Let There Be Poiesis

Referring to the two posts a little ways up, by William Hazlitt and then Coleridge, both on the subject of poetry and imagination—

I used to wonder what it was at the very heart of poetry that made it truly poetic. I did a post in here in the early days of the blog about it, or mentioning it anyway, in which I lamented not being able to discover what it was. I remember saying I thought it would more likely be found in moldering books on the forgotten shelves of libraries than on today's flashy sound-byte-infested internet (which is true).

Well, I suppose now I know what it is—that elusive and mysterious quality in the deepest heart of poetry that truly makes it poetic. The core of it, beneath the meter and rhyme and the poetic devices and the rest of the surface ornaments. At least according to Coleridge and Hazlitt and other Romantics, it's the Poetic Imagination—that integrating, transformative, alchemical element all great artists are possessed of, which is in fact what makes them great artists.

Bought a very inexpensive used copy of

• A Companion to Romanticism edited by Duncan Wu He's also the editor of Romanticism, an Anthology, that I've had since the nineties, which collects the best-known works of the best-known Romantics.

I'm hoping that book refers to the connection between Romanticism and Neoplatonism. If it doesn't, then I'll consider getting the Kindle edition (only edition available that I can find) of—

• A Companion to Romantic Poetry by Charles Mahoney because I know it does. Learned that little factoid from this abstract here:
• Romanticism, Gnosticism, and Neoplatonism by Laura Quinney

It's from a chapter of the same name which is in the book A Companion to Romantic Poetry.

You know all that stuff I keep going on and on about, concerning what religion really is and all? Basically Neoplatonism is what's at the core of it all. I've run into that word many times and always thought 'I should look into that,' but never really did until this morning, when I did a search and ran across this:

• Neoplatonism @ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Consider my world rocked.

Well, this is intriguing—
Here's an online research portal that allows lifetime online reading of the PDF file of just the single chapter (Romanticism, Gnosticism, and Neoplatonism by Laura Quinney) for $18. It beats the hell out of shelling out $55 for the Kindle book, which is the best price I can find it for. If I don't find what I'm looking for in the Companion to Romanticism I just might take advantage of this.

Oh, you need to click on PDF to see it. I'm leaving this here so if I do decide to do this later, I've got the link I need close at hand.

Moby Dick also leans heavily on the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This is coming from The Dark Enlightenment again. I didn't realize how important the Rime must have been to the Romantic movement. It's surprising how many similarities there are that you wouldn't notice at first glance. In the same way the mariner was compelled to wander the earth for the rest of his life warning others not to make the mistake he did, Victor also warned the captain of the Arctic exploration ship not to ambitiosly pursue his quest for scientific research (Victor was himself a scientist, exploring the limits of what could be done) as well as for personal glory. The sun and moon both play the same important role in each—as symbols of the conscious and unconscious minds. Water also stood in as another symbol of the unconscious. Each time Victor's monster committed another murder Victor would travel to a lake to soothe his nerves, and also there was a lot of frozen water symbolism in the form of glaciers.

And in the case of all three, the big rift that's being dramatized is between modern European man and the natural world, that happened when they created the Enlightenment and decided the natural world is there for them to exploit rather than chersih and celebrate, as our ancestors always did. Plus the industrialized ways they began to exploit workers and common people. Trust me, the author makes an excellent case for this, as strange as it must sound.

Companion to Romanticism came in today. Wow, this thing is a beast! I consider it a reserach book, not one I need to read all the way through. Just to dip into now and then when there's some aspect of Romanticism I want to learn more about.

Just bought The Fourth Dimension of a Poem and Other Essays by M. H. Abrams. He goes into great detail about poems and how they're crafted. This is a few steps beyond instruction books for writing poems.

And, speaking of M H Abrams, (or Mike as I like to call him), I dug out his most famous book The Mirror and the Lamp, which I bought about a year ago—a collection of essays about Romanticism. I scanned through the table of contents, and I see Plotinus' name a few times, as well as mention of Neoplatonism in more than one chapter. Once again, another excellent book (I believe and hope) already in my possession.

I believe Neoplatonism was the secret power source of the Romantics. An alternative to Christianity, which allowed them to think outside of the extremely familiar settings and ideas of the time, and also an alternative philosophy, with a set of very powerful ideas including the exaltation of Imagination to a divine essence or connection to the One, the Absolute (aka Everything), the source of the Romantic Sublime.

And also of course, an alternative to the prevailing Rational Materialism that had taken hold of the entire civilization and desacralized everything to an alarming degree, kicking off the great Age of Psychological Disorders we currently live in. Religion carries meaning and purpose, but science is nothing but a set of meaningless data and factoids. It can't be a philosophy of life.

Just got the Kindle version of The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy. I know, it isn't poetry, but he does write very poetically. I wanted to post somewhere about it, this just seemed like the right thread. His writing is very different in it than in anything I've seen by him yet. Dude's always switchin' it up. What got me interested in The passenger today is, I was looking up whether he's considered a literary writer (because Ian Cattenach of Write Conscious keeps saying he is), and one of the articles I landed on had a few passages from it that grabbed my attention. It isn't at all what I expected. I thought he meant he writes literary fiction, as in the contemporary genre (that isn't a genre, but more of a style thing or whatever). No, actually McCarthy is considered literary in the original sense, because his writing competes favorably up against the greats of history like Melville, Faulkner, Hemingway etc. He's considered the last of the great literary writers. Or maybe there needs to be an American in there too.

I won't start in on reading it for a while, I've got a lot I need to catch up on, and a little project of my own I want to get cracking on pretty soon. In writing terms I mean, I'm already deep into the planning and development.

The Fourth Dimension of a Poem has arrived. That is all.

I thought I'd pop in here and talk about poetry a little. Haven't done that in a while. It's mostly an inventory of books ordered and recieved and endless blather about Romanticism and Neoplatonism.

Somewhere, on one of these threads (I have no idea which one) I recently said that I believe I now understand what's at the heart of poems that makes them essentially different from prose, or rather what according to Coleridge and the Romantics, makes a poem different from prose. And that was the poetic imagination.

I've had some more thoughts on that, and I want to address it some more.

I read somewhere in one of these books recently, that Coleridge agrees with Poe that the chief goal of poetry is beauty, where the chief goal of prose would be clarity and concision. There are many techniques available for creating beauty in a poem—alliteration, rhyme, consonance, mellifluence, lyricism, and on and on. We tend not to use these much in writing prose unless it's meant to be lyrical or poetic prose. So all of these techniques are a part of it.

But as I thought about this something else surfaced. I know of another difference too—the Poetic Image.

"By the end of the play the viewer has enough information to assemble the poetic image.

"The poetic image is not visual—it's the sum total of the situations and ideas of the piece. When taken as a whole they reveal the central theme or themes of the work."
​

That comes from a post I did way back in the early days of the blog, from a book about Theatre of the Absurd. But it occurs to me—the poetic image applies to a poem as well, right? It doesn't read like prose—clear and concise and aimed entirely at getting information across in the most economical way possible. It's an image that must be assembled piece by piece, by dwelling on the indivicual parts of it and on the overall image itself. I think this is a big part of what's at the heart of a poem. And the imagery is gotten across, not in a reportorial way, "just the facts ma'am," but hopefully in a way that's beautiful. Elegant maybe. Graceful. Heartfelt. Feelings and emotions are more what poetry is made of, rather than clear concise ideas expressed tersely.

This is as well as I can say it now. it's a start. And hopefully I'm on the right track. And of course it's probably different depending on what movement we're talking about. I'm interested in Romanticism right now, and I think this is their way.

I'm also thinking about this thing I say (or want to say) sometimes in reference to certain poems—

"It's not really poetry, it's just prose in line form." ​

But then if I were to try to explain in more detail what that means I'm stumped. What would make it more poetic? You can't exactly tell someone "Well, just run it through the Poetic Imagination real quick, meld and merge ideas together into new forms, and all that." I'm not sure it would help much either to say "Well, just make it more beautiful and less explanatory." But then this isn't a prescriptive concept, rather it's one to be learned and developed gradually as we learn about poetry and try our hands at writing some ourselves. It's more of a guiding principle to help us try to understand what makes a poem poetic.

^ It's also got something to do with the way poetic lines should connect to each other, which is different from the way sentences do in a paragraph. With sentences there's a forward propulsion, toward a certan goal. Development, maybe of drama or something. I don't know what else yet. Logic and reason I suppose. Clarity of meaning. But in a poem (the kind I'm thinking of anyway, built on the Poetic Image) there isn't or at least there needn't be. A poem develops along different lines.

I'm probably wrong, but I find it's best to let these kind of ideas (intuitive ones) sit and dwell, let them develop and grow for a while rather than just go "Nah," and kill them. Often what you're getting in the beginning isn't on track, but as it develops it comes into focus better. Plus it's probably more important at this stage to be able to do this than to explain it clearly in prose. Hmmm, maybe that means I should be playing around with some freewrite poetry in my journal?