The Eighteenth-Century Reconsideration
The Burden of the Past & the English Poet | Pt. III
The discovery of thirteenth-century Gothic wall paintings at the St. Marienkirche Cathedral in Lübeck, Germany in the mid-20th century was lauded by then Chancellor Adenauer for the paintings’ “healthful confidence, the purity, the simple cleanliness and firmness so typical of the period but so impossible to find in our own.” But “discovery” was not the right word after all. It turned out that Lothar Malskat, hired to help restore the frescoes of the cathedral had painted them himself. The critics who had just been hailing the majesty of these works were now adamant that Malskat was merely seeking publicity, which was undoubtedly true (he had turned himself into the police). But after further investigation and the discovery that Malskat had indeed also painted several Rembrandts and Corots, among other artists, which had been accepted as originals, the disgruntled art critics were forced to declare that the wall paintings of Lübeck were, in fact, no good.
And so we return to W. Jackson Bate’s The Burden of The Past and the English Poet, picking up where he notes that in earlier periods, poetry “had a monopoly on the potentialities of both expression and subject,” while in an “organized” society the arts and language move towards a “remorseless tendency to separation” that “takes place psychologically through specialism, crowding, and competition.”
He then asks: "Would a man with the general mental and imaginative endowment of a Homer, a Dante, a Shakespeare, now be writing poetry at all?”
(Does any of this sound familiar? This kind of imaginative fretting has become something of a sport in recent years, particularly online. Is today’s Shakespeare working for an ad agency? Is Michelangelo designing poster boards for Marvel movies? Tied in with this anxiety is the largely unreflective call to RETURN.)
So in our defense against this oppressively gloomy picture, let’s glance back across our shoulder at our dear friend Malskat and ask ourselves: are we being unduly nostalgic?
“The power of nostalgia to distort judgment is endemic to us all,” writes Bate, “and our confidence that we are free of its prejudices is never justified.” So while 18th-century writers fretted over the absence of the “greater genres” — the epic and tragic drama — and present academic insanity aside, while one cannot merely dismiss a Homer or a Dante, it is important to examine our present situation further. Bate:
“Was what we say we so admire in the great poetry and art of the past really the product of unique circumstances of life, or are we merely indulging in a loose form of epiphenomenalism?…Again, were the achievements of the past—or, to put it more fairly, of any one particular part of the past similar in length of time (a mere half-century, at most a century) to what we decide to call the “present” — really so impressive as was claimed? even if we become very selective, are what we call the “greater genres” really greater in every respect? And concentrating even more selectively, taking only the isolated peaks of achievement to which we pay such lip-service: are they really what we want at the present time? Or is it only something analogous that we want? Finally why, in our dissatisfactions, do we so strongly clutch at deterministic explanations that relieve us from the burden of deciding not only what we most want but also what we can and should do about it? Could this not be the real “burden” after all — not determinism, but the burden of choice.”
In our unique historical moment, with poetic efforts either scattered in a trillion bewildering directions online or centralized in an academic pyramid scheme based on “workshops” that produce exclusively anemic workshop poetry peddled to other professional workshoppers for career advancement, it is perhaps more challenging to take Bate’s shot in the arm and run with it, but we must. Suppose we have some knowledge of our own tradition, or at least the desire to take it upon ourselves to acquire it. In that case, we can find considerable aid in moving forward by recognizing that in each past period an immense amount of junk writing has since been swept away. To associate the very best work of any period as “typical” is not just wrong but unproductive. Reared on a steady diet of anthologized, “all-star” poems, we may find this more difficult than we first thought.
Bate asks us to imagine ourselves in the role of an Elizabethan theater-goer:
Put them down next to the Southwark brothels adjoining the Elizabethan theaters and have them push their way, for only a couple of years, to performances of the average Elizabethan play: would the sharpened critical delight that they have in Hamlet or Macbeth continue to be extended so generously to the period as a whole?
We will briefly jump ahead to the 19th-century to consult Mr. Edgar Allan Poe, who best articulates what began forming in many minds in the 18th century in response to these discussions. In his essay “The Poetic Principle,” he says that a long poem is a contradiction in terms. To Poe’s mind, those long stretches in Homer that do not possess powerful condensations of phrase are not “poetry.” This is the same turn of mind that led Walter Savage Landor (18th & 19th cent.), in many ways a classicist, to say that “the greater part of Homer is trash.” As the Romantics took the stage, we saw the beginnings of what we now know as “pure poetry,” a much debated and maligned term in the 20th century. Poetry “distilled if necessary from relevances other than personal, aesthetic, and verbal, but in any case cherishing, and moving as much as possible toward, condensed suggestion.”
To put it crudely, at present, reciting a Pablo Neruda love poem at a house party may very well get you laid, but doing the same with a random, albeit short section of The Odyssey will likely just get you an eye roll.
John Keats, a “pure poet” if there ever was one, whose short life straddled the 18th and 19-centuries, could begin to wonder whether epic poems were not a “splendid imposition” on the modern world while also writing that the “test of Invention is a long poem…Did our great poets ever write short pieces?”
Despite the advantages afforded to the modern writer, it seemed impossible not to gaze enviously backward towards a time when poetry composed the very warp and woof of society, when all were held captive by the poet’s work, woven as it was into the song, dance, legislation, and priesthood of a people. But who today, when pressed, would wish to live in Homeric Greece?
And so the poet was stuck between the rock of the past and the hard place of a bafflingly open future. Emulation of the past, to some degree, was rightly seen as indispensable, albeit possibly crushing and impossible to match on the epic scale, while a newfound consciousness of originality, establishing a difference, provided another burden. Of course, the siren song of novelty for its own sake inevitably leads to triviality and transgression. Bate cites the Athenian who voted for the exile of Aristides the Just because he finally became tired of hearing Aristides called “the Just.”
Bate ends his third essay on a forlorn note:
With some desperation, the poet was tempted to escort his volume into print — as we see some poets do now, if in other phrasing — with the apology that these were only private, minor jottings, and on special and admittedly restricted subjects. This had already been true since the 1730s, and was to become more so as the next century neared. So Coleridge, particularly sensitive as a barometer in his early years as a poet, could subtitle one of the “conversation poems”: “A Poem Affecting Not To Be Poetry.”
We’ll pick up next Saturday with Bate’s fourth and final lecture from this series, titled “The Third Temple.”