CPR - Our Steps Amid the Ruined Colonnade: The Muddle of Pure Poetry by James Matthew Wilson

E-mail this site to a friend.

more than 100 reviews,
interviews, and articles.

	$6 per month
	$18 per year

Orléans, Beaugency

Notre-Dame de Cléry,

Vendôme, Vendôme.

—traditional

Aristotle was better who watched the insect breed,

The natural world develop,

Stressing the function, scrapping the Form in Itself

Taking the horse from the shelf and letting it gallop.

—Louis MacNeice

The long and turbulent twentieth-century experiment in free verse is at once secondary cause and belated symptom of a larger crisis in the historical life of poetry. As the following reflections seek to illustrate, it is also a minor excrescence of a larger crisis in the historical life of human beings as philosophical creatures, as animals who seek the truth about things. Unfortunately, there is no way to provide a historical account of free verse and the poetic modernism of which it was a part without attending to the larger shifts in how human beings perceive and ask questions about the world in general. As Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946) demonstrated in such a compelling fashion, literary style routinely affords us insight into how the society that reads and writes that literature views the world. In previous sections of this series, I sought to explain why contemporary free verse poetry is unsatisfactory by almost any standard. In this one, I risk tugging the reader along on a historical digression to examine the ways in which persons have traditionally asked questions about the nature of things in order to establish the “wrong turn” queries about the nature of poetry took early in the last century. This will lead us to a brief survey of the literary theories of Henri Bremond, W.K. Wimsatt, Jacques Maritain, John Hollander, and J.V. Cunningham, all of which will set the stage for my own historical account of what poetry is, or rather, what poetry does when it is being itself.

One need only review the major essays of T.S. Eliot, from “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1931), “The Social Function of Poetry” (1945), and, finally, “The Frontiers of Criticism” (1956), to see that the central questions of modern poetry are in fact the definition of those two terms. What is “poetry”? What does it mean to be “modern”? Beyond essential definition, what is the contingent place of poetry in modernity? Free verse proposed, in its earliest appearance, to let poetry at last reach its apotheosis as the antonym of prose. Stéphane Mallarmé, in his brief essay on the book, in his Oxford Lecture, and by example in his last “poem,” Un coup de dés, indicated that modernity, with its listless and useless freedom from necessity, had at last made pure poetry possible. “Prose” bespoke individuation and form, the hunkering down into matter of thoughts that had no better or more lasting use than to be communicated. Poetry indicated that which eternally remains: Mallarmé’s one new word, or Ezra Pound’s “news that stays news.” To differentiate two things that traditionally have very obvious differences in the order of composition—prose and poetry—by the less certain distinction between that which is ephemeral and that which perdures seems odd indeed. But it crisply suggests the interpenetration of the question of modernity with that of poetry: those poems were most modern which were so eviscerated of “use value” that they could be described not in terms of what they did or meant, but only in terms of what they were.

In 1925, the Abbé Henri Bremond actually coined the term “pure poetry,” and developed Mallarmé’s theories about it, claiming that pure poetry was the absolute toward which all poets strive. Purified of all extrinsic contaminants, the poem would serve only the function of its own essential act of existence. It would not inform one of anything, or teach one anything, but would stand forth as its own achieved end. Bremond was primarily a historian of the literature of French mystical theology, however, and the pure poem was not, to his mind, truly autonomous. As his Prière et Poésie (1927) argues, the achieved pure poem is the record of the poet’s entrance into the perception of that which is most truly real. The poem is a pathway beyond the superficial apprehension of facts, leading us “to see into the life of things,” as Wordsworth had written more than a century earlier. Bremond had been struck by the continuities between the works of the great romantic poets and those of the mystical theologians of past ages. The pure poem became evidence of a long tradition of persons who pierced beyond the merely quantitative apprehension of various temporal beings to the vision of Being Itself, in its permanence and absolute unity. No sooner had he sought out a poetry purified of all social utility, in other words, than he found a use for it higher than any of his contemporaries could credit. The pure poem was either the oracle itself or, more precisely, the record of a poet’s experience as becoming himself the oracle that shows forth divine truths. Purity, it turns out, meant beatitude, but few poems indeed shed a holy radiance upon the readers. Bremond’s project, and that of all modern questers after the grail of pure poetry, was both impossible and inevitable.

Let us consider its inevitability first, in the context of the history of philosophy. Philosophical thinking up to the time of Kant had largely remained grounded in the idea of the telos. The human reason allowed one to gather the bulk of our individual experience with that of the experience of others, that of our contemporaries and of past generations, and to submit that vast narrative archive of experience to sustained reflection. The process of determining the identity of something, of defining its essence, had always been one of sifting through the various experiences had or reported in order to determine what those experiences said about the function of some particular thing. Abstractly speaking, the story of a thing’s function, of its purpose and success or failure at fulfilling that purpose, led to its definition. More loosely speaking, one could rely upon the narratives of countless generations in order to define a bed, according to what it does, as “an object or area specifically set aside as a place to rest.”

These pre-modern thinkers determined what was ethical behavior by reflection on different narratives of human life, and by subsequently drawing conclusions on what life practices led to flourishing and which led to unhappiness or death. That is, the telling of and reflection on stories allowed one to determine what one ought to do in light of the flourishing, happy life one desired to live. In the process of discovering what one ought to do, one ultimately formulated a well-wrought image of what a happy life looks like. In the very process of doing one’s life, and of reflecting on the practices of many different lives, the essence or image of the flourishing human life inevitably formed. Virtues are those character traits that lead to practices that must be found in any happy life, and are themselves signs of the attainment of the good life. Though, for example, one might be courageous and still be miserable, one cannot be said to be truly happy (truly to live the good life) if one lacks courage. Some will undoubtedly deny the notion of courage as a virtue, but they also probably make so many decisions out of fear as to have their lives nearly determined by it. They cannot arrive at a proper image of the good life, for fear it might offend someone. No one can be happy whose every rational choice is governed by the necessity fear imposes. Restoring this narrative foundation of ethics to moral philosophy has been the ground-shaking accomplishment of Alasdair MacIntyre. As a rule of thumb, one knows sound philosophical reflection when it begins something along the lines of, “Human beings speak of ‘health’ in three ways . . .” Or, to our subject, “We normally call a ‘poem’ a written composition . . .” and so forth. In a formulation to which we shall return, J. V. Cunningham insists, “I mean by poetry what a man means when he goes to the bookstore to buy a book of poems as a graduation gift . . .” Human experience does not limit our knowledge of the essence of things; rather, it allows us to rise to that knowledge by means of reflection.

Beyond moral philosophy or ethics—indeed, extending to all inquiry—this narratological method (reflection on narrative, but also reflection on shared historical experience as itself a narrative) remains inescapable. As the definition of “bed” given above exemplifies, we determine the essential definition of something by identifying what it does or, rather, for what end (telos) it exists. The concept of finality, or purpose, called “teleology,” allows us to determine what a thing is. People betray their ignorance of telos all the time when they snicker at St. Thomas’s definition of man as a rational animal. “Not the men I know,” they smirk. How right they are. Aquinas does not mean that most men behave rationally, or are always and already reasonable, but rather, that men must use their reason if they are to fulfill the end or purpose which distinguishes them from other creatures. Rational animals are men living fully. Louis MacNeice similarly smirked, “How nice to be born a man,” but that only gets things arsewards. On this definition (which is not the only accepted definition of the human being), one is born a human being because, barring unforeseen contingent obstacles, one’s development would normally lead to one’s possessing the adult power of reason. One’s essence as human depends not on the daily practice of reason, but only on the ordering of one’s being to an end that (again, barring contingent obstacles) would normally include one’s possessing the power of reason. We define all things by the perceptible purpose for which they have been created, not merely by their diverse, particular states, at the moment of creation or even at their moment of individual highest achievement. The seventy-year-old ignoramus and the three-year-old innocent are no less human than the thirty-five-year-old polymath. While only one of these three possesses human reason in the fullest sense, all, by their ordination to the end of becoming rational animals, are equally human. One is simply not yet a fully successful human, and the other may seem to us a failed life, but we can only judge these things in light of the telos we have of what it means to perform the act of “humanness,” the telos of the human being as rational animal.

This pre-modern metaphysics of telos—which, incidentally, remains the metaphysics that subtends the day-to-day life of nearly all persons, and so, in a fundamental sense remains our metaphysics—insists that a given essence can only be determined on the basis of our considering what the existent things to be defined actually do when functioning perfectly. We know, to offer one last example, how a wristwatch works when it “flourishes,” and therefore call a watch a machine that marks the time. Normal function determines essence, and essence determines the identity of any particular being. The difference between the pre-modern and the modern way of defining the nature of things is that the pre-modern consciously defines things in terms of their telos, the modern does so unconsciously, and refuses the definition as soon as talk of purpose, finality, destiny, or meaning arises. What made this great, infinitely iterated refusal possible?

Well, amid the novel scientific spirit of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this equation of function as a determinant of essence was lost, leaving only the equation of essence and a being’s static, transhistorical identity. This accidental revolution had its apotheosis when Christian Wolff (1679-1764) conceived a distinct sub-science within metaphysics called “ontology.” Ontology was to be the theory of determining the essence of that which is. Its inception was part of a larger trend in western thought that was gradually expunging as needlessly troublesome all reference to the apparently contingent events of time and history. Just as a mathematical figure, whether a geometrical shape or simply a number, can be determined to be true, regardless of whether it is contingently manifest in an Egyptian pyramid or a dozen eggs, so must be now the essence of all beings. Without going into too much more of the history behind this transformation, we can safely assert that ontology resulted from the loss of understanding of traditional metaphysics with its foundation in teleology, narrative, and function, because of the dazzling self-evidence of mathematics. Metaphysics, which had traditionally been the first philosophy (because the first aspect one learns about a thing is its act of thingness, its existence), was reordered as a kind of ancillary subject modeled on mathematical theory. Etienne Gilson deprecated this development as “essentialism,” meaning indifference to what actually exists and exclusive concern with what might possibly be defined. (Contemporary specialists in cultural studies inadvertently echo Gilson when they decry the “essentialism” of Western thought. We might sardonically observe that to speak of “Western thought” as such an ahistorical abstraction is itself an act of essentialism.)

Ontology therefore arose as the science of essences, and essences must now be understood not as retrospective definitions of what a thing does when it exists as it is supposed to exist, but as the identity or definition of a given thing prior to and independent of its actual existence in time and history. This is why they smirk at Aquinas. They presume he means all men are rational by their very existence in the same way a triangle must, in order to be a triangle, at all times have three sides. In this modern mathematical way of thinking about the world, change and variation appear as cause of laughter and despair, because most modern persons have lost the equipment necessary to understand them rationally. The rise of pragmatism in the twentieth century sought to rehabilitate philosophy as an investigation of what things actually do, but pragmatists failed to understand that reflection immediately leads us from what things do to what they seek to do: from practice to purpose, from how to why, from experience to meaning. And so, John Dewey and his pards have been left to the dustbin of American history.

I do not mean to argue that the rise of ontology made the attempt to identify a poetic essence inevitable. Rather, its rise guaranteed that any effort to classify poetry would almost certainly be conducted along the lines of modern scientific taxonomy, and therefore poetry, with other things, would be theorized as a static concept removed from its various historical manifestations. More precisely, poetry was to be theorized apart from what it does, and because so many poems seem to do so many different things in so many various ways, the winnowing down to a poetic essence became so much the more difficult. Indeed: impossible. As I mentioned in the first part of this essay, such an effort had the noble motive of liberating poetry from the nineteenth-century umbrella category of moral science. More often than not, literary theorists from Mallarmé, to Bremond, to Eliot, were struggling to free poetry from its subjacent role in Matthew Arnold’s “secular scripture” theory of literature as the chief guide to human “conduct” (“four-fifths” of life is conduct, he observed!) and George Santayana’s aesthetic morality, which reduced the beautiful to a moral category, and morality to that which was sensibly beautiful. After all this extrication-by-negative-definition and resistance to Victorian anxieties about the behavior of the ill-educated masses, what was left?

The answer to this question explains what I mean by calling this ontological quest for the poetic essence impossible. When one boils down all the extant poetry in the world within the crock-pot of the mathematical intellect, only two possible elements perdure, refusing to be broken down as inessential or accidental. These, unsurprisingly, are denominations along lines of form and content. Formally, one could argue that poetry is a mode of composition written in verse; and verse is a method of composition based upon generic—audible—principles of meter and, in some instances, rhyme. Materially, that is in terms of content, one could argue that the poetic was a kind of rapture of language—language under the pressure cooker, expression that had attained to a high degree of intensity, or a unity of tropes, where the metaphorical exposes some aspect of reality ordinarily hidden.

One could elect the formal attribute as determining the poetic essence, but then one was embarrassed by the variety of poetic practices. As everyone knows, the Greeks and Romans had no rhyme; more importantly, their meter was quantitative rather than accentual-syllabic, and so their metrical feet determined not the accent placed on a given set of syllables, but rather whether the syllable was long or short. We might understand this better if we think back to learning phonics as children and recall the difference between long and short vowels. “I hit the baseball with a bat.” The letter “I” appears first in long, then in short pronunciation; the letter “a” appears long once, then in “variant” mode, then short. In ancient Greek, which did not register or measure the variant stress of syllables, long vowel sounds registered as long because they were held for twice as long as short ones. Meter and rhythm were thus closely conjoined, because a long vowel might be understood as a half note, a short a quarter note. But even in Latin, accentual stress already appears, and we therefore have a historically constituted difficulty in understanding the relation of meter and rhythm in any terms other than that between emphasis (accentual stress) and “down-beats” and “up-beats.”

Let me digress to observe that those of us who learned to read by phonics probably find it inconceivable that one would make verses according to a metric that attended merely to vowel sounds, even after recognizing in principle the rhythmic distinction between long and short vowels. Those who learned to read by the faddish methods that supplanted phonics in many schools during the rise of pedagogical sciences in the middle of the last century—presuming for a moment that such persons can read—are probably excluded from understanding this part of the essay altogether. I mention them, because it is important to recall, when some people complain about the difficulty of learning to scan a line of verse, that some people who are literate in an important sense, have nonetheless become so without learning to read letters as corresponding to certain kinds of sounds at the phoneme or syllabic, rather than whole word, level. This is just one instance where two people can both claim to be literate, but one does so despite complete ignorance of the foundational connection between letter and sound syllable.

In any case, the ancients had a meter that, the persistence of its nomenclature not withstanding, operates according to principles at variance with those of us moderns. We can scarcely conceive of quantity, vowel sound, as a principle of meter. Accentual-syllabic seems almost intuitive, because the placement of stress in meter so naturally dovetails with the placement of stress in the rhythm of a sentence, or with the singing of a song to a particular melody, whereas vowel sounds seem something we can make long and short arbitrarily, without violating rules of pronunciation. However natural it may seem, we have the example of Thomas Campion’s Observations in the Art of English Poesy, which claimed that modern English meter and especially its use of rhyme were mere decline from the Classical achievement. He advocated our return forthwith to the practice of the ancients. In actual practice, no one could depend on rhyme and meter more than Campion, whose primary vocation was the writing of songs. His few poems written in classical “quantitative” meter do not seem to be so written, because, despite his strong veneration of the ancients, he does not seem to have understood the principles of quantity. As one modern editor of Campion’s essay puts it, the poet did not convince anyone to take up quantitative meter in English, not even himself.

One does not wish to be a Campion, and to claim that quantitative composition, or a certain kind of metrical composition, is the only proper medium for poetry. This would lead one to the condemnation of rhyme as a modern decadence rather than an advancement and widening of technique (John Milton’s error). In the worldview of modern ontology, one cannot even make such a claim, because the historical contingency of metrical practices—not to mention the comparative novelty of rhyme—prohibits one from claiming that verse is the transhistorical essence of poetry. I can claim a triangle must, no matter what culture it appears in, have three sides to be a triangle. But I cannot claim that verse must be equally static, because verse-practice is not consistent across Europe, much less across time. Change and variation seems to cow the advocates of meter into a corner. They can either admit failure to define the essence of poetry as verse, or they can try to recoup something for their trouble and claim that they are unconcerned with poetic essences, but only with the craft and dignity of humble verse. So Dick Davis does in his most recent collection of poems. He writes, in “Preferences,”

To my surprise

I’ve come to realize

I don’t like poetry

(Dear, drunkly woozy,

Accommodating floozy

That she’s obliged to be,

Poor girl, these days).

No, what I love and praise

Is not damp poetry

But her pert, terse,

Accomplished sibling: verse,

She’s the right girl for me.

Personally, I find this one excellent, if complacent, solution to a problem that would otherwise require considerable reflection. Those who make “woozy” claims for the content of a poetic essence may make one’s head spin with their high talk. Think of Bremond’s auditors, who discovered pure poetry was in fact the prayer of the mystics! In spite of such elevated spirits, or indeed because of them, any person with respect for the perfection of the thing made—for the work in which the artisan rises to fine art without forgetting the craft of making—any such person would rather keep close to the workshop floor of verse. Davis furnishes a kind of limit-case. A prodigious translator of Persian epic poetry into English verse, his books of original poetry often seem afterthoughts of the master craftsman: as if, having completed the most recent translation of a forty-thousand-line medieval masterpiece, his most casual thoughts naturally arrange themselves into epigrammatic little verses, and he, on a scrap of paper he had till then been using as a bookmark, jots the lines down and stows them away with some four-dozen others to await arrangement into his next volume of original poetry. I intend this hypothesis as lightly critical: Davis’ command of form, as his poem suggests, sometimes is used for off-handed little verses whose interest is exhausted once one has enjoyed the brilliant phrasing. One would like to see him worry more about pouring a little more “poetry” down the gullet of his verse. But I consistently prefer to read the slightest of his performances than the dazzling clumsiness of Jorie Graham. In any case, what I have called the formal option for an “ontological” definition of poetry leads one to verse, and leads one further to conceding that verse is distinct from poetry. Some will side with Davis that verse is a good in itself, but others will insist that it is merely ancillary to a greater poetic essence. Only at the end of the present series shall we have opportunity to set forth a third way of defining poetry.

Few matters in the arts have been subject to such wild speculation as the poetic essence in the modern age of “essentialist” thinking. Millennia of claims about the power of poetry encourage the self-consciously modern thinker to offer his own explanation for why poetry should have such a central role in seemingly every culture. Nearly all such thinkers make reference to Aristotle’s claim that poetry is “more philosophical” than history. Given that modern ontology’s origin, as I have said, lies in a rejection of historical or narrative thinking, moderns have rushed in to confirm Aristotle in this, even as they frequently deprecate his theory of catharsis. Indeed, a glance at writings of the Abbé Brémond and of John Crowe Ransom confirms that modern thinkers praise Aristotle for recognizing a “superiority” in poetry compared with other forms of discourse, while also condemning talk of catharsis as an attempt to materialize or “psychologize” that superiority, which is spiritual or imaginative, out of existence.

Those two worthies included, modern theories of the poetic average out to variations on the theory of the “Concrete Universal.” This phrase (Hegelian in tone but far more venerable in fact), was best explored by W. K. Wimsatt (in an essay of that name). He observed that the best poetry is rendered in concrete, specific language that seems to embody a truth or reality much larger and more general. The individual seems to incarnate the universal. The study of poetry becomes a form of Christology at exactly two removes (as do all things when Hegel’s influence can be discerned). Such poetry, one concludes, must be made of highly sensual and detailed language, when it signifies literally, and must be made of highly metaphorical and so no less concrete language, when some un-representable or abstract concept is the matter. In speaking of the “Concrete Universal,” Wimsatt means to indicate the way in which the individual and the universal, the concrete and the abstract, fuse in the “verbal icon” of the poem. He sought to explain why the greatest literature embodied what the ancients called the sublime: universality of importance without the vagueness or abstraction of mere generalization.

In The Situation of Poetry (1938) and Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (1953), Jacques Maritain outlined a theory of “poetic knowledge” that takes the same view, but with greater emphasis on the subject, that is, the mind of the artist, than on the art-object. He claimed that poetic knowledge was, one might say, a kind of language that managed to reveal or communicate abstract and un-representable (or, indeed, ineffable) ideas without resorting to abstraction. We generally are said to know something when we can make a series of accurate abstract propositions about it. Poetic knowledge is not knowledge in this sense at all, but an experience of encountering ideas not in the form of concrete things, but as concrete things. To say that Justice is like a blindfolded woman with a sword will not do. The poet’s task is simply to give us the image of that woman in so incarnate or manifest a form that we sense in the vision of her Justice as itself an incarnate being. Such knowledge lasts—if it does last—as the memory of an experience (of insight, perhaps) rather than as a proposition abstracted from that experience.

I firmly believe in the importance of the concrete universal as an aspect of poetry; nothing prevents its theorization on broader terms than that of the image so that it could take in the centrality of narrative to Aristotle’s conception of poetry as philosophical (as the classical notion of the sublime surely does). Because the poetic knowledge of Maritain is just one of the many degrees of knowledge he expertly establishes and classifies, I believe also in poetic knowledge. Wimsatt and Maritain stand out as the greatest philosophers of the poetic of the twentieth century. Maritain’s early Art and Scholasticism (1920) provides the most complete theory of art as the perfection of the thing made, and of beauty as that which pleases when seen (a unity of integrity, proportion, and splendor) to be found in the long history of aesthetic speculation. These two critics did not, but many who preceded and followed them did manage to ruin the importance of these theories by transforming them into a reductive law of poetic composition. One thinks of William Carlos Williams’ kerygma, “No ideas but in things,” to which the Irish poet Denis Devlin replied that Dr. Williams had thrown “out all the literary luggage, [and] continues to stand peering, in a mixture of rage and uncertainty, over the threshold of poetry.” Maritain in fact considered the “immediately illuminating image” a discovery that, while present in the great poets of all time, had only come to the foreground in modernity. If he sought the poetic essence in the way poetry speaks to the human mind (concretely, rather than abstractly), he did not do so in a historically naïve manner.

Not usually, at any rate. Although Maritain cites John Dryden as a possessor of poetic knowledge, and although no one celebrated the intellect more earnestly than did Maritain, he remained deeply skeptical about poetry that strayed from what Frank Kermode has called the “romantic image.” In The Situation of Poetry, Maritain warns that “it could happen . . . that a neo-classical reaction would ask poetry to exhibit ideas and sentiments, to charge itself with the rubbish of human notions in their verbosity and their natural meanness, and to fabricate versified discourses for the delectation of the formal intelligence.” Versified discourse, for Maritain as for all who wish to describe the poetic essence as something transcendent of form, is not poetry. Maritain does not intend that some particular sort of language is necessarily more poetic than another. Indeed poetry for him is the creative intuition and actual making of art—any kind of art. He believes that poetry, regardless of its type or medium, must provide a concrete experience of the transcendental attributes of Being: the Good, the True, and especially the Beautiful. Poetry in its highest form is that which brings us into contact with Being, that which uses the myriad existents of language and image to draw us into the mystery and depths of existence. But the question remains: is Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man an instance of poetry manifesting the transcendentals, or is it merely “versified discourse”? Depending on how Maritain would have answered that question, we could determine whether he has provided an account of how some (modern) poetry works, or he has provided simply a historically inadequate definition of “the poetic.”

Maritain’s linking of art with the transcendental properties of being offers a profound and too oft forgotten explanation of what art actually does. I do not summarize it only to lay it by. Rather, I want to suggest that it is true precisely because it need not be specific to written poetry; Maritain grounds his arguments in the transcendentals, and therefore in the reality of beauty as something to be made and to be encountered in existence. Like most theorists of poetic essence, he abstains from close argument about what constitutes poetry, not as a metaphysical concept of creation, but as a particular genre of linguistic or literary art. I want to suggest that if he constrained poetry as a genre to the performance of the task he contends is the essence of Poetry-writ-large, then only a limited number of the great poems of history would any longer still be called poems. His theory is not so limited, and so provides a metaphysical basis for why the fine arts, as we have come to know them, touch our very sense of reality, of being, without becoming entirely explicable in abstract terms.

And yet, Rowan Williams observed in his Clark Lectures, Grace and Necessity (2005), Maritain’s ontological poetics lacks a narrative dimension. Biographically, this hampered Maritain’s taste for the novel. Critically, it causes Maritain, like most writers on poetry, to linger lusciously upon the startling line or passage and therefore to neglect the all important total form of any given work. However much one admires a passage in Hamlet, one has not properly judged the play if one approves it as a grab-bag of pleasing images or sentences. One needs to judge the total form of a work—especially when, as in a narrative, that form is difficult to apprehend because it must unfold temporally. I ask, but am not yet sure, what would Mr. Maritain have made of Homer? In Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, he seems merely to sympathize with the blind poet as one of the many Plato would drive out from the state. One suspects that, tradition aside, Maritain might have thought Plato could afford to let old Homer keep yammering, so long as the profound symbolism of Rimbaud and Baudelaire was cast out.

A more practical critic, though hardly wanting in knowledge of aesthetics and linguistics, John Hollander sometimes seems to solve the gulf between those I have designated formalists and materialists (although no material was ever more ethereal than the poetic essence) by insisting, appropriately enough, on a hylomorphic theory of poetry. By this I mean the conventional theory, accepted in one form or another by all philosophers from the ancient Greeks to St. Thomas Aquinas, that an existent material being is one spawned, as it were, of the union of form and matter. Hollander does not outline his position in quite those terms, but they amount to the same thing. Introducing his little guide to verse, Rhyme’s Reason, he says that it is a guide to

the formal structures which are a necessary condition of poetry, but not a sufficient one. The building blocks of poetry itself are elements of fiction—fable, ‘image,’ metaphor—all the material of the nonliteral. The components of verse are like parts of plans by which the materials are built into a structure. The study of rhetoric distinguishes between tropes, or figures of meaning such as metaphor and metonymy, and schemes, or surface patterns of words. Poetry is a matter of trope; and verse, of scheme or design.

Most of what I have said thus far should be reconcilable with this formulation. From an ontological perspective, verse either is the sole determinant of the essence of poetry, or it is something other that nonetheless stands in some relation to it. Hollander indicates that he is of a mind that verse stands in a necessary relation to poetry; Maritain and others suggest that poetry is primarily a way of encountering reality or being, independent of its formal characteristics. Hollander stands as one of the formidable poets and critics of our era because he refuses to be taken in by those who would make poetry into a woozy romantic whiff of ether, and because he writes masterful verse in rhyme and meter without ever indulging in what Davis might contentedly call the itch to versify (except, however, when he writes light verse—and it is the lightness of content that defines the genre, for Hollander). That is, many persons now would not recognize what Davis does as poetry (though they would be, I hope to show, mistaken). I doubt very much anyone would question the poetic achievement of John Hollander.

This hylomorphic theory, however, is not without its problems. Of course it is tenable to suggest that verse formally constitutes poetry while the “non-literal” does so materially. But, we have seen, verse seems to exist without being poetry. Despite Davis’s protestations, his scrap of verse quoted above is a nice little poem, but there are other works in verse that might not so obviously qualify, because they do not adequately manifest the “non-literal.” Indeed, I am not entirely sure what Hollander means by “image,” in part because it is in scare-quotes, and in part because an image could just as easily be produced through a literal use of language as it could through a trope. Only if he were willing to suggest that tropes so saturate our use of language that, allowing for its being fitted into verses, our almost everyday speech becomes poetry could I go along with him. In that instance, I fear, I should have made his definition too broad to accomplish the task he has assigned it. In any case, Hollander’s distinction between poetry, rooted in the “non-literal,” and verse risks the same inadequacy Eliot found in Coleridge’s distinction between imagination and fancy. If one simply refers to good poetry as that which shows imagination, and bad poetry as that which merely indulges in fancy, the additional terminology brings one no closer to an understanding of poetry. As Eliot himself was sometimes willing to do, Hollander either suggests that good poetry is built up of the metaphorical and bad merely of verse, or (again) he grants us so wide a definition of the non-literal that its help in understanding the nature of poetry will be minimal.

Rather than dispute him further, I want to suggest that the plausibility of Hollander’s description arises from a refusal of the kind of ontological stasis taken for granted by the first practitioners of free verse. Instead of insisting that a poem must be—because the poetic must simply be itself pure and simple, free of all other uses—he suggests that a poem must do several things, and that, so long as it does them all, it is poetry. So long as the theorist of poetry insists the poem is a kind of self-referential stasis, free from entanglement with the material or contingent, his task will remain an impossibility, because the very thing he would define will keep slipping away into the contingent, the concrete, and the individual. Hollander’s account has the virtue of envisioning an end (entelechy) for poetry that must be attained: a union of form and matter, verse and non-literal language.

Just as Hollander suggests the fusion of verse and trope constitute poetry, and therefore refuses one kind of ontological purity, J. V. Cunningham refuses this purity from another angle (incidentally, one equally Thomistic). Cunningham relies upon the aggregate experience of readers of poetry over the generations as a practical means to discovering the nature of poetry. After reviewing Aristotle’s and Plato’s theory of poetry as philosophical, as imitation, or as a kind of fiction (and “fiction” is at least as tenable a term as Hollander’s “non-literal”), he concedes that, if this is a necessary component of the poetic essence, it is a highest component. That is, it signifies poetry as it is understood to accomplish a distinguished and unique purpose. Poetry as fiction is a final end of the sort we get when we hear that man is a rational animal. Nonetheless, most men are not rational, and most poetry is not a “philosophical fiction” (to conjoin two terms Cunningham treats separately), even though the best poems and men must be. What is the first cause of a poem that precedes and makes possible this final cause? Cunningham insists upon a formal (first-cause) definition of poetry, and it will be clear from his explanation that he came to this conclusion not through some ontological inquiry but through reflection on shared experience. In “Poetry, Structure, and Tradition,” he writes,

I mean by poetry what everyone means by it when he is not in an exalted mood, when he is not being a critic, a visionary, or a philosopher. I mean by poetry what a man means when he goes to a bookstore to buy a book of poems as a graduation gift, or when he is commissioned by a publisher to do an anthology of sixteenth century poems. Poetry is what looks like poetry, what sounds like poetry. It is metrical composition.

Such a definition does not explain what is good or important about poetry that might make one want to give it as a gift; it does not explain why Plato exiled the poets, or Aristotle credited more to their work than that of the historians. And, it certainly does not explain why Bremond saw the wisdom of the Christian mystics versified in Wordsworth and Shelley. It does not claim to explain these things, all of which may be due to virtues present in all good poetry. Cunningham is more concerned to discover the minimal condition or first cause of what must be present a priori for poetry to ascend, or fail to ascend, the heights of greatness. A little earlier in the same essay he makes clear this modest but crucial ambition, which might be summarized as distinguishing how the word “poetry” variously appears in order to establish its primary meaning, from which all other uses derive only as analogies. He explains,

Poetry is regarded as a kind of literature, a quality of experience, a way of knowing. It is contrasted with verse, with prose, and with science. It is defined in such a way as to favor a special view of experience or to promote the writing or approval of a special view of experience or to promote the writing or approval of a special kind of poem. The difficulty, then, lies in the fact that the object of definition is not constant. The hesitations, the scruples, the blurring in the act of definition result from this. There remains, however, a constant point, if not of reference at least of departure, in all these formulations, and this is poetry as it is ordinarily understood: the body of linguistic constructions that men usually refer to as poems.

The apparent unsatisfactory quality of this passage conceals its defensible profundity. Modernist efforts to define the essence of poetry against the variegated texture of historical experience will not do; they merely ratified the romantic hope for poetry as a new dispensation to replace a failed Christianity, promoting the poetic from a kind of ethical teaching (Arnold’s “conduct”) to the heights of an aesthetic purity that became so much rarified ether (Bremond’s “poésie pure”). We are now in a historical position to appreciate that the conscientious efforts of modern writers to define the essence of their art may have been much needed, but was conducted in a manner that merely imitated the ahistorical abstraction, the “ontologism,” the “essentialism,” found in other branches of modern thought. Given that modern poetry frequently stands in exile from and opposition to so much of modernity, it is unfortunate it should be typically modern in this regard. The passages from Cunningham read, in contrast, as quaint, outmoded. Therein lies their truth. Rather than entertain the ever-more-ethereal quests after the poetic essence, he relied upon the long historical experience—sometimes called “common sense”—that testifies to poetry as founded on metrical composition (regardless of where it might go thereafter). Further on in my argument, I shall make clear the limitations of Cunningham’s claims. But in the next section, it seems appropriate to draw upon his observations as a means to reflect on how the modernist quest for the poetic essence has proceeded apace, and has led much contemporary poetry and literary criticism to still greater extremes of absurd experiments in composition and preposterous ghost hunts after the essence of the poetic.