What is Poetry? (And should we care?)

 

In his 1821 essay "A Defence of Poetry," Percy Shelley says that "poetry is connate with the origin of man." This is an easy claim with which to sympathize. After all, language seems to have been a central element in human evolution. And language is inherently referential and, therefore always seems to hold the promise of poetry in it. Of course, these issues raise the perennial, seemingly unsolvable problem, of how one defines poetry.  Shelley wanted to defend poetry so he had to, at some level define it. But by telling us that "poetry is connate" with our origins, he is really just telling us that poetry is an unavoidable element of language, we cannot avoid it even if we wanted to. But because of the referential nature of language, the continual metaphorical element on which it seems to operate, it seems almost pointless to attempt to distinguish poetry from any other part of language use. In other words, if language in the many ways that we use it, is continually relying on metaphor, or to say it another way if metaphor is at the heart of language, then it seems to be a purely academic matter to attempt to distinguish between poetry and prose. At a wider level, the problem was defined by Derrida when he reminded us that there is no 'transcendental signified." This is just another way of saying that, while language seems to refer to things in the world, it can only, at best, reach out  toward the world, it cannot provide us with certitude. 

I think, at some level, many people feel the uncertainty of the world (and language's ability to pin it down) instinctively. At a practical level, we hope that, say, a set of written instructions will be clear enough and be a useful aid to performing whatever task we are setting out to perform. But many of our linguistic experiences are fraught with imprecision, and certainly our so-called literary ones. We accept it. In fact we usually relish in it. If we were searching for certitude, we surely wouldn't be reading Henry James or Emily Dickinson. And though many wearisome English teachers might insist to their students that James' Golden Bowl or Dickinson's "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain," express certain meanings, such claims are contrary to the nature of literature if not language.  In other words, I think that we read not in a search for certitude, but precisely because life is uncertain. 

But to return to Shelley's Defence of Poetry," I am sure that Shelley would have been comfortable with pushing aside any distinctions concerning poetry and other forms of literature. Shelley was using the term poetry not to indicate a type of literature so much as he was using it as a word for the act of human dreaming. That is why Shelley says that poetry may be defined as "the expression of the Imagination." And in a remarkable foreshadowing of 20th century discourse, Shelley goes on to tell us that "language is virtually metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things, and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them become through time signs for portions or classes of thoughts, instead of pictures of integral thoughts." 

Dreamers express their dreams, and prophets are only prophets to the degree that they express their visions. And like most poets, Shelley was a dreamer,  and certainly a prophet of sorts. 

 But what does it matter if we dispense with literary distinctions? Other than certain conveniences stemming from taxonomy, there seems to be few, if any reasons to advocate for such distinctions. And there seems to be plenty of reasons to argue against them, the dangers of elitism being amongst the most important. And it is no surprise that Shelley's essay contains the reminder that "the principle of equality had been discovered and applied by Plato in his Republic." If political and social equality is supposed to be of such importance to us, why not apply it here, to literary endeavours? Even when we apply rather nebulous categorical boarders to literature types, we run risks of exclusion and devaluation. I have seen this first hand on many occasions. It is a strange phenomenon to listen to a supposed literary authority struggle to defend syllabus choices based on some abstract and painfully woolly categorical argument that ends up with them inadvertently defending an elitist or sexist, if longstanding, structural convention. And so, interesting work is conveniently marginalized and excluded from the very people who should see it. Such exclusion often targets women or other marginalized voices out of hand, but can also exclude groups of work that don't fit into the standard categories. This is true of, for example, essays or just works that don't fit clearly into regular conventions such as Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Thoreau's Walden,  or Leigh Hunt's The Honey Jar. And for more modern examples just think of most of Andre Breton's work like The Lost Steps, Mad Love, and Nadja. (Incidentally, this is also true of a number of other surrealist authors as well as some of the writers from whom they drew inspiration like the Comte de Lautréamont.)

Anyone who has taken a university English course, and has any sense of natural skepticism or a previous interest in some marginalized literary work, knows with what fervour professors can muster a categorical defence. Few phenomena have done more to alienate people from literary enjoyment or study. 

To return to the subject of Shelley's Defence, it is interesting to me that he wraps it up with the now famous declaration that "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," because if it is true, it is remarkable how many impediments are thrown in the way of us garnering the insights of that legislation. 

Here's a thought - next time someone asks you "what is poetry?" step on their foot and when they cry out in pain say, "That! That is poetry."

Can Poetry Save Your Soul?

 There is little doubt that contemporary literature and philosophy can be an alienating exercise in cynicism and apparent detachment. I think most of us have experienced it. I sometimes think of Milan Kundera's book The Unbearable Lightness of Being as the representative post-modern novel, and few books have given me a more overwhelming sense of emptiness. In the opening sequence of that novel, Kundera writes "in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted." Looking around today at the bizarre culture war of the rightwing which is reminiscent of the ethnic purity tropes of the 1930s, Kundera's words, written now nearly forty years ago, are chilling. They are frightening because the permissiveness that Kundera seems to be talking about here is the forgetfulness of history. He makes this remark in the context of taking up a book about Hitler and the way in which, for many, our perverse past is a whitewash, a phantom that never returns. But, of course, Kundera knows, as many of us do, that the past does return, almost as though on a zoetrope loop, and we are compelled to live through what others have lived through before, only with a greater sense of history and, therefore, a greater sense of failure and shame.  

Literature was, once upon a time, one of the great sanctuaries from this sense of failure and shame. And I am not just talking here about novels and poetry - but about the whole gamut of literary work from philosophy to the occasional essay. This is not to imply that literature was, of should be, simply an exercise of escape. Rather, it means it can be a realm not only of honesty and pain, but of aspiration and hope, and that it can satisfy a deep existential need for connection. It can, of course, still be exactly this. But I think its status is now on much shakier ground than it once was. I cannot provide a rigorous statistical argument that proves this cultural shift. Such arguments, when in the midst of the tornado of history, are only reflections of one's sense of what is really going on. Future historians and commentators will make more straightforward arguments with the advantage of distance and evidence. 

Another book that has meant a lot to me is Peter Sloterdijk's 1983 study - Critique of Cynical Reason. In this remarkable book, Sloterdijk traces the rise of modern cynical reason which has gradually reduced everything to a level of pure transactionalism. He adapts the Marxist notion of 'false consciousness' to its modern manifestation - 'enlightened false consciousness,' a state in which people are increasingly aware of the injustice and exploitation of which they are a victim, but they have so little faith that it can change that they just don't bother to do anything about it. 

It is with all of these issues in mind that I find myself continually returning to the great poets of Romanticism and philosophers like Emerson. This is because, despite being part of the cynicism of my age, I, like many people, hunger for a sense of universal connection, but one that doesn't rely on the deep problems of revealed religion. In the face of the isolation of bourgeois individualism and the profound opportunity of a society of transactionalism, it is no surprise that the poems of Shelley and Blake and Dickinson and Whitman, or the essays of Emerson and Thoreau can be a source of genuine edification. 

In his now famous 1838 Divinity College Address, Emerson talks of poets occupying a "holy office" and likens them to priests in their ability to offer revelation, teach, and give. In Emerson's version of transcendentalism, the poet is a kind of priest, only better than most because she is in touch with something more direct. "The true preacher can be known by this," Emerson writes, "that he deals out to the people his life, - life passed through the fire of thought." And what better preacher, therefore, than the poet? Being an advocate for natural rather than revealed religion, Emerson seemed to be much more interested in the revelation of poets than priests. "For the experience of each new age," Emerson tells us in his essay "The Poet, "requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet." And indeed, this idea of poet as revealer of our world and expresser of our experience, is one that I think many of us look for, particularly in an age when the zoetrope loop of dangerous history seems to be circling back to a terrible moment. The waters of art are so deep, Emerson reminds us, "that we hover over them with religious regard." 

One can find this transcendental spirit in a great deal of 19th century poetry. One of my very favorite of Shelley's poems is his 1816 "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." In that poem Shelley tells us that "some unseen Power // Floats tho' unseen among us." And it is this mysterious power to which the sages and poets respond, as well as Shelley himself. "I vowed that I would dedicate my powers," Shelley tells us, "to thee and thine." And indeed this unseen power (we can call it beauty or poetry or aesthetic experience) was, indeed, the thing to which Shelley devoted himself. Shelley tells us that in his childhood he looked for spirits as well as God, but it wasn't until the shadow of this mysterious power fell on him that he "shrieked & clasped" his "hands in extasy." [sic] Though I still struggle with the cynicism of our age, I admire Shelley's experience and faith here. And though this is one of Shelley's more explicit poems concerning this subject, you can find such sentiments throughout his work where he looks to a better world, informed by beauty, where reason and passion are no longer enemies. 

In one of his greatest poems, Queen Mab, Shelley described the world's pain - 

All things are sold: the very light of heaven

Is venal; earth's unsparing gifts of love, 

The smallest and most despicable things

That lurk in the abysses of the deep, 

All objects of our life, even life itself,

And the poor pittance which the law allow

Of liberty, the fellowship of man, 

Those duties which his heart of human love

Should urge him to perform instinctively, 

Are bought and sold as in a public mart.

But for Shelley, as for Emerson, our secret weapon is poetry, the activity that steps beyond the venal world that Shelley describes in Queen Mab, and looks toward and "indestructible order" beneath. Can we escape the eternal reoccurrence of  violence and hate that Milan Kundera talks about through a poetic accesses to an indestructible order?  I cannot be sure, but I have continued all my adult life in such a pursuit. 

Arminianism and the Opening of Aesthetic Horizons....

 The history of protestant theology is complex and difficult for a non-specialist to effectively conceptualize. Many of the central conflicts of Protestantism were between Calvinism and numerous other views which fundamentally opposed the determinism of the Calvinist view. One such theological movement that was in opposition to Calvinism was Arminianism, a movement based on the teachings of the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius. Arminius influenced a great deal of Protestantism, including John Wesley and the rather vague and dynamic movement referred to as Methodism. In America, Arminianism had a significant influence on Unitarianism and the loosely defined, but important movement we know as transcendentalism. 

Arminius

 

Unitarianism split from orthodoxy not just in theological terms but in its whole outlook on human experience. Dissenters in England were pushed into political radicalism both by their exclusion from the political life of the nation (an exclusion that applied to anyone who refused to sign the 39 articles), and by their view that humans were responsible for their own relationship with God and their own views of the world. This was a naturally radical outlook because it relied on a fundamental attitude of equality rather than the hierarchical outlook that grew out of the Church of England and its traditional support of social stratification. In America, where much of the traditional hierarchies had already been torn asunder, Arminianism, through its effect on Unitarianism, was embracing a melioristic world view, a view that pictured humans are improvable, perhaps infinitely so. 

This view is important not only to one's outlook on religion and politics, but also on the arts, because one who is not encumbered by Calvinist inevitability and dour piety, and is at the same time full of the promise of an unbridled human future, is likely to embrace an exploratory attitude towards the arts. Lawrence Buell writes, in his book on literary transcendentalism, that "the main impetus behind the Unitarian departure from Orthodoxy - the shift from a Calvinist view of human nature as depraved to an Arminian view of man as improvable - also helped to produce a climate of opinion more favourable to the arts." 

In America, this expanding attitude arguably led directly to the flowering of transcendentalism in the work of various Unitarians (like Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth Peabody, and James Clarke) who wrote everything from literary essays to poetry, and to bigger names in American literature like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. But it also had a knock-on influence on writers like Nathanial Hawthorn, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. In England, Arminianism and the Methodism that grew from it, undoubtedly inspired much of the radicalism of the 1790s as well as to the growth of English Romanticism. Though the first generation of English Romantics eventually returned, opportunistically, to the fold of the Church of England, the second generation, especially Percy and Mary Shelley, were considerably more philosophically adventurous. 

Emerson 

I think a major aspect of both transcendentalist and Romantic literature was the idea of exploring the possibilities of human experience and potential, which had both been extremely limited in Catholic and Calvinist ideologies. And it was dissenters and those who opposed orthodoxy that were the first to advocate for the literary endeavours that were not simply and straightforwardly edifying.  As late as 1808 the religious magazine the Panopolist condemned nine-hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand novels as "positively seductive and corrupting" at best, and "a contemptibly frivolous...criminal waste of time" at worst. This reflected the view among the orthodox that literature should, at its heart, be morally instructive. But the dissenting generations like the Romantics and the transcendentalists were explorers, and literature often became a map of their travels. And these explorations were not prohibited to some Calvinist, preconceived and limited idea of what people could be. 

The shift in outlook toward the arts during the 19th century in the US (and I think it applies to the late 18th century in England), was described by Willam Charvat as a shift from "the negative principles of religious restraint, " to "the positive principle of moral idealism," This idealism was embodied in much of the work of Emerson or Whitman in the US, and in Blake and Shelley in England.

Mary and Percy Shelley

The rise of Methodism and Unitarianism and their effects on literature is complex subject that could be, and probably is, the subject of a long and interesting book. Thinking about it makes me wonder what kinds of effect the general decline in religious consciousness might be having on our cultural products in contemporary society. I think that Methodism and Unitarianism opened up horizons for aesthetic explorations of the human soul. Are the horizons now so open that we are simply wandering aimlessly with little sense of a goal in mind, like a flâneur in an empty city?  

Jane Eyre and 12th Grade English

 My youngest daughter is in her final semester of high school and is taking grade 12 English. Despite my efforts, she doesn't enjoy reading and isn't into books at all. That's ok, she's from a different generation, a digital generation, and I shouldn't expect her to like all the same things that I do. Books offer all sorts of learning possibilities, but I know that there are other ways to learn. The world is always changing and we have to trust the younger generations to sort things out for themselves. 

I have been helping her with her English work so that she can get through her final semester of school and move on. She has no plans to go to university, but at least if she graduates, her options will remain open. They are reading Jane Eyre in her class, two chapters a week and then answering some questions about the text. Jane Eyre is, of course, a Victorian Novel, and my interests are more centred on the Romantic era.  But I enjoy the Brontë sisters and Jane Eyre is a fine novel. I am a little disappointed, however,  that of all the novels by women from the 18th and 19th centuries, Jane Eyre is the one that these students are compelled to read. However, my disappointment is not a result of the quality of Charlotte Brontë's novel.  Rather, it strikes me as a pity that she is having to read a novel that is so imbued with traditional romantic troupes. Don't get me wrong, there is much to be admired in the character of Jane Eyre, both from the literary and the feminist point of view. Jane is a strong, independent woman who doesn't simply accept the abuse doled out to her. She understands the injustices done to her while still appreciating the positive aspects of her life. And her final triumph is a result of her strength, her integrity, and her unwillingness to simply do what is expected of her as a woman, especially as a woman of minimal means. And perhaps the thing I like best about Jane Eyre is that it is her who is, ultimately, a saviour, and not a man that just comes in to sweep her off her feet and protect her. But as a novel it is the romantic element that sticks with many readers, especially, I think, young readers. 

As fine as Jane Eyre is, there are so many interesting novels by women in the 18th and 19th century. And if young people are going to read only a couple of novels from the past by women, I would really like them to be ones that reject some of the romantic conventions and give the reader a more rounded view. For example, I would love to see them read Mary Wollstonecraft's novel Mary. Though this novel, like most, contains elements of romance, it is not "romantic" in the traditional sense, it is more a novel of the strength of love in friendship than anything else. In that novel, Mary educates herself and only enters into a loveless marriage because of a death-bed promise to her mother. The character then goes on to form a very strong bond with her friend Ann that is really the central relationship of the story. Mary takes Ann to Portugal and nurses her through her consumptive decline and eventual death. Mary also forms an attachment to a man Henry who is also consumptive and she eventually nurses him also as he succumbs to the disease. Mary eventually ends up living unhappily with her husband and the novel ends with the feeling that Mary herself will soon die. 

The great themes of Mary as a novel are concerned with a woman's ability, even in the face of Georgian oppression, to become self-educated and to form strong friendships of equality with both men and women. Though Jane Eyre also takes up some of these same themes, what stands out about Mary is that romance will not come to save the main character, there are no fairy tale endings for Mary, just the realization of the struggles with which we all, particularly women like her, are forced to contend. 

To be honest, there are not that many novels from the 18th and 19th centuries that don't overly trade on traditional romantic tropes. One interesting angle would be to look to the darker novels like those of Charlotte Dacre,  like Zofloya. We can also look to some of  Maria Edgeworth's novels like Belinda and Castle Rackrent as novels by 19th century women that don't rely on typical romantic tropes for their plot. And later in the century the novels of Elizabeth Caskell and George Eliot offer much more complex worlds which, though they contain romantic elements, are not simplistic in their presentation.  

I have never seen any of these novels taught in a high school English class, and I find it unfortunate that they rely on standard fare like Jane Eyre. My daughter is generally repelled by traditional heteronormative love stories and I am sure that the choice of a novel a little out of the mainstream would be much more interesting for her and many young people.