The Stolen World

Modernity has a unique gift—that of generating its opposite. In the sterile wake of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, the Romantic philosophers and poets, especially those of Germany and England, resisted the totalizing demands of “science” and “progress” and sought to restore a vision of human flourishing mindful of mystery, of nature, and of the imagination. In the bleak aftermath of industrialization and rapacious streams of Capitalism in the late 19th century, people turned to alternative methods of inquiry in movements as diverse as the Celtic Twilight, The Theosophical Society, the Occult Renaissance, and a renewed fascination with the World of Faerie. All of these various movements hide within themselves the often unspoken admission that modernity (and postmodernity) leaves much unspoken and more unaddressed.

We live in such times, times that are always-already happening.

In the early modern period, hermetic thinkers like Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme, Robert Fludd, as well as the Metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan and his twin brother, the Anglican priest and alchemist Thomas, resisted the abstractions of Descartes and the world he was creating (by ignoring half of it) that directly led to the disenchanted and dismal landscape we now inhabit. In the transition from the 18th to the 19th centuries, William Blake’s poetic railing against all forms of slavery—both of physical servitude as well as of mental and imaginative enthrallment—did much the same thing. They all may have been on the losing side of history, but they were not on the wrong side.

In the late 19th and into the 20th century, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats straddled all of these worlds. A folklorist, hermetic magician, mystic, and politician as well as a poet, Yeats upheld the value of what might be called the Great Tradition, which encompassed not only Neoplatonism and medieval sensibilities of the microcosm and the macrocosm, but also folk traditions he found in the Irish peasantry, particularly the belief in faerie and the magical properties of stones and plants. Indeed, the desire for a society more closely connected to the visible and palpable world as well as the invisible worlds that coincide and shine through it is characteristic of those facing the abyss of modernity’s false promises of progress. The Cottingly Fairies, for instance, became cause célèbre in face of the inhumanities and horrors of World War I (the 1997 film Fairy Tale: A True Story illustrates this beautifully), echoing the popularity of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan just a decade earlier. All were responses to the crowning features of alienation and confusion that is modernity: “For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand,” in Yeats’s apt phrase.

We live in such a time.

Yet, it is still a time of hope, a time of creating a new world, reimagining where we are and examining how we arrived here. Unfortunately, not everyone in the reimagining business is interested in hope so much as in control, and I am as concerned as anyone about people in whom I have no trust (politicians for the most part) exerting power in a moment of distress. Nevertheless, I find great comfort in Yeats’s short meditation “The Body of Father Christian Rosencrux,” first published in 1895 and later gathered in the collection, Ideas of Good and Evil (and which I later published in The Heavenly Country):

The followers of the Father Christian Rosencrux, says the old tradition, wrapped his imperishable body in noble raiment and laid it under the house of their order, in a tomb containing the symbols of all things in heaven and earth, and in the waters under the earth, and set about him inextinguishable magical lamps, which burnt on generation after generation, until other students of the order came upon the tomb by chance. It seems to me that the imagination has had no very different history during the last two hundred years, but has been laid in a great tomb of criticism, and had set over it inextinguishable magical lamps of wisdom and romance, and has been altogether so nobly housed and apparelled that we have forgotten that its wizard lips are closed, or but opened for the complaining of some melancholy and ghostly voice. The ancients and the Elizabethans abandoned themselves to imagination as a woman abandons herself to love, and created great beings who made the people of this world seem but shadows, and great passions which made our loves and hatreds appear but ephemeral and trivial phantasies; but now it is not the great persons, or the great passions we imagine, which absorb us, for the persons and passions in our poems are mainly reflections our mirror has caught from older poems or from the life about us, but the wise comments we make upon them, the criticism of life we wring from their fortunes. Arthur and his Court are nothing, but the many-coloured lights that play about them are as beautiful as the lights from cathedral windows; Pompilia and Guido are but little, while the ever-recurring meditations and expositions which climax in the mouth of the Pope are among the wisest of the Christian age. I cannot get it out of my mind that this age of criticism is about to pass, and an age of imagination, of emotion, of moods, of revelation, about to come in its place; for certainly belief in a supersensual world is at hand again; and when the notion that we are “phantoms of the earth and water” has gone down the wind, we will trust our own being and all it desires to invent; and when the external world is no more the standard of reality, we will learn again that the great Passions are angels of God, and that to embody them “uncurbed in their eternal glory,” even in their labour for the ending of man’s peace and prosperity, is more than to comment, however wisely, upon the tendencies of our time, or to express the socialistic, or humanitarian, or other forces of our time, or even ‘to sum up’ our time, as the phrase is; for Art is a revelation, and not a criticism, and the life of the artist is in the old saying, “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the spirit.”

Neither can I get it out of my mind that this age is about to pass, and an age of imagination, of emotion, of moods, of revelation, about to come in its place.

William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Stolen Child” set to music by Mike Scott of The Waterboys

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutzand 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.

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.

Anglo-Catholic Pagan: St. Robert Herrick

Corn Doll by John Benjamin Stone, 19th c.

As far as I'm concerned, Robert Herrick is a saint. He may not be known for his piety or his sanctity, but, God love him, he may be the most human poet ever. If ever I could, I would gladly live in 17th century Devonshire as a member of his parish. So, in the spirit of All Saints Day, here is an excerpt from my chapter on Herrick and the community at Little Gidding that appears in my book The Incarnation of the Poetic Word: Theological Essays on Poetry and Philosophy/Philosophical Essays on Poetry and Theology.

The critical history of Herrick’s folk religion embodies all of the problems of the religious nature of his verse. Is it Roman pagan? Nostalgically Catholic? Laudian Anglican? Does Herrick celebrate folk customs in his verse that he observed in his Devonshire parish? Or is he celebrating the Caroline court’s dilettantish and performative appropriation of all things pastoral? The real problem, I think, is in trying to pin Herrick down to a particular faction. His vision of Christianity is bigger than that—but it doesn’t include everyone. In particular, Herrick’s evocation of a communitarian spirit in his verse challenges the Puritan sourpusses who not only disliked feasting and frolic but wanted to—and eventually did— create laws that did their best to eradicate any and all delights connected to the Christian year. As Shakespeare’s Sir Toby Belch tells the pompous Puritan Malvolio in Twelfth Night: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”1 Many precisians, indeed, attempted to curtail the enjoyment of cakes and ale connected with merrymaking. Upon coming into power they erased as much merriment from the English year as possible—including the removal of Christmas as a Christian feast and holy day, which ruined in its wake the merry season between Christmas and Twelfth Night and also brought down maypoles and church ales in a ghastly resurgence of the same ethos inherent to the Visitation of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century.2 Ultimately, “upon 10 June 1647 Christmas, Easter, Whitsun, and all other Church feasts ceased to exist in England by both secular law and ecclesiastical ruling.”3 (It was in 1647, of course, that Herrick was ejected from his living at Dean Prior.) Puritans not only disliked these things because of their own anxieties about merriment: they especially hated them because they believed these observances to be “popish” and full of superstition.

Connecting merriment to Catholicism—and thereby to the worst sort of paganism—had become a pretty standard Puritan trope by the mid-seventeenth century. The Puritan controversialist Thomas Hall (1610–1665) plays on this theme in Funebria Floræ (published in three editions, 1660–1661). His zealous vitriol is patent:

“So that I would debauch a people, and draw them from God and his worship to superstition and Idolatry, I would take this course: I would open this gap to them, they should have Floralia and Saturnalia, they should have feast upon feast (as ’tis in Popery) they should have Wakes to prophane the Lords-day, they should have May-Games, and Christmas-revels, with dancing, drinking, whoring, potting, piping, gaming, till they were made dissolute, and fit to receive any superstition, and easily drawn to bee of any, or of no Religion: And this was the practice of the late Prelates, when they were bringing in Popery by the head and shoulders (as is made apparent to the world out of their own writings) they first caused the book of sports to bee read in all Churches for the prophaning of the Sabbath (a lesson that people can learn too fast without a book) that so they might fit the people the better for the swallowing of those superstitious innovations, which shortly after followed.”4

One can imagine the prelate Robert Herrick responding—enthusiastically— with “A toast!” This is precisely the function of his poetry.

Herrick’s poetry, of course, is widely acknowledged as celebrating the carnival aspects of folk and religious life, even to the point where some question his religious sincerity, as if Christianity were all about melancholy and self-abnegation and antithetical to fun and procreative activity.5 It may be for some, but not for everyone. Certainly not for Herrick. Indeed, many a critic exemplifies the early modern Puritan enthusiasm for a joy-killing Christianity even when that critic happens to be an agnostic or atheist.

But the central feature of Herrick’s festal tone rests in his reliance on ritual and its role in binding communities together. It is with this in mind that the ordered disorder of Hesperides needs to be considered. As the Tudor wholesale extermination of Catholicism had in the sixteenth century, during and after the Civil War the Puritan zeal for reforming the reform and abolishing even the least traces of what might be consider “popish” following Archbishop Laud’s partial retrieval of tradition was, in essence, a project dedicated to the disruption of community, a program devoted to the “divide and conquer and demoralize” methodology which modern states have ever since utilized as a template for “best practices.”

Many critics, of course, have already addressed Herrick’s interest in community, and none so comprehensively as Achsah Guibbory. Certainly, some have called her assessment into question—all interpretation is, after all, contingent—but her argument bears up remarkably well after almost twenty years. And while I don’t have much to add to Guibbory’s masterful contextualization of Herrick’s preoccupation with community, I do think it necessary to add a few thoughts in consideration of Herrick’s worldview in the light of communitarianism.

The term “communitarianism” is, admittedly, more than a trifle anachronistic when applied to Herrick’s historical moment. But, nonetheless, I think it an apt one. The social pressures applied by a mixture of a creeping nascent capitalism—which had concerned Thomas More in Utopia6 during the reign of Henry VIII—and what could be called a kind of “soft totalitarianism” (exemplified by both the Tudor reforms and the reforms imposed by Parliament during and after the Civil War) awakened in Herrick the desire to (re)affirm the sacredness—sublime at times, ridiculous at others—of what was being lost. In this, Herrick’s poetry has much to say to postmodern communitarianism.

Communitarianism asserts a strong critique of modernity, a modernity in its infancy when Herrick lived. And the poet was amazingly prescient in seeing where it would lead and what was in danger of being lost:

“Lost to moderns are the manifest answers to existential questions provided by embeddedness with kin, culture, and place. Lost are pre-modern certainties of everyday rituals and known obligations. Lost is the intrinsic value of work, the sacredness of object and place, the natural rhythms of day and season. Lost also are the intimacy and trust generated from repeated face-to-face interactions in a society in which relationships are dense and multi-stranded.”7

These are the things Herrick simultaneously celebrates and mourns in his verse, as he does in the melancholy strains that complete the otherwise celebratory “Corinna’s going a Maying” (H-178):

And as a vapour, or a drop of raine

Once lost, can ne’er be found againe:

So when or you or I are made

A fable, song, or fleeting shade;

All love, all liking, all delight

Lies drown’d with us in endlesse night.

Then while time serves, and we are but decaying;

Come, my Corinna, come, let’s goe a Maying. (lines 63–70)

Herrick’s uses of carpe diem, then, are not only warnings about a lost moment, but of a lost age.

Charles Taylor, for one, has emphasized the importance of communitas as an element of human flourishing seriously compromised by the various reform movements, by the Enlightenment, and by all that goes by the name of “modernity.” Communitas is found in the sacred (liturgy, preaching, communal prayer, pilgrimage), in the profane (carnival in all of its manifestations) and where both meet and coalesce in the life of the parish: in religious festivals, the “good magic” of blessings and sacramentals, and in the myriad ways in which the Church year intersects with the progression of the seasons and the agricultural cycle. Communitas, furthermore,

“is the intuition we all share that, beyond the way we relate to each other through our diversified coded roles, we also are a community of many-sided human beings, fundamentally equal, who are associated together. It is this underlying community which breaks out in moments of reversal or transgression, and which gives legitimacy to the power of the weak.” 8

Communitas, then, seeing that it encapsulates not only the variety of human affiliations in the living of life as well as in the liturgical and agricultural cycles, is a thoroughly cosmological reality. Though certainly not the intent, the Protestant Reformation effectively destroyed any integral communitas:

“Reform comes to be seen as a serious business, brooking no alternatives. There is no more separate sphere of the ‘spiritual’ where one may go to pursue a life of prayer outside the saeculum; and nor is there the other alternative, between order and anti-order, which Carnival represented. There is just this one relentless order of right thought and action, which must occupy all social and personal space.”9

This is exactly what transpired during the Civil War and the zeal of such reform no doubt contributed significantly to Herrick’s ejection from Dean Prior. He was not alone in being harmed by a rage for reformation. As Michael Walzer has observed, “Calvinist saintliness, after all, has scarred us all.”10

Communitas is, more than obviously, central to Herrick’s religion as well as his poetry. This is why his collection is such a mélange composed of acerbic epigrams, poems celebrating love and fertility, religious verse, poems of self-parody, epithalamion, eulogy, prayer. His collection is a body of work that, by his own admission, represents a “mixt Religion…. Part Pagan, part Papisticall,”11 comprised of Laudian Anglicanism, pre-Reformation English Catholicism, folk and fairy traditions, and pagan Rome: these are things that characterize communitas, what Taylor has called a “multi-speed religion” characteristic of pre-Reformation Catholicism. Communitas is not univocal, but multifarious, messy, teaming with life and variety. This is what Herrick represents and why his verse, both Hesperides and Noble Numbers, stands as such an achievement. This is also why his collection’s disordered order could be arranged in no other way, and why he prefaces it with

The Argument of his Book

I Sing of Brooks, of Blossomes, Birds, and Bowers,

Of April, May, of June, and July-Flowers.

I sing of May-poles, Hock-carts, Wassails, Wakes,

Of Bride-grooms, Brides, and of their Bridall-cakes.

I write of Youth, of Love, and have Accesse

By these, to sing of cleanly-Wantonnesse.

I sing of Dewes, of Raines, and piece by piece

Of Balme, of Oyle, of Spice, and Amber-gris.

I sing of Time’s trans-shifting; and I write

How Roses first came Red, and Lillies White.

I write of Groves, of Twilights, and I sing

The court of Mab, and of the Fairie-King.

I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall)

Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all. (H-1)

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 From The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J.J.M. Tobin, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997), 2.3.115–16.

2 Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 205–12.

3 Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England, 212.

4 Thomas Hall, Funebria Floræ, the Downfall of May-Games… 3rd edition, corrected (London, 1661), 13–14.

5 This is the case with much earlier criticism, as with Swardson, for example, who writes of the poet that “we are dealing with a Christian poet who felt the sense of opposition between his poetry and his religion, as so many poets of Herrick’s century did” (Swardson, Poetry and the Fountain of Light, 42). Such an assessment would probably have moved the poet to respond with an acerbic epigram. Creaser is in general agreement with Swardson. See his “Jocund his Muse was,” 45ff.

6 “…even some abbots though otherwise holy men, are not content with the old rents that the land yielded to their predecessors. Living in idleness and luxury, without doing any good to society, no longer satisfies them; they have to do positive evil. For they leave no land free for the plow: they enclose every acre for pasture; they destroy houses and abolish towns, keeping only the churches, and those for sheep barns…. So your island, which seemed especially fortunate in this matter, will be ruined by the crass avarice of a few.” Thomas More, Utopia, trans. and ed. Robert M. Adams, revised, 2nd ed. Norton Critical Editions in the History of Ideas (New York: W.W. Norton & Company1992), 12–13.

7 Charles Heying, “Autonomy vs. Solidarity: Liberal, Totalitarian and Communitarian Traditions,” Administrative Theory & Praxis 21, no. 1 (March 1999): 39–50, at 40.

8 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard/Belknap Press, 2007), 49.

9 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 266.

10 Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), vii.

11 “The Fairie Temple: or, Oberons Chappell. Dedicated to Master John Merifield, Counsellor at Law” (H-223), lines 23 and 25.