‘O eternal Truth! and true Charity! and dear Eternity!’.—ST. AUGUSTINE, Confessions.
“… the theme of the Gospel … proclaims Eternity as an event’.—BARTH, The Epistle to the Romans.
Is not this true of the greatest poetry?—E. S.
‘The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands and feet Proportion.’—BLAKE, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
‘Caedmon … having gone out to the stable of the beasts of burden, the care of which was entrusted to him on that night, and there, at the proper time, having resigned his limbs to sleep, a certain one stood by him in a dream, and said, “Caedmon…. Sing the beginning of created things.”’—BEDE. Trans. Gidley.
May not the following four aphorisms on Music be applied equally to Poetry of the greatest kind?—E. S.
‘Music, as Schopenhauer has made clear to us, is not a representation of the world, but an immediate voice of the world.’—ARTHUR SYMONS, Studies in Seven Arts.
‘Schopenhauer … recognises in music itself an Idea of the world, wherein the world immediately exhibits its essential nature.’—WAGNER Beethoven. Trans. E. Dannreuther.
In Schopenhauer’s own words, ‘Music never expresses phenomena, but solely the inner being, the essence of phenomena’.—(‘Metaphysics of Music’) The World as Will and Idea, quoted as an epilogue in Wagner’s Beethoven. Trans. E. Dannreuther.
‘Music … expresses the inner being, the essence of phenomena, the Will itself, and represents accordingly the metaphysics of all that is physical in the world, the thing per se, which lies beyond all appearance.’—Ibid.
‘The poetic idea which disengages itself from the movement, in the lines, would seem to postulate the existence of a vast being, immense, complicated but of harmonious proportion — an animal full of genius, suffering and sighing all sighs and all human ambitions.’—BAUDELAIRE, Fusées.
‘… Poetry, prophecy, and the high insight, are from a wisdom of which man is not master … the gods never philosophise.’—EMERSON (‘Plato, or the Philosopher’), Representative Men.
‘Music … would seem to reveal the most secret sense of scene, action, event, environment.’—WAGNER, Beethoven. Trans. E. Dannreuther.
Is not this also true of Poetry?—E. S.
‘As Christianity arose from under the civilisation of Rome, so from the Chaos of modern civilisation music burst forth. Both affirm: “Our kingdom is not of this world”. That is to say, “We come from within, you from without. We spring from the essential nature of things, you from its semblance.”’—WAGNER Beethoven. Trans. E. Dannreuther.
Poetry of the greatest kind springs from the essential nature of things, not from its semblance. But poetry has its phenomena in nature, its outward and revelatory being. Poetry is also the visible world, with its images of wonder.—E. S.
Cézanne declared, ‘I have not tried to produce Nature; I have represented it.’—Quoted in MARTIN ARMSTRONG’S The Major Pleasures of Life.
This great painter must be held to be right, according to the necessities of the art of which he was a practitioner. But in Poetry the exact opposite is right. To represent Nature, in Poetry, would mean, not that Nature is heard or seen through a temperament, but that Nature was un-assimilated by the poet, had not ‘passed into this man as bread into his body’. (See page 1.)—E. S.
The greatest poet has a ‘strong solving sense to reconcile his poetry with the appearances of the world’.—EMERSON (‘Plato, or the Philosopher’), Representative Men.
‘Music blots out an entire civilisation as sunshine does lamplight.’— WAGNER, Beethoven. Trans. E. Dannreuther.
This is true of the greatest poetry in a certain kind. It is true of Shakespeare’s Comedies. In another kind, poetry is a sun whose light does not blot out a civilisation, but fuses it into a single being. This is true of certain of Shakespeare’s characters.— E. S.
‘The Greeks said that Alexander went as far as Chaos; Goethe went, only the other day, as far; and one step farther he hazarded, and brought himself straight back’.—EMERSON (‘Goethe, or the Writer’), Representative Men.
‘He’ (Goethe) ‘had a power to unite the detached atoms again by their own law’.—Ibid.
‘He’ (Plato), ‘from the sunlike centrality and reach of his vision, had a faith without cloud’.— EMERSON (‘Plato, or the Philosopher’), Representative Men.
‘Can no father beget or mother conceive a man-child so entire and so elastic that whatever … syllable he speaks, it shall be melodious to all creatures, and none shall be an exception to the universal and affectionate “Yes” of the earth?’—WHITMAN, Notebooks.
‘If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.’— St. Paul, i Corinthians xiii.
‘We have done nothing … if we have not purified the will in the order of charity.’ — St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel.
‘Thought without affection makes a distinction between Love and Wisdom as it does between body and spirit.’—BLAKE (annotations to Swedenborg’s Wisdom of Angels Concerning Divine Love and Divine Wisdom), Marginalia.
‘His’ (the greatest poet’s) ‘brain is the ultimate brain. He is no arguer, he is judgment. He judges not as the judge judges, but as the sun falling around a helpless, thing. As he sees the farthest, he has the most faith. His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things … he sees eternity in men and women, — he does not see men and women as dreams or dots…. Now he has passed that way, see after him! there is not left any vestige of despair or misanthropy or cunning or exclusiveness, or the ignominy of a nativity or colour, or delusion of hell or the necessity of hell; and no man thenceforward shall be degraded for ignorance or weakness or sin.’—WHITMAN, Preface to Leaves of Grass.
(It may be held that the above should have been placed under the heading of ‘The Greatest Poet’, but to my feeling it belongs where I have placed it.—E. S.)
‘See the mysteries which lie hid in that miracle of Our Lord’ (the changing of Water into Wine). (The) ‘Scriptures were the water. He made the water wine when He opened unto them the meaning of these things, and expounded the Scriptures; for thus that came to have a taste which before had none, and that inebriated which did not inebriate before.’—ST. AUGUSTINE, quoted in St. Thomas: Catena Aurea.
The poets, among the sons of God, must keep this miracle, humbly, before their minds. They must open the meaning of the visual world, which, for them, is among the Scriptures.—E. S.
‘Now was I come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the Paradise of God. All things were new: and all the Creation gave another smell unto me than before.’—GEORGE FOX, Journal.
‘Poetry is the identity of all other knowledges, the blossom and fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.’—COLERIDGE, Biographia Literaria.
‘All truths lie waiting in all things…. For their birth you need not the obstetric forceps of the surgeon. They unfold themselves more fragrant than … roses from living buds, whenever you fetch the spring sunshine moistened with summer rain. But it must be in yourself. … It shall be love.’—WHITMAN, Notebooks.
‘Poetry is the Honey of all Flowers, the Quintessence of all Sciences, the Marrow of Art and the very Phrase of Angels.’—THOMAS NASHE.
(I noted this, but cannot now trace the original quotation, which has been with me for many years. It is quoted by Mr. de la Mare, in Come Hither.—E. S.)
‘Bless Jesus Christ with the Rose and his people, which is a nation of living sweetness.’—SMART, Rejoice with the Lamb.
‘Bless God with every feather from the Wren in the sedge to the Cherubs and their mates.’—Ibid.
‘I would believe only in a God that knew how to dance.’—NIETZSCHE, Thus Spake Zarathustra.
‘Rowland, Rowland, get up and see the sun dance.’—A countrywoman of Hockley, early one Easter morning, to her husband. Told in MRS. WRIGHT’S Rustic Speech and Folklore.
This is like reading As You Like It for the first time. —E. S.
‘All the pain of existence is shattered against the immense delight of playing … with the power of shaping the incomprehensible…. Brahma, the Creator of worlds, laughs as he perceives the illusion about himself; innocence regained plays lightly with the sting of expiated guilt, conscience set free banters itself with the torments it has undergone.’—WAGNER, Beethoven. Trans. E. Dannreuther.
‘Perfection of a thing is threefold: first, according to the constitution of its own being; secondly, in respect of any accidents being added as necessary for its perfect operation; thirdly, perfection consists in the attaining to something else as the end…. This triple perfection belongs to no creature by its own essence; it belongs to God only, in Whom alone essence is existence.’—AQUINAS, Summa Theologica.
The perfection of the spiritual life, as given here, is of the same order as the perfection of a poem.—E. S.
‘What prodigies may we not conceive of…’ (from) “those primitive longæval and antediluvian man-tigers, who first taught science to the world.’—MARTIN SCRIBLERUS, On the Origin of Sciences.
‘. . Satan’s Mathematic Holiness, Length, Bredth, & Highth’.—BLAKE, Milton, Book the Second.
‘As I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels look like torment and insanity, I collected some of their Proverbs, thinking that as the sayings used in a nation mark its character, so the Proverbs of Hell show the nature of infernal wisdom.’—BLAKE, Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
‘… the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.’—Ibid.
‘I constantly thought of the saying that when Delacroix paints, it is exactly like a lion devouring a piece of flesh.’—VAN GOGH, Letters of a Post-Impressionist. Trans. Anthony M. Ludovici.
Baudelaire, speaking of Delacroix, quotes an acquaintance as saying that his is ‘cannibal painting’.—BAUDELAIRE, L’Art Romantique.
Millet said: ‘In art, it is necessary to put our very skin .’ —Quoted in VAN GOGH’S Letters to an Artist.
(NOTE—Which are the great poems from the depths? … Such works, say, as King Lear, Timon of Athens, Villon’s Le Grand Testament, and our traditional Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song.— These I have named are only a few. ‘The Tyger’ has moved through the depths, but he has also walked in heaven.—E. S.)
‘. . The lark is a mighty angel.’—BLAKE, Milton, Book the Second.
‘The verse which out of many vocables remakes an entire word, new, unknown to the language, and as if magical, attains this isolation of speech.’—MALLARMÉ, excerpt from a Lecture. Trans. Arthur Symons, in The Symbolist Movement in French Literature.
‘I say: “A flower!” and out of the oblivion to which my voice consigns every contour, so far as anything save the known calyx, musically arises, idea, and exquisite, the one flower absent from all bouquets.’—Ibid.
‘To create a little flower is the labour of ages.’— BLAKE, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Little, yet perfect. The verses of Austin Dobson, and kindred horrors, are not perfect. They are merely slippery. Certain short poems of Blake, and such a poem as ‘He came al so stil where his mother was’, are among the most wonderful examples of the little, yet perfect kind.—E. S.
‘A flower told me her name.’—RIMBAUD, Les Illuminations. Trans. Helen Rootham.
The poems of Herrick might be an example of this small, yet perfect kind. They have not the childlike humble ecstasy of the short Blake poems, or of ‘He came al so stil’—they are not the flower itself, like those mysterious growths, — but the flower certainly told its secret name to Herrick.—E. S.
‘The greatest poet hardly knows pettiness or triviality. If he breathes into anything that was before thought small, it dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe.’—WHITMAN, Preface to Leaves of Grass.
‘Snow quickly becomes marble in the predestinate hands.’— COCTEAU (‘Carte Blanche,’), Le Rappel à l’Ordre.
‘The artist who has the sentiment of reality must never fear to be lyrical. The objective world retains its power in his work, no matter to what metamorphoses lyricism may have subjected it.’—COCTEAU (‘Le Coq et l’Arlequin’), Le Rappel à l’Ordre.
‘To know how cherries and strawberries taste, said he, ask children and birds.’—GOETHE, listening to ‘the songs and yodelling of the cheerful Tyrolese’: Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann. Trans. J. Oxenford.
The above seems to me applicable to some of the lovely folk-songs that are the natural growth of our soil:’ The Turtle-Dove,’ ‘Under the Leves Grene’ (an early poem, anonymous, but not actually a folk-song), ‘Oh dear, what can the matter be’ and hundreds of others. Also to many of the sweet and exquisite nursery rhymes. In these respects I, for one, am both child and bird.—E. S.
‘The direct trial of him who would be the greatest poet is today. If he does not flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides — and if he does not attract his own land body and soul to himself… and if he be not himself the age transfigured — and if to him is not opened the eternity which gives similitude to all periods and locations and processes and animate and inanimate forms, and which is the bond of time …’ (the eternity which) ‘commits itself to the representation of this wave of an hour, and this one of the sixty beautiful children of the wave — let him merge in the general run and wait his development.…’—WHITMAN, Preface to Leaves of Grass.
This is right for the transcendentally great poet who wrote it, but it is not right for every poet, even every great poet. It is certainly never right for the small poet, under any circumstances. On this subject, van Gogh (Letters of a Post-Impressionist, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici) said we must ‘avoid squandering our modest powers in metaphysical brooding which cannot press chaos into a tumbler; for that is precisely why it is chaos, because it cannot enter into a tumbler of our calibre’. This should be remembered. —E. S.
We must learn ‘to cram today with Eternity and not the next day’.—KIERKEGAARD, Christian Discourses.
‘… poetry sheds no tears “such as Angels weep”, but natural and human tears; she can boast of no celestial ichor that distinguishes her vital juices from those of prose; the same human blood circulates through the veins of them both.’—WORDSWORTH, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800—1805).
This belief has produced, often, wonderful results in the case of the great poet who declared it. But it is profoundly dangerous. Poetry should ‘utter somewhat above a mortal mouth’, to quote a phrase from Ben Jonson’s Discoveries.—E. S.
‘Art is Science become flesh.’—COCTEAU (‘Le Secret Professionnel’) Le Rappel à l’Ordre.
‘Pure draughtsmen are philosophers and the abstractors of the quintessence.’—BAUDELAIRE, Curiosités Esthétiques.
Many modern poets may be considered as draughtsmen — in their precision, avoidance of superfluity, vagueness, or romanticism.—E. S.
‘Ô Soleil, c’est le temps de la Raison ardente.’
I read somewhere, and now cannot trace, this line by Guillaume Apollinaire. I think that poetry, at this time, lives in the weather of the ‘Raison ardente’.—E. S.
‘Genius can no more analyse itself than can electricity. Either one possesses it, or one does not possess it…. Stravinsky canalises a brute force and so uses it that it serves equally the apparatus from the workshop, and the pocket lamp.’— COCTEAU (‘Le Coq et l’Arlequin’, Appendice 1924), Le Rappel à l’Ordre.
‘As you see, we are not far from the religious spirit…. The primordial importance that is granted to lyricism by minds like ours, the most capable, one would have thought, of despising it, obliges us to recognise in it a divine essence.
‘This can change the slightest object into an idol, and make it live, for us, in conditions of an astounding silence.’—COCTEAU (‘Le Secret Professionel’), Le Rappel à l’Ordre.
‘The spirit of poetry: the religious spirit outside all precise religion, is doubtless what Paul Claudel depicted perfectly when he told us that Rimbaud was a mystic in the wild state.’—Ibid.
Among the characteristics of modern poetry at its best, as of modern painting at its best, is the extraordinary and almost terrifying identity of that idol, the subject, — an identity which is due, in part, to simplicity, to the stripping away of all superfluities (see the section on Simplicity, page 34), and the extraordinary, almost terrifying silence by which the idol is surrounded.—E. S.
To speak of certain modern painters, for in these qualities the poets resemble the painters, in a recent essay on Tchelitchew, in the quarterly View (May 1942), Mr. Lincoln Kirstein wrote, ‘In his’ (Tchelitchew’s) ‘later paintings, as in Seurat, objects indicated exist isolated in their own air…. Each has its own essential temporal and spatial independence.’
In the same number of this quarterly, Nicholas Calas, writing of Yves Tanguy, said, ‘The appalling silence of Tanguy’s pictures creates a longing for sound…. The changes of temperature are rhythmical.’ He adds, ‘The solitude of Tanguy is oceanic’.
In poetry, the subject, itself a life of sound, is surrounded by this silence. — In certain poems, it might be said that the changes of rhythm, of speed, are like changes in temperature.—E. S.
‘The depths are fathomless, and therefore calm. The innocence and nakedness are resumed.’—WHITMAN, Preface to Leaves of Grass.
‘More enigmas are contained in the shadow of a man walking in the light of the sun, than in all religions, past, present, or future.’—CHIRICO, writing in the quarterly Minotaure.
This is an exaggeration. To have said’ as many’ would have been truer. But it is from enigmas such as these that the modern poet waits to hear a voice, the voice that spoke in the groves of Dodona, the voice of the Sphinx.—E. S.
‘Here you will see no trace of any monument or superstition. Morality and language are reduced to their simplest expression…. New Erinnyes haunt the cottage which is my country and the home of my desires — Death without tears our active handmaid, hopeless Love, and a pretty little crime whining in the street.’—RIMBAUD (‘A Town’), Illuminations. Trans. Helen Rootham.
‘Great is the faith of the flush of knowledge, and of the investigation of the depths of qualities and things. Cleaving and circling here swells the soul of the poet.’— WHITMAN, Preface to Leaves of Grass.
‘The culte of a ruin hides … the sound of the shock of intelligence against beauty.’—COCTEAU (‘Picasso’), Le Rappel à l’Ordre.
(NOTE. — There is more music than poetry of this nature. For instance, certain works of Stravinsky’s are of this order. In poetry, my verses for William Walton’s and my joint work Façade are examples of this kind.—E. S.)
Warning: The ‘raw elegance of the lion is dangerous’.—COCTEAU, writing of Braque (‘Le Coq et l’Arlequin’), Le Rappel à l’Ordre.
Villiers de l’Isle Adam wrote of his own work, Triboulat Bonhomet, that it was ‘an enormous and sombre clowning, the colour of the century’.
All nations, and particularly the English, are slow to understand works of this nature. At first, these works are derided, and their authors insulted; then, twenty years after their first appearance, the point of such works is seen.
It is certain that an empty work which appears to be serious because it is dull will be acclaimed as a masterpiece, while a work of the above order will be at first disdained. —E. S.
Cocteau, writing in ‘Le Coq et l’Arlequin’ (Le Rappel à l’Ordre) of a great work of this nature, the ballet Parade, of which he, Picasso, and Satie were the authors, said, ‘For the majority of artists a work cannot be beautiful without a plot, involving mysticism, love, or boredom. Brevity, gaiety, sadness without romance are suspect. The hypocritical elegance of the Chinaman, the melancholy of the Little Girl’s steamboats, the touching silliness of the Acrobats, all that which has remained a dead letter to the public, would have pleased them, if the Acrobat had been in love with the Little Girl, and had been killed by the jealous Chinaman, who had then been killed, in his turn, by the wife of the Acrobat — or any of the other thirty-six dramatic combinations
‘… we become drunk with a strong honey, and that honey must sometimes be gathered from the paw of a very young bear.’—COCTEAU, writing about Poulenc (‘Le Coq et l’Arlequin’), Le Rappel à l’Ordre.
Works of this order have, from time to time, this wild and heady sweetness, attached to menace.—E. S.
‘It is the poetry of childhood overtaken by a technician.’— COCTEAU, writing of Satie’s music for Parade. Ibid.
Works of this order, in poetry, are frequently technical experiments of an extreme difficulty.—E. S.
‘Purely arithmetical relations’, wrote Schopenhauer — (‘Metaphysics of Music’) The World as Will and Idea— ‘lie at the foundation of both rhythm and melody; in the one case, the relative duration of the notes, in the other case, the relative rapidity of their vibrations…. The rhythmical element is the essential; for it can produce a kind of melody of itself alone … and without the other…’
This is the case with a work such as Façade, where in many cases (though not, for instance, in such poems as ‘By the Lake’, ‘Daphne’, ‘Four in the Morning’, or ‘Rose and Alice’) the rhythmical element has produced the melody.—E. S.
(See ‘On Technical Experiments.’ page 27.)
The mention of technical experiments brings us to the question of distortion.
Guillaume Apollinaire (Méditations Esthétiques) wrote: ‘The Fourth Dimension, such as it is, offers itself to the intellect from the plastic point of view, is the immensity of space, eternalising itself in all directions at a determined moment. It is space itself, the dimension of the infinite; it is this which endows objects with plasticity. It gives them, in a word, the proportions they deserve, whereas in Greek Art, for example, a rhythm that is to a certain degree mechanical ceaselessly destroys the proportions.
‘Greek Art had a purely human conception of beauty. It took Man as the measure of perfection. The Art of the new painters takes the infinite universe as the ideal, and it is to that ideal that we owe a new measure of perfection which allows the artist to give to the object proportions conformable to the degree of plasticity which he wishes to produce in it. Nietzsche divined the possibilities of such an Art.
‘“O Dionysus divine, why dost thou pull mine ears?” Ariadne asks her philosophical lover in one of the celebrated dialogues on the Isle of Naxos. “I find there is something agreeable, something pleasant about thine ears…. Why are they not still longer?”…
‘Nietzsche, when he recounts this anecdote, brings to trial, through the lips of Dionysus, Greek Art.’—APOLLINAIRE, Les Peintres Artistes.
‘Words and thoughts, never before brought together since Babel, clash into a protesting combination, and in the very aspect of the page there is something startling.’— ARTHUR SYMONS, writing on Villiers de l’Isle Adam, in Baudelaire: a Study.
I would have substituted ‘civilisation’ for ‘combination’.—E. S.
‘Charm needs a profound tact. One must cling to the edge of vacancy. Nearly all graceful artists fall over the edge. Rossini, Tchaikowski, Weber, Gounod, Chabrier … lean over, but do not fall. They have a deep root, and this allows them to lean very far.’— COCTEAU (‘Le Coq et l’Arlequin’), Le Rappel à l’Ordre.
‘Everything which grows with irresistible force is accused of arrivism.’— COCTEAU (‘Le Secret Professionel’), Le Rappel à l’Ordre.
‘You will say to me “No solitude lasts long. You will soon see the school of solitude, or the school of the tightrope.” It is possible; but as it is dangerous, it does not attract everybody.
‘As for the rest, one of the secrets of the tour de force lies in deceiving disciples, if they appear.
‘How shall they be deceived?
‘Ah, gentlemen, turn over our worlds, our pockets…. One risks nothing in divulging the professional secret. The means of using it are lacking.’—COCTEAU (‘D’un Ordre considéré comme une Anarchie’), Le Rappel à l’Ordre.
Alas, Monsieur Cocteau was over-optimistic. Nothing will prevent amateurs from imitating, and spoiling the works they imitate. I defy anyone to escape from them. Simplicity itself — the simplicity of the great master, that most uncopyable of all forces, is imitated.—E. S,