Is it possible, nevertheless, to distinguish a third type of ‘World-view’ analogous to these? In other words, is there any third kind of experience, distinct from that of either religion or philosophy, yet involving an apprehension of reality comparable in originality, and possibly in importance, with theirs? The present essay is based upon the view that such an experience is given in and by poetry.[30]
I
For the specific experience which comes to a poet through poetry, however it may be interwoven with religious or philosophic ideas, has a radically different psychological origin and character. It is equally intense and absorbing, but it is not determined by conscious relation to an outer power, and it seeks to express rather than to explain. It is neither transfigured fear or hope, nor yet a logical process. In the making of a poem there may be even a conscious detachment from actuality, and the poet may float free in a dream world, apparently without thought of the world which he inhabits. The poetic may well be thought to differ from the religious or the philosophic types of experience less in inducing any specific way of contemplating reality than in liberating us from the necessity or desire to contemplate it at all.
Yet it is certain that the poet’s detachment, even in his most ethereal dream-flights, from reality, is only apparent. In all the spontaneous and seemingly arbitrary movement of his mind among its crowding ideal shapes, reality through his stored-up experience is at work, quietly weaving a thousand subtle filiations between the poem and the life of men at large. Othello is much farther from ‘actuality’ than the poor novel on which its story was based; but it is penetrated with the vision of life, of which Cinthio’s tale caught so feeble and fugitive a glimpse. What distinguishes poetic from religious or philosophic apprehension is not that it turns away from reality, but that it lies open to and in eager watch for reality at doors and windows which with them are barred or blind. The poet’s soul resides, so to speak, in his senses, in his emotions, in his imagination, as well as in his conscious intelligence; and we may provisionally describe poetic apprehension as an intense state of consciousness in which all these are vitally concerned. In so far as a particular outlook upon the world is founded upon a particular type of experience, a poet’s World-view will be radically affected by his senses, emotions, imagination. The flower which Wordsworth contemplated on the bank or by the lake, and that other which Tennyson with his more curious scrutiny plucked from the crannied wall, could stir these poets’ intellect and heart to the depths; and their apprehension, as poets, of God and man, of Nature, of Duty, would have been different without it.
But in any case, it will be said, even if we grant that poetic experience tends to induce some way of regarding reality, it cannot possibly induce any constant or definable way, if elements of mind so infinitely diverse, so individual, as emotion and imagination, are vitally concerned in the process. That energizing of mind released from the control of actuality, which we call imagination, that free following out of trains of suggestion called up by emotion, takes the colour, at every step, of the individual make of the poet’s nature, and the individual cast of his experience. In so far as a World-view is strictly poetic in origin, the conclusion might seem hard to resist that there may be as many poetic World-views as there are poets. And it is true that the individual quality of the poet will always cleave to whatever is strictly poetic in his thinking. But even so, it may be possible to determine typical directions in which poetic apprehension tends to engender or to sway belief, and to modify ideas imbibed in education or accepted on authority.
Thus, it may be provisionally laid down that a view of the World reached through poetic experience will tend to accentuate those aspects of Man and Nature, and those ways of regarding them, which offer most scope, analogy, or sanction, to this type of experience. Where the senses play a vital part, and are yet vitally implicated with passion and ideas, there will be little disposition to doctrines which either brand the senses as evil or illusory, or erect them into a sufficing faith. The logical intellect, its processes and conclusions, will receive a respectful but distant salute, while the irrational elements of life are accepted as its needful ingredients or even as a supreme source of its worth. Love, which tramples on reason, and, in the great words of à Kempis, warmly glows like a flame beyond all measure, may be called in some sense the natural religion of the poet. The mysterious love of man and woman, in particular, irrelevant to most of the problems of philosophy, and regarded by religion chiefly as a dangerous disturbing force, is one of the perennial springs of poetry, and one of the shaping analogies of poetic thought. And the same impassioned insight which gives significance to this love exalts also all those other energies of the soul which carry men out of and beyond themselves. Poetry is naturally heroic; it has presided over the cult of the hero, as religion and philosophy over those of the saint and the sage; it has rewarded him with enchanting secular Paradises, Elysian fields, Isles of the Blest, and Temples of Fame. Poetry is disposed to magnify human nature; the transition from Aeschylus, who painted men greater than they were, to Euripides, who drew them after life, is also a decline in the intrinsic temper of poetry, if in that alone. And because of its bent to think greatly of man, it makes for the assertion, in the great sense, of freedom—of man’s freedom to be himself. Neither the shibboleths of political freedom nor those of free thought have always, it is true, found response among poets. Their part has rather been to keep alive in mankind the temper which treats outward obstacles not as the soul’s constraints, but as its opportunities; the faith that iron bars do not make a cage, and that you may be bounded in a nutshell, and yet not only count yourself, but be, a king of infinite space.
In the interpretation of Nature, poetic experience works creatively or selectively on similar lines. To those wonderful deposits of the imagination of the past, the myths of extinct faiths, from which theology and philosophy have long withdrawn their sanction, or on which they have laid their taboo, the poets have habitually been very tender. And when they felt as poets, the image drawn from a myth has never had merely decorative value, or served merely as a ‘poetic synonym’ for the exact term. It expressed something in the poet’s vision not otherwise to be put into words. If the glorious anthropomorphism of Olympus and Asgard has faded for ever, the mystery of life everywhere pulsing through Nature, and perpetually reborn in ‘Man and beast and earth and air and sea,’ cries to the poet with a voice which will not be put by; and the symbols by which he seeks to convey his sense of it, if they read personality too definitely into the play of that elusive mystery, yet capture something in it which escapes the reasoned formulas of science.
Hence many great philosophic ideas about the universe which, without ascribing life or mind to it, might seem projected from our inner, rather than gathered from our outer, experience, have powerfully appealed to poets. The antithesis of the One and the Many, which fascinated and fertilized every phase of Greek thought, had one of its roots in the acute Greek feeling for continuity through change, which is equally manifest in the Parthenon and in the Pindaric Ode, and to a less degree in all art and poetry wherever the sense of rhythm is present at all. ‘When we feel the poetic thrill,’ says Santayana, ‘is it not that we find sweep in the concise, and depth in the clear?’ That felicitously expresses the genius of Hellenic art in particular; but it also marks off the specifically poetic apprehension of Oneness as a ‘something deeply interfused’ in and through the living multiplicity of the world, alike from the mystic vision of a One whose splendour dissolves the reality of things, and from the vision of Peter Bell, for whom nothing but ‘things’ exists. Yet even this pregnant Oneness has commonly gathered, in the poetic conception of the universe, the higher and richer attribute of soul-life. It has become a living and working Nature vitally implicated in every organ and filament, or Mind diffused through every limb, or Love, or Beauty, or Power, woven through the woof of it, or the splendour of God irradiating it through and through.
When we turn, as is proposed in what follows, from these general considerations to watch the actual operation of poetic apprehension in concrete examples, we naturally encounter some serious difficulties. Poetic apprehension may be as distinct and definable as we will, but it can rarely be caught acting in vacuo. Poets are men; they are usually citizens; they are often penetrated with some form of religious or philosophical faith. It is inevitable, in such cases, that their strictly poetic experience should be coloured or even overridden by ideas proper to their possibly more habitual or more deeply established persuasions. In poets like Goethe and Shelley, deeply concerned with the issues of life outside poetry, philosophic and poetic impulses and data may well seem inextricably mingled. Even Blake and Whitman, who perhaps come nearer than any other moderns to shaping out a poetic World-view for themselves, evidently worked, as poets, under a deep bias of revolutionary dogma, which made them unjust to some aspects of poetry itself. And with poet-exponents of great theological or philosophical systems, like Lucretius or Dante, it may well appear idle to seek to catch the moment when the runnel of poetry carved out a watercourse of its own, instead of falling into and moving along with the great tide of Epicurean or Catholic thought. Yet we attach some meaning to our words when we distinguish periods in which the poetic element in a poet’s nature was more potent than at others. When we say, for instance, that in Shelley the poetic apprehension after 1812 worked itself progressively free from an alien philosophy; or that in Wordsworth, from about the same date, it became progressively overlaid by a theology almost equally alien; or that in Dante’s Convito, the poet of the Vita Nuova, who will finally recover dominance in the Commedia, has yielded much ground to the scholastic thinker. Distinctions so clearly felt and sharply drawn cannot be groundless. What is here proposed is to examine whether any typical character or direction can be discovered in the modifications which the data of religious or philosophical beliefs and ideals have undergone in certain commanding poet natures. In that case we might possess some of the material for answering the question I have been bold enough to suggest in the title of this paper.