Seven Romantic Poets Reviewed in Seven Lines: New at Lute & Drum

New poetry by Nathaniel Mackey! Mark Scroggins (who else?) on Adorno and model soldiers!  A story by Magdalena Zurawaski! And much, much more—including my own modest contribution, a review of seven Romantic poets in seven lines, the first in a Lute & Drum series called "Seven Things."  It's a fine new journal with a very slick design, and you can find it all here.

Here's a description of the contents from J. Peter Moore's editorial introduction:

This specter of aesthetic sociality emerges in Magdalena Zurawski’s “The Lamb,” when the professor protagonist realizes that literary meaning, like veterinary obstetrics, depends upon an a community of attentive midwives. Similarly in Edric Mesmer’s sequence from Strawberry Island, exilic regionalism undermines individual property rights: “local axiom—no one ever really owns an umbrella.” In our first installment of Moonlighting, a recurring feature that focuses on writers’ para-literary avocations, Mark Scroggins takes us through the anti-social exercise of raising an army in one’s basement, as he discusses his long-time obsessive-compulsive affair with model soldiers. In our other recurring segment, First Thought/Seven Things (a list of one-sentence reviews addressing a single topic) Robert Archambeau gives us the bathroom graffiti guide to Romantic Poetry. 

Rounding out the issue, Ben Lee’s review of The Feel Trio mines the gentle ferocity of Fred Moten’s poetic insistence (after Édouard Glissant) that diasporic metaphysics begin with the “consent to not be a single being.” And finally, in murmuring tones of awakened consciousness Nathaniel Mackey returns us to those verdant boughs of sugar maple: “So it was green loomed out my window.” In his “Said to Have Been Heard to Say Hush,” we find perhaps the clearest annunciation of that lost past that pervades present day Riddle, that “Remembered moment lamenting / its exit.” In Mackey’s hand, the indestructible city, the little city of Lute & Drum, becomes an upper room where music plays on in our absence.

The Wound and the Self: Notes on Rousseau, Individualism, and Mystical Experience

So the new semester has begun, and I find I'm teaching the Romantic poets again.  I'm always struck by the strange contradictions of the group: reactionary yet revolutionary, nature-loving but with a strong contingent of city-bound cockneys, obsessed with the past yet driven to invent new forms and new ways of living.  One of the more striking of these contradictions comes in the confluence of individualism and mysticism.  It makes for a strange pairing because it involves both an emphasis on the self and a drive to lose the self in something larger.  We see it in many places. It's there, for example, in William Blake.  He was such an insistent individualist that he felt he must create his own system of religion, lest he be "enslaved" by that of another man.  But he also wrote, in The Book of Thel, of how clinging to our little, temporary selfhood was a kind of failure, and that we should embrace the way we dissolve into the living universe after we cease to be.  The combination of an intense preoccupation with individuality and an emphasis on a mystical loss of identity lies at the core of Wordsworth's sensibility, too.  The Prelude sets out to rival the great epics of the past, but instead of dealing with the fate of civilizations (think The Iliad) or with the scheme of the cosmos (think The Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost), it will be a record of "the growth of the poet's mind" in all its individual particularity.  At the same time, though, it's also a poem about the dissolving boundary between the self and the natural world, and its most powerful moments depict the loss of self-identity in a sublime and pulsating fusion of spirit and nature.

Maybe I shouldn't be surprised at the combination of individualism and mystical self-loss.  They might just have something to do with one another.  One certainly gets that sense when reading that greatest of proto-Romantics, Rousseau.  Rousseau was certainly a believer in the individual.  Although he never actually wrote of the "noble savage," he did argue, in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, that humanity in the state of nature was solitary; and his Confessions constituted a tremendous innovation in literature because of their candor and specificity in giving the details, including the unflattering and trivial details, of a life.  What is more, his famous Of the Social Contract argues that the individual precedes society: collective life doesn't precede the individual and form him, but comes about when individuals agree a collective interest and a social formation.  The pioneering sociologist Émile Durkheim takes issue with this kind of thinking (as embodied in the Utilitarian philosophers who emerged in the wake of Rousseau) when, in The Division of Labor in Society, he objects to “deducing society from the individual” because, in his view, “collective life is not born from individual life, but it is, on the contrary, the second which is born from the first. It is on this condition alone that one can explain how the personal individuality of social units has been able to be formed and enlarged.”  It is wrong, writes Durkheim, to suppose that there ever were " “isolated and independent individuals who… could enter into relationships with one another in order to co-operate, for they had no other reason to bridge the empty gas surrounding them, and to associate together… this theory, which is so widely held, postulates a veritable creation ex nihilo.  But this is the voice of the systems-obsessed late nineteenth century objecting to the Romantic individualism that came before.  Rousseau is the full-throated prophet of that Romantic individualism.

With that individualism, though, there comes a certain melancholy loneliness.  Consider the following passage, from Rousseau's posthumously published Reveries of the Solitary Walker.  Rousseau has been wandering in the hills after harvest season has passed, gathering botanical samples.  The fields, once crowded with peasants taking in the crops and reveling townsfolk, has emptied out:

The country was still green and pleasant, but it was deserted and many of the leaves had fallen; everything gave an impression of solitude and impending winter.  This picture evoked mixed feelings of gentle sadness that were too closely akin to my age and experience for me not to make the comparison.  I saw myself at the close of an innocent and unhappy life, with a soul still full of intense feelings and a mind still adorned with a few flowers, even if they were already blighted by sadness and withered by care.  Alone and neglected, I could feel the approach of the first frosts and my failing imagination no longer filled my solitude with beings formed after the desires of my heart.  Sighing I said to myself: What have I done in this world?  I was created to live, and I am dying without having lived.  At least I am not to blame; even if I cannot offer up to my maker the good works which I was prevented from accomplishing, I can at least pay him my tribute of frustrated good intentions, of sound sentiments that were rendered ineffectual, and of a patience which was proof against the scorn of mankind.  Touched by these thoughts, I retraced the history of my soul from youth to the years of maturity and then during the long period in which I have lived cut off from the society of men, the solitude in which I shall no doubt end my days.  I looked back fondly on all the affections of my heart, its loving yet blind attachments, and on the ideas which had nourished my mind for the last few years...

The lonely, dying scene seems to Rousseau like a parallel to his own wandering life as it comes to its final years—and this is important.  He looks at the world and sees himself.  Indeed, he's unlike most thinkers who came before him in the degree to which he obsesses over himself: he plays a kind of symphony of his own soul's journey, with that individual soul's desires and regrets and self-pity, its sense of solitude, and its consolations.  This is a huge affirmation of the importance of the individual life and its little journey, and even presents a fall and redemption story of sorts: he failed to live as he ought, but discovered that this was inevitable, and came in the end to a kind of mild wisdom and gratitude.  But this story doesn't start in Eden, at the dawn of history, with Adam and Eve, and end with the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ: it takes place in the individual life.  We, as individuals, are where all the real action takes place.  This kind of thinking makes each of us very important, but it also traps us in our own little stories, rather than uniting us in a larger story and set of symbols relevant to a whole community of faith.

Along with this deep investment in individuality, though, Rousseau tells us about a release from that individuality, one bordering upon a kind of mystical experience.  After making his way back into town, he sees a Great Dane loping towards him, followed by a carriage careering around, dangerously out of control.  He braces himself to leap to safety, but too late: he is struck, and lies unconscious for a time.  When he wakes in the arms of townsmen, he describes the following experience:

Night was coming on.  I saw the sky, , some stars, and a few leaves.  This sensation was a moment of delight.  I was conscious of nothing else.  In this instant I was being born again, and it seemed as if all I perceived was filled with my frail existence.  Entirely taken up by the present, I could remember nothing; I had no distinct notion of myself as a person, nor had I the least idea of what had just happened to me.  I did not know who I was, nor where I was; I felt neither pain, fear, nor anxiety.  I watched my blood flowing as I might have watched a stream, without even thinking that the blood had anything to do with me.  I felt throughout my whole being such a wonderful calm, that whenever I recall this feeling I can find nothing to compare with it in all the pleasures that stir our lives.

I'm sure neuroscientists could describe what happened to Rousseau's brain after the impact, and explain his perceptions in terms of the effects of physical trauma on brain function.  But what's important isn't the physiognomy, but Rousseau's experience, and his depiction of that experience.  The very thing into which he'd been drawn by his reflections on nature—his selfhood, his identity—has vanished.  He is born anew, without any of the particulars of the long journey of the soul he'd been recounting.  For this one brief moment he has no past, and no sense of belonging to his own body: the blood could be anyone's, and is of no concern to him.  He's been released from the burdens of selfhood and sees the world as if he were no one at all, as if it flowed through him without the filtering resistance of identity.  It's much like the state of religious bliss and selflessness achieved by many religious mystics.  But it is intimately linked to the idea of individualism, because the pleasure Rousseau feels is the bliss of release from the burdens of his lonely self.  The solitary Romantic implies the mystic Romantic the way a wound implies a cure.

Kenneth Rexroth's Other Worlds: Notes on "On What Planet"

So there I was, rooting around on the Bureau of Public Secrets website, when I ran across Kenneth Rexroth's "On What Planet," a poem I hadn't thought about since I'd chanced to see it in the library as an undergraduate, when I was wandering through the stacks and pulling down random books of poetry to read.  The moment I ran across this poem on the BPS site, the whole thing came back to me: that coastline, those owls, and that final turn out toward something much bigger.  I think the reason the poem had lodged itself in the back of my brain, waiting for something to trigger its resurgence into consciousness, has something to do with the simple, powerful structure of the thing.  Mike Theune is very keen on the notion of the turn, or volta, as a structural device at the core of poetry—so much so that he's devoted a web journal to giving readings of the various ways poems turn.  It's the turn, here in Rexroth's poem, that's the trick: it takes us from one kind of experience into something different and much more powerful, something that can make us rethink the experience of those stanzas that precede the turn.  Check it out.

The first stanza, taken by itself, is a decent enough bit of landscape. 

Uniformly over the whole countryside

The warm air flows imperceptibly seaward;

The autumn haze drifts in deep bands

Over the pale water;

White egrets stand in the blue marshes;

Tamalpais, Diablo, St. Helena

Float in the air.

Climbing on the cliffs of Hunter’s Hill

We look out over fifty miles of sinuous

Interpenetration of mountains and sea.

It really shows you where Robert Hass gets some of his sensibility for landscape, doesn't it?  The sense of forces moving dynamically through the landscape, the proper names of specific places, the land and water equally important.  But so what?  Well, there's this:

Leading up a twisted chimney,

Just as my eyes rise to the level

Of a small cave, two white owls

Fly out, silent, close to my face.

They hover, confused in the sunlight,

And disappear into the recesses of the cliff.

It takes a bit of a different tack from the opening stanza, since we find we are not just looking at the landscape from on high, at a kind of Apollonian distance, as observers above the action.  We're a part of the scene, and disturb it.  And what's more alarming, we suddenly see the landscape—or, at any rate, its inhabitants—looking back at us.  Those owls in Rexroth's are perfect for this, since they're all eyes.  When I read these lines, I remember a particularly terrifying moment in my Canadian youth, when I stood on a granite outcropping high above an isolated lake, and what I'd taken to be a large white stone on the cliff's edge suddenly swiveled its head around and fixed me in its horrible, huge glare: it was a snowy owl, and I, the observer, suddenly became the observed.

Anyway: the more I think about Rexroth's poem, the more I think Hass owes to it: there's a moment in part four of Hass' "On the Coast Near Sausalito" when the speaker looks right into the living eye of the fish he's caught, and feels himself caught in that uncanny gaze—so alien, but still something we recognize, and that recognizes us—is a moment straight out of "On What Planet."

But even with this development, the poem has yet to take its major turn.  Look what happens in the concluding stanza of the poem:

All day I have been watching a new climber,

A young girl with ash blonde hair

And gentle confident eyes.

She climbs slowly, precisely,

With unwasted grace.

While I am coiling the ropes,

Watching the spectacular sunset,

She turns to me and says, quietly,

“It must be very beautiful, the sunset,

On Saturn, with the rings and all the moons.”

The girl is a kind of further development of the owl image: just as we'd added more characters to the poem with the owls, we add another here; and just as the owls introduced the concept of a gaze other than the speaker's to the poem, the girl is given to us as a seeing entity, with her "gentle confident eyes" foregrounded.  And the real turn comes when we get to see what she sees: she takes in the landscape to which we've been introduced, and combines it with her own sense of wonder, to ask about even more exotic and spectacular sunsets. 

There's so much going on here I hardly know where to start.  For one thing, the introduction of a younger, more naïve viewer of the landscape places the poem in the Romantic tradition, specifically in the tradition of Wordsworth's great "Tintern Abbey," where the speaker (let's call him Wordsworth) turns to his younger sister and thinks about the difference between how she perceives the landscape and how he sees it.  We get some great themes.  There's the importance of each person's particular subjective experience—how we share an objective world, but nevertheless have our own private interiority.  There's also the difference between adult perception and childhood perception.  Both Wordsworth and Rexroth give the edge to childhood perception, but for different reasons.  For Wordsworth, the child's perception is less mediated by thought and memory than the adult's.  For Rexroth, the child sort of juices up or amplifies the existing scene, allowing wonder at the present beauty to lead to even greater wonder at imagined beauties.  (I think it's significant that Rexroth has the adult engaged in some mundane, utilitarian tasks while this happens—it heightens the contrast between down-to-earth or practical adult and wonder-oriented child).

But to put Rexroth's poem in the Wordsworthian context doesn't exhaust the thing.  There's more!  The girl's observation about Saturn defamiliarizes the whole scene.  We've been thinking about the landscape of the early stanzas as impressive, but when we're asked to compare it to a sunset on Saturn, everything becomes less familiar.  We think of the exoticness of other worlds, and then we think of our own world not as something complete in itself, but as one of many worlds—not as nature, but as one little particular articulation of galaxy upon galaxy of nature's variants.  Our world doesn't just seem grand—it becomes strange, as weird and particular a combination of elements as are found on Saturn, or anywhere else.  The large richness of infinite planetary beauties opens before us, and this makes our own scene not just spectacular and big, as it had seemed, but particular and small too: it's a big place of grand forces and jutting sea cliffs, but it's also, at the same time, our own dear little home in the vastness of space.  The effect is to render the scene uncanny, familiar and strange at the same time.

The real kicker, though, that comes with the poem's turn toward the girl and her observation, is the way we move from one kind of sublimity to another, more complicated kind.  The landscape in the opening stanzas of the poems is sublime in the way Edmund Burke wrote of sublimity in his famous Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.  Here, Burke speaks of the qualities of sublime objects—their vastness, ruggedness, jaggedness of line, and so forth—that mark them out from the merely beautiful.  Those cliffs in the first two stanzas, and their interprenetration with the sea, are sublime stuff by Burkean criteria.  But the girl takes us somewhere else, and, indeed, somewhere more profound.  When she sees the grand, sublime landscape, she thinks of something even vaster.  We were dwarfed by the landscape before, but now we're really dwarfed by the idea of the solar system, and behind that by the idea of the infinite plenitude of worlds, each with its own sun, its own grand vistas, its own sunsets—a deep sublimity of vastness upon vastness.  But (and this is the crucial thing) we're not overwhelmed by this.  In some strange sense, we've mastered it more than it has mastered us, because we—or, to be specific, the girl, and through her, the rest of us—have contained these vast multitudes in our minds.  It's not just that there are an infinitude of planetary landscapes and exotic sunsets, it's that we have imagined them, and their possibility.  This is one of the kinds of sublimity Kant talks about in his Critique of Judgment, where the sublime isn't just constituted by vastness, but by our ability to comprehend that vastness.  This kind of sublime experience doesn't just tower over us: it affirms the power of our minds to take in such infinite vistas.  It's a kind of affirmation not only of the outer world, but of the power of our imaginations to encompass it.  The sublime experience ennobles us, as well as the world (or, in the case of this poem, the worlds).

It's particularly important, I think, that it is a child who, in Rexroth's poem, calls us back to the power of our own imaginations.  This makes such power innate, rather than learned.  In fact, it makes such power latent, waiting to be rediscovered in us through our encounter with the world as seen by the child, or by the poet.  This belief in the innate, but easily forgotten, power of the imagination is what marks Rexroth, for me, as a Romantic.  And it's why I'm glad to have found my way back to a poem whose powers remained latent in a forgotten corner of my memory.

The English Opium Eater and Others

Here's the beginning of a longish review I wrote of Robert Morrison's The English Opium-Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey (by Robert Morrison) and Susan Wolfson's Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action.  It appears in the latest issue of Essays in Criticism:

The Romantics were famous inventors of themselves: a hosier's son could become a prophet dreaming up his own mythology and marrying Heaven to Hell; a club-footed boy from Aberdeenshire could turn himself into the mad, bad heart-throb of Europe; and the provincial son of an obscure lawyer could proclaim himself the universal ‘man speaking to men’ in a new kind of poetry. None of this invention, of course, was ex nihilo, and in different ways two new studies, Robert Morrison's The English Opium-Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey and Susan J. Wolfson's Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action, trace the manner in which Romantics wove their identities out of the cultural strands around them.For the young Thomas De Quincey, out to invent himself, almost any social milieu would do so long as it wasn't the one he knew growing up in the house of a bullying older brother and a mother whose friendship with the Evangelical writer Hannah More drove her ever deeper into an austere and censorious piety. De Quincey's father, who died when De Quincey was quite young, had been a prosperous merchant in Manchester, but the worlds that attracted De Quincey lay both above and below a merchant's station. He was taken up as a protégé by Lady Carbery, who sought to turn the talkative lad into a proper country gentleman who could ride and shoot with the best of them. The diminutive De Quincey didn't excel in gentlemanly acts of physical prowess, but he did enjoy the idea of aristocracy: the ‘De’ was something his mother tacked on to the family name one season at Bath, an affectation of Norman lineage the son kept long after the mother abandoned it. He kept, too, an aristocratic disdain for mercantile Manchester. ‘In this place trade is the religion, and money is the god’, De Quincey wrote in a letter to his mother, ‘Every object I see reminds me of those occupations which run counter to the bent of my own nature … I cannot stir out of doors but I am nosed by a factory, a cotton-bag, a cotton-dealer, or something else allied to that most detestable commerce’. His escape from the mercantile world took him to London, where he pioneered the role that would be played so well by such luminaries as Poe and Baudelaire: the drug-addled, convention-flaunting literary bohemian. He became a kind of low-rent flâneur, falling in with dodgy characters and taking up with prostitutes. De Quincey claimed that one of these, a timid girl of 15 he calls ‘Ann of Oxford Street’, saved his life. He writes that he wanted to save her too, but missed a crucial rendezvous and lost track of her for ever. Morrison makes a good case that we may doubt the veracity of the whole episode. Indeed, Ann seems very much an amalgam of Mary Magdalene and the female vagrants from the pages of Lyrical Ballads: it is probable that De Quincey not only invented a bohemian role for himself, but created his own supporting cast.London life also led De Quincey deep into the arms of that deadliest species of false friend, the moneylender. It was a fatal moment...

The rest of the article is available here.

Anywhere Out of the World: Locating Romanticism

It's the end of August, and I'm already back to teaching. Since I've got a seminar on Romanticism this fall, I've been trying to think through just what that term has meant.

Definition's a tricky business. On the one hand, one doesn't want to fall into the trap of believing in trans-historically valid ideal types, or eternal forms. That is, you just don't want to treat Romanticism as a simply definable essence of some kind that pops up here and there in history, perhaps locked in battle with another trans-historical absolute called Classicism (I do, though, see Romanticism as a structure of feeling that didn't end when Queen Victoria hopped on the throne, and hasn't gone away yet — it comes out of conditions that haven't entirely disappeared). On the other hand, it's just as dubious to go over into some boneheaded nominalism, and refuse to believe that any word other than a proper noun has any meaning whatsoever. Abstractions may well repress certain elements of the whole truth, but they also express important things that we can't get at any other way. Besides, abstractions are like rationalizations: just try getting through a week without using one.

My usual move, when I want to define something, is to root around a bit in the history of the term, looking at how it's been used over a period of time (Raymond Williams is my guide, here, and Keywords my holy text). In the case of the term Romanticism, I'm not quite up to tracing the whole history, but a look at how it's been defined by some of the major critical thinkers over the last century or so is a decent enough start. It's what I did in an essay about Nick Cave and Romanticism I just finished drafting, and from which the rest of these remarks are adapted.

Carl Schmitt argued that Romanticism was all about the individual's "subjective occasionalism," a kind of fetishizing of the moment of individual spontaneity — in a literary context one might think of Jack Kerouac, hopped up on Benzedrine, and clattering away on his scroll-fed typewriter, or shouting "Go, man, go!" at Ginsberg's Six Gallery reading of Howl as the late-blooming apotheosis of sort of Romantism. The Encyclopédie Larousse tells us that it's really all a matter of form, of artists who "freed themselves from the classical rules of composition and style" — one thinks of Paganini cutting loose with defiantly flashy and unruly solos. M.H. Abrams says it's all a matter of emphasizing the visionary imagination, with the mind seen as a light-casting lamp, not a mirror reflecting the world as it is. Morse Peckham said it was all a matter of self-assertion, and so did Bertrand Russell ("Titantic cosmic self-assertion," said Russell, thinking of Lord Byron as the first great rebel without a cause). Irving Babbitt went a step further, saying Romanticism was an "anarchy of the imagination," such as you might find in Rimbaud (not an example he uses). But Karl Mannheim went the other way, saying Romanticism was fundamentally conservative; dead-set in opposition to the ever-rising "bourgeois-capitalist mode of experiencing things" — if you've had a look at Wordsworth's depiction of Bartholomew Fair as a Dantean circle of hell (it's in The Prelude), you've seen this kind of Romanticism.

Since Romanticism can appear in so many aspects, it's no wonder, really, that Arthur O. Lovejoy shook his head in despair and said we should give the term the chuck, or at least speak of "Romanticisms" (a move that doesn't really solve the problem, any more than saying there are "types of poetry" solves the problem of defining poetry). I was almost willing to join Lovejoy, though, until the great Franco-Brazilian sociologist Michael Löwy set me straight. What holds all these loose strands we want to call "Romantic" together, for Löwy, is their opposition to capitalist modernity – their sense of not fitting at a comfortable angle vis-à-vis industrialism, the quantification and rationalization of all things, technocracy, and the general disenchantment of the world. Anarchists? Backward-looking reactionaries? Imaginative visionaries? Stylistic malcontents? Individualist outsiders? Come on in, people — Löwy's bigtop is a commodious place.

The bigtop's inhabitants all have one thing in common, though: the modern world has left them homeless — sometimes literally, in the form of the poète maudit kicked out of his garret by a greedy landlord— but usually in a more metaphorical way. It makes sense. Think about the state of things when the first generations of Romantic writers came of age: the arts, long the handmaidens of church and state, had lost that affiliation in the breakdown of the old social order, and had yet to find a new one in the gaudy commercial world that would take its place. Displaced from their old social roles, Romantic writers would leap into invented worlds, like Blake did. Or they'd dream of a transformed future world, of revolution and Utopia, like P.B. Shelley. Or they'd look to what they imagined as a lost, better world: like childhood, or village life deep in the provinces — Wordsworth's great themes. Sometimes they yearned for the fuller, more organic social life in the middle ages, the period of the romances that gave the Romantic movement its name. If they were particularly bright and observant, like the nineteen year old Mary Shelley, holed up in Switzerland with her husband Percy, Lord Byron, and their egos, the Romantics would dream of monstrous outsiders whose great minds and open hearts meant nothing to the torch-and-pitchfork bearing peasants who drove them to endless wanderings. The world did not fit, felt these dislocated artists and intellectuals, and wherever they looked, it was to turn away from the modern bourgeois world of getting and spending that seemed to have no place for them. Perhaps Baudelaire got at the situation best, when he called for a voyage going "anywhere out of the world."

Poetry/Not Poetry

Where do we draw the line between what is poetry and what isn't poetry? Or, more specifically, what makes a poem a poem? Ask a poet like Howard Nemerov, and you'll get a beautiful answer, in the form of a poem called "Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry":

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn't tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

It's nice (especially since it compliments poetry, making it fly, while prose merely falls), but in the end Nemerov's answer about the nature of poetry is evasive, offering little more than the "I'll know it when I see it" argument that people used to invoke in debates about pornography.

I don't really have a better way to answer the question, except to say that the only real way to answer anything is to quit looking for trans-historical, absolute truths and start rooting around in contexts, in the history of how a question has been answered, and the reasons those old answers made sense at the time. If we do this, I think we can say that something changed in the way we answered the question "how is poetry different from prose" right around the beginning of the nineteenth century, and that, with some small modification, the new answer poets came up with at that time is still with us. This is Romanticism, people, nor are we out of it.

One of my touchstones, when I want to think about pre-Romantic poetry in French or in English is a statement by Roland Barthes in his great, early study Writing Degree Zero. Here, he argues that for poets of the pre-Romantic period, there was a fundamental similarity between good poetry and good prose. “Poetry is always different from prose,” writes Barthes, but in the classical period “this difference is not one of essence, it is one of quantity. It does not, therefore, jeopardize the unity of language, which is an article of classical dogma.” In other words, the classical or Augustan writer doesn’t grant poetry one of the rights that we moderns and postmoderns grant it: the right to follow rules significantly different from those governing discursive prose. It is more or less the same stuff, but with the added use of particular literary devices such as rhyme and meter. Think about it: Alexander Pope's poem Essay on Man is more or less what it sounds like — a discursive, explanatory essay — it just happens to add versification. Even the title indicates a fundamental continuity between prose and poetry. Prose and poetry are more or less up to the same sort of things: explaining, talking, arguing, narrating.

And why did people write poems? Many reasons, of course: but they tended to be the same sorts of reasons one writes prose: utilitarian ones. Often poetry was a courtly game, but all games have some purpose. In this case, it was to show one's wit and cleverness — sort of a peacock's tail thing, in that verse may have seemed useless, but it was a sign of health and desirability, therefore useful in securing a mate or some sort of payoff or privilege. Not that there weren't critics of the rewarding of such displays, like Lord Burleigh, who objected to Queen Elizabeth giving Edmund Spenser a hundred pounds in recognition of a poem, shouting "All for a song?!?" Sometimes there were market motives (remember Johnson's comment that no one but a blockhead ever wrote for any reason other than money?). Sometimes there were more elevated, socially concerned ideas — think of Sir Philip Sidney's argument that poetry presents us with ideal worlds and characters we can try to emulate, since the poet "goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit. Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done... Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden." The old John Donne wrote to save souls ("batter my heart, three-personed God!"), the young John Donne wrote to get laid ("For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love!"). So: personal advancement, money, getting the girl, social improvement, didacticism: there were a host of good, utilitarian, reasons to write a poem, just as there were a host of good, utilitarian reasons to write a piece of prose. Prose and poetry were close cousins formally (one just had extra verse elements), and close cousins in terms of their telos or purpose.

Then things got weird.

They got weird right around the time the Romantics hit the stage (not that this is a bad thing: indeed, it's the beginning of everything I most love in poetry). Suddenly, poetry wasn't more-or-less continuous with prose, or prose-plus-special-effects: there was what Barthes calls a "discontinuity of language." Poetry was reborn as something very different from prose, and different from verse, too.


Consider Coleridge's famous definition of poetry in the Biographia Literaria. Here, we learn that poetry, unlike prose, generates its own rules. We learn that the poem, unlike prose, looks inward upon itself, seeking a co-ordination of all parts to the whole. And we learn that the statement or use-value or telos of the poem is secondary to its formal composition. Poetry is strangely autonomous, being all about its formal wholeness, rather than any specific external purpose. Poetry, says Coleridge, is a kind of communication “opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species… it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part." The organic harmony of the “legitimate poem,” Coleridge continues, necessitates that the parts

… support and explain each other; all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose and known influences of metrical arrangement. The philosophic critics of all ages coincide with the ultimate judgment of all countries, in equally denying the praises of a just poem, on the one hand, to a series of striking lines or distiches, each of which, absorbing the whole attention of the reader to itself, becomes disjoined from its context, and forms a separate whole, instead of a harmonizing part; and on the other hand, to an unsustained composition, from which the reader collects rapidly the general result unattracted by the component parts.

It is the fusing of all elements that is essential to the poetic work— so much so that Coleridge comes to include within the category of poetry all works, including those in prose, that reconcile all their diverse elements.

It almost doesn’t matter to Coleridge how such fusing is accomplished. Or, rather, it does matter, in that a particular form of the fusing must not be prescribed: “could a rule be given from without, poetry would cease to be poetry” says Coleridge. This does not mean the work is arbitrary, though, merely that it must generate its own rules from within. Coleridge’s most elegant formulation of this principle comes in the essay “Shakespeare’s Judgment Equal to His Genius,” where we read that “No work of true genius dares want its appropriate form, neither is there any danger of this,” because “genius cannot be lawless; for it is even this that constitutes genius — the power of acting creatively under laws of its own creation." Such self-generated rules are, in fact, Coleridge’s famous “organic form,” arising from within each true aesthetic or poetic work.

This business of the poem’s autonomy, its inner, organic wholeness, and its fusing of disparate elements is familiar enough stuff to students of Romanticism. But it’s worth rehearsing in the present context because of what it implies for the meaning of poetry. Because of its intense organic fusing-together of all of its parts, the poem has what Coleridge, in his essay on Shakespeare’s genius, calls “untranslatableness.” In a true poem, the meaning cannot be paraphrased: “it would be scarcely more difficult to push a stone out from the pyramids with the bare hand,” says Coleridge, “than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakespeare… without making the author say something else, or something worse." Indeed, the meaning, in the sense we usually reserve for that word as something comprehensible and cognizable, is irrelevant to the work’s status as a poem: the poem’s deepest meaning lies in its activity of bringing together apparently disparate elements.

One refraction of all this is the idea of the symbol. “Symbol” is a term that Coleridge uses inconsistently over the course of his career, but the important sense for the present context comes in a passage of The Statesman’s Manual where Coleridge tells us that, unlike the allegorical figure, the symbol is characterized “above all by the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal." Unlike the allegory, with its one-to-one relation of sign and meaning, the symbol offers polyvalence and endless suggestive possibilities. Interpreting the symbolic work is an ongoing coming-toward and escaping-of full apprehension (think of Coleridge's own "Kubla Khan" here: it is pregnant with meaning, but you can't pin it down to any particular meaning). The symbolic work is certainly at a far remove from the simple, discursive statement of a particular meaning. As Coleridge states in an appendix to The Statesman’s Manual, “discursive understanding, which forms for itself general notions and terms of classification” can only give us “Clearness without Depth." Poetry, when it is symbolic, gives us depth without clarity. We can never quite say what it means, or what it proposes to accomplish in the world.

So poetry becomes a bit of an embarasment in a utilitarian society (and nineteenth century society was getting more and more utilitarian by the day). Poets were meant to chase mysterious symbols, and create organic wholes. The old laureate job or writing odes to the monarch became something of a joke, out of step with the new notion of what poems were all about. The poet isn't supposed to answer to any patron, or, for that matter, to try to make things happen (there were exceptions — consider Shelley's political rabble-rousing poems, but the general trend was toward organic form, symbol, autonomy of imagination, and all the rest). The poet became, in some sense, a figure outside of society. The poet's work was either a quiet withdrawal from bourgeois utilitarian society, or an angry rejection of it. Take your pick. Either way, poetry was different from prose in two respects: it played by different rules, and it was written for different reasons. All of this was new with Romanticism.

While these things may have started with Romanticism, they continued after the Romantic movement in new permutations and combinations. The French Symboliste movement (Mallarmé and company) was in some ways an intensification of the idea that the poem was beyond paraphrase (it should be like music), beyond utility, beyond the logic of means-and-ends. And, despite some of their anti-Romantic rhetoric, the American New Critics in the 20th century made huge intellectual investments in Coleridge's ideas: "The Heresy of Paraphrase" is a rehashing of Coleridge, and the New Critical ideas of irony and balance are just Coleridge's organic form revisited. The poem was about itself, about form, and not subordinate to anything else. (If the Romantics turned to the autonomy of art because they were critical of utilitarian values, the New Critics were a bit different: there's a real story to be told about how they saw the autonomous poem as an essential component of the autonomy of English as an academic discipline: if poems were essentially different from prose statements, they needed a special academic department. If they were like prose, they could be absorbed into history or sociology or whatever — this actually comes up in their correspondence with one another).

But we're past all that now, right? Well, no. In many ways, I think some of the most thoughtful poets of the last few decades have been practicing a kind of modified or inverted version of Romanticism. Think about elliptical poetry: so much of it is all about the lack of formal coherence that you think it'd be the farthest thing from Coleridge's organic form or its New Critical offshoot, the well-wrought urn. But the deliberate incoherence of elliptical poetry is really out to accomplish the same sorts of things Coleridge outlined. First of all, elliptical techniques are all about differentiating poetry from prose, about upholding what Barthes called "the discontinuity of lanuage." Poetry is different, we see, because it doesn't try for prose coherence. And in the deep ambiguities and incoherencies of elliptical verse, we're looking at effects similar to those Coleridge saw as belonging to the symbol: we avoid paraphrasable meaning, we escape the utilitatian logic of means-and-ends. Some see this as purely a matter of beauty, some see it as a critique of a society that relies on a logic of language to support its logic of power. Again, all of this is vey much in line with the general trend of thinking that runs from Coleridge through Mallarmé, and even through the New Critics.

So: where do we draw the line between poetry and not-poetry? Well, it seems that we've been doing it by insisting on poetry's autonomy, its freedom from use-value, its freedom from specific meaning. Poetry is poetry because it is unlike prose: it is more free, and stands somehow (we like to think) outside of the utilitarian world. That seems to be the best answer we've come up with in the two centuries since the poets left off praising popes and princes in exchange for patronage. I wonder: how long it will last? For now the old answer flies, but someday it, too, will fall.

Bloody Poetry

Okay, okay, okay. Sure. Since you've been after me about it for so long, I'll tell you. You're always asking me "how does it feel to go to a play about the English Romantic poets directed by, and starring, students to whom you once taught the works of the English Romantic poets?" Well, I'll tell you: it feels good. It also feels odd, and gives one a sense of time's winged chariot zipping by at an alarming pace. I mean, I'm used to running into former students working as bartenders and wait-staff (I teach English, after all), but now I've been at this game long enough to start seeing my former students accomplish impressive things. They go to grad school. They have kids. Some of them make piles of money. And some of them put on plays in cooler-than-cool little Chicago theaters. In the present case, they've put on a play that pushes a whole lot of my buttons, dealing as it does not only with Romanticism, but with the contradictions of the autonomous intellect.

The play is Howard Brenton's Bloody Poetry at the Side Project Theater, directed by Evan Jackson, and starring, among others, former students of mine Mark Dryfoos, Catherine Hermes, and Tristan Brandon. Brandon plays Byron, which is perfect: I always thought he had a Byron-meets-Brian Ferry kind vibe to him, and he assured me after the show that he was able to kit himself out in full Byronic regalia from his personal wardrobe. Anyway, the play's a sharp two-acter about the goings-on between Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, Claire Clairemont, and Dr. Polidori. I'd call it a love triangle, but I think it's more like a love dodecahedron, with revolutionary politics, social deviancy, polymorphous sexuality and a bit of opium thrown in for good measure. There's also sudden death, Shelley's funeral pyre, and some weird supernatural hauntings.

For me, though, the most interesting thing about Brenton's play is the way it depicts the relations between the bourgeois world and the nascent bohemian intellectual demimonde, right at the moment of that demimonde's birth. Long story short, up until the late eighteenth century European intellectuals (including literary types) tended to be supported by, and subordinate to, various powerful institutions. Sometimes it was the aristocracy, which patronized (in both senses) writers, artists, philosophers, and scientists. Sometimes the church did this, or even the royal court. With the rise of market forces and the bourgeoisie, though, some intellectuals stepped away from this system and found the same combination of support and subordination in the marketplace, writing or thinking or painting for the money to be found there. But there's more. In the great bust-up of aristocratic and ecclesiastical authority, some intellectuals chose to step away from the old patrons and the new market system. Some of these writers went broke, and were on the outs politically (think Shelley), others happened to make a lot of money from writing, but did so without having that in mind as a goal (think Byron, who walked away from many of his royalties because he thought accepting them beneath him, and who had great kegs and barrels full of inherited cash anyway). There was an historical opportunity to serve no one, and the Shelleys and the Byrons of the world took it.

For Byron, this opportunity for freedom was largely a matter of hedonism, beyond even the level of self-indulgence in which a peer of the realm could generally revel. For Shelley, it was a matter of revolution, a chance to change the social order for the better (Byron signed on for some of this too, and famously died in the service of a Greek revolution). The really great thing about Brenton's Bloody Poetry, though, lies in the way it captures two of the great complications attendant upon such assertions of freedom.

The first complication involves the way the bourgeoisie (represented in the play by Polidori, Byron's physician and a would-be writer himself) is both attracted to and repelled by the new, autonomous intellectuals. In the play Polidori (played with splendid creepiness by Mark Dryfoos in the Chicago production) is obsessed with the literary genius of the Shelley-Byron circle, but angered by his own exclusion from their literary projects. He's even more obsessed by their sexual intrigues, from which he is also excluded. Envy of the Romantics' intellectual and sexual intrigues turns into a kind of hatred, and he vows to take revenge in the memoirs he's writing. He wants to paint the Romantics in salacious terms, to get even with them, and, as he says in a dark aside, "to own them." There's a creepy way in which we, the audience, are Polidori: after all, we're also Peeping Toms at the Romantics' sexual irregularities, and we're also excluded. His prurience is ours, and if he stands condemned by the play, so do we.

The second complication isn't a matter of clever audience-positioning, but it does give us some of the better speeches in the play. It's the problem of the isolation and uselessness that accompanies the new freedoms of the intellectual. While a court poet knows where he stands in society (he adorns the existing social order), a poet who declares his autonomy from power faces a problem. He doesn't really know what his role is. Even if he yearns for a role in social revolution, he's got to face the question of whether or not his efforts really have any effect (well, he's got to face this, or mire himself in a whole lot of self-deception about the efficacy of his linguistic activity in challenging the powers). There's a great bit in the play where Brenton's version of Byron rants about how restless he feels, and how he wishes there were a revolution, because then at least the poets would have a role, writing the songs and making the banners. And there's a fantastic speech where Shelley gets so caught up in the problem he nearly drowns in a storm at sea, as he calls out “I write poems. But most of the world cannot even read. So what can I do? Act as if I were free. Write, as if I were free.” There's the stuff, the subjunctive utopia of the autonomous intellectual. You know: where most of us live now.

I suppose it's important that Howard Brenton, an old sixties radical, wrote the play during the dawn of the reactionary Thatcher era in Britain. He'd have to have been thinking about the revolutionary dreams of his generation, and the rude awakening when the bourgeoisie reasserted itself with a vengeance. The solutions to the world's problems that Brenton and his friends had hoped for didn't seem to be taking hold, and the whole question of what all their writing and thinking had been for must have been painfully present. They had tried to live and write freely, as autonomous intellects, but to what end?

Brenton's play flirts with at least one solution to the problem of intellectual autonomy: aestheticism. Strangely, it gives this view to Mary Shelley. When Byron dismisses Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" on political grounds, she stares down the decadent Lord and refutes him by saying, of the poem, "but it sings." Its beauty is its justification. This art-for-art's sake position isn't, as far as I know, where Mary Shelley really stood. But accuracy be damned: Bloody Poetry sings, too.