Poetry as Education of the Senses

This subject is difficult to manage.  I can best illustrate the difficulty with two quotations.  The first is from a note of Coleridge’s rejecting “Rousseau’s Plan of Education”:

Education is to man what the transmission of Instincts is to animals – [It] intwines Thought with the living Substance, the nerves of sensation, the organs of Sense, the muscles of motion, and this finally with the Will – the total Soul energizing, unique & unific!

The other is a remark made by Noam Chomsky in a recent BBC interview:

We can say a fair amount about the principles that make it possible for us to behave in a normal creative fashion, but as soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.  These questions remain in the obscurity in which they were in classical antiquity.

Any discussion of education involves assumptions about the way “the mind” grows, about our processes of knowing and getting-to-know, about our ways of perceiving, remembering, recognizing, about the relation between perceiving and knowing, and about the quality of “experience” that accompanies these processes – what it feels like to know, to perceive, to choose, to discriminate, to recognize.  The theory, the way of looking at a question or problem, can never be separated from the “practice”; each induces and clarifies the other by reciprocal activity; if that reciprocal activity does not occur the result will be either absurdity or disaster.  Hence the danger of working from accepted and unexamined doctrine; for the validity of a doctrine depends upon the context in which, and for which, it was devised.  Hence also the danger of unwarily confusing analogy and metaphor: of (e.g.) uncritically thinking of the “mind” or of the brain as a computer (as we have them at present) or of thinking of language on the analogy of “computer language” (which is not a language but a code for programming a machine).

It is impossible in small compass to articulate with much subtlety the theory of knowing, perceiving, and learning that informs what I have to say.  I hope that the reader will be able to infer that I have avoided the use of abstract nouns and references to causality because the subject requires me to place the emphasis on relations rather than upon “things” or “ideas” (as though these were “objective” entities).  I hope also that the recurrent use of special terms, such as “feeling,” will become clear from the contexts in which I use them; that the difference between analysis and synthesis, as distinct mental processes, will emerge as fundamental to my exposition.  My rejection of behaviourism and of causal-mechanistic “psychology” can easily be inferred by the care with which I prevent certain words and phrases from deflecting the reader’s attention (and mine) towards such doctrines.

Coleridge and Paul Valéry have encouraged a habit of looking back to the beginnings of a question – of considering not simply how the question was posed, but why it should ever have arisen in the mind.  For I am sure that we need to be very careful about the first contact a question makes with the mind; the first utterance of it, in words, is crucial.  Any question, through verbal habit, can easily transform itself into another apparently similar but very different question.  This could be called the “nothing-but” syndrome.  The mind can be a great explorer and discoverer; it can also become a great beguiler, a great self-deceiver, through its swift short-circuiting of an elusive and fugitive question into a familiar question that is not worth answering because it is not even worth asking.

The two remarks I have quoted at the beginning may seem a little scandalous because they insist that there are true questions still to be asked in an area that we may have supposed were already settled in a thoroughly modern manner.  Yet the desperate surgical and chemical expedients that may be acceptable in trying to treat cases of gross psychopathology probably work from “models” too inexact to guide healthy growth and change; the rapid finger-counting of an electronic computer, and the circuitry that makes that possible, may provide an irrelevant “model” for the mind; the camera and tape-recorder provide at best a limit and rigid model for the various ways we see and hear.

In the absence of a completely articulated “theory,” it is hardly possible to proceed in a fluently discursive manner.  I have therefore disposed what I have to say in certain nuclear clusters, leaving the reader to make his own inferences and connections.  A “conclusion” is never a direct product either of “data” or of a discursive “argument.”  The hint of a possible answer or conclusion provides both the principles of selection and of articulation.  The worst errors arise from rigidity – and often the irrelevance – of doctrinal premisses.  The question in its primal form has to interact with hints of possible answers and will to some extent generate the theory that makes an acceptable answer possible.  In these matters, the peculiar “feel” of certain mental events can be more compelling that logical plausibility.  A reader who wishes to see in what sense my conclusions (offered in the form of “proposals”) are not the direct product of my theoretical premisses can turn first to my concluding section.  He will then see how the remarks that precede those proposals are the necessary context or universe in which those proposals might fruitfully function.  The fruitful functioning of those proposals would tend to generate an understanding of the nature of our cognitive experience very different from the doctrines that inform much current theory of education.

I know that education, like poetry, is always subversive, because its end is awareness, and its purpose is to encourage growth towards integrity in those who are capable of growing.  It may be that as government becomes increasingly preoccupied with control and prediction, it inevitably seeks to disarm education, to prevent education from being subversive and integrative.  This is to be expected particularly when society moves towards the horror that Valéry foresaw after the First War: “the miracle of an animal society, the perfect and ultimate anthill.”  One way of being subversive and individual, without ever being certifiably so, is to cultivate the senses, to restore – in the face of pervasive abstraction – the physical substance that the senses impart, and particularly to recover and cultivate the bond between the senses and language so that we can understand and use language with the directness and force of our senses.

Discipline

Education, I take it, is a self-constructive process in which a person makes himself real by discovering how to place his full resources at the disposal of whatever he most values.  As a process, education is less properly concerned with accumulating “knowledge” than with finding out how to establish certain states of mind.  In recent years educational theorists have declared that at school everything must be done “freely,” “naturally,” without restraint, and largely without guidance.  As a result, many young people are now coming to university who have not only learned very little, but also show little aptitude for skillful and concentrated inquiry.  That is, they have probably engaged in a parody of “research” but have discovered little discipline.  From this I suspect that discipline is commonly represented as an intrusion upon personal freedom and destructive of something unaccountably called “creativity.”

Discipline, however, is simply the way of calling up and establishing the way of mind in which particular enterprises can be undertaken with some reasonable prospect of success.  Discipline, as a way of bringing-on learners, does not turn upon imprinting doctrine; rather, it is practice and exercise in establishing certain desired dispositions of the mind.  Discipline is usually based on the accumulated experience of practitioners; it is more often concerned with discovering effective talismans and tricks of integrative concentration (how to “keep your eye on the ball”) than with “technique” (a preformulated scheme of performance).  The mind becomes agile through activity, especially through those activities most difficult to induce and most delicate to sustain.  To withdraw discipline is as serious as to deprive a child of the development of speech; the effects can be irreversible.  “Where there is no vision, the people perish”: without discipline there is no sustained vision.

Accumulated “knowledge” is essential to education, not merely because what is known can be applied to the understanding of what is not known, but because it enriches the mind with resonant materials; it give us something to think with and something to respond from.  Through what we know and the way we know, we become more knowing; we can open ourselves to wider, more subtle, and more exacting areas of inquiry than, uneducated, we might ever have come upon.  But that extension of “cognitive range” comes about, I believe, not by improving our “methods of thinking” (as though thinking were an isolable activity like walking or skiing), but by refining and disciplining our perceptual experience, and by encouraging us to think perceptually as a complementary alternative to abstraction and generalization.  For our senses are the foundation of all knowing and the guide to our thinking.  Not that our senses are the single source of all our knowing, but that they are the point of radical engagement with our worlds, imparting structural continuity and substantial relation.  By cultivating the senses we become progressively capable of minute and reliable discrimination, recognition, and judgment.

Sense and Feeling

I find it very difficult to think about the senses in isolation.  Our sensory experience is almost invariably a complex and seamless process that flows instantly from the senses into “perception” and into “thinking.”  In the same way that there is no such thing as an elementary poem, or an elementary instance of the transforming of perceptual experience into the words that make a poem.  I doubt whether pure sensory experience can occur in humans except in exceptional or highly artificial conditions.  I don’t know whether a fisherman can be trained to see small objects at a greater distance than most people with good eyesight can see them; I am reasonably certain that nobody can train his ear to attain what musicians call “perfect pitch”: I have no way of saying what a composer or conductor actually hears when he reads a musical score.  But, having education in mind, I know that we can cultivate our sensibility, our capacity for minute sensory response; that we can make our senses increasingly discriminating: and that in doing this we can become increasingly “perceptive.”^[i]  We can, I suppose, in some way disengage sensory activity from mental activity, and tell the difference between seeing things and thinking about what we are seeing; but that is a matter of common sense in introspection rather than of psychological analysis.  What I am interested in is not the senses in isolation, but “perception” – the senses implicated in complex mental events, and particularly those events transformed into language and simultaneously constructed by language.  I want to emphasize the physical bond, that holds poetry in the field of perception, as against the semantic and intellectual relations that connect a poem with “the ordinary world.”

An inseparable component of all sensory experience is “feeling.”  For pragmatic purposes – to some extent as a means of self-protection – we hold the component of feeling below the level of awareness, particularly in the most practical context of seeing and hearing.  But each sense has its own threshold, our visual experience normally being least colored by feeling, our sense of touch with the lowest threshold, and the sense of hearing intermediate.  Feeling I consider simply as “psychic energy,” and distinguish it sharply from “emotion” (which could be described as a more or less stable self-centred and self-sustaining complex state of feeling).  When feeling rises above the threshold of awareness in perception, it transforms itself – in part at least and with varying insistence – into heightened sensory acuity and a sense of value; and when this occurs we find that the state is momentary and fugitive, and that the feeling – like all forms of energy – is easily and quickly discharged.  Feeling is the dynamic of perception, the energetic element that induces knowing, remembering, recognizing.  Our sense of likeness, difference, identity, relation, or quality turns very little upon intellectual or comparative processes but very largely upon our ability to discriminate feelings.

The primary task of education, in my view, is to refine our states of feeling as both agent and judge of the accuracy of what we know and perceive, and to discover ways of sustaining states of feeling that by their nature are evanescent.  In this, poets and artists have most to teach us; this is what their lives as “makers” turn upon.  Valéry has said that “Poetry has sensibility as beginning and end, [even though] between these two extremes, the intellect and all the resources of technique may and must be used.”  In poetry there is a “very intimate union between the physical reality of the sound and the virtual excitations of sense” (Valéry again): and the reality of the sound is normally distinct from the “subject” of the poem and from the auditory representation that the poem may offer.

Artists pay particular attention to complex states of feeling arising in a perceptual mode; they cherish them and find means of sustaining them until they can embody them in whatever physical medium they use.  How artists get into that state of mind is their own business; but one way of thinking of a poem is that it is capable of inducing the poetic state of mind in others.  By establishing an appropriate relation with such an object we not only arouse a complex state of feeling; we find that the feeling can be sustained, disciplined, and given an axiomatic order by the presence of what we perceive as a poem.  But it is a first principle of inquiry into art that we always have to begin with complex and highly-developed instances of the art.

(When Baumgarten first introduced the term aesthetics (1750-8) he associated it with theory of Art and theory of Beauty.  Not even Kant was able to steer the word away from that unfortunate connection towards what its origin in Greek cleary implies – a theory of perceiving, sensing, and feeling.  A non-mechanical theory of perception might be able to rejuvenate this badly needed word.

Accuracy

I prefer to begin in a simple-minded way, asking myself what it feels like to see, hear, touch, taste; then to ask myself whether it feels different (for example) to perceive something that is not physically present – dreams, fantasies, hallucinations, and not least “shapes made in words”; then to ask myself what it feels like to perceive something with exceptional clarify and fidelity.  My own events of heightened perception help me to understand the fascination certain Elizabethan and Tudor poets felt for the doubleness of the sense of sight.  According to theory (even in those days) the basis of such an experience is that the eye receives patterned light from outside and somehow converts this into a visual “image.”  But these poets also represent – and this strikes for us an eerie chord of recognition – that the eye projects into the world a sort of virtuous juice that searches out what it is looking for and brings it back; and that the virtue of this juice is variable, with the highest marks going to loves.  (See for example Donne’s The Extasie.)

The quality of perception depends only in part upon instrumental accuracy; it also depends upon what we are perceiving from, and why.  We all know perfectly well the difference between seeing and looking, between gazing and looking at, between looking at and looking for.  We are also aware how by a slight shift of attention or disposition (as happens when we suddenly see in three dimensions through stereoscopic lenses) we can alter the quality of our perceptual bond with the outer world from seeing to looking, or from hearing to listening.  And if this seems to place most of the qualitative responsibility with the perceiver, we also know – unless we are remarkably apathetic – what it feels like to have something in the outer world seize the attention, insist upon being looked at fixedly or listened to attentively.  Artists know this feeling well; they call these events données.

The commanding quality of these events depends not upon the physical presence of what is perceived but upon the engagement being almost entirely perceptual, physical, even though what is given is “in the mind” – a tune, a rhythm, a feeling looking for a body.  Yet, like vision, whatever seizes the attention in this way is given, comes from outside.  Such events depend upon causes so complex and fugitive that we should be tempted to call them accidental if we didn’t feel, when they happen to us, that they had been specially and uniquely designed for us individually.  Yet there is no reason to doubt that events of this sort, though perhaps more usual for artists, some time or other happen to all of us.  Even if we could not tell empirically that that was so, we should have to infer it; for this is a condition of language in which what is unique discloses itself in a manner at once unique and axiomatic, and this is the source of the process called “symbolizing” – “poetry at the meeting point between mind and life.”  (Valery).

In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth said: “I have at all times endeavoured to look steadily at my subject, consequently ... there is in these poems little falsehood of description.”  Fifteen years later, giving an account of “the powers requisite for the production of poetry,” he noted as the first of these: “the ability to observe with accuracy things as they are in themselves, and with fidelity to describe them unmodified by any passion or feeling existing in the mind of the describer, whether the things depicted be actually present to the senses, or have a place only in the memory.”  He then went on to give as the second requirement (echoing his earlier statement that a poet is a person of “more than usual organic sensibility”) “Sensibility, – which, the more exquisite it is, the wider will be the range of a poet’s perceptions; and the more will he be incited to observe objects, both as they exist in themselves and as re-acted upon by his own mind.”  Whether or not “description” is the correct term for the transformation of what is perceived into the wording of it, Ruskin suggested something of the same sort when he insisted that it is the business of an artist to “see things as they truly are.”  Ruskin was thinking of painters.  But the transformation into words is the element in the functional equation that cannot be taken for granted since the process is not a matter of transliterating into a stable notation, but of symbolizing into language in the mode of poetry.  I am confident that both Wordsworth and Ruskin, if cornered, would concede that the success of the operation depends not upon something like instrumental accuracy but upon precision of feeling embodied in the words, and that that precision arises from a certain quality of perception – a state of the person in which all his cognitive capacities function harmoniously towards whatever is “outer.”  The integrity and presence of what is perceived becomes so imperious that it precludes self-indulgent distortion and illicit intervention.

There can be no such state as “pure objectivity” – not even through instruments – unless the subject observed is well below the level at which poetry functions; for our knowing and perceiving always and inevitably occur through ourselves as knowing and perceiving.  There is no way of escaping the quality of the “I” who sees, hears, knows, thinks, composes; a thought (as Coleridge said) is “I-thinking”; a vision is “I-seeing”; a sound is “I-hearing.”  If the “I” is a good one, this is not a disadvantage.  There are ways of disciplining the “I” so that it can achieve the quality it desires or the quality demanded by the sheer confrontation of arresting experience.  Yet the fidelity of rendering what Wordsworth and Ruskin demand depends not simply upon the refinement of the poet-as-observer, but rather upon a reversal of the instrumental analogy.  The shaping initiative comes dominantly from “outside”: the mind, far from being a neutral instrument that simply records or takes note without intervention, becomes an instrument that is played upon, and at the same time an instrument that plays upon itself and is played upon by the poet.  Once into the zone of poetic activity, the mind becomes an instrument of great subtlety and power in which the arresting music discovers itself.

Poetry and Language

Poetry is perhaps the most potent educational instrument now at our disposal, especially if teachers stop thinking of literature as a group of verbal phenomena to be inquired into according to principles of inquiry well-understood.  For educational purposes it is well to regard poetry as itself an instrument of inquiry.  To know about poetry and poets is probably no more virtuous than to know about anything else.  In a different frame of mind, however, poetry – if we allow it to do so – can tell us how to get to know; it can also tell us a good deal about what it is possible to know and what is likely to be worth knowing.  For poetry is not of primary importance as a record of (mental) events that can give us vicarious access to “new experience.”  Poetry, rather, provides a way of generating complex and refined states of feeling, and so of instructing – that is, giving a shapely and energetic disposition to – our minds.  To begin with, those structures may last only for a short time; to allow such structuring to occur is an allusive discipline.  But at least with an intimate grasp of poetry we get to know the feel of such structuring and find that we can evoke them, return to them, reflect upon them – if not at will or in all circumstances, at least sometimes – under the guidance of the poem itself.  As an education principle, poetry both liberates and tempers us because its integrity remains constant, and is never dissolved in our process of knowing.

Poetry is always of primary importance as a making in words; it is of peculiar value in giving us the feeling of the intimate union of the word and the mind.  Poetry functions purely in the field of language, not in the field of “actual” physical experience (except as far as feeling is the most “physical” experience we know); and it functions in that field through the continuous transformation of sensory and mental events into words which (as Coleridge said of poetic symbols) “always partake of the reality that they render intelligible.”  (It is mathematics, not language, that consists of a system of conventional signs.)  Language can be seen as usable in two different ways, each identified by the fate of the language itself in the relational process that we call “communication.”  As a pragmatic instrument of reference and indication, in which “words” provide a more or less conventional system for identifying “things,” simple relations, and functions, language functioning as “communication” (i.e. transferring “information”) dissolves as soon as the “meaning” is grasped.  When the “information” has been received and is understood the medium (language) disappears.^[ii]

Language in a poetic mode seizes the attention like an enchantment; we recognize it at once by its tune or touch or feel; unlike communicative language it is not annihilated by the function of communication; it tends to gel itself reproduced, it demands to be repeated, it encourages us to reconstruct it in its identical form.  For it is a poet’s function to induce the poetic state by means of words.  The exact effect that a poem will produce in any particular mind is always uncertain, for “nothing is certain about action or other minds.”  The value of poetry, especially for educational purposes, is that in it sound and sense are indissoluble.  Since, in poetry, sound – the auditory function – is paramount and inseparable from (indeed simply is) the physical body of the poem, the potency of sound triumphs over causality, sound in its dynamic aspect transforming itself into “resonance.”  A poem – again in Valéry words – is “its own harmonic cause.”

Poetry has certain educational virtues peculiar to itself.  (a) Poetry functions in the field of language, that is, in our common field of “communication.”  But poetry functions in a special way that is radical to the nature of language itself, beyond what we usually mean by “communication,” and proper to our pre-logical nature.  It helps us, or may even force us, to engage our minds in a way not usual in our day-to-day pragmatic encounters with “things in the outside world.”  (b) Poetry, being both ordered and orderly, calls up the integrative habit of our minds.  It reinforces our habitual impulse towards unity of apprehension and provides a nourishing alternative to the unity of abstract generalization that Western education has for a long time imposed as the most effective instrument of technological pragmatism.  (c) A poem, by holding our attention, can impart momentum and structure to a kind of mental activity that is often inaccessible and always fugitive.  (d) Poetry obliges us to ascribe the initiative in our processes of knowing to the poem rather than to ourselves.  It obliges us to be guided by what is to be known; it makes us place our resonant resources at the disposal of the poem instead of assembling our cognitive equipment to carry out an assault upon the poem.  Poets work, not from data, but from données.  Correspondingly, the reader of poetry (if he is not to end in solecism or tautology) is drawn into the universe of the poem and is compelled to regard it, not as a phenomenon to be analyzed in terms of certain presumptions about knowledge or communication or “experience,” but as an autonomous mental event, stable, ordered, and energetic – an event unique yet self-declarative, and to which we have access only if we meet it on its own terms.

All of this, I am aware, is counter to many technical-experimental-analytical assumptions that dominate our not very literate culture.

Distancing

“Knowledge” is often represented as internal to the knower, the possession or acquisition of “things known.”  We are therefore inclined to suppose that an item of knowledge is the product of a transfer from the outer to the inner world rather like an act of “communication.”  These assumptions, however, are at variance with the figurative language that we use for activities of mind, much of which (idea, image, intuition, for example) is visual.  Yet our visual experience projects the neural process outward so that what is seen is seen where it is – “out there.”  So persistent is the separation between the knower and the known that we expect cognitive statements to take the form “I know that...” (with the corresponding question “What do you know?’  A comprehensive theory of knowing, however, would want to take qualitative aspects into account.)  The tendency to project our “thoughts” into “psychic space” may account for the tendency to represent “ideas” as “things,” and to mistake conceptual distinctions for real distinctions.

That our minds may have more than one mode of “distancing” is suggested by a well-known fact of education.  As self-education progresses and judgment matures, we discover an increasing personal disengagement from what we know and want to know.  The sense of relation becomes paramount, the emphasis not falling exclusively upon either “object” or “subject.”  We become less inclined to value certain things simply because we like them or because they seem to belong to us, or because they merge comfortably with our cherished states of mind or our images of ourselves.  The things we care to pay attention to stand with increasing intransigence “out there,” impervious to our knowing, declaring an autonomous order of life with something of the status and inscrutability of a person.  We may even feel privileged that we can perceive and know them at all.  The “outness” of what we value may hold a special fascination because we know that we could not have made those things ourselves.  As this distinctness occurs we find that our knowing is more like our perceiving than we may have expected.

Psychic distancing occurs in two modes; and these, as functions of the mind, are probably not separable from each other even though they are readily distinguishable.  One mode may be called analysis – the abstractive process of disposing particulars into general groups or classes, and then arranging and relating those classes with each other and with other classes.  In this mode the unique identity of any particular is less important than the extent to which that particular shares characteristics with other particulars so that it can be assigned to a class.  The intransigence of the unique particular is to some extent dissolved in order to achieve a level of abstraction at which general relations can readily occur.  The abstractions, distanced both from the actual world and from the thinker, achieve coherence in terms of a criterion called “logic.”  The other mode, synthesis, resists abstraction, is dominated by the unity of an event and by the integrity of each particular embraced in the event, the whole being implied – almost prophesied – by and in each distinguishable part.  Analysis is like looking at, synthesis is like gazing.  Each mode is induced by the momentary disposition of the mind, analysis being directed towards practical application (whether immediate or delayed or even suspended in theoretical form), synthesis engaging the cognitive or sensory event as its own end.  Although most minds habitually assume one mode or the other, all minds are capable of both, and can in fact move very rapidly back and forth between them.

When these modes are embodied in language, the abstractive transformation in analysis is characterized by absence of feeling-tone, by discursive syntax logically and causally related, and by the use of the propositional statement as basic unit, the units being disposed in linear sequence.  In the mode of synthesis language achieves resonance (of meaning, implication, sound, rhythm) vertically disposed above the flow of utterance (like upper partials disposed above a fundamental musical tone to produce a note of a certain timbre); feeling-tone is noticeably associated with the language itself and unity – of tone, theme, action – is dominant.  The principle of coherence is metaphor (as compared to the proposition in the mode of analysis) and the ordering and inter-coherence of elements depends as much upon the actual sound, movement, and patterns of feeling as upon the content of “meaning” or the logic relations among the elements.  The function of language, even in a poem, often moves back and forth between these modes – as our minds do.

Poetry arises from a dominant mode of synthesis, and can be seen as existing in order to induce that mode.  Technology arises from a dominant mode of analysis.  “Science,” though dominantly abstractive and analytical in its striving towards the second order of abstraction called mathematics, illustrates the inseparability of the two modes.  Analysis uninformed by synthesis is blind.  No principle of generic differentiation can arise spontaneously, or necessarily, from a group of data or observations.  Only the mind can discern or provide a promising principle of differentiation; and it does so by making an intuitive leap in the mode of synthesis.  The mind will glimpse a possibility – for example, that the principle of similarity is the number of legs not the number of whiskers, the configuration of the teeth rather than the alarm-cry, the temperature of the blood rather than the color of the skin.  The authority of such a glimpse is unknown until it has been tested; the testing may take a very long time; and the “best” hypothesis is not necessarily tested by its fidelity to any particular, but by its power to bring the largest number of data under a single analogy.  When an analogy breaks down, you look for another intuitive glimpse.  The “best” scientists are not simply those who have the “best” glimpses, but the ones who best known how to prepare themselves for “good glimpses.”

The most direct way of distinguishing between the modes of analysis and synthesis – whether introspectively (to see how one is thinking) or in language (to tell whether what is written is poetry or science) – is by the presence or absence of feeling (i.e. psychic energy), and by the quality of perception that characterizes the event.  Feeling, with its tendency to constellate into emotional states, may be a distraction; but the risk must be taken.  Without feeling, perception is at a low level of precision, the “observation” will not be “perceptive.”  I am reminded of a principle of university government first formulated (I think) by Frank Scott: “Power corrupts; but lack of power corrupts absolutely.”

Placing the Initiative

When we arrange for a poem to remake itself in our minds, we place the cognitive emphasis neither on the “subject” nor upon the “object” but upon the relation (interaction) between them.  The outer becomes inner, the inner outer; the veracity and fidelity arise from the fineness of the reciprocal fine-tuning by which what is to be perceived becomes increasingly perceivable through the discriminate state of the perceiver.  The thing-seen becomes a focus – a sort of optical lens – through which the world it stands for is engaged and apprehended in the world of the knower.

A poet can tell whether his making is satisfactory only according to the feel of the rightness of the thing.  In the same way, we come to recognize – that is, know at first sight – when our relational engagement in a cognitive event is “right,” when it is faithful both to what is to be known and to the integrity of the knower.  Accurate perception – in poet and reader, – accurate knowing, accurate recognition depend upon the accurate construction of the states of feeling demanded by the cognitive event.  Hence the need in education not simply to establish the “truth” of what we know, but also to refine our discrimination of states of feeling as our only guides beyond the limited range of logical plausibility.  We all have to do our own knowing for ourselves, and we have to find out how to test the quality of our own knowing.  Feeling – which I have carefully distinguished from “emotion” – would have no value superior to that of any other form of energy if it were not that in the perceptual field feeling always refracts into, or represents itself in the form of, heightened acuity and an affirmative sense of value.

For educative purposes poetry and language offer peculiar advantages.  For one thing, poems, “entities of direct appeal”, evoke a sensory response; and again, in our engagement with poetry the most abstractive of our senses, the sense of sight, is subordinate to the more intimate and evocative sense of hearing.  If the rhythm (vitality), shapeliness, and multiple simultaneous implications of language are to be engaged, the words must be listened to.  In poetry nothing is actually seen, even though words can evoke a sensation of seeing; and, although nothing is actually tactile in poetry, any rise in the valency and resonance of language above the level of conceptuality tends to evoke a strong tactual quality to the words themselves: words become heavy, light, rough, sharp, smooth or jagged in texture, opaque or translucent.  In general, poetry is sensory and physical not only in the auditory sense, but through synaesthesic implication in all the senses.  A heightened condition in any one of the senses probably tends to evoke the other senses; but poetry is exceptional not only in calling the other senses into action through the auditory sense, but also in controlling and sustaining the activity of each sense and the interaction among all the senses.

In our engagement with poetry the education of the senses can occur in a number of ways, all closely related.  The first and essential bond is the auditory sense, passing by synaesthetic resonance into other senses.  Other aspects are similarly physical and sensory – especially what (for lack of any other term) we call “recognition,” the direct grasp of something as “valuable,” the direct noticing of detail, of subtle difference, of commanding power, of the implications of what is too profound to be presented other than allusively.  For recognition is not a conclusion drawn from a study of evidence, but an affirmative and hospitable gesture of the mind.  The feel of recognizing is not unlike the feeling of wonder, or respect, or delight.

Only a cultivated sensibility, minutely perceptive, can give us access to the range of intelligence and order of perception that we find embodied in “great” poetry.  If we seek to match those minds by going over the ground that they have made for us, the enterprise itself will teach us the appropriate method, the method becoming what Coleridge called “the self-unravelling clue.”  In the end we could do worse than to find for the good reader, as Coleridge finds for the good critic, the intimacy and physical directness of “tact” – the sense of touch and the feeling of respect.

Quality of Perception

So far I have spoken as though good reading of poetry were simply a matter of disposing oneself passively towards a poem, assuming that one has a mind so furnished as to resonate to the particular poem.  To do that is essential to good reading – or rather, without that there is no basis for a good reading.  That such a state of affairs should occur successfully is no doubt partly a matter of sensibility, or occasion, or simply good luck.  Anybody who has experienced this intimate relation with a poem will probably wish to repeat the experience; and if he is of a reflective turn of mind he may well wish to extend the intrinsicate his reading by taking the risk of exploring the poem in more detail by analytical and other means.  Here the question of disciplined perception enters: one needs to be able to evoke the appropriately responsive state of mind and to find out how to sustain the perceptual “feel” in the face of abstractive and discursive activities.

Fortunately the processes of analysis and synthesis, though absolutely different and also mutually exclusive, function in the same mind.  The transition from the one to the other occurs as immediately and exclusively as we shift from a wide-spectrum gaze to a sharply focused and intent looking-at.  Although analysis is characteristically devoid of feeling-tone, and synthesis is characterized by prominence of feeling-tone, our minds can move back and forth between the two processes rapidly and consistently enough (under appropriately guided circumstances) for us to sustain the feeling-of-the-whole, if only at times as a strong memory-of-feeling.  It is the business of refined education to bring students – by fine examples of the art rather than by precept – to enter confidently into so delicate an enterprise.  Let us consider a little how that might be done; for the just interaction of analysis and synthesis, of the conceptual and the perceptual, is what we mean by an educated mind.

The quality of perception that Wordsworth sought to engage in his poetry, unlike what is now popularly thought of as “objective,” is a disposition of total preoccupation that I think of as “Aristotelean.”  What is needed is to hold the attention within the field of inquiry and to nourish it there in such a way that the mind does not deflect into the abstractive generalizing and thinking-about that instantly dissolves the integrity of the poem in the perceptual mode.  Like any energy-system, the mind responds to any increase in valency or discontinuity by swiftly coming to repose at a lower level of valency and by resolution into comfortable continuity.  It is much easier for the mind to react – and to react away from – than to reflect; easier to placate by accommodation than to hold in the field of mental vision.  Our minds have so adapted themselves to the pragmatic use of perception that many people hold their perceptual experience at or below the threshold at which they become aware of the concomitant of feeling-tone.  Perception at that level is itself an accommodation, for our perception is normally meaningful: that is, we normally see and hear in a way that instantly “makes sense” of what we are seeing and hearing.  We do not first receive detached and incoherent “sense-data” and “interpret” them; we grasp everything (except in unusual circumstances) as at-once-meaningful.  We can – and do – think about what we perceive; but if that process is largely controlled by our own wishes, fantasies, and habits of mind, our thinking rapidly moves farther and farther away from its starting-point, and will come to rest (if not from exhaustion ore boredom) in the apparent stability of a conceptual abstraction interlocked in some ways with what we always supposed to be the coherent structure of our minds, our world, our beliefs, our sources of action.

Is it on the whole difficult to arouse our minds to activity, more difficult to sustain that activity, and even more difficult to prevent our minds from achieving a rapid conceptual resolution in the disarming or ignoring of whatever initiated the perceptual event.  Poetry, if we can make a sensory and physical engagement with it, draws us powerfully back to the vivifying and seminal prelogical condition upon which the “logical intellect” has supervened.  By this means, poetry can restore our minds to an ancient vigor and daring, and at the same time enlarge and deepen those “later” functions that have historically achieved abstract coherence at the expense of our natural bonds with the roots of our nature.

Keats said that he knew what it felt like to be a sparrow pecking about in the gravel, and what it felt like to be a billiard ball (perfectly spherical, smooth, impervious, resilient).  I accept those statements without question, for he speaks in them from a quality of perception that his best poetry shows – the quality that I call “Aristotelean.”  In Aristotle’s writings we see him gazing in wonder at creatures that he wished to understand, at civil institutions, at the moral nature of man, at that highest form of poetic art called tragedy.  He evidently could hold his mind with almost obsessive concentration upon whatever he chose, confident that as he did so its inner nature and substance – even its inner history – would be disclosed if only the gaze could be intent enough.  The study of poetry – that is, the good-reading of poetry and sustained reflection upon it – can perhaps most favourably and directly induce such powers of attention.  From a reader’s point of view, as distinct from a poet’s, it can provide us with the “armed vision” in a setting largely cleared of accident (because our reflection is commanded by the poem under inquiry) and in a way that encourages the systematic cultivation of such a quality of perception.  For the study of poetry cannot go far without our inquiring also into the making of poems.

Good-reading is a re-making of the poem through reflection, a renewing and re-experiencing of the process of making – but with the terrible exigencies of invention removed.  Yet what the good reader of a poem re-makes and re-experiences is neither the actual history of the making of the poem nor a reconstruction of the experience-of-making out of which the poem grew.  The poem is made in words, it is transformed out of the mode of experience into the mode of language, thereby giving us access to a “reality” that our actual “experience” seldom discloses to us in so stable, concentrated, and substantial a form.  We know the more profoundly by disengaging ourselves from what is to be known; we discover the mental reality by moving away, through the physical bond of the senses, from the physical actuality that might conceivably have brought the poem into being.  Only through the needle-sharp and luminous acuity that our senses allow us can we bring particulars into the burning focus that evokes the universal; failing to do that, we are condemned to an inner world of generalities.

Another reversal of the normal discursive-technical-generalizing habit of mind is also Aristotelean.  It occurs when we assume that the poem is not an “effect” produced by a series of prior or exterior “causes,” but rather that it is the realization of a cause that is present within itself.  A poem is the perfect self-finding of the “content” in its final “form” through the progressive self-discovery of the poem in the activity of the poet’s mind.

The poem is simply what-was-to-be-uttered, and the making of it is the discovery of the what and how of the utterance as it disclosed itself.  “I didn’t want to say but wanted to make,” Valéry said; “it was my intention of making that wanted what I said.”  If the poem has become what it had to become, being an utterance seeking to be uttered, its cause will be intrinsic to it, not outside.  And the fascination that orders and holds the “Aristotelean” quality of perception is the fascination that that something simply is what it is and not otherwise – that in spite of the infinite range of possibilities that might have made it other, it is not other than it is.

Educational Proposals

No doubt there is a musical imagination distinct from the poet’s verbal imagination and distinct from the auditory imagination engaged by poetry; and no doubt there is a painterly imagination distinct from all those others.  Surely the education of the senses could be conducted – theoretically at least – through any of the arts.  Yet poetry has a special advantage in that its body is language, capable of minute precision and supple articulation, a mode in which thinking can be directed and sustained.

Yeats claimed that it is a function of the rhythm of a poem to “set the mind dreaming” – that is, to detach the mind from its habitual activities so that it could do its own making with what is given, as we do in dreams.  The mind, however, is all too easily set dreaming in another sense – towards evasion, abstraction, fantasy.  Language finely articulated can secure us against that drift into nothingness.  In the way that the quality of an idea depends upon the quality of the mind that holds it, so the quality of thinking, the ability to know well and to intuit accurately, depends upon the quality of perception available at the physical level of experience and the primordial level of mind and language.  Against the fragility of willed attention, poetry stands as an order of disciplined fidelity, springing from life, nourishing the life of the senses, turning back to illuminate life.  The poetry that does not arouse delight is a hollow poetry.  The criticism that does not heighten and sustain awareness is a pretentious and wasteful parascientific distraction.

To educate the senses through poetry I would – if I exerted any authority – see to it that children were allowed to listen to poetry, especially difficult and arcane poetry so long as it is strongly and subtly rhythmic; and I would have them listen with no ulterior purpose in mind, but for delight simply.  (Least of all would I allow teachers to intrude any clumsy analysis or any of those parody-attempts at “criticism” that begin by representing a poem as something that it clearly is not.)  I would also see to it that children should speak poetry, so that the physical engagement of the ear would be reinforced and deepened by the intimate articulation of lips, palate, and tongue to discover how a poem “works,” and acts itself out, and can “speak itself.”  Further I would have them listen to their peers speaking poetry in order to see within what range the integrity of a poem can find itself.  I would have them study prosody and versification in the way a musician studies musical notation and musical scores in order to discover, within the necessary rigidities of any system of notation, how the poem asks to be spoken, the music to be played, at what tempo, with what patterns of emphasis, with what arcs of voicing.  They would achieve the cultivated power of listening that would permit them to recognize the structural limits that the poet interposes as a principle of freedom and a resource of counterpoint – the line-lengths, stanza-forms, metrical patterns, syntactical patterns, rhythmic echoes, and those subtle effects of sound and movement that (not being descriptive) order the unfolding of a poem into something like a single and intricate whole.  I would want them to be able to recognize, without analysis or comparison, the orders of resonance in language, so that the difference between (say) a poem and a prose narrative would be seen as a physiological difference, a difference in the musculature, the nerves, the integrative system.  I would hold their attention away from what is adventitious enough to encourage a drift towards journalistic topicality; this would mean withholding much that, being imperfectly realized, invites the reader to indulge in topical speculation and personal fantasy.

Above all, I would wish all children to try to make their own poems – which many can well do until they are inundated by the crisis of self-consciousness – and so to discover how far language has a will of its own and is to be respected if we are to use language to any notable effect.  At some point I would have them appreciate the peculiar nature of that other verbal harmony that we call “prose.”  I would have them take pleasure in the written forms of letters and in making the written forms of letters; and I would have them savour the physique of books and the textures of paper, and to train their eye to enjoy the just disposition of printed characters in space for this somehow corresponds to the way poems, being sonic, are always ringed about with silence.

Faithful and tactful instruction in such matters (and where would we recruit teachers for such an enterprise?) would constitute the rudimentary and essential discipline from which the risky business of analysis and discourse could begin.  The art of reflection could then, I think, proceed confidently by presenting the self to an endeavour for which there can be no definable preparation and the outcome of which is always in question.  For the more deeply and incisively we “know” a good poem, the less we seem to be able to say about it: the poem beings us to silence.  Beyond silence there are perhaps only two possibilities open to us: either to repeat the poem as best we can, or to discover some way of making it possible for somebody else to repeat the poem in a manner that we and the poet and the poem could approve.