It seems to me that there is something forbidden, something sacrilegious about speaking of the relationship of poetry and metaphysics.1 Ideas flee when I try to clarify them, rather like those dream images that we would like to preserve. The more we try to secure them, the more quickly they escape us.
In fact, poetry, as Schelling said, is a union of consciousness and unconsciousness, of the subjective and objective. How do we make conscious what involves so many unconscious elements, and objective what involves so many subjective elements?
I am speaking of a certain kind of poetry above all, but perhaps it will allow us to reach the idea, the essence of poetry. Can it shed some light on the relationship that even the poems of the least metaphysical of poets maintain with metaphysics?
It could be said that even today poetry and metaphysics deal with the same subjects but with different techniques. But both poetry and metaphysics try to get rid of every technique. The few masters that we would love to follow do not give a teaching properly speaking. Rimbaud or Mallarmé for poetry and Kierkegaard for the theory of existence are not teaching some or other thing, but teach us to draw out of ourselves things that are difficult to express. Very often we can have the impression today that poetry and metaphysics are at an impasse.
At a certain time they were very deeply united. The Greek sophists very readily relied on Homer and discovered in him the idea of a perpetual transformation of things. Before them the first philosophers were very often poets. Regarding Anaximander we possess the account of Theophrastus: “And things return to where they came, in accordance with what is. For they are given reparation and pay the price for their injustice to each other according to set times.” Theophrastus adds: “As Anaximander said in rather poetical terms.”2
Parmenides formulated his metaphysics in very austere verse. The way of opinion leads us to nothing; those who rely on senses rely on what does not exist. It is necessary to trust only in things that are known by the way of knowledge [science]. Thus this poet metaphysician warns us against the poetic universe and lets us open our eyes only to gaze on the brilliance of the eternal sphere of being. Yet the writer of prose, Heraclitus has highlighted the unreasonable elements of the universe—all the while insisting on the logos, a reason, that unites them in a mysterious way.
Plato is the heir of these two philosophers. He severely criticizes the poets, Homer and Hesiod. Yet it is Platonism that has for many long centuries made possible the majority of poetic breakthroughs toward metaphysics.
I would like to see what metaphysical patterns poetry can contain, how poetry can give access to the metaphysical world and how the poet sets out from these metaphysical patterns in order to constitute a poetic system.3
Whitehead tells us that we must appeal to the witness of the great poets without ceasing. “Their survival is the evidence that they express deep intuitions of mankind penetrating into what is universal in concrete fact.”4 In support of his thesis he cites two examples: Wordsworth and Shelley. In fact, it is perhaps with Romanticism that we see appear most fully the inner relation between poetry and metaphysics. It has been said that Romanticism is the birth and rebirth of wonder: it makes strange things familiar and familiar things strange.5 Its essence is uncovered in a poet like Novalis when he ceaselessly places his hero before things that he seems to have always known, and which, at the same time—by a singular paradox and essential antinomy—are things that he knows he has never seen. The magic of Novalis can bring before Henry of Ofterdingen, as before the novices at Sais, and before us, a new absolute, which is at the same time very old, a radically foreign element which is at the same time intimately our own.
If we take the problems of memory and time and read Musset’s Souvenir, the Tristesse d’Olympio6 and the Lac,7 we find this idea of the sacred character of memory that one preserves within himself, and in Musset this idea (shown in another manner in Shelley’s Adonais) that every being and every event has its reverberation in Nature, is retained in its heart, even though it no longer exists in us.8 But the ideas of Nature and Memory are not elaborated here.9
It is not the same in Wordsworth or Shelley, both permeated by the Platonic tradition. Wordsworth makes us feel Nature in its immobility and Shelley in its incessant mobility. It is the idea of “endurance,” to use Whitehead’s word, of duration, of an immobile and dreary duration, but also sometimes nourishing and consoling, that reading Wordsworth births in us, while Shelley shows us Nature in movement and in the reciprocal interpenetration of its forms. There is in him “a feeling for nature as exhibiting entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with modal presences of the others.”10 Here we have a poetic intuition (in a certain degree derived from philosophical intuitions) translated a little barbarically into the language of contemporary philosophy.
If nature is extensively investigated by Wordsworth and Shelley, it seems to me that Novalis and Hölderlin do the same with time. The feelings of the ever new and ever old that are mingled together in Novalis fall under an affective Platonism. He leads us to an instant that is simultaneously eternity. These poets have observed what Baudelaire and Mallarmé perceived in their own way. Is there not in Baudelaire an echo of Platonism found in his theory of correspondences, of the symbol, of that vision of ourselves as “obscure and plaintive mirrors”? Platonism is equally present, perhaps even more acutely, in Mallarmé, where the idea appears both as “glory of long … desire” and as being “himself at last.”11
This idea of the instant is found in Blake. He attempts to show us eternity and its presence at each instant of our lives.12 The role of the poet is to consecrate this moment, to make the passing moment into something that remains and is sanctified by the fact that it is desired, just as the Nietzschean hero wants to maintain it by the notion of the eternal return.
Through this consecration of time, this intensification of the instant, and also by the fact that poetry fills out time in diverse ways (as a magic flight in Shelley or a breathless race as often appears in Swinburne), poetry seems like a manipulation of time.
Regarding space, I will refer again to Blake:
And on its verge the Sun rises and sets, the Clouds bow
To meet the flat Earth and the Sea in such an order’d Space.
The Starry Heavens reach no further, but here bend and set
On all sides, and the two Poles turn on their valves of gold;
And if he moves his dwelling-place, his heavens also move
Where’er he goes, and all his neighbourhood bewail his loss.
Such are the Spaces called Earth and such its dimension.
As to that false appearance, which appears to the reasoner,
As of a Globe rolling thro’ the Voidness, it is a delusion of Ulro.
The microscope knows not of this, nor the Telescope: they alter
The ratio of the Spectator’s Organs, but leave Objects untouch’d
For every Space larger than a red Globule of Man’s blood
Is visionary, and is created by the Hammer of Los.13
Space is the child of time, the unity that measures change, and it is limited. True space is not the one considered by science but the space that we feel. And its true rhythm and principle are located in its smallest fragment, in the same way as the principle of time was found in its smallest fragment, the instant.
There is found in Blake what we could call a concrete notion of space and time. This is approached in contemporary poetry by Claudel, who, in his Art poétique, sketched his own philosophy. He expounded on his idea of causality, the pressure things exert on each other. He speaks of knowledge as something elementary, of which human knowledge is only the final efflorescence. “Blue knows the color orange, truly the hand knows its shadow on the wall.” Knowledge is a compresence, as Alexander said, a first juxtaposition of subject and object, and since we are here before the idea of knowledge, I return to a poem of Traherne, leaving Romantic poetry but not the poetry of astonishment:
My naked simple life was I.
That Act so strongly shin’d,
Upon the Earth, the Sea, the Sky,
It was the substance of the Mind.
The sense its self was I.
I felt no Dross nor Matter in my Soul,
No Brims nor Borders, such as in a Bowl
We see: My Essence was Capacity.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
This made me present evermore
With whatsoere I saw.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
There was my Sight, my Life, my Sense,
My Substance, ev’n my Mind.
My Spirit shin’d
Ev’n there, not by a transeunt Influence.
The Act was immanent, yet there,
The Thing remote, yet felt ev’n here.
O Joy! O Wonder and Delight!
O sacred Mystery!14
What can the poets say about the unknowable?15 In 1796 Hegel dedicated a poem to Hölderlin:
Dank dir, du meine
Befreierin o Nacht!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Der Sinn verliert sich in dem Anschaun,
was mein ich nannte schwindet,
ich gebe mich dem Unermesslichen dahin.
Ich bin in ihm, bin alles, bin nur es.
Dem wiederkehrenden Gedanken fremdet,
ihm graut vor dem Unendlichen, und staunend fasst
er dieses Anschauns Tiefe nichte.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Dem Sohn der Weihe war der hohen Lehren Fülle
des unaussprechlichen Gefühles Tiefe viel zu heilig,
als dass er trockne Zeichen ihrer würdigte.
Schon der Gedanke fasst die Seele nicht,
die ausser Zeit und Raum in Ahndung der Unendlichkeit
versunken, sich vergisst, und wieder zum Bewusstsein nun
erwacht. Wer gar davon zu andern sprechen wollte,
spräch er mit Engelzungen, fühlt der Worte Armuth;
ihm graut das Heilige so klein gedacht,
durch sie so klein gemacht zu haben, dass die Red’ ihm Sünde deucht,
und dass er bebend sich den Mund verschliesst.
Was der Geweihte sich so selbst verbot, verbot ein weises
Gesetz den ärmern Geistern; das nicht kund zu tun,
was er in heil’ger Nacht geseh’n, gehört, gefühlt …
Thanks be to you, you my
liberator, oh night!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
sense shedding itself in intuition,
what I call mine fading,
I give myself to the vastness therein,
I am in it, am everything, am only it.
recurring reflection becomes alien,
it dreads before infinity, and astonished grasps
not the depth of this intuition.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
To the son of the initiation was the richness of the high learning
the unexpressable [sic] feeling’s depth much too holy
than that he should value their dull signs.
Even the thought does not seize the soul
which outside of Time and Space lost in premonition of infinity
forgets itself and again to consciousness now
awakens. Whosoever would wish to speak thereof to others,
speaks he with tongues of angels, feeling the poverty of the words;
he dreads the holy so little contemplated,
through words to have been made so small, that speech to him seems sin,
and that he, shaking, closes his mouth.
What the initiated thus himself forbade, forbade a wise
law the poorer spirits to make known
what he on the holy night saw, heard, felt …
(“Eleusis,” to Hölderlin, August 1796)16
In this poetry we see asserted the pantheist mysticism of the young Hegel. It had been thought that Hegel did not like this infinite that terrified his thought. But still, he is plunged into it like Hölderlin and Novalis. For them all that is thought is attached to the unthinkable, as all that is visible to the invisible, and all that one understands to what cannot be understood.17
The junction of poetry and metaphysics is accomplished below, on the one hand, and above, on the other. If there is a metaphysical base, a hypophysical domain—that which Nietzsche, Whitman, Lawrence, Boehme, and Schelling wanted to draw out—if there is a massive torpor at the root of nature and sometimes at our root, it is precisely there that a junction between poetry and metaphysics can be found. And on the other hand, if there is a point toward which metaphysics tends—like an arch reaching toward its summit—then here also this link can be found, for that of which the philosopher senses the power can be indicated only by something other than discourse, and this “something other” can be poetry. There would therefore be a block of the real and of acute moments, there would be the base and summit of the pyramid, and it is by this immense base and acute summit that the communication would be realized between the two domains we are studying.
If we return to the hypotheses examined by Plato in the Parmenides—first, that the one is only one and disappears in order to become a sort of nonbeing, and then, that the one is all—then we could find in the Illuminations and the Saison en enfer the equivalent of the chaos of the second hypothesis and the equivalent of the negative theology of the first. The poet is the one who is aware of all this disorder of being and of this purity of nonbeing spoken of by Valéry.
But between these two domains through which poetry and metaphysics could perhaps be united, there are a great number of regions of the soul where this junction could likewise be brought about. The human soul knows many lands, and they are its own. This notion of regions through which the soul, the I, passes is on display in Blake. It is the theory of states. There is nothing real about the I; what is real are the states that it traverses.18
Poetry causes us to know what is most subjective under the most universal aspect. We can ask ourselves whether what we find at the root of poetry are not the great types of being that Plato’s reflection has uncovered. Thibaudet shows that when Valéry attempts to know himself he only sees nonbeing (and, we could add, its “possibilities”), and when he creates he sees being forming before him. In him there is a nihilism of knowledge and a positivism of creation. If we then comprehend every movement of philosophical thought from Parmenides to Mallarmé and Valéry, we see that this nonbeing and these possibles that Parmenides excluded are, on the contrary, precisely what—in a sense—captures the gaze of Mallarmé and Valéry. Nothingness, that which is absolutely not, the blankness of the page and the darkness of the night of the Igitur, the fate that cannot be abolished: these are among the dominant themes of Mallarmé’s poetry. The possible that was expelled from Parmenides’s poem found a place in the universe of Valéry—and in such a way that we find a reflection on being and nonbeing both in these metaphysical poets and in this poet metaphysician. But the poets arrive at their conclusions by a completely different way than the philosopher. Here we conceive the possibility even of a poetry of being. Claudel and Whitman perhaps give us some idea.
The idea of the Same explicates the feeling of Unity, and its role in poetry is difficult to overemphasize since it is present in the love of nature, in the love of the other self, in the love of God, and we find it at the bottom of that cult of the Night which constitutes one of the principal chapters of the book of Rolland de Renéville. Novalis, Nerval, Wagner, Baudelaire have all celebrated Unity under the dark spaces of the Night.
One could show the importance of the idea of the Other as that of a call toward the other, toward a felt presence and as an affirmation of things and beings that we cannot reach—and in such a way that it would be necessary to distinguish profoundly between the alterity that calls to us, to which we pray (whether that of a human person or god), and the alterity before which we are threatened (whether the object of a negative ontology, the god of a negative theology or another I, cruel and closed off). If we now consider the Same and Other, no longer as isolated but as united, the play of the Same and Other, and the influence of the Same on the Other, do we not find the Platonic idea of participation and all its derivatives: correspondence, symbol, image, reflections, analogies, Platonic love? Is it not precisely because Plato has put his hand on this mechanism of the Same in the Other that he stands at the origin of this poetic Platonism?
After the same and the other, we could cite the two last categories that, for the Plato of the Sophist, complete the hierarchy of great categories: movement and rest. We have already spoken of these in relation to Wordsworth and Shelley.
How are all the categories united by the poet? How are they bound together and how are they opposed? By the play of analogies and antitheses. The analogies are the “correspondences” of Baudelaire. The antitheses are described by Blake: “A Negation is not a Contrary; Contraries are Positives…. Two contraries are positives to each other.”19 And these analogies and antitheses will come to dissolve before our eyes if we recall the mystical experiences of Novalis or Nerval, “The Marriage of the Seasons” in Novalis, the fusion of the Virgin and the Cybil in Nerval, or of Christ and Dionysos in Hölderlin, the eternal return when “the thirteenth comes back” in Nerval, or when the “great noon” sounds in Nietzsche.
The discernible danger in these concurrences between metaphysicians and poets is that the themes of poetry would become conceptualized. To consider these themes independently of the way in which they are incorporated in the texts is to consider them wrongly.
From this vantage it would be interesting to study the connections between a poet like Hölderlin and a philosopher like Hegel. The thesis could be sustained that they are starting from experiences that are nearly identical. But what became the great philosophy of Hegel—transformed by another temperament—became the poetry of Hölderlin. Therefore we do not say that the poet is a failed metaphysician. Nor do we say that the metaphysician is a failed poet. Idealism is not the philosophy of a poet, and German Romanticism is not the poetry of a philosopher. Moreover it is doubtful that one could travel any further into the regions of metaphysics by means of poetry than by some other means of expression, such as drawing, color, or the sound of music, for metaphysics is in the last analysis nothing conceptual at all. The strokes of Rembrandt or the colors of El Greco do not arouse in us thoughts any less spiritually metaphysical than a poem by Vigny or Coventry Patmore. Rest is better known in its essence, in an essence even more reposed, by Cézanne than by Wordsworth, and movement, billowing forth (as it were) in its essence, is better known by Van Gogh than by Shelley.20
The way that poetry incarnates its idea is different from that of a system of philosophy. Hölderlin tries to determine this indeterminable that he has before his eyes in a poem he composed as a letter: “Storms, not just their greatest manifestation, but seen as power and figure, among the other forms of the sky, the effect of the light, shaping nationally and as a principle and destiny, so that something is holy to us, the intensity of its coming and going, the characteristicness of the woods and the coincidence in one region of different characters of nature, so that all the holy places of the earth are together in one place, and the philosophic light at my window, they are now my joy.”21
Thus the instant will be for the poet the essence of his reflection, bathed in however a philosophical a light.
A little later, Hölderlin wrote:
In lovely blue the steeple blossoms
With its metal roof. Around which
Drift swallow cries, around which
Lies most loving blue. The sun,
High overhead, tints the roof tin,
But up in the wind, silent,
The weathercock, crows.22
There is nothing metaphysical in this poem, properly speaking. But the emotion that it invokes causes this instant to be separated from every other and lived intensely; at once so familiar and so strange, it allows us to divine the veiled face of that which Hölderlin calls the philosophical light.23
The same Hölderlin says, “A sign we are, without meaning.”24 And it is this sense of the absence of sense that his poem brings to us, along with the feeling that we are here without knowing why, but still that this instant is somehow consecrated by the very fact that we are living it.
Baudelaire writes: “In certain nearly supernatural states of the soul, the profundity of life reveals itself whole and entire in the sight before one’s eyes, however ordinary it may be. There it becomes a symbol.”25 It is in this way that every great poem is susceptible to metaphysical signification, even if it does not contain anything metaphysical itself. Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, Hugo’s Sur une Stèle antique, even such a poem of Chénier, such a tragedy of Racine, where the sea of passions is contained in the play of rhymes and the unity of day and place, such a drama of Shakespeare, such a Dinggedicht of Rilke, arouse the worlds of metaphysical thought, awakening in their virtual hearth a blinding eruption of unthought thoughts and almost unformulatable formulae.26
The very description of what is given to us in reality can include a philosophical signification.
Poetry will be a union of contradictories, for what cannot be imagined will be presented under the form of images which often—as Bergson has shown—are followed in order to be destroyed, finally giving forth the idea of that which is no longer an image. Pure quality will be presented under the form of quantity. Words will be endowed simultaneously with a “purer sense” and more impure sense, and in these two ways they will be distinguished from our ordinary words.
It is yet by this union of things that contradict one another that the poet will not only be able to lead us to the beyond, but, once we have perceived this beyond, leads us back toward the here below, joining immanence to transcendence. Heidegger taught this by his notion of “belonging to the earth” through reference to Hölderlin.
The poet will make us feel that the physical is the metaphysical and that which passes by is eternal.27 Here Novalis, Rimbaud, Whitman, and Nietzsche agree.
“Eternity is the sea gone with the sun,” said Rimbaud.28 Nietzsche said it is the Noontime of Joy. In these contradictories that we see at play, in this union of transcendence and immanence, we equally discover the explication of the fact that the poet is at once subject and object, subjective and objective, conscious and unconscious, active and passive—and living these contradictions in a tension, in an intensity that is lyricism. Here we are not merely rediscovering Heraclitus’s ancient thought about “the harmony of opposed tensions like that of the lyre.” Modern poetry is distinguished from ancient poetry by its subjectivity, by this lyrical subjectivity that began to develop with Romanticism. There is doubtlessly something there essential to all poetry. If, apparently, Lucretius worked with the most objective concepts in order to constitute his poem, it is nevertheless the case that his passion was intensified through contact with these very concepts and was expressed with all the more personality as the world before which he found himself was an impersonal world destructive of such passion. The flame aware of its immanent extinguishment only burned all the more strongly in this dark world.
In some way the poet is conscious of the unconscious. “To dream and altogether not to dream, to be in a state of complete wakefulness and yet to dream.”29
And it is Novalis still who allows us to see the union of activity and passivity. The poet is the one within whom can be known something analogous to what one imagines to be the creative activity of the world; this is the meaning of the word poet in full force—the creator, and who is also the one who can write, like Novalis: “One does not create [fait], but he does [fait] what he can [faire].30
And in such a way that the poet will no longer know if it is he who speaks or another. He does not know anymore to whom he is addressed, or for whom he writes. It is for no one other than himself, and it is not for himself.
What is he trying to do when what is not addressed to him is addressed to a him who is not he? He is trying to build and destroy at once, to save this moment and to be delivered from it by destroying it. He is the “widowed, the inconsolable,” but also the one who is incited toward an audacious endeavor. He carries the unconscious to consciousness. He destroys himself while affirming himself through expression. He is Orpheus resurrecting Eurydice, but under the mask of the maenad who kills him: it is he, he and his poetry, that we recognize.
The manipulation of time, poetry is also the manipulation of ourselves. It is our prayer and our revolt. It is our chance that we seal with the seal of necessity. It is our destiny. The poet is Prometheus the Rebel, Orpheus bringing unconscious Eurydice to the light, Pygmalion blowing his soul into Galatea. He is also Ulysses returning to the country of his birth, Empedocles united to the unleashed forces of nature, the maenads who destroy the poet himself. There is a struggle of metaphysics against poetry and of poetry against metaphysics, yet they always remain bound together, living out of their reciprocal deaths, each being born at the moment of the other’s destruction, but also living through their reciprocal lives. When metaphysics is reduced to silence at the root of ourselves, then suddenly poetry raises its voice. But in this voice we hear the echo of a departed metaphysician.
What will be the destiny of the poet today? Hölderlin writes:
But, my friend, we have come too late.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
… and who wants poets at all in lean years?
But they are, as you say, like those holy ones, priests of the wine-god
Who in holy Night roamed from one place to the next.31
We can no longer construct great metaphysical poems, and it is perhaps difficult in our day to construct great poems. Better to remain in our place marked by the destiny of our culture and our own specific destiny and to create [faire] what we can [faire], however little it may be. During the present time of distress, perhaps not a poetry of distress, but a poetry born from it in order to surmount it, after appropriating it. Perhaps in the coming epoch the fundamental intuitions of every domain will become vaguer, more ponderous, more shapeless, whereas the ideas that correspond to them will become finer and more subtle.
What I have said about the relation of poetry and metaphysics evokes in me the feeling that everything has been done [fait] by the poets and that everything remains to be done [faire] for the sake of the appearing of the metaphysico-poetic Truth.32 I cite a very short poem that summarizes this relation between poetry and metaphysics. Metaphysics speaks, and says:
Poetry, elder sister,
Let your song soar,
I hear you, and it is I who speak.
We know neither what metaphysics is, nor what poetry is, but the heart of poetry will always be metaphysical, and there is a strong possibility that the heart of metaphysics is equally always poetical.
1. The task is facilitated by studies of poetry. Father Brémond moves it closer to mysticism. Others have dealt with this subject in depth from the side of the poetical-metaphysical relationship: Saurat, Rolland de Renéville, Claude-Louis Estève. In the same way Raymond was engaged in exploring contemporary French poetry and Béguin in considering the relation of German Romanticism and metaphysics. Cf. also the books and articles of Maritain and de Corte, where the question is envisaged with the help of an Aristotelian conceptuality, albeit—despite Maritain’s possession of a real poetic sense and valuable human sense—without this conceptuality allowing him to offer any new ideas.
I leave Eastern poetry to the side, which would be important to consider. But I think that everything it can teach us is perhaps more rarely but no less intensely found in Western poetry.
2. [Fragment 12 B 1, Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 10th ed. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1952). Also found later in Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics 24, 17–23. Jonathan Barnes (Early Greek Philosophy, 2nd ed. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001], 21) translates the fragment (from Simplicius’s use of Theophrastus) in the following way: “And all things from which existing things come into being are also the things into which they are destroyed, in accordance with what must be. For they give justice and reparation to one another for their injustice in accordance with the ordering of time. (He speaks of them in this way in somewhat poetical words).”]
3. This is not undertaken without some danger because I risk transforming what is essentially nonconceptual into a concept.
4. [Alfred North Whitehead, Science in the Modern World (1925; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 108.]
5. Shelley, and Bergson in our day, have defined art as the power of lifting the veil that habit weaves between us and things.
6. [A poem by Victor Hugo, composed in 1837 but published in Les rayons et les ombres (1840).]
7. [A poem by Alphonse de Lamartine, from his Méditations poétiques (1820).]
8. [Wahl seems to refer implicitly to Anatole France’s collection, Les poèmes de souvenir (1910), which contains the very three poems he invokes here. Literary critic Charles Saint-Beuve had already compared these poems in the previous century.]
9. It would be appropriate to mention the objection of Leconte de Lisle, “What is all that which is not eternal?” and of Vigny, “Love what will never be seen twice.” The thought of these two poets is found reconciled to a degree by Novalis or Nietzsche’s eternal return.
10. Whitehead. [Science in the Modern World, 104. Wahl seems to misquote Whitehead here, for in the latter the reference is clearly to Wordsworth (The Prelude, bk. 1), although Whitehead in fact notes two pages later that “Shelley is entirely at one with Wordsworth as to the interfusing of the Presence in nature” (106).]
11. [From Mallarmé, “Prose” and “The Tomb of Edgar Poe,” respectively. See Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 47, 71.]
12. Is this not analogous with Kierkegaardian repetition?
13. [I leave these with Wahl’s punctuation, which varies slightly from the original. Elsewhere Wahl translates Blake into French. See William Blake, Milton a Poem, ed. Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi, in The Illuminated Books of William Blake, vol. 5 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), plate 28: 8–20 (178–79). For the quotations from Blake in this and the next chapter, page numbers in parentheses refer to the Princeton edition of The Illuminated Books unless otherwise noted.]
14. [“My Spirit,” Thomas Traherne, Selected Poems and Prose (New York: Penguin Classics, 1992).]
15. Here we would have to take up the much too massive subject of the link between love and metaphysics as it is suggested in Shelley’s Epipsychidion or Wagner’s Tristan, for example.
16. [I quote Alan W. Grose’s English translation of Hegel’s “Eleusis,” The Philosophical Forum 33, no. 3 (2002): 312–17.]
17. The poet has been placed in opposition to the mystic. The mystic was preferred. This is perhaps unjust. They say the poet speaks and the mystic remains silent. But the mystics have indeed spoken, at length, saying again what other mystics said before them. And the poets have indeed been aware that the most valuable moment of their poem is when it falls into silence; it is the sound that is extinguished little by little, and finally its empty form vanishes, of which the memory, by moments of silence, renders again more sacred than the poem, melodious thanks to the poem, before being itself absolute silence. There is a complex dialectic in the poem, a dialogue of dialogue with the silence that engulfs it and causes it to come alive again.
18. In Nietzsche a plastic equivalent of this theory can be found in the description of landscapes, categorizable as heroic, idyllic, and heroic-idyllic. Perhaps it could even be said that tragedy, idyll, elegy, and all the great classical genres are only attempts to translate the different states of the soul into well-defined genres that correspond to them.
19. [Milton a Poem, bk. II (title), plate 30 (181).]
20. Repeating an idea of Plato, we could say that the poet is four steps from reality, whereas the painter or sculptor is only three. Yet perhaps this very distance that he finds himself from the real permits him a better approach to it, or at least an approach to its essence that is more intelligible.
21. [Friedrich Hölderlin, Letter 110, Essays and Letters, ed. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (New York: Penguin, 2009), 214.]
22. [Hölderlin, “In lovely blue …,” Hymns and Fragments, trans. Richard Sieburth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 249.]
23. Every passion is a charm, says Novalis. The passion of Orpheus stands at the origin of order itself and its construction. And its sorrow.
24. [Hölderlin, “Mnemosyne,” Hymns and Fragments, 117.]
25. [Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 287.]
26. Blake writes [Milton a Poem, plate 27: 1–7 (176)]:
Some Sons of Los surround the Passions with porches of iron & silver
Creating form & beauty around the dark regions of sorrow.
Giving to airy nothing a name and a habitation
Delightful: with bounds of the Infinite putting off the Indefinite
Into most holy forms of Thought: (such is the power of inspiration)
They labour incessant; with many tears & afflictions:
Creating the beautiful House for the piteous sufferer.
27. The poet does not appeal to the same region of ourselves as the writer of prose. He disturbs an interior lake that mysteriously communicates with the ocean, which the Greeks conceived as the origin of all things. It was none other than Schelling who sought to define it: the union of the subjective and objective. [The poet] touches extreme subjectivity and by that joins us to the cosmos.
28. [A variation on the opening and closing lines of “Eternity” quoted earlier.]
29. [Novalis, Werke (Munich: Beck, 1969), 433.]
30. Surely Baudelaire intended something analogous when he wrote, “With the vaporization and centralization of the self, all is there.” Similarly, Hugo says in a passage cited by Béguin: “The question is to know to what degree the song belongs to the voice and poetry to the poet.”
31. Hölderlin, “Bread and Wine,” Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Penguin Classics, 1998), 157.
32. All great poetry is simultaneously a surrealism and realism. The error of surrealism properly speaking, or rather, its errors, is to have believed that one could discover the surreal by mots en liberté [“stream of consciousness”], and also to have believed oneself to be a surrealist when one was all along practicing post-surrealism (the true surrealists being Blake and Rimbaud). Its permanent glory is found in having maintained in the most violent manner this essence of poetry. The task at hand, today above all, is to forget not what it was, and what its role remains, despite its errors. We remain grateful to it for the non-new truths that it has articulated.