The Fourth Dimension of a Poem

by M H Abrams

  I want to glance at Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to show how all strands of the great Romantic theme—the circular journey through alienation back to integration, involving the recognition of the one shared life and the realization of what it means to be at home again in a world from which we have been estranged—are incorporated in the plot of the best-known narrative poem in English. The mariner departs from his native land and sails toward the Antarctic. In a desolate icy setting, a lone albatross appears. The sailors hail it “as if it had been a Christian soul,” and in the ancient ritual of welcoming a human traveler, give it food. Suddenly the mariner, “in contempt of the laws of hospitality,” as Coleridge’s marginal gloss specifies, kills the albatross with his crossbow. This seemingly gratuitous act expresses the condition of the mariner’s spirit: his prideful self-sufficiency, his readiness to sever himself from a universal community, the fellow participants in a shared life. The mariner’s punishment, as the ship moves north in the Pacific Ocean toward the equator, is to experience the full measure of the isolation he has elected—his fellow sailors fall dead, and he finds himself becalmed in a dead and static nature that has become alien and inimical to him:

  Alone, alone, all, all alone

  Alone on a wide, wide sea.

  The only living things he sees are the water-snakes on a rotting sea—“only a thousand thousand slimy things / Lived on, and so did I.” As Coleridge’s marginal gloss explains, “He despiseth the creatures of the calm.”

  At this lowest point of total stasis comes the narrative reversal, announced in the lines, “The moving Moon went up the sky, / And nowhere did abide.” Coleridge’s matchless prose gloss on these lines is designed to make clear to the reader what the mariner, by suffering alienation and solitude, has learned. The mariner humanizes the motions of the moon and stars; and the insistent repetitions in his interpretation of their circular courses reveals how profoundly he has learned what it means to belong—to belong to a place, a native land, a family, a home:

  In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and everywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.

  The lesson of community thus achieved, the mariner looks again at the water snakes; but what he had earlier seen as loathsome, he now sees to be beautiful, and to be joying in the life they share with their penitent observer; and in an unpremeditated burst of familial love, he blesses them:

  O happy living things! no tongue

  Their beauty might declare

  A spring of love gushed from my heart,

  And I blessed them unaware.

  At once the terrible spell snaps; the dead elements of nature “burst into life” and move the mariner to complete the circle of his spiritual journey. In literal geographic fact, he completes his circumnavigation of the globe, to end his voyage at the precise place where it had begun. But only now, after the alienation he has deserved and suffered, does he become aware of what it means to be at home in what the gloss specifies as “his native country.”

  Oh! dream of joy! is this indeed

  The light-house top I see?

  Is this the hill? Is this the kirk?

  Is this mine own countree?

  IV.

  To be estranged from the natural world was to Coleridge, as to fellow Romantics, the radical affliction of the human condition; it is to experience as a lived reality what he regarded as the post-Newtonian world-view, “the intuition” in which, as he wrote in The Friend, we “place nature in antithesis to the mind, as . . . death to life.” To such a view Coleridge opposed that alternative “intuition of things which arises when we possess ourselves, as one with the whole.” This is the condition in which alienation is annulled, and the human individual breaks through the barrier of self to achieve awareness of the one life that he shares with all living beings, and with all nature. And of this intuition the emotional accompaniment is what Coleridge—in what for him, as for many of his contemporaries is a specialized term—calls “joy” or “joyance.” As Coleridge put it in his Philosophical Lectures:

  In joy individuality is lost. . . . To have a genius is to live in the universal, to know no self but that which is reflected not only from the faces of all around us, our fellow creatures, but reflected from the flowers, the trees, the beasts, yea from the very surface of the [waters and the] sands of the desert.

  Repeatedly in other Romantic writers we find the acme of human experience represented as a breakthrough to a joyous participation with the abundant diversity of all living species. William Blake, in his buoyant middle thirties, wrote of the renewal of “the fiery joy”:

  For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life;

  Because the soul of sweet delight can never be defil’d.

  In Night the ninth of his Four Zoas, Blake represents mankind’s climactic recognition that outer nature is no other than his own estranged self—Blake’s equivalent in myth of Hegel’s philosophy of alienation and reintegration—as an exuberant celebration of the rebirth of a dead and wintry world:

  For Lo the winter melted away upon the distant hills

  And all the black mould sings. She speaks to her infant race, her milk

  Descends down on the sand. . . .

  The roots shoot thick thro the solid rocks bursting their way

  They cry out in joys of existence. . . .

  The bats burst forth from the hardened slime crying

  To one another, What are we & whence is our joy and delight?

  Twice in this passage the apocalypse of the imagination is signalized by the term “joy.”

  We don’t think of Wordsworth as an exuberant poet, yet his elation equals Blake’s at moments of imaginative insight when, as he says in the eighth book of The Prelude, “The pulse of Being everywhere was felt . . . / One galaxy of life and joy.” Hence, in the second book of The Prelude, his exultant response, again called “joy,” to his achieved sense that he participates in the plenitude and diversity of the one life, whether on land, in the air, or within the depths of the sea:

  I was only then

  Contented when with bliss ineffable

  I felt the sentiment of Being spread

  O’er all that leaps, and runs, and shouts, and sings,

  Or beats the gladsome air; o’er all that glides

  Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself,

  And mighty depth of waters. Wonder not

  If such my transports were, for in all things

  I saw one life, and felt that it was joy.

  As a reminder that the Romantic vision of nature was voiced by German as well as by English writers, I shall cite a passage by the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. In the 1790s the young Hölderlin wrote a romance in prose, entitled Hyperion, of which the plot, as he summarizes it in his “Preface,” reiterates the central Romantic theme of the basic human need to reintegrate with an alienated nature.

  To end that eternal conflict between our self and the world . . . to unite ourselves with nature so as to form one endless whole—that is the goal of all our striving.

  In the course of the narrative, the protagonist momentarily reaches this goal, in an achievement of unison with the vigor and variousness of life in the natural world. Although in prose instead of verse, Hölderlin’s rapturous expression of such an imaginative moment is remarkably close to that of Wordsworth:

  Each living thing flew and leaped and struggled out into the divine air, and beetles and swallows and doves and storks wheeled and mingled in joyous confusion in the depths and heights, and the steps of those who were bound t
o earth turned into flight; over the furrows charged the horse and over the hedges the roe, and out of the depths of the sea the fish rose and leaped over its surface.

  So didst thou lie poured forth, sweet Life. . . .

  I have time for only one other example of the Romantic celebration of the sense of the one shared life. It is from Shelley’s great elegy, “Adonais,” composed in the Italian springtime of 1821. The poem memorializes the death of young John Keats, and concludes with a death wish by Shelley himself; yet in the course of the poem, the poet responds to the upsurge of life in the spring, and to the joyous urgency in all living things to procreate more life, in a rapture that outsoars even his Romantic contemporaries. Here Shelley comes close to the expressive limits of language, yet without strain, despite the stringencies in meter and rhyme of the complex Spenserian stanza.

  “Ah woe is me!” The passage begins with the classical cry of elegiac mourning, and proceeds to an equally traditional topos—introduced into the pastoral elegy by Theocritus, more than two thousand years earlier—which laments the finality of human death in contrast to the rebirth of the natural world in spring. But in Shelley, the ancient commonplace triggers an ecstatic realization of a teeming universal life:

  The amorous birds now pair in every brake,

  And build their mossy homes in field and brere;

  And the green lizard, and the golden snake,

  Like unimprisoned flames, out of their trance awake.

  Now, the Shelleyan liftoff:

  Through wood and stream and field and hill and Ocean

  A quickening life from the Earth’s heart has burst

  As it has ever done, with change and motion,

  From the great morning of the world when first

  God dawned on Chaos; in its stream immersed

  All baser things pant with life’s sacred thirst;

  Diffuse themselves, and spend in love’s delight,

  The beauty and the joy of their renewed might.

  V.

  Some version of cosmic ecology—the sense of close affinity between the human and the natural world, and of joyous participation in their shared life—is to be found in later writers who, in this aspect, are recognizably in the Romantic lineage. I shall cite three instances, two English and one American.

  The first is D. H. Lawrence, who put forward the Romantic concept of alienation and reintegration in its uncompromisingly primitive form; that is, in the mythical mode of the One Primal Man who has fallen into division, but yearns to be reunified with his estranged natural self. In his book entitled Apocalypse, written in 1932, Lawrence announced: “We and the cosmos are one. The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts. . . . Now all this is literally true, as men knew in the great past, and as they will know again.” The development of human self-consciousness and the expansion of abstract knowledge gradually divided this cosmos, in a process that reached a crisis in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the scientific world-view “substituted the non-vital universe of forces and mechanistic order . . . and the long slow death of the human being set in.” Lawrence continues, in his haunting rhetoric:

  What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison. . . . I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. . . .

  What we want is to . . . re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen.

  My next reference is the opening stanza of a poem by Dylan Thomas, composed in 1933, “The force that through the green fuse.” (The “green fuse” is the hollow stem of a plant.) Note the interchanges of “green” and “wintry,” which are literal for the natural plant and season but metaphorical for human beings, and of “fever,” which is literal for human beings but metaphorical for a plant:

  The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

  Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

  Is my destroyer.

  And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose

  My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

  The metaphoric interplay between the human and the nonhuman, between the internal and the external, is recognizably Wordsworthian, although the voice is unmistakably that of Dylan Thomas.

  The poetic voices both of Wordsworth and of Thomas are remote from that of A. R. Ammons, who wrote free verse in the American vernacular, and with the rhythms of everyday conversation. We nonetheless recognize in Ammons’ nature poems—“Mansion” is an example—his expression of a Romantic sense of commonality with the life and death of all natural things, on the earth from which all originate, and to which all return. The poem named “Still” records Ammons’ sudden accession to a state of consciousness that Romantic writers called “joy,” the ecstatic awareness that the self is inter-involved with the natural world in one all-inclusive life:

  everything is

  magnificent with existence, is in

  surfeit of glory. . . .

  I whirled through transfigurations up and down,

  transfigurations of size and shape and place:

  at one sudden point came still,

  stood in wonder:

  moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent

  with being!

  Whatever the difference in its linguistic register, the similarity of this passage is patent to Wordsworth’s expression of “bliss ineffable” when he “felt the sentiment of Being, spread / O’er all that moves, and all that seemeth still.” And Ammons’ short poem entitled “Reflective” is recognizably, although in a whimsical rendering, a Wordsworthian recognition of kinship with even so lowly a being as a common weed:

  I found a

  weed

  that had a

  mirror in it

  and that

  mirror

  looked in at

  a mirror

  in

  me that

  had a

  weed in it.

  COLERIDGE AND HIS philosophical contemporaries, as we have seen, claimed that the alienation of humanity from nature “strikes death.” Science and the technology it fosters, when applied heedlessly or with unbridled greed, has turned Coleridge’s metaphoric death of nature into a grimly literal possibility. Many scientists and ecologists have recently taken the lead in trying to persuade us, by an appeal to the facts, of this lethal threat to the natural world. It remains to be seen whether merely to know the facts is enough, or whether it will take a revival and dissemination of some equivalent to the Romantic vision of nature to enable us, in Shelley’s great phrase, “to imagine that which we know.” It seems likely that only such a motive power—such an emotive power—will suffice to release the energies, the invention, and the will to make the sacrifices that are needed if we are to salvage this no-longer-quite-so-green earth while it is still fit to live on.

  Kant and the Theology of Art

  *

  MY CONCERN IS with the origin, and with the antecedents in intellectual history, of the modern theory of art-as-such. I use “art-as-such” as a convenient shorthand for the following views:

  1. All works of “fine art,” whether a painting, a poem, sculpture, music, or architecture, can be defined in a way that demarcates them from all other human products, by reference to distinctive features in the experience of the perceiver, or else by reference to distinctive attributes of the works themselves. Usually it is assumed that the normative aesthetic experience and the defining attributes of the work of art are mutually implicative, or at least correlative.

  2. In terms of the perceiver’s experience, a work of art is sa
id to be contemplated, and to be contemplated disinterestedly. This claim signifies that the work is attended to absorbedly and exclusively, without reference to anything beyond its own bounds, and for its own sake—that is, independently of personal concerns or desires, and without regard to its referential truth, or its pleasurable or emotional effects, or its practical use, or its moral content or implications. A work of art may or may not be true to life or the world, or serve useful or pleasurable or emotional ends, or have moral effects; but consideration of such matters is held to be irrelevant, or even destructive, to the purely disinterested contemplation of the work as such, simply as a work of art.

  3. In terms of its own attributes, the work of art is said to be an object which is self-sufficient, nonreferential, “autotelic,” autonomous, and independent of relations to anything outside its own bounds. Alternatively, it is said to be an end in itself, not a means to an end beyond itself; or else its end is asserted to be internal, not external, and its artistic value to be intrinsic, not extrinsic. The work, then, is conceived as an entity of which the end is simply to exist, to be what it is for our disinterested contemplation.