I have noted some difficulties with Modernism, which were largely evident to contemporaries, and which can be accommodated only by accepting that the poet’s world (with the surrounding critical apparatus) is the sole arbiter of truth. That accommodation is so commonly made in poetry today that the resulting autism is only apparent from wider perspectives, when art, truth and meaning are seen in the closely-argued generalities of philosophy. As Eliot indicated, poetry is the reorganisation of pre-existing material — attitudes, artworks, tacit beliefs and understandings. The poet assembles and shapes the material to effect a certain response. Or he did once. In Modernism, the poet has to create his own material, and his own response. If, further, the poet cannot employ the beliefs and habits of the common reader, which Modernism, by its stress on the new, has outlawed, then the poet will be cultivating ever less hospitable terrain. The poetry grows thinner, more arbitrary and fragmented.
A similar trend is apparent in other art forms, of course: perhaps less
so in the modern novel but markedly so in the visual and performing
arts. Each has its fiercely loyal partisans, but is generally dependent on
specialist reviewing and the public purse. The unpopularity points to
real difficulties, real flaws in the product, I am suggesting, and
suggest further that these flaws have to be faced, and alternatives
found.
Poetry need not be inspirational, but its great periods in world
history do generally coincide with periods of political freedom,
material prosperity and abounding faith in the future. So is the poetry
of the Greek playwrights, the gold and silver ages of Roman poetry, the
poetry of the T’ang Dynasty, the Elizabethan and Romantic schools in
England, the gold and silver ages of Russian poetry, and early
twentieth-century poetry of Spain. Many of those hopes were misplaced,
of course. Wars and political repression followed in Greece, Rome,
Russia and Spain. But poets do need the conviction that they are doing
something worthwhile, and they are voicing more than personal
interests, a situation which is not so apparent today, in poetry’s tone
or its accomplishments.
Happily, the scene grows much more encouraging if we look a deeper. Since the
new vistas can be found in the free Ocaso Press publication Literary Theory,
generally in more detail and with supporting references, I simply note the
relevant section here — as (B 6) etc. — and just source the new
material. As the Background
stresses, these alternative vistas will only come alive and make sense
if readers make their own intellectual journeys. What is
ingrained in our current literary sensibility is not easily detected,
questioned or enlarged
The first suggestion is that we ameliorate our pessimistic view of
modern life which finds its expression in Baudelaire, and the poètes
maudits, draws on Eliot and the horror and despair general after
W:W.I., turns darker after W.W.II, and now gloomily stares at
environmental degradation {1}, climate change {2}, looming shortages of
land and water {3}, corporate takeover of government {4}, rising levels
of global debt {5}, debt peonage {6}, surveillance and erosion of civil
liberties {7}, and the threat of world war as Russia and China challenge
American hegemony {8}.
All are real and pressing, with nuclear annihilation the greatest
threat to the planet, yet warfare is not written into our genes but
only a legacy of social attitudes. Organized conflicts go back some
6,000 years, well before the creation of literature and modern
societies but not 300,000 years to the origin of Homo sapiens. For 98%
of his time on earth, mankind has lived happily and cooperatively
without the need for wholesale butchery, and of the three animal
species known to engage in warfare — ants, some species of chimpanzees
and man — man is by far the least aggressive. {9}
Indeed, Matt Ridley’s {10} superficial, selective but persuasive
defence of free enterprise suggests that the world will go on getting
better for everyone. Climate change can be accommodated. Poorer
countries have made great strides towards material prosperity in recent
decades, and will continue to do so, even in Africa. Much remains to be
done — a truly enormous amount — but there is no cause for the
pessimism so prevalent today.
Many of the views are contentious — that labourers left the land
willingly to escape rural poverty, that threats to species and the
environment are exaggerated, that fossil fuels and nuclear power are
still the best if not the only power options, that British cotton goods
undercut Indian supplies by fair competition, that economic divides are
deepening only in the US, that GM crops are beneficial — but the
central message is clear. Successful societies exchange products and
ideas, learning from each other and mutually improving themselves if
not prevented from doing so by church and state (i.e. excessive
regulation, patents, etc.) Need is the mother of invention throughout,
and innovation comes more from shop-floor pressures than fundamental
scientific research. High debt levels, contracting world trade and
financial instability will be overcome by ad hoc adjustments just the
same, though asset markets, i.e. banks and currency flows, do need to
be regulated. In the last 50 years, more people (practically everywhere
but not in North Korea, or presumably in the Middle East) have come to
enjoy greater choice, greater material prosperity and freedom to go
their own way. The world is not about to run out of water, oil or food.
There were food shortages that created the unrest of the Arab Spring,
certainly, but a contributory factor was foodstuff farming diverted to
create biofuels. Again in the last 50 years, GDP per capita has become
lower only in Afghanistan, Haiti, Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone and
Somalia. Life expectancy is lower only in Russia, Swaziland and
Zimbabwe.
Child mortality has declined. People live longer, and enjoy
better health. Living standards fell only in China (1960s) Cambodia
(1970s) Ethiopia (1980s) Rwanda (1990s), Congo (2000s) and North Korea
throughout. The rich got richer, but the poor did even better (except
in the UK and USA). Even those designated poor in the USA generally
have electricity, running water, flush toilets, refrigerator, TV,
telephone and even a car and air conditioning (the last two in 70% of
cases.) Absolute world poverty may well disappear around 2035.
Declining inequality stalled in the UK and USA in the 70s, and
increased in China and India, but only because the really rich got even
more so. Measured in terms of labour needed to produce the item,
everything has got cheaper. Competition creates millionaires but also
affordable products. Housing is an exception — because of government
policies: restricting supply, tax relief on mortgages and preventing
property busts. People richer materially are also happier, on balance,
but more important is social and political freedom. Of course there are
black spots: war, disease, corruption and the continuing post-2008
recession. Debt levels are high, but increased productivity will see
them brought down to manageable proportions. The curse of resource-rich
countries is not the resources themselves but rule by rent-seeking
autocrats. GM crops bring better productivity.
Large companies are commonly inefficient, self-perpetuating and
anti-competitive, but not do generally survive for long. Trust,
cooperation and specialization (not self-sufficiency) are the key.
Agrarian societies spent much of their income on food (e.g. 35% in
modern Malawi), which today takes only 14% of the average consumer’s
take-home pay. And life for modern hunter-gatherers around the world is
not idyllic: two thirds of their time is spent under the threat of
tribal warfare. 87% experience war annually. Disease, starvation,
murder and enslavement are never far away. Homicide rates in Europe
fell from a medieval 35% to 3% in 1750 to under 1% in 1950. World
population is increasing, but at declining rates: it will probably
stabilize at 9.2 billion in 2075, allowing all to be fed, housed and
given worthwhile lives.
Rome’s energy source was slaves, supplemented by water-power, animals
and simple machines. Windmills became important in Europe, and peat
fuelled Holland’s success. Britain’s industrial revolution was made
possible by coal and America. The country got sugar from the East
Indies, timber from Canada, cotton from the southern American states,
and power equivalent of 15 million acres of forest from her coal.
However unpleasant the life in industrial cities, it was far worse in
the countryside. Birmingham began as a centre of metalworking trade in
the early 1600s, helped by being free of a civic charter and
restrictive guilds. Success bred success. A disposable income enabled a
consumerist society to begin here in the 18th century, well in advance
of France and other European countries. American land open to settlers
prevented the division of holdings between multiple heirs — the problem
in Japan, Ireland, Denmark and later in India and China. Planned
parenthood is counter-productive and unnecessary. Mothers automatically
limit their families when the child mortality rate declines. They turn
to education, improve the lives of their families, follow individual
inclinations and take a paying job. Over half the world now has a
fertility rate below 2.1, which in some countries now places a strain
on loan repayments and pensions.
Ridley’s views are not Pollyanna hopes. Mankind now has the
technologies to purify saline and contaminated water for US 0.2
cent/litre, to generate biofuels from algae, to make alternative energy
sources competitive with oil, gas and nuclear energy, to grow food more
cheaply in ‘vertical farms’, to replace meat sources by artificial
protein growth, and to bring health care to the poorest by mobile phone
technology. {11} All that is missing is the political will to
abandon ruinous resource wars, and engage in more equitable and
fruitful dialogue.
I suggest, secondly, that poets become interested in such themes, and
so come to terms with science, just as philosophy and organized
religion were compelled to do. Two great streams of thought run through
the nineteenth century: idealism and materialism. (B 12.5) The first
argued that we can understand the ultimate nature of reality only
through and within natural human experience, especially through those
traits which distinguish man as a spiritual being. It is thought that
provides the categories to experience sensations.
In contrast, the materialists held that there is an independently existing world, that
human beings are material entities like everything else, that the human
mind does not exist independently of the human body, that there is no
God or other non-material being, and that all forms and behaviours are
ultimately reducible to general physical laws. Science opposed theology
but not religion, and many felt they were freeing faith for a nobler
and more adequate conception. Others regarded theology as reflections
on knowledge and experience of religion in history, and so undergoing
change of necessity. There were many schools of thought, but religion
had to renounce its claim to literal truth and content itself with
shaping feeling.
But perhaps the most significant development of century was
historicism, the belief that something could only be understood, and
its significance assessed, by seeing it within the stream of history.
Historicism drew strength from notions of an organic unfolding, and
from nineteenth century hopes of a science assisting social change.
The themes are still important in current aesthetics and literary
theory. Central today are the questions of knowledge, of grounding and
of authority. On what do our judgements ultimately rest? On sense data
and logic, say the materialists. On the principles and presuppositions
that we acquire through living in society, say the idealists.
Structuralism (B 6) and Post-structuralism (B 7-9) crossed the divides.
Structuralism sought a conceptual structure as comprehensive as
Hegel's, but derived it from anthropology and linguistics, disregarding
the assumptions inherent in these disciplines. Post-structuralism is a
stance against tradition, authority and measurement. Stressing the
individual and spontaneous response, it returns to the early thinkers
of the nineteenth century who reacted against the shallow conformism of
the Enlightenment. But its view of the world is darker. Wars, genocide
and economic exploitation have destroyed any comforting faith in God,
in man's inherent goodness, or in the healthy outcome of his passions
My third suggestion is that poetry give
up its obsession with the
limitations and deceptions of language, which are not as Modernist
poetry
supposes. In every profession and walk of life a sensible multi-purpose
compromise
enables us, every hour of the day, to go about our business in modest
security. Nothing in our contemporary world would last a week if the
assertions of deconstruction (B 8) were true, and making poetry from
misapprehensions only compounds the difficulties. If language is indeed
unsatisfactory, even more so will be the poetry that highlights that
unsatisfactory nature. Such poetry cannot be revelatory or
thought-provoking, moreover, because it is necessarily preaching to the
converted, to the shrinking and largely academic world of Modernist
poetry, critical theory and literary
criticism.
In practice, as I've tried to show, the difficulties arise because
Modernist poets take liberties with language. Their usage is oblique to
normal usage, exploits ambiguities of their own making, and continually
prefers closing the circle of their own thoughts to making any communal sense.
That policy is their privilege, the licence they have given themselves
in making their creations, but it is not a feature inherent in language
as such, and not therefore a feature of the larger world viewed with
and through language as normally used.
A fourth suggestion is that poets investigate love and the erotic
passions in a more thorough-going and transcendental way, perhaps
looking at Eros through depth psychology (B 42.4), of which more later.
The Greeks had many words for love and they didn't confuse Eros with
maternal love or sexual pleasure. Today many aspects of Eros are
debased or impoverished, especially in the commercialisation of
'explicit' films and novels, where sex appears squalid, banal and
vulgar.
Man has constantly tried to understand the secret and essence of
sex in divinity itself. Through sacred prostitution, possession by
incubus and succubus, and by secret societies, the gods of sex were
manifest on earth. The male appears as logos or principal or form, the
female as the life force, each with different attitudes and objectives.
And if the sex drive is not to be repressed, it must be asserted — in
profane or sacred love — or transformed by tantric practices, by the
Cabbala or Eleusinian mysteries. Eros is not an instinct for
reproduction, nor a pursuit of pleasure, but a deep attraction that
causes fundamental changes in the partners. Erotic experience
transforms the habitual boundaries of the ego, a dis-individualizing
exaltation by which one temporarily escapes the human condition.
Worldwide, humanity has indeed recognized many aspects of
Eros: The overpowering nature of the sexual experience. Its possession
and abandonment. The ever-present danger of loss. The heart as the seat
of consciousness. Its roots in love, pain and death. Its pleasure and
its suffering. The ecstasy. The incommunicable experience of
coitus. Its modesty and associated fear of falling. Its cathartic and
cleansing properties, and its part adulthood, initiation ceremonies and
social behaviour. All are woefully unrepresented in today’s poetry
Poets also need, it seems to me – a fifth suggestion – to explore the religious dimension (B 42). Poets require a vision of the world, and for long centuries the Christian church provided precisely that, not only in doctrine but in revelation, experience and inspiration. A poet's religious affiliations were not merely reflected in the semantic core of his work, but conditioned the vocabulary, the structure of his arguments and patterning of his Christian outlook. Religion so outlined applies to all religions, to Humanism, scientific neutrality, indeed to all types of human commitment. Commitment anchors the system of meaning in the emotions, and generates awe. Ritual maximizes order, reinforcing the sense of place or identity in society, especially after the important events of marriage, birth and death. Sacrifice is a form of commitment that clarifies priorities. Morals are what guarantees order in a society. Myths in the broader sense, including religion, are the emotion-laden assertion of a man's place in a meaningful world.
Readers who are not adherents of a recognised religion, and/or
who wish to sidestep the notoriously partisan nature of religion, may
find depth psychology (B 42.3) helpful, a sixth suggestion. Depth
psychology is not a new concept, nor an unusual activity: every day we
are undertaking analysis and therapy of the soul, this being the psyche
of the Greeks or anima of the Romans. The soul does not denote unusual
activity: every day we are undertaking analysis and therapy of the
soul, this being the psyche of the Greeks or anima of the Romans. The
soul indeed is a perspective rather than a substance, a perspective
mediating and reflecting on the events we are immersed in all the time.
It forms a self-sustaining and imagining substrate to our lives. It
deepens events into experiences, making meaning possible, communicating
with love and religious concern. It includes dream, image and fantasy
in its operation, recognizing that all realities are primarily symbolic
and metaphorical.
Depth psychology does not begin with brain physiology (B 23) or with
structures of language (B 37) and society (B 26), but with images,
these being the basic givens of psychic life: self-originating,
inventive, spontaneous and complete, organized in archetypes. It is
archetypes, the deepest patterns of our psychic functioning, that are
the roots of our souls, governing our perspective of ourselves and the
world. Fundamentally, they are metaphors — God, life, health, art —
which hold worlds together and which cannot be adequately
circumscribed. Other examples can be found in literature, scientific
thought, rituals and relationships. Archetypes are emotionally
possessive. Organizing whole clusters of events in different areas of
life, ascribing the individual his place in society, and controlling
everything he sees, does and says, they naturally appear as gods.
By denying the gods we commit many crimes. By seeing ourselves as god,
we commit to ideologies and commit atrocities in their name. We look to
other people for our salvation, and are continually disappointed.
Psychologising cannot be brought to rest in science or philosophy. It
is satisfied only by its own movement of seeing through, during which
it a) interiorises, moving from data to personification, b) justifies
itself, even hinting at a deeper hidden god, c) provides a narrative,
told in metaphors, d) uses ideas as eyes of the soul. Literalism or
monotheism of meaning is the greatest enemy today, and we should
remember that definitions outside science, mathematics and logic are
elusive things. Enigma provokes understanding. Myths make concrete
particulars into universals. Vico remarked that metaphors (B 24) 'give
sense and passion to insensate things'. Archetypes are semantically
metaphors and have a double existence, being a) full of internal
opposites, b) unknowable and yet known through images, c) congenital
but not inherited, d) instinctive and spiritual, e) purely formal
structures and contents, f) psychic and extra-psychic.
The gods are essential to our well-being, therefore, giving us
faith and significance in our surroundings, but are rooted in society's
understandings and tacit beliefs. They are not individual to the poet,
therefore, who has to search for them through a shared response to what
he writes, i.e. not simply tack them on à la Pound's
Cantos.
Metaphor research (B 24) is a seventh suggestion. Human beings create
cognitive models that reflect concepts needed for interaction between
themselves and their surroundings. Such concepts are made by bodily
activities prior to language. The cognitive models proposed were very
varied, with the most complex being radial with multiple schema linked
to a common centre. Language was characterized by symbolic models (with
generative grammar an overlying, subsequent addition) and operated by
constructing models — propositional, image schematic, metaphoric and
metonymic. Properties were matters of relationships and prototypes.
Meaning arose through embodiment in schemas. Schemas could also be
regarded as containers — part-whole, link, centre-periphery,
source-path-goal, up-down, front-back. Objectivity was never absolute,
and we could only look at a problem from as many aspects as possible.
Though schemas were hypothetical, and lacked the analytical power of
other approaches, Lakoff and Turner have enlarged their potential.
Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western
Thought attempted to re-found philosophy on cognitive science. It
employed three premises: that mind is inherently embodied, that thought
is mostly unconscious, and that abstract concepts are largely
metaphorical. Out went Platonic Idealism, Cartesian Dualism, and much
of the Anglo-American analytical philosophy. As ever, the concepts were
intriguing, indeed liberating, but the empirical evidence was not
compelling, and the arguments advanced did not fully engage with those
of different intellectual tribes (mathematicians, philosophers,
scientists in general). Mark Johnson had independently extended the
notion of metaphor to parables — not a word standing for
something else, but a whole story standing for a particular description
of the world. Narrative imaginings allow us to understand and organize
experience. We project one story onto another, language emerging to
allow this process. Again, a useful top-down alternative to the
bottom-up (and not over-successful) approach of traditional
linguistics, but still only straws in the wind. Then came Where
Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into
Being by Lakoff and Núñez, that did build rigorously on two decades of
cognitive science.
Images are important to metaphor research and to Modernist poetry, but
those images have important and complicated tasks to do, and so are not
wholly under the poet's control. Race memories, important distinctions,
types of argument, rhetoric and tacit beliefs — all have to play their
part to make a poem's imagery significant and persuasive.
For those interested in the mind, but find
scientific models based on the physiology of the brain, (B 23.1) and
computer models (B 23.5) too mechanical, I recommend — an eighth suggestion — they explore the Theory of the
Irreducible Mind (B 23.10) This approach by Edward F. Kelly and
co-workers is built on the psychology of William James and the
research of F.W.H. Meyers into the paranormal. On this evidence, the
mind is not generated by brain activity, but is merely part of an
exterior, pre-existing and all-pervading consciousness, a consciousness
that is selected and shaped by the brain into an individual awareness —
much as the radio set selects and makes audible some frequency in a
broad spectrum of radio waves. Consciousness is therefore incorporeal,
larger than individual brains, and may to some extent survive physical
death.
But how can mind and matter interact, non-physical with physical
matter? Because mind and matter are connected on the quantum mechanics
level, believes Henry Stapp, (B 23.10) essentially by ion channels, so
narrow that quantum mechanics effects must operate at nerve terminals
in the brain. Stapp's views have naturally been contested, but are
based on a thorough understanding of quantum mechanics and Whitehead's
Process and Reality. Indeed the emergence of complexity, consciousness
and networks has greatly changed our view of the universe,
and given back to human beings some control over their thoughts and
actions, as common sense has always supposed, but behaviourism and
recent literary theory have denied.
In short, poetry is language used in its larger dimension, and that
dimension assumes the world itself has larger dimensions than the
materialism of our late capitalist age. In profound ways, poetry is an
exploration of our lives and their meanings to us.
References can now be found in a free pdf compilation of Ocaso Press's Modernism articles.
