A Companion to American Poetry. Группа авторов

A Companion to American Poetry - Группа авторов


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a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity” so as to develop “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (Eliot 1975, p. 177). Eliot’s fascination with myth, and his study of such works as The Golden Bough and From Ritual to Romance, do not, of course, simply result in a “method” of composition. The poet’s manipulation of myth in order to produce the “continuous parallel” between past and present generates a sense of supernatural timelessness (implicit in The Waste Land and explicit in Four Quartets) which may in turn counteract what Eliot regards as the worst tendency in modern literature. As he declares in “Religion and Literature” (1935), “modern literature is corrupted by what I call Secularism, that it is simply unaware, simply cannot understand the meaning of, the primacy of the supernatural over the natural life: something which I assume to be our primary concern” (Eliot 1975, p. 105).

      In contrast to Eliot (although influenced by him), Hart Crane considers myth in a less severe and more anticipatory manner. Crane cannot subordinate himself to old myths and recycle them: “The great mythologies of the past (including the Church) are deprived of enough façade to even launch good raillery against” (Crane 1966, p. 218). In contrast to Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism, Crane’s spiritual vision, following that of Whitman, is deeply American: “I feel persuaded that here [in America] are destined to be discovered certain as yet undefined spiritual quantities, perhaps a new hierarchy of faith not to be developed so completely elsewhere” (Crane 1966, p. 219). Hence the poet, in the famous last lines of “To Brooklyn Bridge,” beseeches the bridge to “sweep, descend/And of the curveship lend a myth to God” (Crane 1966, p. 46). This new myth, envisioned through the technologies of modern life, comes into being because “New conditions of life germinate new forms of spiritual articulation” (Crane 1966, p. 222).

      This leads us back to the question as to whether the loss of myth under the conditions of modernity is itself a myth. The status of myth under modern conditions is ambiguous, indeterminate; it is, to use Jean-Luc Nancy’s term, “myth interrupted.” If the secularism of enlightenment is a myth, then myth is a myth as well. As Nancy puts it, “The phrase ‘myth is a myth’ harbors simultaneously and in the same thought a disabused irony (‘foundation is a fiction’) and an onto-poetico-logical affirmation (‘fiction is a foundation’). This is why myth is interrupted. It is interrupted by its myth” (Nancy 1991, p. 55). If this is the case, then the self-consciousness of modern archetypal thinking always undermines itself; it is part of the destabilized dialectic of reason and belief. As Nancy tell us, “A name has been given to this voice of interruption: literature” (Nancy 1991, p. 63). Let us see how this plays out among modern poets.

      Redemptive Poetics

      “It is the belief and not the god that counts” (Stevens 1990, p. 188), writes Wallace Stevens in his Adagia (1934–1940). For Stevens, belief remains a necessity even after the death of God, and the importance of poetry grows proportionately: “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption” (Stevens 1990, 185). Poetry can redeem us, it can save us, for apparently, we still need saving, even, or perhaps especially, in a godless world. In Stevens’ view, “Poetry is the expression of the experience of poetry” (Stevens 1990, 190). Hence his use of the term essence: poetry is something intangible—a spirit or idea—which we experience in words, though it is by no means only its words: “Every poem is a poem within a poem: the poem of the idea within the poem of the words.” And yet “In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all” (Stevens 1990, p. 188)—an adage in which one hears an echo of the commandment of Deuteronomy 6:5: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” We cannot love the essence of poetry, perhaps because it is beyond us in its very intangibility. Rather, we must love the words. Therefore, writes Stevens, “It is possible to establish aesthetics in the individual mind as immeasurably a greater thing than religion” (Stevens 1990, p. 192), codifying a notion that Stevens puts forward years before in “Sunday Morning,” when his female persona recognizes that “Divinity must live within herself,” that “All pleasures and all pains…are the measures destined for her soul” (Stevens 1954, p. 67).

      Perhaps an answer may be found in Stevens’ late poem, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”: “We say God and the imagination are one…” (Stevens 1954, p. 524). Here, the union of the poet and his muse counteracts the poverty of a reality without poetry, without the idea of order. This union produces “a light, a power, the miraculous influence,” and in the grip of that power, the lovers “feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, / A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous, // Within its vital boundary, in the mind.” That godlike power is the imagination, offering a vision of the cosmic order, and “out of the central mind, / We make a dwelling in the evening air,/In which being there together is enough” (Stevens 1954, p. 524).

      The idea


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