Category: Poetry

From the mail:

Thanks for your blog. It deals with matters of real interest (…using the word 'interest' in its original sense of 'it matters').  [From Latin inter esse, which is suggestive.]

Perhaps you could elaborate on something you mentioned in your (very funny) post on some aphorisms of Wallace Stevens:

After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption. What a paltry redemption! It would be better to say that there is no redemption than to say something as silly as this. Learn to live with the death of God, my friend! Don't insert a sorry substitute into the gap. Don't try to make a religion of what is only a dabbling in subjective impressions. Compare John Gardner, "Fiction is the only religion I have . . . ." (On Writers and Writing, p. xii.)

I doubt you are saying that poetry, perhaps even all art, ‘is only a dabbling in subjective impressions’ because to say that Greek tragedy, for example, is only a dabbling in subjective impressions would surely be saying something even sillier than what Wallace Stevens says. Moreover, you mention that you have ‘nothing against art properly chastened and subordinated to the ultimate dominatrix, Philosophia’. So what did you mean?

Best wishes, and keep up the great work.

Thanks for the response.  It would indeed be absurdly silly to maintain that all of poetry is "only a dabbling in subjective impressions."  But note that the context is critical commentary on certain aesthetic aphorisms of the distinguished American poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955).  Wallace is the focus of my interest in that post and no one else.  And my focus is not on his poetry but on certain aesthetic (and thus philosophical) observations of his about poetry and art in general.

What I am objecting to in the passage you quote above, and quite strenuously, is the notion that poetry, especially Stevens' sort of poetry, could be an adequate substitute for God, or that belief in poetry could adequately substitute for belief in God.  To my mind that is silly, absurdly silly.  And Wallace's talk of redemption in this context makes a joke of the quest for genuine redemption. No one who understands what the religious yearning for redemption and salvation is all about could trivialize it in such a way as to suggest that the writing or reading of poetry could satisfy it.  That's ridiculous.  Imagine a naked Jew standing before a grave he was forced to dig himself, about to be shot down by a Nazi SS officer.  Imagine telling him that redemption from meaningless suffering is to be had from the poems of Wallace Stevens.

What I'm saying is: be honest and don't misuse words.  You cannot plug the gap caused by the death of God (Nietzsche) by putting some paltry idol in its place.  Poetry in Stevens' style would be such a paltry ersatz.  Better nihilism than idolatry.  The death of God is an 'event' of rather more significance than the discovery that Russell's celestial teapot has been destroyed by an asteroid.  The death of God, as Nietzsche well understood, has grave and far-reaching consequences.  Knock out the celestial teapot and nothing of moment changes. The death of God is the death of truth and meaning.  Everything changes.

As for your question about lit crit recommendations, I'd have to think about it.