An Apology for Poetry (Part 2)

As I wrote in my introduction to Part 1 of An Apology for Poetry, after a rather long hiatus in my postings on Tradition Restored, I thought that it might be helpful to the reader to re-publish the first three posts of Tradition Restored, which, beginning in the August of 2016, I posted as an introduction to the blog.

These three posts served to introduce the many posts that have followed them. I intended the three as an orientation, a kind of container or point of reference by which all those that follow them might be ordered in the mind. The Apology is a commentary on my long poem, “The Young Poet’s Elegy to the Court of God,” in which many years ago I was bold enough (or presumptuous enough) to set forth a theory of poetry and what I rather briskly considered deviations from the recommended path. It is upon the foundation of this theory that I based my plays, The Tragedy of King Lewis the Sixteenth, Dido: The Tragedy of a Woman (both available at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble), and now The Tragedy of Orpheus and the Maenads (available at Arouca Press, Amazon.com, and Barnes & Noble). The “Elegy” will be found in the book including and entitled, The Tragedy of King Lewis the Sixteenth, and appended as well after the text of Orpheus and the Maenads. I hope that readers who do not share my Catholic faith, which is herein implicit, may yet feel that they derive some benefit or stimulation from my thoughts. The discourse on Thomistic angelology, for example, may serve to shed light on the nature of man and the consequent nature of poetry. I have considerably revised Part 2, which appears forthwith.

Part 2

The trial to which God subjected the angels and by which they should either merit the Beatific Vision of Heaven or bring down upon themselves eternal punishment was instantaneous and possibly occurred the instant after their creation. One can hardly speak of their lives before they reached eternity as spans. Now, we spirits who exist in time are given to describing human life as a journey. The Christian knows that he was conceived in Original Sin (the sin of Adam), but that through Baptism and the consequent infusion of sanctifying grace (obtained through the sacraments of the Church, especially the Holy Eucharist) he is enabled to live a strenuous life of virtue. He takes Christ as the model of perfect man and imitates Him. Generally, the perfecting of this imitation takes a lifetime. The Christian who perseveres receives a reward that is really the fulfillment of his Christ-like life: a participation as an adopted son in the life of the Holy Trinity.

Now, if art is to be engaged in discovering to us in a concrete way the peace-conferring abiding unity in human nature and if this unity in men exists as the fruit of the specifically temporal human activity of conforming oneself to the Divine Will, then the main and highest function of poetry must be to represent sequential human action that in its purposefulness shows changeable, unstable humanity taking on universal form, which in its fullness is Christ Himself. In The Classical Tradition in Poetry, Gilbert Murray writes that in poetic imitation, or mimesis, so well embodied in Greek drama and so well defined by Aristotle, the poet ceases to be himself; he takes on the persona of a god or hero (cf., a Catholic priest acting in persona Christi in the traditional Sacrifice of the Mass) and in an ecstasy, or rising out of self, imaginatively becomes like the person or thing he most reveres and so partakes of a divine or magic life. How superior this noble super-rational ecstasy is to the merely sub-rational self-expression most art (including poetry; cf. also, a Catholic priest saying the Protestantized new [Novus Ordo] Mass facing the people) since the eighteenth century !  Although the hero or protagonist may, like Macbeth, involve himself in gross moral turpitude, occasioned by his fatal character flaw, at the end in true tragedy he exhibits compunction and a measure of wise self-awareness at the moment of his death, however condign. Murray writes also: “Tragedy . . . hides or adorns ‘the coming bulk of death,’ magnifies the glory of courage, the power of endurance, the splendour of self-sacrifice and self-forgetfulness, so as to make us feel, at least for the fleeting moment, that nothing is here for tears, and that death is conquered.”

I will make bold and say that the life of Christ, culminating in the agony of His Crucifixion and the glory of His Resurrection, provides the paradigm of all art. Of course, He had no tragic flaw to lead Him into hubris and the retribution of nemesis. He willingly and in complete innocence became the spotless Lamb and Scapegoat, bearing our sins in His Body on the wood of the Cross. His life was a journey to Jerusalem, at once the altar of sacrifice and the type of Heaven or beatitude. The tragic poets of Greece in the few centuries before the Incarnation were effectively groping their way to an ideal art that was perfectly suggested by the God-Man in a divinely chosen nation some hundreds of miles away. Murray points out that the Greek tragic hero always suffers and dies to save others. 

As I said above, serious art is a product of the Moral Imagination, which may be defined as intuition of the super-rational (not to be confused with the “surreal”). Now, the products of what Irving Babbitt calls the Idyllic Imagination, which may be defined as intuition of the sub-rational (including the “surreal”), are legitimate when without pretension they provide recreation, a refreshing respite from the serious responsibilities of life and the inevitable chain of cause and effect. Trouble comes when, out of moral indolence, men decide to forsake responsibility and set recreation up as wisdom and a substitute for religion—to replace awe with wonder. The Many is emphasized to the detriment of the One; sub-rational Idealism is born, a wishful thinking—feeling, rather—cut off from the reality of human nature (e.g., the poetry of Wordsworth [who denigrated reason (“the false secondary power by which we multiply distinctions”), Keats [Oh, for a life of sensations!”], and Goethe [Gefühl ist alles. (Feeling is all.)]).

In a curious way, men who give themselves to this predilection become strange counterfeits of the angels. They would live intuitively and without the stern, prosaic interference of reason or good sense. They shrink from time as the unfolding of cause and effect, which continually offers itself as a kind of textbook of use in living a strenuous life of either moral or utilitarian action, that is to say, action with a purpose. They much prefer to live in “distinct and disconnected” instants of sub-rational “intuition,” perhaps the quintessence of which may be found in Symbolist or Imagist poetry. Because they were never infused with innate ideas of things, that is, are not really angels, and owing to their moral lassitude and recoil from analytical reason, the experience to which they address themselves and would dignify with the aura of wisdom and infinity is mere strangeness and wonder (i.e, frankly, sensationalism or nervous inebriation). A man such as these may in a wide sense be called a Romanticist.

(To be continued in Part 3.)