THOUGHT IN POETRY

Prof. S. S. HOSKOT, M.A.

Ever since Plato denounced Poetry as an ‘imitation’ twice removed from reality, and an unhealthy social influence, numerous philosophers, aestheticians and critics in every age have deemed it obligatory on themselves to expatiate on the value and function of this fascinating art. For critics and aestheticians indeed, it is ostensibly a duty to inquire into these questions. As regards philosophers, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that few major representatives of this ‘curious’ tribe have regarded the edifice of their metaphysical system complete without a triumphal pillar commemorating their audacious incursions into the treacherous realms of the ‘Theory of Poetry’.

Even Aristotle, Plato’s own disciple, felt constrained to revert his master’s theme in the ‘Poetics’ and to defend poetry on the plea that far from demoralising men, it actually purged or purified their passions of selfishness and was thus an ennobling influence the social order.

In the Middle Ages, nevertheless, the Roman Church discouraged poetry, as a ‘wanton’, throughout Europe. But when at Renaissance, there was an unparalleled outburst of poetic activity, we come across eminent intellectuals venturing out boldly to defend poetry against its detractors. Sir Philip Sidney, for instance, gave an eloquent tribute to poetry when he described it as “the first light-giver to ignorance, and first Nurse, whose milk by and little, and little, enabled them (i.e. those who inveighed against it) to feed afterwards of tougher knowledges.” Poetry, he asserted, was not a frivolous pastime but a delightful teacher and pointed out the ironical truth that Plato who looked askance at poetry was himself a poet: “Though the inside and strength were Philosophy, the skin as it were and beauty depended most of Poetry.”

Sidney’s conception of poetry as ‘a delightfut teacher’ runs as the principal note in the entire gamut of English criticism throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. To this, however, is yoked the Aristotelian notion of ‘mimesis’. The French critic, Boileau, who reigned as Legislateur du Parnasse throughout the neo-classical age, advised writers to make Nature their study and never to deviate from her in their works; and Dryden, the dictator of English literary taste in the 17th century, averred that “to imitate well is a poet’s work”. To Dryden, the making of poetry was like the employment of a curious goldsmith or watch-maker. Like them, the poet is a decorator. His business is to present the raw material of life in a pleasant and shapely form. Dryden’s view is echoed by his successor, Alexander Pope, in the middle of the 18th century.

“True wit is Nature to advantage dressed,

What oft was thought but never so well expressed,” he tells us, and wit, according to the critics of the time, was the soul of poetry.

The romantic poets, who discredited so many critical canons of their eighteenth century forbears, ousted also the theory of imitation out of the field, envisaging Imagination as the distinguishing attribute of the poet. Poetry was recognised as a creative act and has since been accepted as one of the most exalted creative functions of man.

But even the romantics could not altogether supersede the time-honoured notion that the primary end of poetry was to teach. On the other hand, a moral function of a higher order than ever before was attributed to poetry by the poets and critics of this age. Wordsworth himself, the arch-rebel against neo-classical, critical dicta, asserted that “poetry was the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge” and deliberately devoted his poetic genius for the purpose of instructing men in the moral value of intimate communion with Nature. To Shelley, again, Poetry was “at once the centre and circumference of knowledge” and its function was “to strengthen the faculty which was the organ of the nature of man.” “The great instrument of moral good,” he tells us, is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.” Shelley indeed recognised that the poet cannot be subservient to a narrow moral purpose. But, he asserted, “poetry awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thoughts.” “Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void for ever craves for food.” The moral influence of poetry was, thus, both profound and incalculable. Poets were “the unacknowledged legislators or mankind.” They could, by the magic incantation of their verse, usher in the golden age.

It is not surprising that in the sentimental and didactic Victorian era, the utilitarian conception of poetry should find ready and almost universal approbation from its readers as well as its practitioners. Of Tennyson, the supreme representative of this age, it has been said, and said rightly, that “he tied the tin-kettle of his morality to the tale of his pegasus”. Arnold harnessed his poetic muse to the celebration of the virtues of stoical endurance and calm detachment in the face of a grim, complicated and fundamentally non-human world, brought into being by the rapid advance of technology and science; Browning devoted himself to the exaltation of courage and panegyrizing a strenuous faith and a rather facile optimism. The few poets of the age who regarded poetry as an art to be cultivated as an end in itself and not as a vehicle for moralistic propaganda, were isolated from the main stream of Victorian poetry. Their poetry indeed revealed a strong impress of foreign influence, and many of them were frowned upon as protagonists of the ‘Fleshly School’ of poetry.

It is only in the present age that it has been widely and unreservedly recognised that the end of poetry is not the dissemination of any doctrine–moral or otherwise–and that poetry is not to be evaluated principally on the basis of the logic and cogency of the philosophy that it conveys or is supposed to convey. Whatever the reason that impels the few present-day readers of poetry to read it, it is certainly not the desire for ‘self-improvement’. Poetry has, at last, been accepted as an art to be enjoyed and judged, like painting and music, by no other standards than those that belong to art.

Now, the primary function of art is the communication of certain thought-and-feeling patterns intuitively apprehended by or revealed to the artist, through a material medium. Accordingly, poetry, like painting, music and sculpture should strictly be judged purely formal standards. Though this is widely recognised in theory, most readers, even today, expect to find in poetry values other than formal and are dismayed when they miss them. When read a poem, they look for its ‘meaning’, by which they mean something that can be put more succinctly, logically and simply in prose. This is otherwise described as the ‘thought’ or the ‘substance’ of the poem, and when readers are unable to extract such ‘thought’ or meaning from the poem they read, they regard the poem as ‘obscure’ or treat it as a failure.

As if in revolt against this tendency, many present-day poets have tried to compose verse that baffles all attempts to get at its logical meaning; and some have even attempted to write as though to demonstrate that poetry is not only lacking in ‘thought’ but has in fact no recognisable relation to what is ordinarily described as ‘life’. It has in fact been seriously asserted that to inquire whether a poem is ‘true’ is as meaningless as to ask whether a sunset or a symphony is true. Eliot’s declaration that “poetry can communicate before it is understood” is widely acclaimed as an unchallengeable dictum.

Is then poetry to be regarded as a function absolutely without a moral or intellectual value? Is it wholly illegitimate for a poet to make his poetry a vehicle for doctrines or ideas, and for a reader to expect to find them? Is Beauty the ostensible end of poetry, as of the other arts, to be deemed, despite Keats’ dictum, as a value different in kind from ‘Truth’, instead of being identical with it.

Two works, one critical and the other mainly philosophical, published recently by Raymond Tschumi and Leon Vivante respectively assist, not a little, in the formulation of at least tentative answers to these vital questions of criticism. The two critics, working on these problems independently, arrive at similar conclusions. Prof. Tschumi points out, at the outset, that while a good deal of poetry is not a vehicle of ‘thought’ at all, there exists a great variety of poems which is. But poetical thought is fundamentally different in quality from philosophical thought. Lucretius’ de rerum natura and Bridges’ Testament of Beauty are outstanding examples of poems “where the doctrine clearly stands out and mars the feeling. The vocabulary in these poems is the same and is used in the same way as philosophical vocabulary. The author states and prescribes, he does not suggest and convince. His method is essentially speculative and didactic, and his prosody is but an elegant cover for a philosophical text.” Such poems, in short, belong rather to the realm of philosophy than of poetry.

But, on the other hand, the thought of Milton and Dante is truly poetical. Both these poets “introduce ideas in their poems and these ideas are religious myths which appeal to the feelings, and being emotionally felt, can be introduced in a poem.” Similarly though T. S. Eliot indentifies his thought with Catholic doctrine, “the poems which are clearly connected with this doctrine, the Four Quartets, are related to circumstances of the poet’s life and are inspired by personal experience. They are true poetry despite the fact that Eliot gives an impression of complete det ment. “The impersonality of the poet is necessary in order to communicate with the reader, but the approach to the ideas of a poem must be emotional, then perhaps intellectual. The substance of poetical thought eludes all conscious effort at reducing it to abstract terms.”

Besides being emotionally felt by the poet, thought must also be capable of stirring the imagination and feelings of the reader. Otherwise it cannot legitimately find a place in poetry. When a purely intellectual individual belief is expressed in a poem, as for instance in Donne’s Holy Sonnets, the doctrine is an obstacle to the reader, for he does not share the emotion of the poet. But philosophical ideas concerned with the fundamental and ultimate problems of life are not dangerous to poetry, for though these ideas may not be intellectually assented to by the reader, their emotional qualities may be felt by him. The difference between philosophical and poetical thought lies precisely in this difference of purpose, viz., “whether ideas are used to create a poetical state of mind or to expound a philosophy.” If the ideas are expressed as static and abstract concepts, the result cannot be poetry, however valuable the ideas are in themselves. But abstract thought is not necessarily static; it may be a source of emotion and a creative function. When it is thus a Source of dynamic emotional activity, it may express itself in poetry: for, as Herbert Read finely puts it, “the words are born or reborn in the act of thinking,” and this act of thinking implies the blending of emotion and thought, attributed by Eliot to the Metaphysicals, as well as the “symmetry between form and content, music and meaning, word and spirit”.

Poetical thought is thus not didactic and does not serve to expound a system rationally. Prof. Tschumi’s study of modern poetry conclusively demonstrates that in the work of the most significant philosophical poets of our time, viz., Yeats, Eliot and Read, there is a considerable wealth of original thought, but that this thought is not explicit and cannot be set out systematically in any language other than that used by the poet. Only an intuitive reading or close analysis of the poems can discover and extract it.

Leon Vivante’s examination of seventeen English poets, from Shakespeare to Thompson, leads to a similar conclusion. The thought of these poets, he finds, is independent of external data original. “It consists of subjective and eternal values rather than in philosophical concepts, and expresses the principle of inward light which, far from being an abstraction, discloses the spiritual essence of life.”

Leon Vivante’s observations on the general nature of artistic activity reveal recognition of the fact that art is neither ‘imitation as the classicists regarded it, not cerebration as some of the moderns seem to think. Art is the perpetual discovery and embodiment of the spiritual principle of life. “Modern Schools of art and poetry have eventually understood that beauty does not properly lie in the object which is represented or contemplated. Hence they have been encouraged to look for the subjective element. This critical point of view may be justified. But it is a sheer mistake to believe that this element can be better discovered by looking for it in the subconscious life, in dreams, and in magic. A thing is no less an object for the mere fact of being sought or envisaged in the subconscious…Frantically and hopelessly and in fact too much blinded in external (though sub-conscious) objectivity, many a modern artist or poet seeks the subjective or original element and finds again and again objects and remains in the aridity and arbitrariness of the abstractly objective view. He ignores the real source of depth, which lies in the consciousness, no matter if it be the ordinary consciousness of the waking state or a less apparent one. The essential and common characters of consciousness, in a kind of philosophical barbarism, are forgotten and the name of consciousness is lost. All is traced to something else. Consciousness–and conscience–either in art or literature, and in so called ‘realistic’ politics, is considered only a net of illusions, something to be entirely traced to, or made dependent upon, something else.”

But art itself is a standing refutation of aesthetic theories based on modern psychology. For “what is fundamental in all artistic activity is the self-discovering and self-realising of an original causal principle in its manifold aspects and in its integrity.” While any good poetry will bear this out, Shakespeare’s plays provide perhaps the most unquestionable evidence. Hence, as Leon Vivante observes, “Shakespeare’s works have the merit of being the strongest bulwark against modern psychology. So long as Shakespeare continues to have influence on the English language, it will be difficult for English speaking people to forget the soul for the complexes, the instincts, the subconscious, the unconscious or the tropisms. Indeed the same well-deserving quality or influence can be ascribed to all poetry. But as regards Shakespeare, it is in a particularly high degree that the non-composite principle of subjectivity shows, as it were, under our very eyes, its absolutely inherent richness and depth.”

In a very real sense, therefore, it may be asserted that far from being divorced from objective reality, genuine poetry–and indeed all art–springs from its very deepest levels. There is a sense in which it is right to maintain that reality lies in art pre-eminently. This is the sense in which that is supremely real, which firstly has in itself its cause, and secondly, as creative thought does, knows self-causality (intimate original causality) at once as a value of certainty and as a value of universality.”

Poetry, in other words, may be regarded as the very touchstone of truth. But truth is not conceived by the poet “as if its substance lay in its practical confirmation or in a kind of correspondence between things and our representations of them.” It is rather understood as a “value of supreme identity with our deepest self and with reality, a value of directness and simplicity, exceeding the particular occasion and interest, which is ultimately a passion as love is, and grounded in the same principle.” That is why ‘truth’ finds place at all in such lines of Shakespeare as the following:

“As gentle and as jocund as to jest

Go I to fight; truth has a quiet breast.”

Keats’ poems show that, like Shakespeare, he also understood that truth cannot be “labelled or objectively defined with clear-cut compartments and outlines”. He knew that the poet may not seek knowledge as an extrinsic end but that “as an intimate motive-value, ‘beauty’ is supreme knowledge, and the two things–beauty and the knowing of the spirit–are identical.” The following seven lines of the Ode to the Nightingale testify to this, his life’s conviction and justification:

“Away, Away, for I will fly with thee,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

But on the viewless wings of Poesy,

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:

Already with thee! Tender is the night,

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

Clustered around by all her starry fays.”

“Here,” as Leon Vivante points out, “we attain the fullest and highest reality of creative thought. Its essential characters are expressed (self-revealing). Invisibility (cf. ‘the view-less wings’) is in this connection, ontologically true; for original freedom (i.e. form in the making), though essentially a felt value, is endlessly from-transcending, radically and vitally inobjective, invisible. Yet from the very core of infinity (cf. the last three lines) visible form–which is its permanent cause–arises objectively clear, still instinct with infinity, in all its power and glory.”

Shelley, a poet whose genius and temperament were so different from Keats’, revealed similar insight into the nature of ultimate spiritual reality, in four memorable instances: In the Ode to the West Wind, it is discovered and expressed above all as freedom; in the poem To a Skylark as perpetual novelty; in the Epipsychidion as Oneness, and in the quietness of the forest near Pisa as self-enshrined eternity.” His real poetic thought is not to be found in the political and social views inspiring Prometheus Unbound or in the Notes to Queen Mab or in the literary history of the philosophy of love to be found in Epipsyehidion, but in the recurrent insights enshrined in these and other poems.

In fact, it may be said not only of Shelley but of poets in general that their ‘poetic thought’ or ‘poetical insight into self-activity, is quite distinct from their more systematic thought or philosophy of life. While their more deliberate thought is under the control of the will, poetic thought is subservient to no external authority. Hence it is that the poet who consciously sets out to preach fails as a rule to write poetry.

Wherein, then, lies the moral value of art? If poetry cannot be used as a handmaid of conventional and utilitarian morality, neither can it be regarded as morally ‘useless’ as the ‘aesthetes’ perversely asserted. It has indeed a supreme moral function. This function is, “to vindicate that which is human and more than human, essential and universal, because of its intimate and profoundly original character,” and further, “to contrast and supersede conventional values and to overcome all forms of social and political group-solidarity and their blind spirit of exclusion and egoism, and to rebel against the excess of organisation which kills the heart of man and life itself.” Milton, whose stern puritanical ideals of character are so antipathetic to many moderns, knew what he was talking about when he said that “a poet who would write well hereafter in laudable things...must himself be a great poem”. For, as Leon Vivante eloquently observes, “hate, cruelty, presumption, arrogance have never made good poetry, and that is a test of their being or not being rooted in the very depth of the spiritual essence. Freedom must perpetually merge in its eternity; love must be felt as a reality on principio, this is to say, in its intrinsic; omni-original character; self-realisation must be at one and the same time a self-transcending principle; or else they have no practical (or poetical) value. They must be felt as not only belonging to men in general, not only to man essentially or universally beyond any barrier, but to life itself, even to being itself to its destiny, whatever it may be.”

Back