You know how the song goes:
He's a real nowhere man
Sitting in his nowhere land
Making all his nowhere plans for nobody
Doesn't have a point of view
Knows not where he's going to
Isn't he a bit like you and me?
Now that's pure poetry and song, the sort of thing that The Beatles gave us so much of.
That's not the point I wanted to make though: here I am sitting in my nowhere land talking about something, Pure Poetry, that so far as I can tell, nobody cares about. I'm also a bit like Bellow's Herzog, sending off messages to nowhere about modernity and how we got there--and never managing to finish the masterpiece that was going to explain it all, Romanticism And Christianity. Until one day he wakes up, blissfully happy in his shack in the middle of nowhere saying to himself, "If I'm out of my mind that's fine by me," (I think I got that right), and deciding that anyone who thinks he can make sense of history is either a fool or mad.
Let me just say this about pure poetry, pure art, pure mathematics, pure science. What makes them pure is, as Matthew Arnold would say, their character as disinterested constructions: they serve no political interest.
Where would we be if there were never, anywhere, anyhow, any way to get away from our political obsessions?
Only a hopeless romantic, like me I guess, would ask such a question.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Pure Poetry: Can of Worms or Net Full Of Butterfies?
Both. The subject of pure poetry--or they used to say back in the Pre-Postmodern era, art-for-art's-sake--is a sort of Pandora's Box of questions, problems and conundrums, and therefore a can-of-worms. On the other hand, pure poems when you know what to look for, and have conquered your aversion to anything that smacks of High Art, are like butterflies. Which may be why Nabokov who certainly believed in High Art as much as anyone, was an avid student and collector of these improbably beautiful creatures.
Eliot's poem (see previous post) is pure poetry, i.e. it defeats criticism, and so (I would guess) is Baudelaire's. (Auden said, in a famous poem about Yeats--September 1939 which was when he died-- that "poetry makes nothing happen"). Let me say, before proceeding, that Baudelaire and Poe got it right, more or less, in rejecting the idea that poetry has anything to teach or promote--the "didactic heresy" they refer to. The term 'beauty' has gone out of fashion, and Baudelaire's semi-theological (and pre-symbolist) notion of 'correspondences' belongs in the dust-bin of history, but his (and Poe's) rejection of the traditional theory--that the purpose of poetry is, by giving us pleasure, to give us moral instruction--is right on. If you are curious, you can find this theory well laid out in Sir Philip Sydney's 16th century essay "In Defense of Poetry." (He was defending poetry against the puritanical types of his day who distrusted pure art and poetry just as much as the post-modern puritans of yesteryear.)
Now for the can of worms. The trouble with any theory of pure poetry is that there are some indubitably great poems that have a lot to teach: Lucretius' On The Nature of Things, for example. And how about Paradise Lost? Bk.I is some of the purest and greatest poetry I know--it doesn't get much better than that. Too bad it's too long to quote. (It is possible to write pure poetry that says nothing at all and is of no interest.) But Shakespeare wrote some of the purest poetry there is--not so much in the blank verse of the plays themselves, which always have a dramatic context, but in the songs that are included by the way, as in Twelfth Night and Cymbeline some of which I shall show you. First though I want to show you one of Shakespeare's purest poems. It is called "The Phoenix and Turtle" and it may be that only specialists know about it these days. ('Turtle' is a dove.) No one knows much about it or who it refers to. Like all pure poetry, it defeats criticism yet its meaning is clear.
Let the bird of loudest lay,
On the sole Arabian tree,
Herald sad and trumpet be,
To whose sound chaste wings obey.
But thou shrieking harbinger,
Foul precurrer of the fiend,
Augur of the fever's end,
To this troop come thou not near!
From this session interdict
Every fowl of tyrant wing,
Save the eagle, feath'red king:
Keep the obsequy so strict.
Let the priest in surplice white,
That defunctive music can,
Be the death-divining swan,
Lest the requiem lack his right.
And thou treble-dated crow,
That thy sable gender mak'st
With the breath thou giv'st and tak'st,
'Mongst our mourners shalt thou go.
Here the anthem doth commence:
Love and constancy is dead,
Phoenix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence.
So they lov'd as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.
Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance, and no space was seen
'Tiwxt this turtle and his queen;
But in them it were a wonder.
So between them love did shine
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phoenix' sight:
Either was the other's mine.
Property was thus appalled,
That the self was not the same;
Single nature's double name
Neither two nor one was called.
Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together,
To themselves yet either neither,
Simple were so well compounded;
That it cried, "How true a twain
Seemeth this this concordant one!
Love hath reason, reason none,
If what parts can so remain."
Whereupon it made this threne
To the phoenix and the dove,
Co-supremes and stars of love,
As chorus to their tragic scene.
THRENOS.
Beauty, truth, and rarity,
Grace in all simplicity,
Here enclos'd in cinders lie.
Death is now the Phoenix' nest;
And the turtle's loyal breast
To eternity doth rest,
Leaving no posterity:
'Twas not their infirmity,
It was married chastity.
Truth may seem, but cannot be;
Beauty brag, but 'tis not she:
Truth and Beauty buried be.
To this urn let those repair
That are either true or fair;
For these dead birds sigh a prayer. 1601
I realize, now, that this may be tough to swallow for those unaccustomed to reading poetry, pure or impure. So, for another pure poem, on similar but less philosophical lines, look up Edward Lear's "Owl And Pussycat."
Eliot's poem (see previous post) is pure poetry, i.e. it defeats criticism, and so (I would guess) is Baudelaire's. (Auden said, in a famous poem about Yeats--September 1939 which was when he died-- that "poetry makes nothing happen"). Let me say, before proceeding, that Baudelaire and Poe got it right, more or less, in rejecting the idea that poetry has anything to teach or promote--the "didactic heresy" they refer to. The term 'beauty' has gone out of fashion, and Baudelaire's semi-theological (and pre-symbolist) notion of 'correspondences' belongs in the dust-bin of history, but his (and Poe's) rejection of the traditional theory--that the purpose of poetry is, by giving us pleasure, to give us moral instruction--is right on. If you are curious, you can find this theory well laid out in Sir Philip Sydney's 16th century essay "In Defense of Poetry." (He was defending poetry against the puritanical types of his day who distrusted pure art and poetry just as much as the post-modern puritans of yesteryear.)
Now for the can of worms. The trouble with any theory of pure poetry is that there are some indubitably great poems that have a lot to teach: Lucretius' On The Nature of Things, for example. And how about Paradise Lost? Bk.I is some of the purest and greatest poetry I know--it doesn't get much better than that. Too bad it's too long to quote. (It is possible to write pure poetry that says nothing at all and is of no interest.) But Shakespeare wrote some of the purest poetry there is--not so much in the blank verse of the plays themselves, which always have a dramatic context, but in the songs that are included by the way, as in Twelfth Night and Cymbeline some of which I shall show you. First though I want to show you one of Shakespeare's purest poems. It is called "The Phoenix and Turtle" and it may be that only specialists know about it these days. ('Turtle' is a dove.) No one knows much about it or who it refers to. Like all pure poetry, it defeats criticism yet its meaning is clear.
Let the bird of loudest lay,
On the sole Arabian tree,
Herald sad and trumpet be,
To whose sound chaste wings obey.
But thou shrieking harbinger,
Foul precurrer of the fiend,
Augur of the fever's end,
To this troop come thou not near!
From this session interdict
Every fowl of tyrant wing,
Save the eagle, feath'red king:
Keep the obsequy so strict.
Let the priest in surplice white,
That defunctive music can,
Be the death-divining swan,
Lest the requiem lack his right.
And thou treble-dated crow,
That thy sable gender mak'st
With the breath thou giv'st and tak'st,
'Mongst our mourners shalt thou go.
Here the anthem doth commence:
Love and constancy is dead,
Phoenix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence.
So they lov'd as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.
Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance, and no space was seen
'Tiwxt this turtle and his queen;
But in them it were a wonder.
So between them love did shine
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phoenix' sight:
Either was the other's mine.
Property was thus appalled,
That the self was not the same;
Single nature's double name
Neither two nor one was called.
Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together,
To themselves yet either neither,
Simple were so well compounded;
That it cried, "How true a twain
Seemeth this this concordant one!
Love hath reason, reason none,
If what parts can so remain."
Whereupon it made this threne
To the phoenix and the dove,
Co-supremes and stars of love,
As chorus to their tragic scene.
THRENOS.
Beauty, truth, and rarity,
Grace in all simplicity,
Here enclos'd in cinders lie.
Death is now the Phoenix' nest;
And the turtle's loyal breast
To eternity doth rest,
Leaving no posterity:
'Twas not their infirmity,
It was married chastity.
Truth may seem, but cannot be;
Beauty brag, but 'tis not she:
Truth and Beauty buried be.
To this urn let those repair
That are either true or fair;
For these dead birds sigh a prayer. 1601
I realize, now, that this may be tough to swallow for those unaccustomed to reading poetry, pure or impure. So, for another pure poem, on similar but less philosophical lines, look up Edward Lear's "Owl And Pussycat."
Friday, July 18, 2008
Pure Poetry
Poetry has no other aim or object but herself....Truth has nothing to do with Song.... With these words, Baudelaire cut himself and poetry loose from a couple thousand years of literary tradition. I don't know if he got this idea from Poe or if he or Poe got it from someone else. Schopenhauer had said something similar about music but it is unlikely that either of them could have had a chance to read The World as Will And Idea which though published in 1819 would not become widely known until the the late 1850s or sixties.
Pure poetry is not easy to write. Henceforth this would be the ideal that ambitious poets would increasingly try to approximate. Rimbaud for example. Literary critics did not much like this idea, if they paid it any attention at all, for it didn't give them much to talk about. But it had important consequences for some critics in the 20th century who took it to mean that if you want to understand what a poem is actually doing, you had to try to understand it on its own terms. You had to try to get inside it, so to speak.
How 'pure' is Baudelaire's own poetry? This is a question that I am not qualified to answer since I don't read French very well.
Here, in Richard Howard's translation, is the poem that T.S. Eliot was 'imitating' in Preludes:
TWILIGHT: EVENING
It comes as an accomplice, stealthily,
the lovely hour that is the felon's friend;
the sky, like curtains round a bed, draws close,
and man prepares to become a beast of prey.
Longed for by those whose aching arms confess:
we earned our daily bread, at last it comes,
evening and the anodyne it brings
to workmen free to sleep and dream of sleep,
to stubborn scholars puzzling over texts,
to minds consumed by one tormenting pain. . .
Meantime, foul demons in the atmosphere
dutifully waken--they have work to do--
rattling shutters as they take the sky.
Under gaslamps shaken by the wind
whoredom invades and everywhere at once
debouches on invisible thoroughfares
as if the enemy had launched a raid;
it fidgets like a worm in the city's filth,
filching its portion of Man's daily bread.
Listen! Now you can hear the kitchens hiss,
the stages yelp, the music drown it all!
The dens that specialize in gambling fill
with trollops and their vague confederates,
and thieves untroubled by a second thought
will soon be hard at work (they also serve)
softly forcing doors and secret drawers
to dress their sluts and live a few days more.
This is the hour to compose yourself, my soul;
ignore the noise they make; avert your eyes.
Now comes the time when invalids grow worse
and darkness takes them by the throat; they end
their fate in the usual way, and all their sighs
turn hospitals into a cave of winds.
More than one will not come back for broth
warmed at the fireside by devoted hands.
Most of them, in fact, have never known
a hearth to come to, and have never lived.
I (very briefly) discussed Eliot's poem, Preludes on 3-11-08. I'll show you that poem as soon as I can locate it. Ah, here it is:
THE WINTER evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
II
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.
III
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.
IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
Pure poetry is not easy to write. Henceforth this would be the ideal that ambitious poets would increasingly try to approximate. Rimbaud for example. Literary critics did not much like this idea, if they paid it any attention at all, for it didn't give them much to talk about. But it had important consequences for some critics in the 20th century who took it to mean that if you want to understand what a poem is actually doing, you had to try to understand it on its own terms. You had to try to get inside it, so to speak.
How 'pure' is Baudelaire's own poetry? This is a question that I am not qualified to answer since I don't read French very well.
Here, in Richard Howard's translation, is the poem that T.S. Eliot was 'imitating' in Preludes:
TWILIGHT: EVENING
It comes as an accomplice, stealthily,
the lovely hour that is the felon's friend;
the sky, like curtains round a bed, draws close,
and man prepares to become a beast of prey.
Longed for by those whose aching arms confess:
we earned our daily bread, at last it comes,
evening and the anodyne it brings
to workmen free to sleep and dream of sleep,
to stubborn scholars puzzling over texts,
to minds consumed by one tormenting pain. . .
Meantime, foul demons in the atmosphere
dutifully waken--they have work to do--
rattling shutters as they take the sky.
Under gaslamps shaken by the wind
whoredom invades and everywhere at once
debouches on invisible thoroughfares
as if the enemy had launched a raid;
it fidgets like a worm in the city's filth,
filching its portion of Man's daily bread.
Listen! Now you can hear the kitchens hiss,
the stages yelp, the music drown it all!
The dens that specialize in gambling fill
with trollops and their vague confederates,
and thieves untroubled by a second thought
will soon be hard at work (they also serve)
softly forcing doors and secret drawers
to dress their sluts and live a few days more.
This is the hour to compose yourself, my soul;
ignore the noise they make; avert your eyes.
Now comes the time when invalids grow worse
and darkness takes them by the throat; they end
their fate in the usual way, and all their sighs
turn hospitals into a cave of winds.
More than one will not come back for broth
warmed at the fireside by devoted hands.
Most of them, in fact, have never known
a hearth to come to, and have never lived.
I (very briefly) discussed Eliot's poem, Preludes on 3-11-08. I'll show you that poem as soon as I can locate it. Ah, here it is:
THE WINTER evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
II
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.
III
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.
IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
'romantic' & 'romanticism'--again, but for the last time
I've concluded that these words have no useful meaning--if they ever did. They do not enable us to make useful distinctions. What do we know that we didn't know before when we call a poem 'romantic'? Nothing.
None of the Romantic poets, so-called, called himself a romantic poet. According to the OED, the first literary use of this term is by Emerson in 1841: "The vaunted distinction between classical and romantic schools seems superficial and pedantic."
My guess is that these words were concocted by literary historians trying to organize their materials or critics looking for a simple way to categorize works and writers they approved or disapproved of.
None of the Romantic poets, so-called, called himself a romantic poet. According to the OED, the first literary use of this term is by Emerson in 1841: "The vaunted distinction between classical and romantic schools seems superficial and pedantic."
My guess is that these words were concocted by literary historians trying to organize their materials or critics looking for a simple way to categorize works and writers they approved or disapproved of.
Friday, July 11, 2008
Beaudelaire & E. A. Poe
Thinking about romanticism some more, I notice a signature trait of certain 19th century writers especially when they are writing in prose. 'Beauty' is a very big word and so are 'soul', 'eternal', 'spiritual,' 'redemption', 'evil,' 'god', etc. Whether practising christians or not (I don't know if Baudelaire was one), the residual effects or emotional habits of christianity retain a powerful hold over them. Modernity is the enemy; though they don't use this word as I do, so as to mean a qualitative change so fundamental in the economic and political conditions of ordinary life, and coming so fast, as to create a sort of historical discontinuity between the Modern Age and all the ages that had preceded it. (Henry Adams knew what was going on and felt compelled to posit Christianity as a countervailing force to the energy of the modern dynamo [capitalism] that was remaking the world. See the chapter on The Virgin and The Dynamo in The Education of Henry Adams.)
The word 'modern' for Baudelaire just meant whatever is going on now, in the present. So far as I can see, he has no sense of history. All he knows (in 1852) is that things are going badly and will probably get worse. Worst of all, the middle-classes (the Bourgeoisie) were growing fat and becoming more numerous and more powerful. The Aristocracy at least had some taste; the Bourgeoisie had none. Forced to choose, Baudelaire--an admirer of Joseph de Maistre--prefers aristocracy, anytime.
Democracy in the U.S could only mean one thing, the tyranny of the bourgeoisie. Edgar Allen Poe, accordingly becomes for him a martyr to the cause of Art and Beauty, a victim (in effect) of modernity. (See the chapters on Poe in The Painter of Modern Life And Other Essays
I remarked, some time ago, that romanticism is a reaction to modernity. (I freely admit that this idea is not based on deep or wide-ranging historical scholarship; it is an inference I've drawn from the little I've read.) This definition strikes me as especially relevant to mid-19th century France and especially to the poets and artists of that time and later. The novelists of that time in France seem not to have entirely shared the hatred that the poets felt for the bourgeoisie, as the agents and beneficiaries of change; like Balzac (and Dickens) they were as fascinated as they were appalled by the death-throes of the world that was dying and the birth-pains of the one that (in Matthew Arnold's words) was struggling to be born. Though Arnold invented the term 'philistine' (meaning your ordinary, brutish, uninformed consumer of--mostly--cheap, mass-media art), he by no means intended to limit its application to the middle-classes; he was, after all, a middle-class intellectual himself. (Virtually all important writers, artists and scientists since the Renaissance have come from the middle-classes. Only in 19th century Russia will you find serious, first-class thinkers and writers among the nobility--Tolstoy, for example--and, in the 20th century, Stravinsky, Nabokov, Pasternak. Have I got that right?)
Baudelaire's essay(s) on Poe (written, I think, in 1852--the 'editor' of this collection supplies no dates! Infuriating.) give us an unusual opportunity to examine, in a short time and space, how political attitudes and literary theory reinforce each other in the mind of a major poet--i.e. Baudelaire.
It is immediately apparent that Baudelaire is not particularly interested in Poe's stories or poems. The only poem he singles out--for perfunctory treatment--is (of course) The Raven (that stupid bird, as one of my students once neatly noticed. It is just a bird, as Moby Dick is just a whale.)
What mainly interests Baudelaire is Poe's essay The Poetic Principle, and the political prejudices recorded in his Marginalia and Fifty Suggestions. For example, Poe regarded Progress (I quote Baudelaire who is frequently paraphrasing Poe), "that great idea of modern times, as an idiot's delight." And: "Material activity, inflated to the form of a national form of madness, leaves the American mind with very little room for the things which are not of the earth.... among a people without an aristocracy the cultivation of Beauty could only be corrupted, cheapened and must finally disappear.... [Poe] believed only in the unchangeable, the eternal, the 'self-same'...." "The People"--says Poe--have nothing to do with the laws but to obey them." And: "The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be led."
A society of this kind [says Baudelaire]was hardly made for poets. What even the most democratic of Frenchmen understands by the word 'State' would find no place in the mind of an American. For any citizen of the old world, a political state has a center of activity which is its sun and its brain, ancient and glorious memories, long poetic and military annals, an aristocracy to which poverty, daughter of revolutions, can only add a paradoxical lustre; but that?! That rabble of buyers and sellers, that nameless thing, that headless monster, that convict deported beyond the seas, a State?!....
It will always be difficult to pursue at once nobly and fruitfully the profession of man letters without laying oneself open to the slander and calumny of the impotent, the envy of the rich--that envy which is their punishment!--and the vengeance of bourgeois mediocrity. But what is difficult enough in a benevolent monarchy or a regular republic becomes well nigh impossible in a kind of nightmare chaos in which everyone is a police constable of opinion...[there, in]the noble
land of Franklin, the inventor of the ethics of the shop-counter, the hero of an age dedicated to materialism....
A social environment of this kind is bound to beget corresponding literary errors. It was against these errors that Poe reacted as often as he could, and with all his strength. We should not be surprised therefore that American writers, while recognizing his singular powers as poet and story writer, should always have sought to invalidate his worth as a critic. In a land where the idea of utility, which is the most hostile of all to the idea of beauty, outweighs and dominates everything [serious criticism, like poetry, must cease to exist.]
For Poe the Imagination is the Queen of the Faculties, but by this word he understood something greater than what is understood by the generality of readers....The Imagination is an almost divine faculty which perceives at once, quite without resort to philosophic methods, the intimate and secret connections of things, correspondences and analogies....
But there is yet another heresy which, thanks to the hypocrisy and to the dullness and vulgarity of minds, is much more to be feared... I refer to the heresy of The Didactic... a whole host of people imagine that the aim of poetry is some kind of instruction--that it ought now to fortify the conscience, now to perfect manners, now to demonstrate some aspect of utility....But we have only to descend into ourselves, to look into our own souls...to see that Poetry has no other aim or object but herself.... On pain of death or decay, Poetry cannot transform herself into a branch of science or ethics; her object is not Truth but only herself. The modes of demonstration of Truth are other and elsewhere. Truth has nothing to do with Song....
It is this admirable and immortal instinct for Beauty that makes us consider the Earth and its shows as a glimpse, a correspondence of Heaven. The unquenchable thirst for all that lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the liveliest proof of our immortality. It is at once by means of and through poetry, by means of and through music, that the soul gets an inkling of the glories that lie beyond the grave....Thus the Poetic Principle lies, strictly and simply, in human aspiration towards a supernal beauty....
From here, as you can see, it is but a hop, skip and a jump to symbolism.
The word 'modern' for Baudelaire just meant whatever is going on now, in the present. So far as I can see, he has no sense of history. All he knows (in 1852) is that things are going badly and will probably get worse. Worst of all, the middle-classes (the Bourgeoisie) were growing fat and becoming more numerous and more powerful. The Aristocracy at least had some taste; the Bourgeoisie had none. Forced to choose, Baudelaire--an admirer of Joseph de Maistre--prefers aristocracy, anytime.
Democracy in the U.S could only mean one thing, the tyranny of the bourgeoisie. Edgar Allen Poe, accordingly becomes for him a martyr to the cause of Art and Beauty, a victim (in effect) of modernity. (See the chapters on Poe in The Painter of Modern Life And Other Essays
I remarked, some time ago, that romanticism is a reaction to modernity. (I freely admit that this idea is not based on deep or wide-ranging historical scholarship; it is an inference I've drawn from the little I've read.) This definition strikes me as especially relevant to mid-19th century France and especially to the poets and artists of that time and later. The novelists of that time in France seem not to have entirely shared the hatred that the poets felt for the bourgeoisie, as the agents and beneficiaries of change; like Balzac (and Dickens) they were as fascinated as they were appalled by the death-throes of the world that was dying and the birth-pains of the one that (in Matthew Arnold's words) was struggling to be born. Though Arnold invented the term 'philistine' (meaning your ordinary, brutish, uninformed consumer of--mostly--cheap, mass-media art), he by no means intended to limit its application to the middle-classes; he was, after all, a middle-class intellectual himself. (Virtually all important writers, artists and scientists since the Renaissance have come from the middle-classes. Only in 19th century Russia will you find serious, first-class thinkers and writers among the nobility--Tolstoy, for example--and, in the 20th century, Stravinsky, Nabokov, Pasternak. Have I got that right?)
Baudelaire's essay(s) on Poe (written, I think, in 1852--the 'editor' of this collection supplies no dates! Infuriating.) give us an unusual opportunity to examine, in a short time and space, how political attitudes and literary theory reinforce each other in the mind of a major poet--i.e. Baudelaire.
It is immediately apparent that Baudelaire is not particularly interested in Poe's stories or poems. The only poem he singles out--for perfunctory treatment--is (of course) The Raven (that stupid bird, as one of my students once neatly noticed. It is just a bird, as Moby Dick is just a whale.)
What mainly interests Baudelaire is Poe's essay The Poetic Principle, and the political prejudices recorded in his Marginalia and Fifty Suggestions. For example, Poe regarded Progress (I quote Baudelaire who is frequently paraphrasing Poe), "that great idea of modern times, as an idiot's delight." And: "Material activity, inflated to the form of a national form of madness, leaves the American mind with very little room for the things which are not of the earth.... among a people without an aristocracy the cultivation of Beauty could only be corrupted, cheapened and must finally disappear.... [Poe] believed only in the unchangeable, the eternal, the 'self-same'...." "The People"--says Poe--have nothing to do with the laws but to obey them." And: "The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be led."
A society of this kind [says Baudelaire]was hardly made for poets. What even the most democratic of Frenchmen understands by the word 'State' would find no place in the mind of an American. For any citizen of the old world, a political state has a center of activity which is its sun and its brain, ancient and glorious memories, long poetic and military annals, an aristocracy to which poverty, daughter of revolutions, can only add a paradoxical lustre; but that?! That rabble of buyers and sellers, that nameless thing, that headless monster, that convict deported beyond the seas, a State?!....
It will always be difficult to pursue at once nobly and fruitfully the profession of man letters without laying oneself open to the slander and calumny of the impotent, the envy of the rich--that envy which is their punishment!--and the vengeance of bourgeois mediocrity. But what is difficult enough in a benevolent monarchy or a regular republic becomes well nigh impossible in a kind of nightmare chaos in which everyone is a police constable of opinion...[there, in]the noble
land of Franklin, the inventor of the ethics of the shop-counter, the hero of an age dedicated to materialism....
A social environment of this kind is bound to beget corresponding literary errors. It was against these errors that Poe reacted as often as he could, and with all his strength. We should not be surprised therefore that American writers, while recognizing his singular powers as poet and story writer, should always have sought to invalidate his worth as a critic. In a land where the idea of utility, which is the most hostile of all to the idea of beauty, outweighs and dominates everything [serious criticism, like poetry, must cease to exist.]
For Poe the Imagination is the Queen of the Faculties, but by this word he understood something greater than what is understood by the generality of readers....The Imagination is an almost divine faculty which perceives at once, quite without resort to philosophic methods, the intimate and secret connections of things, correspondences and analogies....
But there is yet another heresy which, thanks to the hypocrisy and to the dullness and vulgarity of minds, is much more to be feared... I refer to the heresy of The Didactic... a whole host of people imagine that the aim of poetry is some kind of instruction--that it ought now to fortify the conscience, now to perfect manners, now to demonstrate some aspect of utility....But we have only to descend into ourselves, to look into our own souls...to see that Poetry has no other aim or object but herself.... On pain of death or decay, Poetry cannot transform herself into a branch of science or ethics; her object is not Truth but only herself. The modes of demonstration of Truth are other and elsewhere. Truth has nothing to do with Song....
It is this admirable and immortal instinct for Beauty that makes us consider the Earth and its shows as a glimpse, a correspondence of Heaven. The unquenchable thirst for all that lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the liveliest proof of our immortality. It is at once by means of and through poetry, by means of and through music, that the soul gets an inkling of the glories that lie beyond the grave....Thus the Poetic Principle lies, strictly and simply, in human aspiration towards a supernal beauty....
From here, as you can see, it is but a hop, skip and a jump to symbolism.
Saturday, July 5, 2008
A Foot Note To Schopenhauer
Schopenhauer had no interest in Mathematics and knew nothing about the tremendous developments that were occurring under his nose. It did not occur to him therefore, as it had not to Kant or any of his other followers, that mathematics is the true synthetic a priori.
In 1831, Evariste Galois used a hint from Newton about symmetries in relations between the coefficients and roots of algebric equations to prove that equations of the fifth degree had no general or algorithmic solution (like the algorithm that everyone learns for quadratic equations) and invented group theory in order to complete his proof. Mathematics had become by that time a European enterprise, building on the work of Euler and Gauss and many others in the 18th century. Lagrange, Cauchy, Abel, Dedekind, Dirichlet, Helmholtz, Kronecker, Kummer, Riemann, Sylow are just a few of the names that a man like Schopenhauer who claimed to be up to date in all the sciences, ought to have known about.
When Schopenhauer died in 1867, history had passed him by. The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. The purpose of philosophy, said Marx, is not to understand the world but change it. Schopenhauer's message of esthetic contemplation or Buddhist self control and denial was of no use to people who were under the tiger's or Capitalist paw. Henceforth the romantic will would take new directions. Marxism, without any of the checks and balances that 18th century liberalism had devised, proved to be wonderfully useful--as the world would learn at horrendous cost--to the will to power, which as Schopenhauer had shown, is what makes the world go round.
In 1831, Evariste Galois used a hint from Newton about symmetries in relations between the coefficients and roots of algebric equations to prove that equations of the fifth degree had no general or algorithmic solution (like the algorithm that everyone learns for quadratic equations) and invented group theory in order to complete his proof. Mathematics had become by that time a European enterprise, building on the work of Euler and Gauss and many others in the 18th century. Lagrange, Cauchy, Abel, Dedekind, Dirichlet, Helmholtz, Kronecker, Kummer, Riemann, Sylow are just a few of the names that a man like Schopenhauer who claimed to be up to date in all the sciences, ought to have known about.
When Schopenhauer died in 1867, history had passed him by. The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. The purpose of philosophy, said Marx, is not to understand the world but change it. Schopenhauer's message of esthetic contemplation or Buddhist self control and denial was of no use to people who were under the tiger's or Capitalist paw. Henceforth the romantic will would take new directions. Marxism, without any of the checks and balances that 18th century liberalism had devised, proved to be wonderfully useful--as the world would learn at horrendous cost--to the will to power, which as Schopenhauer had shown, is what makes the world go round.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Schopenhauer & Wagner
Schopenhauer wrote The World As Will And Idea in 1819 when still a very young man, in his early twenties, expecting its importance would soon be recognized. He had to wait for more than thirty years, until 1853 when it was reviewed in The Westminster Review. He died nine years later, alone, as he had lived for almost his entire adult life. He read everything--including, every day, the London Times. He had an independent income and could afford to attend concerts and the theater. Which brings up an aspect of his work and life that I have not touched upon: one doesn't have to become Buddhist monk, or a Shaker, in order to withdraw from the cold, brutal, egoism of the world and the Will that keeps it going. One can also withdraw, if one has the means and/or talent into another world, of disinterested esthetic contemplation: to create or contemplate representations of the world in art, music, poetry, philosophy is (he thought) to lift oneself out of the blood and muck of the world into a higher realm:
In all these reflections I wish to make clear the nature and the scope of the subjective element in esthetic pleasure--that the deliverance of knowledge from the service of the will, the forgetting of oneself as individual, and the raising of consciousness to the pure will-less, timeless, subject of knowledge, independent of all relations.
Music, which can only be about itself and is therefore in itself necessarily disinterested, is the highest form of art. ('Disinterested' of course means having no axe to grind, so Schopenhauers's principle here is implicitly moral. His esthetics, therefore, has an unacknowledged moral basis.) The religion of Art, which become such a huge part of bourgeois life in the 19th and 20th centuries, may have originated with Schopenhauer. When he finally became famous, following the publication of that English review essay, Wagner was his first great convert. He and Schopenhauer never met. The latter had never heard of him and did not answer Wagner's letters.
Since I don't care much for Wagner's music, I shouldn't talk about him at all, and will limit my comments to an arbitrary device in the plots of The Ring and Tristan and Isolde which has the effect (as it seems to me) of transforming rationally comprehensible tragedies into incomprehensible catastrophes. I'm referring to the black magic of the love potions--no different from those used for appropriately comic purposes in A Midsummer Night's Dream--that divert Seigfried's love for Brunhilde to the sister of his enemy, and force Tristan into an essentially adulterous affair with Isolde. Since magic is both inexplicable and irresistable, Tristan is blameless. His story is not about moral confusion but about a passion that has nothing whatsoever to do with morality or ethics. The Ring, similarly, is diverted from a rationally comprehensible tragedy of the will to power to a meaningless catastrophe caused by an unaccountable power beyond human control. What Schopenhauer would have thought of all this I don't know but I don't think he'd have approved.
In all these reflections I wish to make clear the nature and the scope of the subjective element in esthetic pleasure--that the deliverance of knowledge from the service of the will, the forgetting of oneself as individual, and the raising of consciousness to the pure will-less, timeless, subject of knowledge, independent of all relations.
Music, which can only be about itself and is therefore in itself necessarily disinterested, is the highest form of art. ('Disinterested' of course means having no axe to grind, so Schopenhauers's principle here is implicitly moral. His esthetics, therefore, has an unacknowledged moral basis.) The religion of Art, which become such a huge part of bourgeois life in the 19th and 20th centuries, may have originated with Schopenhauer. When he finally became famous, following the publication of that English review essay, Wagner was his first great convert. He and Schopenhauer never met. The latter had never heard of him and did not answer Wagner's letters.
Since I don't care much for Wagner's music, I shouldn't talk about him at all, and will limit my comments to an arbitrary device in the plots of The Ring and Tristan and Isolde which has the effect (as it seems to me) of transforming rationally comprehensible tragedies into incomprehensible catastrophes. I'm referring to the black magic of the love potions--no different from those used for appropriately comic purposes in A Midsummer Night's Dream--that divert Seigfried's love for Brunhilde to the sister of his enemy, and force Tristan into an essentially adulterous affair with Isolde. Since magic is both inexplicable and irresistable, Tristan is blameless. His story is not about moral confusion but about a passion that has nothing whatsoever to do with morality or ethics. The Ring, similarly, is diverted from a rationally comprehensible tragedy of the will to power to a meaningless catastrophe caused by an unaccountable power beyond human control. What Schopenhauer would have thought of all this I don't know but I don't think he'd have approved.
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