Susan, I'm thinking of a male reviewer who criticized Rhina P. Espaillat's poems for their "modernist smallness," rather than going on to tackle "greater things." The reviewer listed her poems' domestic subjects and sighed, as if it was self-explanatory that poems "about" such mundane things couldn't possibly be wrestling with Big Philosophical Questions.

What a dork.

"Beauty is truth; truth beauty," -- that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

- John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos: Or if Sion Hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa's Brook that flow'd
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th' Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.
And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumin, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justifie the wayes of God to men.

- John Milton, Paradise Lost

The aim of the poet is to inform or delight, or to combine together, in what he says, both pleasure and applicability to life. In instructing, be brief in what you say in order that your readers may grasp it quickly and retain it faithfully.

- Horace, Ars Poetica

Just saying.

The way I see it (one of the two or three conversations going on here--I don't mean to exclude others) is that Nemo (correct me if I’m wrong, Nemo) is recognizing the irreducibleness of the poetic image. A poem or an image cannot really be “translated” into rational concepts, not fully anyway. It’s an experience of the whole person—or “soul,” as I prefer to call it. Philosophical poetry or poetic philosophy doesn’t “mean” in the way conceptual philosophy does; it conveys a sense of meaningfulness, the way a Bach cello suite does, as whole as life.

At the same time, the Bach cello piece or even the Tarkovsky image contains an immemorial storehouse of symbolic knowledge and culture—the spiritual and mental DNA of generations of life, art, philosophy-theology, and more. Not “doctrine” in a direct way, but culture that comes out of a unity of being--of shared knowledge.

About “symbolic knowledge”: The Neoplatonist Proclus said that there are two ways to apprehend transcendent or vertical realities. The first is wordless and imageless contemplation of metaphysical realities, in prayer and meditation. This is the way of some saints, monks, mystics. The second is through the symbolic imagination, since the imagination and symbols share in something of the world of the senses and also of the intelligible, the world of meanings. It’s what Henry Corbin called the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world. This is the way of the philosophical or mystical artist. Dante put it this way: angels do not need language, since as pure celestial intelligence they apprehend the real directly; human beings do need language, because our apprehension of the non-literal real mostly happens in that middle realm, between the senses and the intellect.

And it can’t be accurate that “it is a mistake to consider poetry as a vehicle to deliver or convey something other than itself,” as Nemo said, since that would mean that King David, Rumi, Dante, and the author of the Bhagavad Gita made a mistake. But I don’t believe this necessarily contradicts what Tarkovsky and the other people that Nemo quotes said: The poem is the thing itself, that’s what makes it poetry, and that’s what makes it (I am painfully aware) untranslatable. Poetry or painting or architecture or any art communicates philosophically by transporting the listener or viewer to an experience of the idea when it is still in its matrix.

Yes, Andrew, my comment, “it is a mistake to consider poetry as a vehicle to deliver or convey something other than itself,” suffered from a certain amount of rhetorical over-zealousness and as a result skirted dangerously close to a sterile aestheticism. I didn't mean that poetry is only self-referential, but rather, as you have clarified, that the poetic image is first and foremost irreducible. Meaningfulness here means meaning's fullness, full of meanings, and in fact many of those meanings can contradict one another—which is why a single-minded rational approach strangles an image from the beginning. The image is not the servant of the idea, but rather the ground/matrix of all ideation.

Nemo

"The basis of all excellence is truth: he that professes love ought to feel its power." (Johnson)
An effective poem is such that it brings truth to bear of some kind or other and makes it accessible to the reader. The truth need not be what you would get from a philosophy book necessarily, though it sometimes is; it is very often some truth, even indefinable as it may be, that is gathered or felt of the human experience. The ultimate function to result from effective poetry and indeed literature is to preserve and celebrate as well as to help realize truths about our human experience we might not otherwise have realized or apprehended so potently. This does not mean one need sit down and think from the outset I will convey this and that truth by means of poetry (there can be hazards in that, when taken to its extreme); but in writing effective poetry, truth may come to bear and be made accessible to an audience.

Poetry helps us come into a fuller awareness of our being and also to preserve our awareness and wisdom. Sometimes the motives of poetry as a primary end can include teaching this or that, rather as a secondary and subordinate component under the main. But I think in all cases truth can be gleamed from effective poetry whatever the kind, as poetry in its essence helps us face and sense some truth about our being. As Heidegger put it Poetry and language helps us dwell:

"What then does ich bin mean? The old word bauen, to which the bin belongs, answers: ich bin, du bist mean: I dwell, you dwell. The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is Buan, dwelling. To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. it means to dwell. The old word bauen, which says that man is insofar as he dwells, this word barren however also means at the same time to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine."

All I can say is, I'd bet a sawbuck you guys don't think like this when you're writing. As the great comedian put it, "Enough with the small talk -- off with the clothes!"

Best,

Ed

But Ed, I was sawbuck naked when I wrote that. :eek:

Heidegger, someone said a while back. Do you mean to say there is someone here who understands Heidegger? Share your knowledge wih us do. And you can chuck in Husserl while yo'ure about it.

I like a lot of kinds of poetry, Susan. Variety is the spice, etc., and this isn’t about rules or restrictions. But I find there is very little current poetry that creates the sort of “entire world” of altered consciousness that Nemo mentions in an earlier post on this thread. In my own writing, I myself rarely pull off a shred of it. It can’t be forced or contrived, so I slog along and look for it where I can get it.

You bring up the poetry of Alicia Stallings, and Julie brings up Rhina Espaillat, and I admit (bring on the fire and brimstone!) that I don’t find that quality in their work. Brilliant writing and striking insight, yes, but not that. I like it but it is not what I most want in poetry. If we are naming names, I will say that among the best-known “formalist” and anthologized poets who do it for me, David Mason in his lyrics probably comes closest. There are others too who are less well known.

You can turn it into a women’s issue, but here’s my five-word response to that: Hildegaard of Bingen. Emily Dickinson.

The neo-formalist aesthetic in general tends to downplay the visionary and hermetic for the practical and skeptical; it favors Larkin over Yeats. For me the priorities or criteria are reversed. Larkin was a good poet, but I’m not sure he knew the difference between Plato and Playdough, or metaphysics and Marmite.

Ok, I guess I’ve just committed Spheresy. Bring on the Inquisitors!


Meanwhile, I’m hoping that Bill Lantry has more to say on this: “Those are the two questions that most interest me: what can we say about beauty, and why are we so reluctant to say anything about it?” So far I draw a blank. But the questions are evocative.

John, I suspect you take so much delight in claiming not to understand Heidegger, that the gauntlet you've thrown down seems mostly a rhetorical flourish. But to my mind, no philosopher has rationally tackled the ineffabilities of poetry better than he. Read poetically, I think he is clear as a bell.


".....the exciting question: how can that which by its very nature remains hidden ever become a measure? For something that man measures himself by must after all impart itself, must appear. But if it appears, it is known. The god, however, is unknown, and he is the measure nonetheless. Not only this, but the god who remains unknown, must by showing himself as the one he is, appear as the one who remains unknown. God's manifestness—not only he himself—is mysterious.

A strange measure for ordinary and in particular for all merely scientific ideas, certainly not a palpable stick or rod but in truth simpler to handle than they, provided our hands do not abruptly grasp but are guided by gestures befitting the measure here to be taken. This is done by a taking which at no time clutches at the standard but rather takes it in a concentrated perception, a gathered taking-in, that remains a listening.

Martin Heidegger (trans, Albert Hofstadter)
Poetry, Language, Thought: "...Poetically Man Dwells


That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery.

Martin Heidegger (trans, John M. Anderson / E. Hans Freund)
Discourse On Thinking: Memorial Address


To write about something you must write with it, you must write/be in it: within it. Hence the poetic thinking of Heidegger. Oh, he had other political problems as well, but his writings on poetry (on Holderlin in particular) are exquisite and invaluable to me. He walks the rational as far as it can go, and if he needs to re-invent the lexical wheel near the far edge of thought where cerebration falters, then he merely proves himself as much poet as philosopher.

What Andrew says about variety and spice holds true for me as well. In fact, despite all my comments here, I adore Alexander Pope. But I also do not lose sight of my poetic ideals; and these ideals would not be ideals if they were easily made manifest. One of the reasons I may seem to rail against light verse on these boards is because I think it is true that the so-called new formalism tends to elevate it at the expense of "the visionary and hermetic" and thus gives the impression that formal poetry lends itself better to the one that the other. I disagree with that, and feel it vital to take a stand now and again for the contemporary marriage of the formal and the visionary.

Nemo