The Metaphysical Revival

The art of the twentieth century, despites its perplexing diversity, springs from a distinct purpose and is moving in a definite and fruitful direction.  It bears the marks not of a debility and disintegration but of vitality and a desire for wholeness.  For at least fifty years artists (with the possible exception of dramatists) have held no organic position in society.  They have used the freedom of this state of affairs to examine all the modes of expression in detail, ruthlessly, even iconoclastically, with reference only to artistic criteria.  The period of self-conscious revolt, of narrow theory and experiment is passing.  The new assessment is more fully assimilated in some arts than in others: in music, say, than in poetry or painting.  I wish to examine the purpose and nature of the revolt in poetry, and the direction of the recovery; and to consider, in the light of that examination, the function of the poet in contemporary society.  What is true of poetry today is, I believe, true of painting, music, and sculpture when allowance is made for the fundamental differences in media: the purpose of the revolt is the same and the process of recovery parallel.

While recognizing that it is never safe to generalize about literary periods or even about individual poets, I shall discuss the poetry of the last thirty years in general terms.  To cite individual poets or to attempt a panoramic critique of contemporary poetry would raise extremely difficult problems of classification and deflect the discussion from its secondary purpose of indicating a possible basis for more accurate classification and assessment of contemporary art.  To classify, as more recent critics do, according to method, theory, or technique (into realist, symbolist, imagist, post-symbolist, and the like) is useful for chronological and stylistic groupings; but it does not go deep enough, it establishes external distinctions that conceal the larger issue of judging poems at their roots.  I have, therefore, chosen the term metaphysical as applied by T. S. Eliot, because it is properly a classification not of method or theory but of the poet’s consciousness.

The metaphysical poet, Mr. Eliot maintains, is distinguished not by any feature of style but by his “unification of sensibility…, direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling…A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.  When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary…In the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.”  The metaphysical poet achieves or sincerely tries to achieve wholeness of perception homogeneity of experience; and to match that, a mode of immediate, sensitive, integrated expression.  It is true that many metaphysical poets have tended to express themselves in metaphor of some elaborateness, even violence.  The poet’s special activity is to discover and reveal “the hitherto unrealised connections of things.”  Metaphor, image, and symbol are of the very genius of language and of poetry.

The artistic revolt of this century is a reaction against contemporary society – against materialism, one-sidedness, sentimentality, debility, determinism; in search of a sense of qualitative value, integrity, wholeness, vitality, precision of feeling and expression.  It represents a sincere effort to rediscover and experience the primary forces of life, the springs of elemental vitality.  Poetry, through the medium of language, is more closely connected with society than other arts, and has at times been deflected from its primary purpose into the expression of anger and satire.  That is accidental, a symptom of the impact with various opaque surfaces which various elements of society establish and are concerned to maintain.  It is the nature of the artist to penetrate surfaces, to discover the vitality and reality beneath all surfaces whatever.

Artists being (as Wordsworth said of poets) people “of more than usual organic sensibility” imply the civilization of their own time, either reflecting it by approval or reacting in disapproval.  Under the increasing pressure of the industrial and capitalist revolution, the artistic rebels of the last fifty years have consistently turned backward, seeking to discover some valuable element lost by previous generations.  All the available examples of instinctive and spontaneous expressions have been carefully studied: primitive religions, the art of children and of primitive peoples, reports on the subconscious mind, the literature of psychoanalysis.  Some, in the disinterested cause of art, have misguidedly sought new sensation in lives ascetically devoted to opium, alcohol, and satanism.  Much interesting, revolting, and intractable material has been unearthed and most of it put to use in some art form or other with various degrees of emphasis.  This is one aspect of the search for vitality.  An admirable insight suggested that the sensitive observer could recover from unsophisticated art the primitive force of unmodulated human feeling and expression.  That was the purpose of the search.  Unfortunately, merely to reproduce the external features of such work will not induce in the artist the force and kind of feeling that produced the original style.  Some artists, forgetting the purpose of their journey, or losing their way, are satisfied to sell picture postcards of their travels.  But all who undertook the journey have not lost their way.  The task of the artist is to recover the desired force and mode of experience, to assimilate technique and theory, and to express his experience in terms which will not be anachronistic in his own time.

Poets are concerned to find the precise equivalent in words for intense experience, moments of vision.  Literary revolt occurs when poets find the established mode of expression (usually that of the preceding generation) inadequate to state their own experience in their own setting.  Literary development is an oscillating movement between different traditions of the use of language; that is, between different traditions of sensibility.  Phrases like “the language of the future,” “the art of the future,” are sales talk.  The best expression of a generation is rarely achieved by more than a few members of that generation; and their expression is of a “now,” not of any future – even though it may prove adequate for a long time to come, and at the time of its conception is far ahead of ordinary use.  Literary revolt casts backward to find something lost, seeking a sympathetic tradition in which the thought and feeling of the poet are analogous to present poetic thought and feeling.  For the twentieth century the discovery of a sympathetic tradition in the past and the study of primitive and newly discovered material are two facets of the desire for wholeness of experience and adequacy of expression.  A past tradition is selected, not because it is thought to represent the fullest achievement of modern aspiration, but because the aspirations are much the same.

The search for vitality has led to a few notable foci of material: for example, Sir James Frazer’s “The Golden Bough” and the literature of psychoanalysis.  The search for expression has led to an intense study of English seventeenth-century poetry, especially the poetry of Donne, and the work of the nineteenth-century symbolists.  The real benefit of such studies rest in the recovery of vitality, consciousness, power of expression, as a result of the assimilation of technique, theories, and material.  Only the creative artist is primarily concerned with the theories and the raw materials: the quasi-creative critic is concerned with poems.  The reader expects a good poem not to obtrude its mechanics, in the same way that he expects to lunch with somebody who is not too obviously a casual conjunction of skeleton, muscle, skin, and chemistry.  The Donne-Fraser-Mallarmé-Freud discipline is only one of countless possible disciplines for the poet.  As a poet he is expected to produce poems, his poems; not poems in the manner of Donne, or in illustration of a dictum of Mallarmé, or as a commentary upon the Oedipus complex.  It is possible to write symbolically without being intellectually conscious of fertility rites and primitive myths.  Those are the jargon and toys of scholarship and criticism.  Theoretically, the perfect symbolist poem will not be recognized as specifically symbolical: it will just be a perfect poem.  Symbolism, realism, imagist, and the like are methods, theories about possible ways of writing the perfect poem.  Poetry can achieve full stature only when free of theories.  Theories are compasses not destinations.  Intelligent laymen can be forgiven for imagining that it is impossible to write or read poetry in these days without a copy of Frazer (presumably, the convenient one-volume abridgment), a seventeenth-century emblem book, a smattering of Oriental religion, the works of Rimbaud, and the hundred best essays of Freud, Jung, and Adler.  Poets have had a hard struggle against indifference; but they need not give the impression that their studies have provided them with nothing better than the ammunition of intellectual snobbery.

A widespread literary revolt centers upon a poet in the past who displays distinct features of style capable of imitation.  The instinct that chose Donne as the model of the twentieth-century revolt tells us a good deal about our own poets.  He was a man with a truly metaphysical cast of mind; he struggled throughout his life to achieve integration of personality; he was an intellectual and a self-conscious rebel; he expressed his transcendent experience and his anger (sometimes petulant) in a violent, angular, uncompromising style.  He wrote much satire as well as pure poetry; his style is idiosyncratic and not fully integrated.  Shakespeare’s mature style reveals a metaphysical mind of equal or greater penetration.  But Shakespeare is unlikely ever to be the focus of a poetical revolt: his power is too effortless, his method too fully assimilated, his style too difficult to analyze and imitate.  If the choice of a poet like Donne is necessary and inevitable, it is also dangerous.  The search is not for certain features of style but for a style supple enough to fulfil the contemporary poet’s needs.  As far as Donne’s thought is of the same kind as the thought of a contemporary poet, approximation to Donne’s style may be a useful test to the success with which thought like Donne’s has been embodied in words.  But to imitate the style of Donne will not induce the consciousness of Donne; and it is fatally easy to imitate Donne.  Thought and feeling change constantly according to their context.  The language and methods of poetry are constantly obsolescing in the hands even of the individual poets.  Each poem is its own problem in expression and method.  The establishment of a settled technique is as much a danger to the individual poet as to a literary group or generation.  Style is organic and internal; it is nothing less than the clear projection in words of the pattern, force, and personality of sensibility.  The most original features of style are often irrelevant and superficial: the habits in the use of words which exist often despite rather than because of the thought.  Yet it is only such idiosyncratic quirks that can be imitated.  And great poetry tends to transcend personality.  What really matters in a poem is the truth of the poet’s apprehension, and his ability to express his spiritual experience precisely in words.

The position of Donne in contemporary poetry is representative: there are other models and idols.  The desire to theorize and to oversimplify complex processes is a serious stumbling-block in a period of artistic recovery like ours.  Single poets and groups tend to explore single aspects of their art in isolation.  That is a necessary stage in the exploration of fresh ways of using the medium of language.  But as far as theories overstress single aspects at the expense of others they prevent synthesis; they conceal the fact that the end of all poetic theories and experiments is nothing less than a sensitive, fully adequate medium of expression capable of being used without apparent effort.  The critical study of metre, texture, and diction is of fundamental importance both for critic and creator; but theories of metre, diction, and method are detrimental as far as they induce a narrow self-consciousness and, by concentrating on technical externals, tamper with poetical integrity.

Naturalism has been sternly repudiated by many of the artists of this generation; but realism has a considerable vogue.  Undue emphasis of the method of realism is pernicious, partly because it is too naturally associated with another preoccupation of the time – the psychology of the subconscious – partly because the word itself is too easily equated with the word reality.  Realism, like facetiousness, presents and stops short at a surface.  Poetry is concerned with the reality behind all surfaces, with the fundamental human experiences of delight and loneliness, hope and grief, despair and exultation.  The recording of sense data in poetry is never enough, essential though precise observation may be.  The detailed presentation of the subconscious is realism, and similarly presents an opaque surface.  Art is a matter of selecting and fusing detail under the pressure of distinct purpose, the purpose being the creation of the work of art, which is itself the equivalent of intense vision.  The only artistically effective realism is that which does select, arrange, and fuse phenomena, no matter how unobtrusively.

The obsession with psychoanalysis and the subconscious is the most insidious preoccupation in contemporary art.  Few if any spheres of recent investigation have caused so much general excitement.  It has provided the ordinary man with some good excuses, a determinist philosophy, and a jargon consistently misapplied.  It has supplied artists with quantities of unused material and with an illusory hope of the easy solution of problems of expression and criticism.  The psychology of this century has been narrowed to clinical diagnosis and classification, in the attempt to explain all human behaviour as the operation of conditioned reflexes.  The twentieth century has discovered psychoanalysis and lost psychology. Psychoanalysis has dropped out of the philosophical perspective of the whole human experience; it has substituted the study of psychic mechanisms for the study of the soul.

Poetry is the precise equivalent in words of complex states of consciousness.  It might then be thought that the poet’s task is merely to depict accurately the operation of the mind and feelings in moments of heightened experience.  But poetry is not concerned with the mind and sensibility in quite that way.  To the poet the mind and senses are means to the perception of truth, the apprehension of reality; they are his instruments; they are not ends of study in themselves except in the sense that any craftsman studies the nature and operation of his instruments.  A study of the subconscious mind may, indeed, discover connections unrealized by the conscious mind.  But there is a realism of the subconscious, as there is a realism of the conscious.  The subconscious is another level of experience, presenting another opaque surface.  The poet must penetrate.

The studies of psychologists in the last few decades have drawn attention to the intensity and evanescence of subconscious activity.  But the subconscious is not a new discovery.  Poets have always, in varying degrees, “used” the subconscious, in the same way that the great confessors have been acute psychiatrists without using the cumbrous methods and terminology of clinical psychoanalysis.  To claim for the subconscious a more profound reality than for the conscious, and to make such a claim the centre of an artistic theory, is another form of the ascetic fallacy.  Men are in fact both body and soul, both emotional and rational, both thinking and feeling; the whole consciousness includes, because it is modulated by, the subconscious.  The poet must be a whole person, expressing the wholeness of his complex consciousness.  If the supreme reality were to be found only in the subconscious, poetry would be completely esoteric and unintelligible: for in its function of expressing reality it would have to express the chaotic variety of response of an infinite variety of senses to an infinite variety of stimuli.  But the conscious, the logical, is almost part of reality.  We may experience, may even normally experience, fragmentary and incoherent thought, transitory and violent emotion; but that is not all we mean by reality.  There is also the part of the mind that seeks pattern, meaning, coherence; distinctness of expression to match distinctness of impression.

The associative faculty performs, to a varying extent in individual cases, constantly shifting arrangements and rearrangements of the data of observation, thought, feeling.  This is the faculty which Dryden calls “wit,” and which Coleridge distinguishes from imagination by the word “fancy.”  The poet at his best does not merely reproduce the collocations achieved by association; he fuses the elements of a profound perception into a single transcendent vision.  The fancy is at best calligraphic, arranging familiar detail into unusual and provocative patterns.  The imagination not only makes such arrangements but fuses them so that each is no longer an arrangement of details but a single complex unity.  The power of imagination is mysterious and unbiddable.  But the poet is not primarily concerned to study the operation of the mind, the subconscious, or the imagination: he is concerned with his poems, usually one by one.  He may by introspection gives us valuable information about their functions, their scope, their place in art; but while he does so he is critic or psychologist rather than poet.  The peculiar value of poets’ accounts of the creative activity owes much to their ability to describe processes without mistaking description for explanation, influence for cause.  For the poet in the act of composition, memory, association, imagination are instruments to be stimulated and controlled to sensitive response.

Sooner or later the question of the “difficulty” of contemporary verse must be considered.  Whether or not a poet should devote himself to solving problems of communication need not concern us here.  The conclusion of such an inquiry would not alter the fact that poetry is communication, even though we may not fully understand what is being communicated or how.  In general, it is desirable that poetry should not become altogether esoteric and unintelligible.  Yet to condemn out-of-hand any poetry which is obscure or “difficult” is to deny the birthright of poetry.  There are different causes of obscurity in poetry; and some of them are not only legitimate but inescapable.  More than twenty-five years ago Mr. Eliot explained the case in terms which cannot be dismissed as self-justification.  “Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results.  The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”  There is no reason why a poem should be capable of being comprehended in the same way as a scientific treatise or a newspaper report; indeed, since the differentiation of the function of prose and the development of subtle and direct prose style, there has been no reason why anybody should ever attempt to read a poem as though it were factual and scientific.  For one thing, poetry always has a human centre.  The end of poetry is pleasure, but its beginning is suffering.  There is human significance in the force that changes the person who suffers into the person who creates, that transforms the suffering of one man at one time to the suffering of any man at any time.  The poet communicates experience, not knowledge: the poem must be encompassed by the whole person.  A good reader attunes himself to the scope and mode of each poem, knowing that experience is never capable of embodying itself completely in words.  The poet cannot interpret beyond the poem: the poem is the poet’s interpretation.  Coleridge should not interpret “Kubla Khan” and was not such a fool as to attempt it.  As far as poems require expository interpretation (apart from the reconstruction of their setting) they are suspect.

Let us put it in another way.  Poetry cannot be apprehended merely by dialectic or ratiocinative logic.  Poetry is neither a-logical nor non-philosophical; it has a logic of its own.  A sincere poet will never sacrifice poetical integrity to the logic of the mind or to the logic of dictionary meanings.  On the other hand, poetry is not music: completely to dissociate words from meanings is flagrant defiance of the medium.  Obscurity can be introduced into verse when the thought does not require it; such offenses against sincerity and economy need not detain us.  But there is a kind of obscurity, germane to the thought of the poem – organic intractability, if you like – which no amount of rumination or skill can remove.  To attempt to write poetry which will always be as obvious as a railway time-table is like trying to ride a bicycle at the speed of light; the machine will disintegrate long before it reaches the desired speed.

It is not possible to say very clearly what the logic of poetry is although we can show what it achieves in certain poems.  Poetic thought is direct and immediate, a species of seeing.  It is not necessarily, or even characteristically, processive; it does not build up in dialectic stages, but rather achieves its purpose through patterns.  The fact of vision is its own sufficient argument.  Poetry is the expression by allusion, evocation, feeling, thought, of a vision at once immediate and peripheral.  Poetic logic makes such expression possible; but it cannot be learned as a technique.  It is applied indirectly and intuitively, and is apprehended in reading in much the same way.  Poets themselves can give us little information about the logic of poetry because they apply it instinctively.  A good critic or a good reader must be in some sense a poet if he is to recognize the poetry of a poem; and his judgment will be, in the first case, intuitive.  If asked to explain why he considers a particular piece of verse a poem, he will not be able to convince a reader who is not capable of the intuitive re-creative act that brings a poem to life.  The apprehension of poetry is an act of immediate perception and re-creation.  It is sensitive response of a peculiarly complex kind.  A poem must be met on its own ground.  Those who have no gift for such encounters might as well read Chinese, for poetry will not speak directly to them in their own language.

Because poetry is communication and because a poem is a unique fragment of truth and reality, it is undesirable that the ability to read poetry be severely limited.  The problem of writing poetry today is not different from the problem of writing poetry at any period; only the background of our civilization is different.  Poems are written with words.  The reason why poetry is so often misread and misunderstood is that, from custom, we expect words to be immediately intelligible; and poets do not necessarily use words in a way that makes them immediately intelligible.  The reading of poetry requires a special kind of attention.

It is noticeable that, in many ways, our position is analogous to that of the English poets in 1800.  A mood of optimist has been followed by sharp disillusionment.  Great currents of social change are moving, and we cannot see their outcome.  Some of us are hampered by sentimental notions of democracy no less dangerous and not much more clearly defensible than were the Utopian dreams of Rousseau.  Confidence in the unlimited power of applied reason is as ill-informed, naïve, and disproportionate as was the early nineteenth-century pride in the Newtonian physics and a mechanist philosophy.  We are confronted with a more complex order of society, a more inadequate philosophy of life; we are more obviously threatened with despair and impotence.  But the more vigorous currents of contemporary poetry do not reflect despair.  At times poets have been driven to satirical outbursts against the crippling power of domestic propaganda, against widespread ignorance behind mass education, against uncreative passivity and spiritual atrophy, against the cult of noise, slickness, and sentimentality.  And well they might.  But those expressions of anger are ephemeral achievements.  The greatness of contemporary poetry and its importance to contemporary society are to be found elsewhere: in the insistence upon integrity and the desire for integration of experience.

It is precisely this recent tendency which, in 1936, W. B. Yeats emphasized in the work of three young poets.  Yeats says: “We have been gradually approaching this art through that cult of sincerity, that refusal to multiply personality which is characteristic of our time.  [These poets] may seem obscure, confused, because of their concentrated passion, their interest in associations hitherto untravelled; it is as though their words and rhythms remained gummed to one another…They have pulled off the mask…Here stands not this or that man but man’s naked mind.”  (“Oxford Book of Modern Verse”)

The direction of social change in the coming years will, I believe, be at the same time centrifugal and centripetal.  The view is based not upon any political scheme but upon the belief that civilization cannot survive in any other way.  A process of disintegration of bureaucratic centralization will be matched by a process of personal synthesis.  The process will produce for itself great synthesists – scientists, philosophers, poets – to heal up the intolerable disease of narrow specialization and the unreconciled elements of individual consciousness.  In this process the poets will exert influence according to their ability to make themselves intelligible and the ability of readers to make sense of the poets.  Poets are the antennae of society; they are always in the forefront of change.  What reports they bring back from their “raids on the inarticulate” will certainly not be capable of reduction to theories of social or political reform as long as the poets remain poets.  But poetry can liberate individual minds, in solitude, to see through confusion and complexity the value and implications of human action and faith.

To see clearly is a prime attribute of genius.  Genius is rarely loved by many; it is too disturbing; it sees too incisively, it speaks too directly.  Since artists lost a recognized function in society, the ordinary man has been usually about fifty years behind contemporary artistic thought; he is not only out of date but prefers to be out of date; he champions the stragglers from an earlier generation because he prefers the comfort of familiar platitude to the harsh reports from the advance guard.  If the poet is to fulfil his function in society, the gap between poet and public must be bridged; and it must be bridged from both sides.  Indifference kills art; patronage endangers it; patronizing drives it away.  Every art needs an audience to provide the stimulus of criticism and appreciation, the discriminating response of intelligent people.  Poetry is not exclusively for an intellectual minority: it is accessible to any person who can achieve the art of sensitive and re-creative reading.  The reader has privileges; but he also has corresponding responsibilities.

Our civilization can survive only if it can achieve integration, wholeness, clarity of vision, a sense of non-material value.  This integration can be achieved only by persons, not “on a national scale,” not by any scheme of mass education or political rhetoric.  It is a matter of individual growth.  Behind the many formidable, and often repulsive, manifestations of modern verse there has been going ahead for some thirty years the attempt to think and write with the whole body, to discover metaphysical wholeness of consciousness and expression to match it.  The path has been a zigzag one.  Many have stayed behind or lost their way.  But many have not.  Some poets have achieved integration and are discovering how to fashion language as a supple vehicle of their vision.  They have important discoveries to make.  We should pay careful attention to them.