Ars Poetica: The Death (and Resurrection) of Poetry

The Death of Orpheus by Jean Delville

I’ve been teaching a lot of poetry to undergrads these days, and these are typically the moments my teaching becomes most inspired. I’m not sure the students necessarily understand what I’m talking about—poetry is often a very foreign, very strange object to them, for ours is a culture sadly and (for the most part) unconsciously suffering from a lack of the poetic. I ask my students how many of them know any poems by heart. None. I ask them if they remember and Mother Goose. None. Then I recite Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” part of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” and so forth. In general, the only exposure to poetry most of my students have is when they had the writing of haiku inflicted on them sometime in elementary school. Poetry should not be a punishment. It should be a lived experience. I fear sometimes I must appear a madman from the past or future to my students, someone speaking in a strange language that sounds like English, but a language mysteriously other. It only gets worse when I speak about the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, John Donne, William Blake, or W.B. Yeats. Surely some revelation is at hand.

This week I had one class read Dana Gioia’s now classic essay “Can Poetry Matter?” which I read long ago and which impelled me to rethink what poetry could be. Gioia discusses all of the varieties of entropy contributing to poetry’s decline—without whining about the general public. Instead, he blames the “professionalization” of poets in academic circles as well as the insular and self-absorbed culture created by MFA programs in poetry. Before his untimely death, Franz Wright criticized the same phenomena—though in language far more strident (and far less polite) than Gioia’s.

As the founder and editor of the journal Jesus the Imagination, I can only concur with the opinions of Gioia and Wright. Most of the poetry I receive is of two types. The first is of the garden variety (I-write-for-my-cohort) MFA pablum. It all sounds the same, the voices of multitudes homogenized into a dull uniformity. This is depressing. The other kind of poetry I tend to get is reactionary formal verse, apparently intended to revive the golden age of Christendom. I have nothing against formal verse—I’ve written and published a ream of it myself—but this reactionary propaganda is poetry as ideology. And it’s bullshit.

In fact, I was so discouraged by the recent batch of submissions (not that all of them were lacking in imagination, but…) that I almost decided to suspend publication of Jesus the Imagination. But only almost. When I founded the journal, my primary inspiration was the reimagination of culture, not the regurgitation of fallen ones. Among those already mentioned, I looked for inspiration to Paul Claudel, William Everson, David Jones, and Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz-Milosz—poets unafraid to move into a space reserved to prophets—not in imitations of style but of their daring. But we live in fearful times. As Blake quotes Numbers in the Preface to Milton: “Would to God that all the Lords people were Prophets.”

In closing, let me share some thoughts from the chapter entitled “On Poetry and Prophecy” from my book, The Incarnation of the Poetic Word:

What I am describing here, then, is no less than what Nikolai Berdyaev has called “the apocalypse of culture.” Such is the product of our decent into spiritual torpor and thence into slavery: a slavery in our day of our wills to technology, our feeling to a shallow narcissism, and our thinking to the opinions of the electronic coterie which turns us all into mimetic sciolists. Cultural ennui is indistinguishable from spiritual and religious ennui. Culture without religion rapidly decays, while religion without culture loses its mooring in actual human life and has nothing to claim but the past:

“Behind the ideal values there stood prophets and geniuses in their day, with creative inspiration and fire. But when monuments have been erected to the prophets and the geniuses, and the streets have been called by their names, a chilled and mediocre culture comes into shape which no longer endures a prophetic spirit and a new spirit of genius.”1

The apocalypse of culture ensues: “Culture must be transfigured into a new life, as the whole earth must be. It cannot linger on indefinitely in its mediocrity, in its cold legalism.”2

The prophet is he who lives in the barren places, attentive to parousia, eating locusts and wild honey as he awaits the coming of the divine utterance. The poetic vocation also requires such wildness, such authentic transgressivity. The much-lauded “transgressivity” of the academic poet has nothing transgressive about it. If the coterie holds the same opinions, there is no transgression. Transgression, to be authentic, requires the ground of the spirit, the source of all life. The transgression of the academy is mimetic transgression, anchored in the world, possessing no life. And, because of its privileged status, it spreads like a cancer….

...The primal quality of the prophetic voice is fearlessness. Fear of speaking permeates our society. Indeed, such fear has become its hallmark. It infests academe: show me a professor not afraid to speak truth before the archons of the academy and the assured punishment inflicted by the egregore, and I’ll show you a career destroyed. Fear poisons workers in the arts, who then become its tools of power. It even touches the episcopacy. Fear, we know, is the primary tool of the Enemy.

“All the tortures of repentance are tortures of self-reproach on account of our leaving the Divine Harvest to the Enemy, the struggles of entanglement with incoherent roots. I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of mind & body to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination.” (William Blake, Jerusalem, plate 77)

Like Blake, Joséphin Péladan recognized the divine nature of the poetic vocation, a legacy fundamentally abandoned in our current cultural milieu, a milieu in which the guardians of art and poetry offer incense before the idols of utilitarianism, politics, and self-promotion and leave prophecy to the extravagances of a past that, in their postmodern positivism, they regard with condescension, themselves satisfied with the puny returns of publication, position, and notoriety.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses.

1 Nikolai Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom, trans. R.M. French (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), 129.

2 Ibid.

Nobody Wants the Messiah to Come: Art and Eschatology

Lucien Levy Dhurmer, Salome with the Head of the Baptist (1896)

Christendom died a long time ago. The Oxford Movement, the Gothic Revival, and Traditionalism all failed to restore the golden age when Christ was King (a title only used ironically in the Gospels but embraced with fervor during the too long centuries of Christianity’s flirtation with political power). More recently, in its spectacular failure, “The New Evangelization” has proved itself neither new nor evangelization. Instead, it simply appropriated the modes and attitudes of the master culture it hoped to supplant (if not save) and became a caricature of that culture, prone to its polemics and polarizations under the guise of spreading the Gospel. A sort of voluntary demonic possession.

Christians are afraid of the Death of Christianity. This is irony at its most sublime. Perhaps also hypocrisy, as it betrays the fact that we do not believe what we believe.

Fear of death is fear of the To-Come, fear of the future. This fear characterizes humanity, of course, and it is nothing for which to feel shame. Terror accompanies the contemplation of eschatology. As Jacques Derrida put it so honestly,

But the Messiah might also be the one I expect even while I do not want him to come. There is the possibility that my relation to the Messiah is this: I would like him to come, I hope that he will come, that the other will come, as other, for that would be justice, peace, and revolution—because in the concept of messianicity there is revolution—and, at the same time, I am scared. I do not want what I want and I would like the coming of the Messiah to be infinitely postponed, and there is this desire in me.[1]

No one really wants the Messiah to come. Or so it would seem.

This is nowhere more obvious than in the arts, particularly in the allegedly Christian crystallizations of things called art. Not in every case, of course, but it certainly permeates the atmosphere in the way of stale incense or appears as an excrescence akin to the residual alkaline rings that form around the basin of a disused holy water font. Christian versions of the arts, when not busying themselves with adopting the modes and vocabularies of the master culture, all too often engage in an aesthetics of retrieval, as if Michelangelo and Raphael, for example, in the fine art version of a Great Books program, are the answer to modernity’s ills. This is even the case with the all-too-habitual invocations of inhabitants of a more recent past—C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, or Flannery O’Connor—and whose acolytes often see fit to adopt the requisite uniforms of beards, pipes, tweeds, if not crutches and peacocks. These tombs are beautiful, brothers and sisters, but they are still tombs.

Any Christian art worthy of either name, should be grounded in the future. John the Baptist, therefore, is the archetype of the Christian artist: for he calls the Messiah out of the future. The Baptist, while simultaneously embedded in a tradition, nevertheless lives in the wild, on the outskirts of that tradition, a prophet of “the wild Being.”[2] He is of the tradition, but not in it. He does not listen to criticism. He does not solicit advice. He does not fear death. He does not network or build his resume.

But, as Nikolai Berdyaev reminded us, historically, Christianity has not exactly embraced the act of creativity. Indeed, prohibitions concerning graven images have haunted (and continue to haunt) the inheritors of monotheistic religions, even those cultures now recognized as secular, an anxiety as persistent today as it was during the iconoclast controversy and the Reformation. But whereas postmodernity merely dismisses the notion of transcendental beauty in favor of the ephemeral fashions of attraction, the Reformation exhibited its anxiety through its ambivalent equivalences of beauty with sin, an idea that still troubled Jacques Ellul.[3] But it’s more than this. Neither the Gospel nor the Fathers speak of human creativity. Writes Berdyaev,

“Creativeness is something mysterious and hidden. The revelation of creativeness does not come from above but rather from below—it is an anthropological, not a theological, revelation.”[4]

But it is still a revelation. This was clearly the prophetic space inhabited by William Blake, but such an understanding of the role of creativity need not be the province of antinomian mystical enthusiasm. Human creativity is participation in God as “it wills another world, it continues the work of creation.”[5] As such, true creativity—a creativity touched by the mystery of redemption—becomes theurgy. And it is in the theurgic that art speaks the language of eschatology: “Theurgy is the banner of the art of the last times, the art of the end.”[6] In its eschatological vocation, art anticipates the revelation of the mystery of the glorified body.

But, we hasten to admit, this is precisely not what art has become in a culture dominated by both market-driven metrics and Marxist materialism.

When Walter Benjamin wrote in 1935 that “Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art” he had no way of anticipating what the intervention of cyberspace would do to art.[7] But he certainly saw the cultural repercussions in the flattening of art as a thing for mass consumption. And not only is art threatened: human culture in general—cultus—also suffers. Martin Heidegger saw the dangers of the factory and assembly line for the human arts as well as for human flourishing:

What threatens man in his very nature is the view that technological production puts the world in order, while in fact this ordering is precisely what levels every ordo, every rank, down to the uniformity of production, and thus from the outset destroys the realm from which any rank and recognition could possibly arise.[8]

Heidegger and Benjamin could never have imagined the MFA production line that all too often turns the pursuit of making of art or the making of poems into cliquish schools for dilettantes or political coteries more interested in making “statements” (or money—the two are not mutually exclusive) or the laughable and self-aggrandizing concern to “raise awareness” at the cost of authenticity and ability, so much so that the arts in our age have been identified as under the zeitgeist of a “post-skill movement.” In the music “industry” (an apt word), sampling and autotune have likewise flattened the need for skills or vision in that realm, technological innovation obviating the need for them.

This is an excerpt from Michael Martin's Transfiguration: Notes on the Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything, forthcoming this Fall from Angelico Press.

[1] John D. Caputo (ed.), Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, 2nd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), 24–25.

[2] A phrase of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. See his The Visible and the Invisible, followed by Working Notes, trans. Alphonso Lingis; ed. Claude Lefort (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 121.

[3] For Ellul, iconoclasm “is the first act of the Christian life.” See his Humiliation of the Word, trans. Joyce Main Hanks (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1985), 96. See also Stanley Fish’s examination of this dialectic in John Milton in Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

[4] Nicolas Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, trans. Donald A. Lowrie (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 92.

[5] Ibid., 95.

[6] Ibid., 239.

[7] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt; trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 234.

[8] Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 117.