If Antony be well remembered yet,
’Tis not his conquests keep his name in fashion,
But Actium lost; for Cleopatra’s eyes
Outbalance all of Caesar’s victories.25
(Not long after writing these words, Byron was to abandon his own mistress to assist in founding the new Greece. By 1937, an analogous decamping by King Edward VIII with Mrs. Simpson—one of whose several names was, paradoxically, Warfield—inspired an enthusiastic Calypso song: “It was Love Love Love Love, Love alone / Cause King Edward to leave the throne.”)
In Shakespeare, of course, other elected heroes divest themselves of their lustrous burden and throw themselves on the mercy of the court of rampant humanism: Richard II tells his courtiers, “I live with bread, like you; feel want, taste grief, / Need friends. Subjected thus, / How can you say to me, I am a king?”26 Sensibility was a theme for Renaissance writers as for classical authors, as a power of mutual recognition in human kind. But sensibility as an isolating property had gained, by the Romantic period, such ascendancy that Leopardi in the 1830s was cautioning the Romantic poets on the elevation of subjective feelings over the greater mysteries of existence, in contrast with the ancient writers who preserved a humility before the universe. Leopardi says, “And they, the Romantics, do not realize that it is precisely this great ideal of our time, an intimate knowledge of our own heart, and the analyzing, foretelling, and distinguishing of every minute emotion, in short the art of psychology, that destroys the very illusion without which poetry will be no more.”27
Leopardi, in early youth a translator of Virgil, who grieved over the inhumanity, as he called it, of the Aeneid’s closing scene; Leopardi, whose monument stands beside the supposed tomb of Virgil at the entrance of Naples; Leopardi was the author of “A se stesso,” as of the “Infinito.” Perhaps it is Leopardi among poets who first fully realizes that hubris, egotism, will drive man to destroy, along with Nature and his own relation to the world, his very relation to mystery and his source of poetry. This is a theme close to Montale, who again invoking the Aeneid, makes an ironic comment on fashionable modern disbelief:
There is no Sybil at Cuma as far as I know.
And if there was, no one would be such a fool as to listen to it.
(Non esiste a Cuma una sibilla
che lo sappia. E se fosse, nessuno
sarebbe così sciocco da darle ascolto.)28
(Montale also wrote a poem on being called up by a broadcasting official who wanted his opinion as to whether Dido would make a good subject for television.)29
Disbelief in a greater order produces disbelief in one’s own obligations, which is a form of disbelief in oneself. The literature of the nineteenth century is often preoccupied with a redefinition of Duty—that is, with an attempt to set the hero up on his own terms. There is a continuous examination of duty—duty to god, to the greater good, to the object of one’s affections; or of the conflict between these and a duty to the new hero, oneself: to one’s perception of justice and reason and to a human dignity independent of or opposed to established order. Equilibrium was now re-sited in the self. Under new management. One had become a hero merely by bearing with existence, which was no longer gratefully viewed as a gift of gods. Literally regarded, the daily life of man had become a heroic enterprise in itself.
Virtue, even idealism, might still be present in literature; but modern man in his new isolation must bear his destiny in himself—as Lydgate in Middlemarch, an innovative scientist and public benefactor, inspired by a noble humanitarian cause, foundering yet again, let us note, on the triviality of a woman. The pure redeeming female of the novel is in fact explicitly likened to the Virgin Mary. Loss of faith is a prevailing theme: “We are most hopeless who had once most hope,” Clough tells us, “We are most wretched that had most believed,”30 while the contingent forces of godless inchoate darkness were confronted in the novels of Hardy. In literature, disillusion relieved itself in unmasking; and this unmasking, under the name of Realism, was a trail swiftly leading to the self. No deed or sentiment, however lofty, was now exempt from reassessment. While Tolstoy poured scorn on the historic phenomenon of “glory,” Baudelaire compared memory to a chest of drawers or a communal grave.31 Psychiatry was on the scene, a valet for whom there are few heroes. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams bears an epigraph from Virgil: “If the gods will not stir for me, I’ll rouse all hell.”
Literary discreditation of vigor was answered with the more languid genius of introspection: Proust told us what was fit for memory, and the Homeric Ulysses was ironically invoked in the obscure Dubliner. The Idiot had become the Hero.
Of this hero, the poet and writer was himself assuming certain attributes. The poet would address himself to power, to authority, to established ideas as to a phenomenon incapable of virtue. The poet would stand apart and accuse order; he would bear solitary witness. In the nineteenth century, exile, prosecution, and imprisonment—always a feature of the writing life—became common among literary figures: Shelley, Hugo, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Zola, Dostoyevsky. The Idiot was becoming an Outcast; but a heroic outcast, at least to himself. As Victor Brombert says in his Romantic Prison, “repressed freedom and poetic inventiveness are intimately related.”32
With the coming of our own century, the institutions of authority seemed bent on justifying the writer’s condemnation—bent on identifying “heroism” with destruction and self-destruction. Nature had been, as the saying goes, “subdued.” With the onset of the First World War, the state, and society itself, appeared to embrace disorder, to have gone berserk. The betrayal of the helpless man at arms was excruciatingly reported by the poets of the trenches, and Eliot was to ask, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”33 From now on, if equilibrium was to reside anywhere it was in a private, almost conspiratorial exchange of sensibility. The literary duel to the death is no longer between two warriors—Hector and Achilles, Aeneas and Turnus—but is exemplified in Edwin Muir’s beautiful poem “The Combat,” in which a monstrous heraldic beast endlessly does battle with an unprepossessing little creature who represents the tenacious surviving shred of our humanity.34
Everyman was now the anti-hero—a Pooter, a Prufrock—who was to shamble onstage in the plays of Beckett and later of Pinter, and to perish in a seedy limbo in Death of a Salesman; the protagonist of such novels as Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, where the vacuum cleaners of the salesman Wormold are mistaken by the authorities for a global missile crisis.
Not everyone accepted this state of literary affairs. On the shell-shocked terrain between the wars, a great poet of our language struggles to reconcile an ancient concept of nobility with the modern reality, and reported failure in magnificent verse. Yeats was, as he said,
born into that ancient sect
But thrown upon this filthy modern tide
And by its formless spawning fury wrecked.35
On the death of the hero he warned us:
And I am in despair that time may bring
Approved patterns of women and of men
But not the self-same excellence again.36
Poets were beginning to take the measure of loss, and to wonder if the joke might be on them. In 1936, in his “Letter to Lord Byron,” Auden reviewed the disintegration of literary order as a party which began brilliantly—as he says, “How we all roared when Baudelaire went fey.” As the party progressed, he says:
…alas, that happy crowded floor
Looks very different; many are in tears:
Some have retired to bed and locked the door;
And some swing madly from the chandeliers;
Some have passed out entirely in the rears;
Some have been sick in corners; the sobering few
Are trying hard to think of something new.37
Poets had not entirely given up on deeds, in life and work. The young Auden was one of numerous writers to endorse, in Spain, a call to arms—on behalf of a collective literary hero, the p
roletariat. For these sporadic revivals of action, Montale—who resigned his library post rather than identify himself with fascism—had no respect. “D’Annunzio,” he said, “wrote poetry via his social personality. He was so vain that he even managed to be brave in war. [Poor Aeneas!] But vanity was the driving motive, as it was in the case of André Malraux.”38
Not the proletariat but Everyman was soon—if briefly—to fill the hero’s role; and Day Lewis would write of the dead lying in a blitzed London street “They have made us eat our knowing words, who rose and paid the bill for the whole party.”39
Along with the rest of us, the poet entered the Orwellian postwar world—the era of mass cult, of a technological supremacy whose ultimate achievement is potential annihilation. The poet’s aversion to events is representative but immaterial, it lacks the force even to register in what Montale calls the “civiltà dell’uomo robot.”40 Montale, like Eliot, is a poet of the end of the line. Unlike Eliot, he brings no religious belief to the void; and his “divine indifference,” as he calls it, is a state very far from the nil admirari of Horace, that condition of composed maturity. The scraps of life that make ironic appearance in Montale’s verse—slivers of soap, squeezed toothpaste, crumpled wrapping paper—are introduced as fit accessories for the meagre modern soul. Mistrusting most passion and all enthusiasm he tells us to take life in small spoonfuls, in homeopathic doses: “Non aumentate le dose.”41 His tone is that of a sage whose knowledge can spare us much useless expenditure of emotion. And when he announces—with no little egotism—that he has “Lived at five per cent of capacity,” one feels that anyone attempting a larger percentage would be making a brutta figura.42 Far from Virgil’s “ocean roll of rhythm,” as Tennyson called it, Montale’s is a voice lowered so as to cause the auditor to cup his ear.43 Although sound is measured and essential in every syllable of his verse, Montale—who was a highly trained and knowledgeable musician—is rarely a musical poet. He is aphoristic, but laconic. His poetry is a level gaze at life.
Montale has decreed public events as fit only for history. What then is fit for memory? One of his briefest and most beautiful poems is called “Memory.”44 Memory, he says, was a literary genre before writing was invented and already had a stench of death. Living memory, he says, is immemorial, evanescent, and its content is a secret candor. Not every writer would agree that lofty ideals have entirely passed away from human possibility, or that one may not hope to encounter in literature qualities greater than our own, as we sometimes do in life. In our era, live heroes are often writers themselves—dissidents, prisoners of conscience. The very phrase “our hero” speaks for whatever in the human spirit anciently hungers after revelations and for exemplars (even if exemplars are sanitized nowadays in gibberish as “role-models.”) The Aristotelian ideal, that human life “take possession of the beautiful” and live nobly if briefly rather than prolong a commonplace existence is identified by Werner Jaeger as “the sense of heroism through which we feel the classical world most closely akin to ourselves.”45 Mystery remains; and no one can really explain why a multitude outside the Duomo of Milan should break into “oceanic applause” at the sight of a poet’s coffin.
Montale has said that every illusion is matched by its disillusion. Yet illusion is the very nature of art. Proust speaks of the historic figures who owe their stature to the illusory magic of literature. Yeats says that civilization itself is “manifold illusion” and that man,
Despite his terror cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality.46
What then of the prospect for art in this nuclear-fearing, overpopulated, polluted, and dehumanized world? Where men and women speak of themselves as case histories or as some inferior mechanism that must adapt itself to all-powerful technology—which can be “perfection” as no human being can be (according to Rilke). Where there is no time for spiritualizing events into legends of honoring gestures. Where Nature, in Montale’s words, has withdrawn into the personal myth of the poet; and the poet himself, in Auden’s limbo of lost contexts, is a repository of sentiments and sensations that arise like vapor from the deeds of others, lacking even, in our mass culture, the dignity and refreshment of solitude. Even if the specter of an imponderable finality should be exorcised, it seems not impossible that great art may wither away, and that the dynasty of great poets who have nourished our thought for so many centuries is already dying out.
Virgil’s Aeneid has been called a prolonged literary allusion to Homer. It was Virgil whom Dante chose as his spiritual and literary companion. Crowned with the laurel on the capital of Rome, Petrarch chose the theme of his address from Virgil. In accepting, from detention, his Nobel award, Solzhenitsyn—who had inhabited and described the circles of hell—took his text from Dostoyevsky: “Beauty will save the world.”47 Eugenio Montale’s Nobel address was called, “Is Poetry Still Possible?”—poetry, which he has called a pebble, a grain of sand. His address ended with characteristically inconclusive words—which will serve as my own conclusion this evening:
Not only poetry, but the entire world of artistic expression as it calls itself has entered a crisis indivisible from the human condition, from our life as humane beings, and our conviction or at least illusion of privileged existence as the only creatures who hold themselves masters of their fate and bearers of a destiny no organism can boast. It is therefore useless to ask ourselves what will be the fate of the arts. It would be as if asking whether the man of the future—a future so remote from our conception—will resolve the tragic contradictions in which we have increasingly struggled since the dawn of creation; and whether, by such an epoch, some unimaginable man would still be capable of talking to himself.48
2. THE DEFENSE OF CANDOR
If all philosophy is an argument with Plato, as is sometimes claimed, all poetry might be seen as an effort to regain the immediacy of Homer. Literature, like philosophy, is concerned with truth. But the nature of poetry—of literature—extends beyond intellectual enquiry. It engages all human perception, intuitive, rational, mystical, spontaneous, or reflective. It proposes no outcome. It not merely enhances understanding, but is in itself a synthesis. Poets have been at pains to explain this to critics throughout the ages, but their words are unnecessary to lovers of poetry and have been disregarded by critics: The judgment of great poetry, said Whitman, “is as the sun falling around a helpless thing.”49
In the previous lecture I quoted Montale’s observation that memory existed as a literary genre before writing was invented [Ed.: See note 44]. Articulation is an aspect of human survival, not only in its commemorative and descriptive function, but in relieving the human soul of incoherence. In so far as expression can be matched to sensation and event, human nature seems to retain consciousness.
In a sense Realism itself is a means of spiritualizing experience. And a civilized society, forced back to the wall of essentials, called upon the coherence and redemption that a great articulation might provide. That appeal, for poets, is unimaginable in any crisis we might now face.
By introducing this talk with a reference to the indirection that has pervaded Western literature since the time of Homer, I don’t intend a tour of familiar theoretical ground. As in my previous talk, I should like to illustrate, through literature itself, the consciousness of writers towards the revelatory or dissembling powers of language. Their commentary is for the most part embedded in their work; it is not theory but practical illustration. Recognition and exposure are present in it, but the artistic purpose is always to return, through language, to essentials, to reclaim truth. In the greatest poets, truth can be found, in Tennyson’s phrase, “often flowering often in a lonely word.”50 So that, as Heidegger says of Homeric Greek, “We are directly in the presence of the thing itself, not first in the presence of a mere word-sign.”51 As Coleridge said of Shakespeare’s language, it becomes the instrume
nt that makes the changeful god felt in the river, the lion and the flame.52
I believe that Heidegger endorsed the tracing of the word logos to the harvest, to a gathering of crops. Similarly the Accademia della Crusca—the authority that has reigned over Italian language—takes its name from the sorting of grain from chaff, the sifting of good language from bad; it has a sieve as its emblem. (Unfortunately, the Crusca has in its turn become a symbol for stuffiness.) In the case of logos, the word is held, by some philosophers, to refer to the gathering not only of crops but of fruit. A Greek friend of mine proposes a still more direct connection of logos to the collecting of olives. And there is something compelling in the idea of the word as a small firm pungent fruit, with a hard pit at its center.
Auden’s celebrated assertion that Poetry makes nothing happen first appeared, in February 1939, in his memorial poem for Yeats who had died in the previous month.53 Thirty-odd years before that, Yeats himself had stated that he did not write to affect opinion, but—in his words—to give “emotions expression for my own pleasure. [Otherwise] all would be oratorical and insincere. If we understand our own minds, and the things that are striving to utter themselves through our minds, we move others, not because we have understood or thought about those others, but because all life has the same root.”54
In its preoccupation with the root of life, language has special responsibilities. The visual arts and music are an aesthetic appeal to senses of immediate perception, whatever subsequent impressions they make elicit. But language is the medium through which we all deal continually in daily life. Language, whether as daily speech or transcribed, must be formulated and decoded. Its deviations from true meaning are peculiarly exposed, and some of them fall into familiar categories under ancient names. Yet there are always new variations on impostures, adapted to the receptivity of the times. The multiple possibilities for valid approaches to truth through language are themselves increasingly circuitous, and increasingly insistent in their successive claims to be “definitive.” In repudiating such pretensions from the realists, Flaubert said, “There is no ‘true.’ There are merely different ways of perceiving.”55 In considering tonight some of these different avenues toward truth I want to comment on special difficulties that have overtaken “the lonely word” in recent generations, one of the most drastic of those difficulties being reflected in the word’s no longer being lonely but found in agglomerations.
We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think Page 5