ode to the West Wind”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“To a Skylark”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ozymandias”

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

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

“Mont Blanc”

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

“Mutability”

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

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

Notes on John Keats

“St. Agnes’ Eve” (834-44)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“To a Nightingale” (849-51)

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

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

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

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

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” (851-53)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Week 05 Samuel Taylor Coleridge

2005-02-26T16:22:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Week 04 William and Dorothy Wordsworth

2005-02-24T16:24:00.000-08:00

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 flowed in part from the Enlightenment ideal of progress, of the good life here and now: not in some displaced fantasy afterlife, not from the crumbs tossed our way from the king’s table as if we were dogs. If we have made our institutions, the idea goes, we should be able to change them at will and for the better. But in the wake of the extremist period of the Revolution (the Jacobin-inspired “Terror” of 1792-93), it became increasingly difficult to believe that the French upheaval was such a positive affair. It has often been said that Wordsworth and his fellow poets didn’t really abandon their democratic hopes, but instead turned to their art as a way of expressing them, and even placed a great deal of emphasis on literary art itself as one of the main vehicles for promoting change. I think there is some justification for that understanding of British romanticism—Wordsworth himself, in the Prelude, offers many a verse observation that confirms it, at least with respect to his own development as a poet. If, in fact, the romantics more or less internalize the ideals of the revolution, weave them into literature, and then expect literature to help effect change (to put it baldly), it almost goes without saying that such a formula doesn’t solve the difficult question of how human societies make progress: do we start with the individual, or is that a bourgeois notion since progress can only happen when a mass movement or a revolution gets underway, as with America in 1776, France in 1789, Russia in 1917, or the recent anticommunist turnabouts in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall? Can any force short of a French Revolution influence the sensibilities of large numbers of individuals, and so help bring about eventual change? Let’s turn to Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads to see what he has to say about the relationship between literature and the prospects for meaningful change.

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

Wordsworth as a reformer of the public’s taste in literature shows disdain for old-fashioned aristocrats, but also finds distressing the still relatively small but growing urban population of readers. The aristocrats—aside from their blatant adherence to an unjust and inadequate system that awards people for high birth rather than merit, are too favorable to the decorum-laden “poetic diction” that would abstractify 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.

Another post will follow (now included below) on the status of the poet and on poetic process since I haven’t found time to integrate all my comments into one unified post. Just the sort of thing that happens when one starts writing about romanticism--how can you start or finish anything??

E212 Week 04 Addendum on Wordsworth

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 requres 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 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 streetcorner preacher in some dingy corner of London shouting at indifferent passersby, “what doth it profit a man if he gain the world, and lose his soul?” The father of capitalist ideology, Adam Smith (see his book The Wealth of Nations), predicted some such thing when he said that his principle of the “division of labor” logically applies to thinking, not just to physical employments. And if we can pay people to do our thinking for us, it makes sense to say as well that one day we will also pay people to do our feeling for us. In effect, that kind of statement acknowledges that even grand romantic poetry is one commodity amongst many others, and that as always in the marketplace, people will choose as it pleases them, for whatever reason or no reason at all. In a sense, art remains part of life, but by no means a privileged one—there are plenty of other things to do out there in a modern urban community, especially in one that follows the utilitarian line that the goal of society is the pursuit of undifferentiated individual pleasure. Jeremy Bentham puts it eloquently: “all other things being equal, pushpin [a game less sophisticated than checkers] is as good as poetry.” Evidently, we aren’t the first society to say, “do it if it feels good” or “whatever turns you on.” Bottom line: in Williams’ view, the effect of capitalism is to marginalize, specialize, and commodify the act of writing poetry. The poet is a specialized worker, not an exalted demigod. Modern literature continually confronts this problem of “social value,” and the simple fact that people (critics, moralists, the public) come up to literature with their hands in their pockets and make such a demand shows that Williams’ claims about literary “marginalization” have some genuine explanatory power.

Week 04 William and Dorothy Wordsworth

2005-02-24T07:28:00.000-08:00

Albert Wlecke's Lectures on William Wordsworth, 1997
English 102 (Romantic and Victorian Lit.)

*In Memoriam Albert O. Wlecke
*Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of California, Irvine

*Below is my transcription of Albert Wlecke's lectures on Wordsworth in an upper-division survey course for which I served as a graduate student assistant. I will be posting my own materials on Wordsworth, but thought that I might first pass along these notes on comments by a scholar who dedicated much of his life to thinking about Wordsworth's poetry and prose. Albert passed away a few years ago after retiring from UC Irvine, and I think he would be pleased to have these notes offered to interested students. I always found his lectures insightful and clear. Enjoy!

Wordsworth’s “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.” Week 1.2 4/2/97

All the English Romantics were at first sympathetic to the French Revolution. Wordsworth and Coleridge were even spied upon by ignorant government agents. But when the Revolution led to war with England thanks to the September Massacres, the Terror, and Napoleon’s empire-building, some former supporters felt betrayed.

At first, the Revolution was seen as the advent of a new dawn (the symbol of the French Revolution). What went wrong? See The Prelude, Book 2, where Wordsworth refers to the “melancholy waste of hopes o’erthrown.” Meyer Abrams argues that High Romanticism is best understood as a movement that occurred after the failure of revolutionary ideals. Abrams says that the Romantics’ answer to societal problems begins with the realization that reformers must begin with the heart of mankind, not with attempts to tinker with social institutions. That is, they reject social determinism. Social and political transformation presuppose a transformation in the sensibility and consciousness of individuals.

In “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” we see the displacement of the French Revolution’s political ideals into the theory and practice of literature. “Liberty,” “equality,” and “fraternity” are transferred to literary theory, to certain claims about the composition and effects of poetry.

See, for example, Norton 6th. edition page 151, the “spontaneous overflow” passage. This idea is new, and it opposes the older, mimetic/pragmatic theory of neoclassical authors. Wordsworth’s is an expressive theory of poetry; the author’s personal feelings may rightfully be expressed in his poetry. So Wordsworth is psychologizing literature. We might ask, “but isn’t poetry a species of language, just as earlier authors would have insisted?” Yes, it is, but Wordsworth is interested first and foremost in the creative process that leads to successful composition.

The political implications of this idea are important. Wordsworth’s theory expresses the emergence, according to many critics, of middle-class individualism. Wordsworth claims the right to discuss his own inner feelings. “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” claims this individual freedom; it claims freedom from literary conventions. [My note--a corollary of this tie to the middle class would be Wordsworth’s choice of “low and rustic” speech and situations for his poetry: he has displaced the universal and primary passions onto country people, but this category of “country people” is itself in the process of being shaped by urban, middle-class-driven developments and ideas. The same goes for the concept of “nature”--external nature was already under threat by the Industrial Revolution when it became part of the solution for the problems caused by technology and urbanization.]

Wordsworth says that poetry comes from impulse. He argues against poetic diction, against flora legium. He wants to listen to shepherds talk. The point is to recover a more democratic language, as opposed to the language of aristocratic pride and elitism. The word, “spontaneous” has for its root sponte--“of one’s own volition.” Wordsworth will compose not according to stale rules but in accordance rather with his own will and imagination.

So poetry should combine free choice and impulse. Feeling must first move the poet, but then he must freely choose to express that feeling. In Wordsworth, we see a commitment to artistic liberté--to artistic freedom, to the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” as the source of poetry.

See page 142. Here we can find Wordsworth’s commitment to égalité. Wordsworth says that his “principal object” is to choose incidents from common life and to make a selection of language really used by men. He has backed away from his emphasis on “spontaneous overflow”: he now says that the poet’s goal is not to express his own merely private idiosyncrasies, but instead to express a universal. He must demonstrate general psychological laws, universal emotional states. His task is to reveal a universal, common human emotional nature.

When Wordsworth writes on page 142 about a “state of vivid sensation,” he is using the language of British empirical philosophy. See, for instance, Locke’s doctrine of the “association of ideas.” For Locke, an idea is any object of consciousness, including feelings. Locke is trying to inquire into the laws of the mind, and such inquiries are part of the empirical tradition Wordsworth follows.

Also in accordance with his egalitarianism, Wordsworth says that he has chosen to take his model from “low and rustic life”--i.e. from what we might call the lower class. Here, he says, the "essential passions of the heart" find a better soil and are freer. Feelings are purer in poor country people than in rich aristocrats or in the urban middle class. This notion on Wordsworth’s part amounts to a kind of primitivism, along the lines of Rousseau.

Wordsworth’s “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.” Week 1.3 4/4/97

Last time, we talked about the displacement of Revolutionary ideals into poetic theory. We spoke in particular about the displacement of liberty and equality. The latter comprises Wordsworth’s ideas about the value of low and rustic or common life and common, democratic language.

Now let’s move on to examine how “fraternity” shows itself in Wordsworth’s theory. See page 149, the passage in which Wordsworth writes about the differences between the “man of science” and the poet. If poetry is the individual poet’s expression, how is it that he sings a song in which all can join with him? Well, Wordsworth the empiricist, who writes about selecting his language from men in a “vivid state of sensation,” assumes that there is a general human nature. It is not an Aristotelian nature based upon reason; rather, it is a nature based upon the passions, upon the human being’s capacity to feel. All people, thinks Wordsworth, are potentially capable of experiencing the kinds of emotion we find in his own poetry: compassion, love, sorrow, and so forth. The point is that the poet can find in himself these essential, universal feelings. He is, therefore, the source of human community.

But what about “alienation”--the social context that surrounds Wordsworth’s poetic program? The poet is the only person who has not forgotten what it is fully to be a human being. Of course, the idea that there is a common human nature is not easily accepted today. But in any case, the poet is the binding principle; through his poetry, we the readers can rediscover our own humanity.

Wordsworth says that the poet is the “rock of defense” for human nature. What, then, is the attacking agent? Social conditions: war, industrialism, capitalism. We must see that our unity lies in the common capacity to experience universal feelings--the “essential passions of the human heart.” Poetry is a kind of therapy for alienated people.

See page 150: Wordsworth says that “in spite of differences of soil and climate,” the poet binds men together by “passion (impassioned expression) and knowledge [of the heart]” the whole of humankind. The emotions expressed by the poet, says Wordsworth, transcend political, cultural, and historical situations.

See page 144 bottom: Why do we need the poet? Because he can help us recover our sensibility, our capacity to feel. In particular, he can help us feel universal passions instead of the mere shocks that accrue from our present need for “gross and violent stimulation.” Wordsworth is explicitly setting up a hierarchy of humanity, with the highest humans being those who can feel in the absence of “violent stimulation.” At this point, we can see that Wordsworth is very much a pragmatic critic; that is, he is interested in the effect of his poetry on his audience.

The claim that humanity is rapidly falling into a state of “savage torpor” also shows the radical quality of Wordsworth’s thinking. Something new is happening to humanity, he claims. This era is like no other before it. The notion that people are being reduced to “savage torpor” has political implications: if British citizens become unfit for “voluntary exertion,” they will obviously not be able to exercise their free will in running a democratic society.

Wordsworth refers to the forces currently shaping nineteenth-century England: war and urbanization. He refers to what Marx would later call the “alienation of labor.” All these forces threaten human sensibility, the capacity to feel. The thirst they create for “violent stimulation,” says Wordsworth, is a great threat to democratic values and practices. His narrative goes like this:

social conditions > savage torpor > appetite for “outrageous stimulation” > inability to feel “essential passions” and to act freely > isolation > loss of democratic sentiments and institutions.

Sensationalism is the enemy of freedom and fraternity. Wordsworth presents the poet as the doctor who will restore certain political ideals.

See page 387. Coleridge’s theory of creative imagination, the “esemplastic power,” reminds us of another important Romantic claim: originality, radical newness. The primary imagination, says Coleridge, is the “living power and prime agent” of all human perception. [So even to perceive and render intelligible the world that appears to us is vitally creative.] And the use of [secondary or poetic] imagination amounts to repeating the creative acts of a god who is pure, unpredicated (unlimited) Being. The poet repeats the divine act of creation; he creates ex nihilo, in a moment of pure being. According to Coleridge, the artist can imitate god by creating something entirely new and original. He is not the only Romantic who hopes that something unprecedented can be brought forth. Emerson, for example, says that we can judge a book to be “good” if it leads to new ways of thinking, and bad if it claims to be “the last word” on a given subject.

Wordsworth’s “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.” Week 2.1 4/7/97

Today we shall discuss three topics (we discussed only the first topic this session):

1. Revolutionary epistemology: philosophical idealism.
2. “Culture” vs. “nature.”
3. Romantic attitudes toward “nature.”

Coleridgean imagination is one source of the Romantic emphasis on the possibility of “pure beginnings”--the chance to create something radically new in human affairs. This idea is the poetical analogue of the political hope during the 1790’s that a “new dawn” was beginning.

Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Pope, Johnson, and others are philosophical realists; that is, in response to the question, “how do we make our experience intelligible?” they locate the source of intelligibility in things themselves. During the Medieval Era, the answer to this question would have been, “faith.”

But philosophical idealists like Hume and Kant assume something far different: they say that the source of intelligibility is to be located in the way we think about things. Kant says that we cannot know the noumenal world of supposed "things in themselves"; we can only know the phenomenal world that appears to us. So he analyzes how the mind actively constructs the phenomenal world, how the mind imposes schema or categories of intelligibility upon phenomena.

Hume the skeptical idealist says that cause/effect relationship is the product of the way the mind is constructed to connect events and ideas (in accordance with associational psychology). The mind imposes a cause/effect relationship on events and ideas; such a relationship is not intrinsic to things themselves. Hume’s claim undermines the traditional arguments in favor of god’s existence. How, for example, could one rationally prove that there is a “first mover” if cause and effect are products of the mind and not properties of the universe?

Kant effects a Copernican Revolution in philosophy. Just as Copernicus’ heliocentric theory displaced human beings from the center of the universe, so Kant’s insistence that we structure all perception through mental “categories” shifts the object of investigation from some “noumenal” source of reality to the way the mind construes experience and sense data. According to Kant, the categories [of space and time] are like a pair of spectacles that we can never remove. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, among others, will draw out the implications of this insight. In any case, Kant’s idealist claim is the philosophical analogue of political revolution: it becomes plausible to think of “cultural revolution” if we say that our institutions are human-made [i.e. that they are similar to Kant’s “categories”--ideological lenses through which we see the world, our relation to others and to the state, etc.].

Culture might well be thought of as a series of tales told by parents and other authority figures to a child before it is old enough to “fight back.” Later, the growing child begins to “rewrite” the cultural script/s that he or she has been handed. The child becomes an “epistemological revolutionary.”

See page 387: Coleridge says that the secondary imagination is an echo of the primary imagination. The secondary imagination “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to recreate.” Let’s illustrate this idea with a diagram:

mind >>>>> lens (i.e. cultural scripts) >>>>> world of experience ("mighty world of eye and ear")

Wordsworth’s “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.” Week 2.2 4/9/97

1) Culture vs. nature
2) Romantic attitudes toward nature
3) Greater Romantic Lyric (“Tintern Abbey”) [we did not get this far today]

Wordsworth wants to hammer out a new vocabulary, one free of poetic diction.

1) Culture vs. nature

“Expostulation and Reply”/“The Tables Turned” were both included in the Lyrical Ballads of 1798. Matthew is the cultural conservative who takes the side of culture as opposed to nature. The poems show some comic irony since William’s pro-nature view must be published in a poem. Why is William sitting on a stone? Wordsworth tends to define things by their location; he deals with states of mind in terms of physical location. [This tendency has to do with meditative technique.] The location of the speaker or character begins to define the spiritual and moral nature of the thing described. See, for example, the “vale profound” in “The Solitary Reaper.” The same could be said of Keats.

Coleridge says that poetry should awaken us from the “lethargy of custom”; it should strip from our perceptions the “film of familiarity.” He implies that consciousness is radically socialized. (An example would be the ordinary mid-C19 American southerner’s inability to see slavery as anything but “normal.”) The Romantics often use dream metaphors to show that one must “sleep” to awaken from a socialized consciousness and to find an imaginative alternative state of consciousness. The Romantics are suspicious of “normal” ways of thinking. Keats’ heroes are usually dreamers.

The metaphor of light is another staple of Romantic poetry. Light generally stands for the principle of intelligibility. In the Wordsworth poem we are examining, Matthew says that William is acting like Adam--as if there were no cultural past. But William himself wants to experience nature without cultural baggage; he wants to be Adam. In keeping with this desire, Wordsworth favors radical empiricism. His speaker says that “our bodies cannot choose but feel.” Sensation, in other words, has little to do with will. We should not intellectualize our sensations.

In “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” Wordsworth promotes rural language spoken “in a state of vivid sensation.” That is, he promotes an empirically based language.

The phrase “wise passiveness” indicates that we should leave ourselves open to empirical sensations. This notion amounts to “secular Quakerism.” William opposes Matthew’s obsession with intellectualizing. It is better to make way for a different kind of wisdom.

To attain that wisdom, we must listen to nature attentively. Nature, then, is an expressive language to be read without the help of cultural authority. See Emerson’s essay, “Nature.” In this essay, Emerson writes that words are “the signs of natural facts; natural facts are the signs of spiritual facts.” In other words, natural phenomena can be read for their moral and spiritual significance. See also Melville’s Moby Dick, in which Ishmael interprets things in this Emersonian way.

In “The Tables Turned,” William admonishes Matthew that if he does not stop studying so much, he will “grow double.” That phrase has a double meaning; it signifies both that Matthew will become hunched over with “scholar’s stoop” and that he will grow “double-minded.” His mind will become so filled with arguments and counter-arguments that he will not be able to decide on anything. Wordsworth here looks forward to what Matthew Arnold would describe as a key problem in the Victorian Era: the destruction of the Christian world view resulted in the proliferation of new, incompatible arguments. Arnold calls this situation “multitudinousness.” It amounts to radical pluralism, to a breakdown of consensus on the most basic questions about human nature and society. Similarly, Lionel Trilling writes that the multiplicity of books in the twentieth century threatens us with meaninglessness.

Wordsworth favors the light of empirical nature, not the abstract light of culture and the past. He would have us examine ourselves and the world by “the light of things.” In William’s notorious terms, “One impulse from a vernal wood” is a better teacher than any of the sages.

In connection to this claim for the light of nature, recall Wordsworth’s own moral confusion over the French Revolution. In “Tintern Abbey,” the relevant phrase is “the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world.” To overcome his confusion, Wordsworth turned first to the reading of William Godwin. But nature is his ultimate guide; nature gives us sensations, which then lead to therapeutic feelings. We cannot solve our moral dilemmas solely by intellection. Nature, not reason or books, is the best therapist.

Nature; Greater Romantic Lyric; Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey.” Week 2.3 4/11/97

1) Romantic attitudes toward “nature.”
2) The Greater Romantic Lyric. Its meditative structure.
3) “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey.”

1) Romantic attitudes toward “nature.” In general, civilization corrupts people, so they must go back to nature. Romantic praise of the natural is negation (i.e. nature negates culture’s pernicious effects.)

a) Romantics consider “nature” as the antithesis of inherited and institutionalized practices of thought, self-alienated ways of making sense and assigning values and priorities.

b) They also see it as a substitute for traditional religion. By the mid-Victorian Period, “doubt” becomes endemic to the whole middle class. Religion is a source or moral knowledge, a source of faith that the world is intelligible. Recall the Monks’ mystical experience of ultimate oneness with god. Such experiences account for the importance of meditative technique to the Romantics. See Thomas Merton’s modern work on the subject of meditation. In “Tintern Abbey,” nature substitutes for religion.

c) Romantic “nature” is a vehicle for self-consciousness. City life leads to Arnold’s “buried life”--a life in which people’s real identity has been lost. So the Romantics’ preoccupation with natural phenomena amounts to a search for the true self, for one’s real identity. See Thoreau’s Walden Pond: “the wilderness is the salvation of the world.” Nature makes people know what they truly are, what god wants them to be.

Nature is an expressive language. See pg. 195 Norton, “The Solitary Reaper.” This poem is a good example of Wordsworth’s ability to write in a way that is at once mimetic and expressive. The speaker says that the “vale profound overflows with sound.” The sound of the Reaper’s voice, that is, echoes through the deep vale. Wordsworth uses mimetic language to describe or imitate nature: he represents a sound in nature. But at the same time, his mimetic imagery expresses something about the speaker’s reaction.

“The Solitary Reaper” is about the speaker’s emotional reaction to the Reaper’s song. The speaker’s emotions carry his mind beyond the vale. In the second stanza, we enter a world of pure imagination via the speaker’s analogies about the Arabian traveler and the cuckoo birds in the far-off Hebrides. The poem’s natural images represent an overflowing mind; they provide us with an expressive subtext about the mind’s responses to nature. Nature, then, provides a set of images that manifest our inner lives. We can read in nature and natural images the workings of our own imaginations and emotions.

d) “Nature” is a source of sensations--healthy feelings. It is therapy for a diseased, overcivilized heart. Humans can discover emotional health in nature. Such health leads to moral and spiritual clarity.

e) Nature is a provocation to a state of imagination. Sensation leads to imaginative vision. See, for example, the poem, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” page 186. The speaker is traveling through nature when something stops him. He becomes Geoffrey Hartman’s “halted traveler.” What stops him? “a host of golden daffodils.” Notice the Miltonic, biblical connotations of the word, “host.” In this poem, sensation (the perception of the daffodils) transforms itself into vision. The sight of the daffodils leads the speaker to think next of the heavens: the flowers are like stars. Wordsworth insists on the earthly location of the speaker’s source of vision--the flowers appear “along the margin of the bay”--but at the same time something heavenly is glimpsed.

See also Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.” The poet starts with simple sensation, and then his speaker’s imagination takes off thanks to his complicated reaction to simple sensation. The generic way to put this move is to say that for the Romantics, imaginative miracles lurk in ordinary sensations. As Blake would say, one can find “infinity in a grain of sand.” It is only the Coleridgean “film of familiarity” and the “lethargy of custom” that keep us from seeing these miracles. Part of meditative technique involves staring at a small object until the meditator sees god. That is another way of saying that he or she “awakes from the lethargy of custom.”

f) Romantic “nature” is an expressive language, a vehicle for self-consciousness. As in “The Solitary Reaper,” natural images provide us with a way of thinking about human feelings and the self. So the natural image is at the same time an expressive one. (For example, if a tree can survive a great storm, the person who perceives it can survive his or her own trials.) The phrase “vale profound” is both mimetic and expressive. We shall see this tendency in Victorian poetry, too: nineteenth-century poets are constantly drawing moral and spiritual meanings from nature.

2) The Greater Romantic Lyric (including “Tintern Abbey” and “Intimations of Immortality”). “GRL’s” follow a three-stage pattern:

a) They begin with a description of the scene. The scene turns out to be filled with mysterious emotional and moral meaning. The natural location embodies vital half-perceptions on the speaker’s part and offers leads to be explored in the rest of the poem.

b) Then they move to the speaker’s analysis of the scene’s hidden significances. A “problem” must be enunciated, clarified, explored. In “Tintern Abbey,” the first twenty-two lines concern the location, and then we move to the speaker’s past experiences with this scene, his memories. In this second stage, the diction of “Tintern Abbey” becomes more abstract.

c) They end with the achievement of an affective (i.e. emotional) resolution. The resolution is intended to allay the speaker’s anxiety and solve his problem.

Many nineteenth- and twentieth-century poems fit the definition Abrams gives for the Greater Romantic Lyric: Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight”; Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”; Yeats’ “Among School Children”; and Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” come to mind.

Wordsworth's “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.” Week 3.1 4/14/97

Today we cover as many as possible of six points about "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey."

1. This poem is what Abrams calls a "Greater Romantic Lyric." In stage one, the poet describes the scene, which embodies some disturbing feeling or memory. In stage two, the speaker analyzes the scene and sharpens his sense of the problem that besets him. In stage three, the speaker arrives at an affective resolution.

2. Wordsworth's biography.

3. The relationship between the poet's mind and nature.

4. Wordsworth's religion of nature.

5. The way in which sensations derived from nature provoke a complicated emotional response. Contemplation of nature leads to introspection, heightened self-consciousness.

6. The power of memory. See "The Solitary Reaper," in which the first stanzas turn out to be memories. See also "I wandered lonely as a cloud." Wordsworth often describes nature as remembered; he writes a poetry of after-imagery. The memory of experience is central to his work.

In connection to point 6, let's discuss the paradox of nature. The poet's relationship to nature is changing; he can no longer respond to its images as he once could: those "aching joys and dizzy raptures are no more." This recognition of loss depends on memory, which creates in the speaker consciousness of his problem. Memory, therefore, cuts both ways: it helps connect us with nature, but it also reveals the loss of our ability to respond to nature. This notion of "loss" is a recurring motif in Wordsworth--he deals with time as the experience of incremental loss.

See page 136. The Wye is in western England. It arises in Wales and runs east. "Tintern Abbey" was a last-minute inclusion in Lyrical Ballads.

1. Verse Paragraph (VP) 1: "Five summers, with the length of five long winters" have passed. This poem concerns Wordsworth's relationship to nature first at the age of 25, and then at 28. Lines 1-22 set the scene, so the diction is appropriately mimetic. Wordsworth has seen the location he describes once before, five years ago during a walking tour.

VP 2: Now we move to analysis, and the poem's diction therefore becomes more abstract. The speaker begins to analyze what the scene has meant to him during his five-year absence. Memory, remembered sensations, will be important to him. The idea is that "affective memory" allows the speaker to remember past feelings. On the basis of this remembrance, he will be able to respond to the present experience. (See also Proust.) In VP 2, Wordsworth begins to recognize a loss: the relationship between his own mind and external nature has been broken. Once he realizes that this is true, he begins to work toward an affective resolution.

That resolution starts to take effect at line 102: "Therefore am I still a lover of the meadows and the woods . . ." Threatened with loss, the speaker has nonetheless found a way to say that even though his relationship with nature is no longer as direct or intense as it used to be, he still loves nature.

2. Biographical information. Winter is a period of sterility, and it has been "five long winters" of the soul for Wordsworth. He has broken with nature. Nature is "always there"; it is cyclical and so revives annually, but the mind is not necessarily so capable of reviving itself: mind and nature can go in opposite directions. Wordsworth himself has been through a painful period of disillusionment concerning his revolutionary hopes for France. He has had a child by Annette Vallon, but cannot even return to France because England is already at war with that country. Because of his disillusionment, Wordsworth was thrown into a state of moral confusion over the betrayal of his utopian hopes. He has come to feel "the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world." The war era was a time of intense and radical questioning--the old, stable ways of life and modes of thought have come into doubt.

3. By the age of 28, however, Wordsworth has revived. Once again, he re-sees the sights that delighted him five years ago. One can, then, return to nature; it is always "there" as a restorative force. This last recognition is central to the speaker's hopes for resolution: much depends on his ability to respond to nature.

4. Wordsworth's "religion of nature." When the speaker says that the landscape has not been to him as to a blind man's eye, he points out that he could have forgotten his first experience. He is anxious on this point: will memory someday fail him? At this point in the poem, though, the speaker denies this possibility by using litotes. Overall, "Tintern Abbey" is a positive poem, but we should bear in mind that the speaker's positive assertions play against fear and denial. The poem is a meditation, and the one meditating is engaged in acts of emotional overcoming.

When the speaker uses phrases like "unremembered pleasure," his language has begun to grope; he is uncertain about the mind's mysteries. He is trying to describe a psychological process, and of course he cannot entirely clear up the mystery about the way the human soul and mind become what they are. (This "mysterious" quality of the mind's growth is a prominent motif in The Prelude.)

Perhaps, thinks Wordsworth, his remembrances have led him to retain a certain moral capacity. Nature is the best teacher after all; it can help him develop the desire to do good, positive things. It can help him replace the crumbling schemes of morality and make the world intelligible again. Nature can satisfy the speaker's basic need to make sense of the world, to arrive at moral intelligibility. Culture cannot assist him since it is on the brink of incoherence (Arnold's "multitudinousness" is too much at play.)

The idea is that sensations lead to memory and meditation, which lead to the discovery of a "gift," a blessed mood or intuition, that turns out to be the antithesis of unintelligibility. Notice the poem's mystical claims: "we see into the life of things." Wordsworth is saying that nature can lead us to the ultimate metaphysical, spiritual insight. In this regard, nature's power is religious: it leads us to a state of mind in which we may glimpse the ultimate reality.

Wordsworth's “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.” Week 3.2 4/16/97

"Tintern Abbey," continued. Last time, we described Wordsworth's ideas about poetry being a "religion of nature." The "burden of the mystery" must be lightened both in the merely physical sense and in the sense of "enlightenment." When the speaker says we can "see into the life of things," he is describing a feeling, a moment free of unintelligibility. This metaphysical state is intensely private, and the speaker's memory of it is tenuous.

To justify this moment, the speaker turns not to rational argument but to "experiential proof." He says that the feeling works for him: "Yet oh how oft in spirit have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye!" The feeling opposes the ordinary world's falsely raging, feverish pulse. The apostrophe to the Wye is similar to the Psalm-writers' trust in god--"The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want"--except, of course, that the praise has been translated into the language of a nature-worshiper.

The point is that Wordsworth's poetry of nature transforms itself into the poetry of self-consciousness. Representations of natural scenery turn into descriptions of the poet's state of mind. As the poet translates his feelings (i.e. the "state of mind" just referred to) into words, he begins to rationalize them. This intellectualization amounts to a poetry of self-consciousness.

Wordsworth is committed to "self-expression." The idea is that an inward emotion is pressed out, is turned into language. The poet's language, then, is emotion socialized. His language, that is, makes his inward mental states or feelings available to his readers. The poet's words also rationalize his emotion. For example, he may see a tree groaning under the wind but holding firm, and then write a poem about this experience of nature. In writing the poem, he makes the experience--as represented in his words--a vehicle for self-representation. The poet's language "holds the mirror up to his own inward life."

Romantic poetry, then, aims at successful acts of self-representation. Self-representation is an act of self-consciousness, a doubling of the self to itself. "Being-to-oneself" is the goal. The aim is also to contain and understand powerful feelings.

So Wordsworth's nature poetry becomes poetry of self-consciousness. In other words, we move from stage 1 of the Greater Romantic Lyric to stage 2.

The "smoke" in "Tintern Abbey" is a signifier, but its meaning is uncertain to the poet. This uncertainty is a common moment in Romantic lyric: a physical thing is seen as symbolic, but the poet cannot explain precisely what it signifies. (See, for example, Ishmael's reflections in Moby Dick about the "whiteness" of the whale.) The lyric poem is partly about different interpretations of symbols. In Wordsworthian terms, lyric poetry is full of surmises.

A sensation leads to an assumption that the sensation is meaningful; then the poet begins to make surmises about the possible meanings. At the moment the surmising begins, the poet shifts into the poetry of self-consciousness and away from mere nature.

What could the smoke in "Tintern Abbey" signify? The presence of gypsies? On second thought, says the poet, perhaps it is from a hermit's cave. The idea of a hermit makes the poet remember his own former state as a practicer of meditation, a seeker into "the life of things." The surmise about the hermit, then, brings to the "surface" of consciousness a displaced memory of the poet's own self.

See page 137. At least the poet realizes that he is full of "sad perplexity." He understands, that is, that he no longer feels the same way about nature as he used to. The loss he recognizes occurred sometime after his last visit five years ago. (Notice that the interval between possession and loss differs from that of the "Intimations of Immortality" ode. In the latter poem, Wordsworth concerns himself with what has been lost in the passage from infancy to adulthood.)

The speaker says, "I cannot paint what then I was." (Again, "was" refers to 1793.) The word, "paint" reminds us of eighteenth-century poetic theory, which often compared poetry to the mimetic art of painting. Wordsworth is partly implying that he cannot find the words to express the feelings he had in 1793. However, he may also be hinting that he is reluctant to express what he was then, what he felt. Why? Perhaps because it is painful for him to face up to what he has lost. He may fear that the loss is irrecoverable.

Nonetheless, the speaker does tell us exactly what he felt like in 1793. His relation to nature consisted in "an appetite, a feeling and a love." His language names a variety of natural elements, but syntactically the poet equates them with acts of emotion. See "were" at line 79: the things he describes were "a feeling and a love." The experience described is that of consciousness of nature being inseparable from consciousness of self: in 1793 at the Wye, to see was to feel--no need to distinguish seeing from feeling. Mind and nature were one, and no reflection was necessary. This state of oneness with nature is what the speaker knows he has lost.

Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"; "Intimations of Immortality." Week 3.3 4/18/97

In "Tintern Abbey," the speaker suggests his former oneness at 23 with nature. But at line 83, he says the time is past. There is much discussion in the poem about "gifts" ("recompense") and losses. See Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dying. Taylor says that when threatened with the unforgivable sin of despair, a Christian should work actively to practice the virtue of hope. He should think about what god has given him. Wordsworth works out the problem of despair in secular terms--he counts his gifts from nature. (The root meaning of "grace" is "gift.")

See line 93: The speaker says that he has felt a "sense sublime." This is rather vague language, but it amounts to Romantic pantheism. Many Romantics attempt to break down the distinction between the divine and the non-divine. For them, everything is divine, including humankind. For a pantheist, god is an impersonal creative force or act; "the god principle" would be a better description than would the personal god of Christianity. See Emerson's "Nature." See also Shelley's "Mont Blanc." The creative principle or energy is in nature and in human beings, not in an external agent. The good news for Wordsworth is that he can discover in himself this same creative energy--even five years after it seems to have left him, he retains the "sense of something far more deeply interfused."

If Wordsworth cannot tell the reader exactly what this energy is, he can say where it is: in nature and "in the mind of man." Thus, awareness of nature is in fact an act of self-consciousness since the speaker himself has within him nature's creative principle or energy. Wordsworth "has felt" this energy, and continues to be able to feel it. This realization leads him to his resolution: "Therefore am I still a lover of the meadows and the woods." He has asserted that there is a fundamental continuity between nature and the human mind.

We "half-create and half perceive" nature, says Wordsworth. This statement verges on philosophical idealism.

In Christian iconology, the anchor is a symbol of hope. So Wordsworth borrows this symbol and applies it to nature. His hope is that he will continue to feel the "sense sublime," his old oneness with nature's energy. Nature, he says, is the basis of his moral being. Or rather this basis consists in his ability to respond to nature. That is why he feels so much anxiety over what he has lost and may lose again. Altogether to lose one's ability to respond to nature would be disastrous. By Victorian times, of course, no one is able to put much faith in the idea that nature is a viable substitute for religious belief. Coleridge, who never left off his Christianity, said that when Wordsworth wrote "Tintern Abbey," he was essentially a pagan, a nature-worshiper. Had he held on to his pantheism, it seems unlikely that Wordsworth would have been appointed laureate by Victoria.

The main context in "Tintern Abbey" is dramatically self-expressive: the speaker wrestles with the problem of combating despair with hope. So why is there so much grand language in the poem? So much emphasis on large sublimity? Often in Wordsworth, the emphasis is on finding sublimity in small things. Perhaps the dramatic context of the poem accounts for the scope of its claims and language.

On to "Intimations of Immortality": Here, the problem to be analyzed is not the relation between mind and nature but rather the relation between the adult's mind and the child's mind, between adult self-consciousness and the child's more innocent sense of itself. The radical idea in this poem is that the child's intuitive sense of itself turns out to be closer to the truth of human nature than is the adult's self-conscious sense. To grow up is to become self-alienated, to be put into a "prison-house."

Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality." Week 4.1 4/21/97

The lecture on the Immortality ode will be divided into six points:

1) Wordsworth attempts in this poem to provide new grounds for the ancient belief that the soul is immortal. He makes this attempt without recourse either to Christian theology or philosophy. He does not follow in the path of Descartes' Meditations, which tried to deduce the soul's immortality by appeals to "reason." Rather, Wordsworth bases his claim upon his own "recollections of early childhood," as if he constituted a "church of one." At base, he is at work writing a new cultural script.

2) "Intimations of Immortality" is a Greater Romantic Lyric.

3) The poem pursues the theme that there is continuity between the child's state of mind and adult consciousness. It does not concern itself much with "Tintern Abbey's" main relationship--that between mind and nature.

4) "Intimations" is about loss. The kind of loss differs, however, from the one in "Tintern Abbey": it has nothing to do with the poet's inability to respond to nature. In fact, the poet of "Intimations" has no problem responding to nature. What he has lost is "the glory and the dream" that he sensed as a child.

5) In "Intimations," the poet uses the ancient myth of pre-existence. He does not take this myth literally, but instead uses it as a metaphor with which to explore psychological truths, truths about "human nature." (Freud uses the Oedipus myth for a similar reason.) See also Keats' Endymion, which employs its primary myth as a way of dealing with imaginative growth. Wordsworth uses the myth of pre-existence as a metaphoric structure within which to examine the losses that occur as a child's mind enters society. He is interested in the socialization of the act of self-consciousness. This interest runs all through the nineteenth century; we can find it in the Brontes and Dickens, for example. These authors see childhood in terms of loss.

6) "Intimations" depends for its resolution upon the power of affective memory to help the adult recover childhood feelings. On the shadowy surmise that we can recover such hard-to-define feelings, Wordsworth bases his claims for the soul's immortality.

2 elaboration) Here is how we might divide up the stanzas of "Intimations of Immortality" into the three stages of the Greater Romantic Lyric:

a) The scene is delineated in stanzas 1-4.

b) The analysis comprises stanzas 5-8. This is the point at which the poet tells a story about growing up and, in so doing, employs the myth of pre-existence.

c) The affective resolution runs from stanza 9 through stanza 11. The "joy" the speaker feels comes to him because of the power of affective memory to recall a shadowy early childhood. Notice the metaphor of "fire"--here it is a way of figuring human life, as in Shakespeare's "That Time of Life Thou May'st in Me Behold."

3 elaboration) Wordsworth claims that the break between childhood and adulthood need not be absolute. Memory (not the Church or philosophy) provides the means to maintain this continuity. The phrase, "natural piety" is not a reference to Wordsworth's "religion of nature." Instead, it has to do with Roman pietas. Aeneas remains loyal to his father and to his household gods. Virgil's hero, in other words, remains loyal to Troy's cultural past, its venerable "cultural scripts." For Wordsworth, however, the past that deserves loyalty is not the father's (i.e. church, state, and culture) but the child's. Wordsworth will be true to his own shadowy recollections of childhood. Notice that he insinuates this radical doctrine by using traditional Virgilian language about piety.

4 elaboration) Stanza 1 is about loss. The speaker laments, "The things that I have seen I now can see no more." A "glory" has passed. (Traditionally, the word "glory" refers to the halo around a saint's head.) "Intimations" is full of multiplying images of natural light, so the reference to "glory" is important. One can learn a lot about this poem just by underlining its references to darkness, shadow, and light. The poem is not about the speaker's loss of connection to nature; on the contrary, he can respond to nature. But the "light" to which he refers is not of nature.

When the speaker was a child, everything seemed to him to be "apparelled in celestial light." This sartorial metaphor, again, indicates that the light Wordsworth has lost is not of nature--it only seemed to him that nature was clothed with "celestial light." Now, beautiful though the heavens are, they can be described as "bare." The tree reference indicates what critics today might call the presence of an absence. The key question in the poem is the nostalgic line, "Whither is it fled, the glory and the dream?" What has happened to the "visionary gleam" that formerly surrounded the speaker's perceptions? This question was so difficult for Wordsworth to answer that he put "Intimations" aside for two years before arriving at his myth of pre-existence.

5 elaboration) In working out this myth of pre-existence, Wordsworth treats life metaphorically as a "solar journey." The soul, he writes, "has had elsewhere its setting." The location of our present state, that is, depends upon our perspective. In order to pass from the state of pre-existence, the soul must "set" like the sun in the west; in order to pass the barrier into the mortal state, the soul must "rise" or be "born."

pre-existence | mortal state
("set") >>> | "rise" (be born)

Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality." Week 4.2 4/23/97

When Wordsworth says that "our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting," he echoes the Phaedrus. See also Trilling's book, The Liberal Imagination concerning Freud's view of the basis for religion. [But Freud himself does not say that the "oceanic feeling" explains the existence of religion; rather, he refers to the child's helpless longing for its father as that existence.] What we are pre-exists what we and society say we are. Wordsworth suggests that there is a self, a reality, prior to socialization.

The phrase, "Trailing clouds of glory do we come" is another instance in "Intimations" of the rising/setting sun metaphor. The phrase is accurate as an observation of nature--sunsets often are trailed by light-suffused clouds. Translated into human terms, Wordsworth's metaphor means that we retain some faint memory of a pre-existing state.

Soon, however, "shades of the prison-house" begin to close in around the growing child. Shadows of adulthood start to obliterate the memories of the pre-existing state. Even to be born is to be socialized, to lose one's freedom fully to possess oneself in thought. ["Self-determination" would be an appropriate term.] Adults are enslaved by others' ideas about who we are--that is, by cultural scripts.

The phrase, "light of common day" refers to principles held commonly in a given social context; i.e. within a certain "epistemological establishment." So Wordsworth opposes "visionary light" to the shadowy prison house of socialized self-consciousness. Of course, the terms one uses depend upon one's point of view: from the perspective of a person who has faded "into the light of common day," Wordsworth's "visionary light" might well be termed a "shadowy recollection."

See pg. 192. Wordsworth implies that the child is in possession of a basic truth that precedes "the light of common day." The child is at play in this poem, but he plays in the light of his father's eyes: he is fast and eagerly becoming an adult. Moreover, we should consider the role of language since learning to speak in itself is a way of becoming socialized.

The child in "Intimations" is a "little actor [who] cons another part." When he puts on his adult persona, he puts on a mask. Indeed, the word persona means "mask." Of course, as the child grows, he quickly internalizes these masks and consequently becomes "self-alienated." The adult belies the infant soul's immensity, its immeasurability. A child, insists Wordsworth, is the "best philosopher" because he or she intuitively comes closest to the truth that adults have forgotten. The father in the light of whose eyes his son plays is blind.

In the scheme of "Intimations," there are two kinds of self-consciousness: a) that of the adult, who, when asked who he or she is, must say, "I am x, y, z . . ." That is, the adult self accords with various societal predicates: names, job roles, relations, etc. This sort of predicated existence involves loss of liberty; the sentence, "I am x" is the discourse of the shadowy prison-house. b) that of the child, who is not compelled to predicate its existence. Children are "immense," unlimited, uncontained by mortality. See DeQuincey on "The Immortality of Youth." We must stop at Wordsworth's depressing line, "deep almost as life," and leave it to students to examine the strategies Wordsworth uses to overcome the threat of despair.

Wordsworth's The Prelude. Week 4.3 4/25/97

In The Prelude, Wordsworth’s expressive theory is tied to his concerns about regaining “freedom” (i.e. self-possession). See pg. 182 Norton. Wordsworth’s epic is a meditation on the mind at the height of its creative powers. See line 130: the speaker has “preserved and enlarged this freedom in himself.” Expression has led to true liberty. Poetic expression involves the translation outward of inner life via language. It socializes acts of self-consciousness. Wordsworth apprehends himself in order to express himself; this process is what a Romantic poet might call “liberation.” At base, the French Revolution’s ideal of liberty has been psychologized.

The Prelude is an autobiography, a search for self-knowledge. Autobiography is, of course, a common genre all through the nineteenth century. Dickens, the Brontes, and others all wrote within it. In Great Expectations, for example, Pip’s ambition is to become a “gentleman.” As always, the middle class valorizes personal mobility. But such fluidity creates problems as well as solves them--if traditional societal roles are lacking, the subject may well ask, “who am I? how can I justify my mobility?”

We should remember that the “Immortality” ode is a precursor of Freud’s theory of the unconscious. The idea is that we are unaware of vast areas of the self and that our social training does not allow us to discover these things. Freud’s clinical technique consists in getting the patient to make available autobiographical discoveries. The same may be said of The Prelude: the poem is an act of autobiographical writing that the poet hopes will lead to liberty, to full consciousness of the self.

Wordsworth’s autobiographical impulse arises also from nineteenth-century historicism. Romanticism is a philosophy of becoming, not Platonic being. To explain what a thing is, you must tell us how it became. You must write its history. In The Prelude, Wordsworth writes a narrative about how he became what he is--a poet. The poem, then, historicizes Wordsworth’s self.

Wordsworth rewrites the cultural script about what it means to be a poet. But what is this new poet? Is it possible that he should be the hero of his own tale? Milton had a poetic agenda mapped out from his youth, but Wordsworth is doing something radically new.

How much help can “nature” lend him as he writes? Nature, for the Romantics, is a negation of culture. But then, being a poet is a deeply cultural role, so Wordsworth must engage in autobiography, the self-historicization of his gifts. How did he get to be a poet?

Notice that the concept of “god” is not operational in The Prelude. Nature itself, not god, is Wordsworth’s teacher and guide.

The Prelude is a sustained act of self-representation in narrative form. As in Saint Augustine’s Confessions, we get a narrative about the author’s spiritual development. Wordsworth, with nature’s guidance, gradually recognizes his own imaginative power. Wordsworth’s epic contains a double narrative: a) an historical narrative that deals with the speaker’s growth from boyhood to maturity, and b) the story of a man in the act of telling his own autobiography. That is, Wordsworth explains to his readers why he decided to write his own story; it is as if he has been forced into writing it. During the writing process, new recognitions keep cropping up. Again, the structure of The Prelude resembles that of Augustine’s Confessions: the author halts his historical narrative to express his present reactions.

The Prelude is an act of self-consciousness. It does two things: it represents Wordsworth’s historical self, and it registers his response to this act of self-representation. Self-consciousness, therefore, can always double upon itself.

Wordsworth's The Prelude; Introduction to Keats. Week 5.1 4/28/97

In the Invocation, nature replaces god as the poet's source of inspiration. Spiritus means "breath." See Acts on the founding of the Church; Peter is "inspired" by the Holy Ghost. In Wordsworth, nature is "half-conscious" of the joy it brings. That is, the poet personifies nature and credits it with a teleological purpose.

In The Prelude, the line "the world is all before me" is happy, not sad as it was for Milton's Adam and Eve. Perhaps the sense of newness causes anxiety in Wordsworth's speaker, too, but he takes care of the fear by using litotes.

The phrase "correspondent breeze" implies that while nature inspires the poet, he too is a creative agent. Creative acts, then, are mutual; they result from the marriage of mind and nature. Nature provides stimuli or providential sensations, and the poet responds to them. As usual in Wordsworth, sensations lead to acts of imagination.

See page 213, lines 237ff. The poet has been blocked in his attempt to write. Wordsworth is anxious about wasting his talent and being a "false steward." The Protestant tradition imposes upon him a moral obligation to develop his talents. At this crisis point, Wordsworth turns to the past, to childhood: "was it for this?" he asks? Did nature train him as a youth only to find him a confused adult who is unable to write? With this question, we arrive at the second narrative in The Prelude.

Week 03 William Blake and Mary Robinson

2005-02-13T18:50:00.000-08:00

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

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—just 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, and so forth.

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. He may be an eccentric, but he isn't a "cowboy" in the Spaghetti Western sense. So the charge of "solipsism" (being wrapped up in one's own head) is hardly something that would 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 & 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 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.

E212 Week 3 02/17/05 William Blake Additional Post: 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, an 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.

Week 02 Barbauld, Smith, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine

2005-02-13T15:23:00.000-08:00

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.