Underdetermination in Two French Poems

 

Baudelaire’s “L’Étranger” and Verlaine’s “Art Poetique” are appended following the endnotes in new translations of my own as well as in the French originals. 

 

    Teachers of expository writing, technical writing, and journalism generally stress clarity and economy.   For such forms of discourse the language should most often be transparent with the meaning evident and the style unobtrusive.  In aesthetic genres, though, to exploit literature’s capacity for an extraordinary density of meaning, phrasing, figures of speech, tone, and sound enrich and deepen signification.  Ambiguity can convey a richer truth that reflects the contradictions, even the mystery of things, rather than a reductive simplicity. 

     Literary usage, however, differs widely in deployment of this strategy.  Some texts have what seems a unitary (or at least a rapidly decodable) signification while others are more ambiguous or unclear in meaning [1].  The distinction was recognized in medieval France in the contrast between trobar leu and trobar clus.  Either may be appropriate depending on the aims of the text.  Realistic fiction, for instance, is generally highly determined as are popular dramas like television situation comedies and folktales, while experimental and avant-garde works are more likely to be underdetermined.  Poetry that succeeds in oral performance is likely to be more immediately intelligible than written texts which the reader may ponder and review.

     Though works of both kinds may be found throughout literary history, during the last century and half underdetermined poetry has been particularly prestigious.  Since Romanticism the elevation of the individual genius and the rise of an art indifferent or even hostile to popularity has in part displaced the old emphases on art’s transmitting cultural norms while seeking to please.  Intellectuals relish complexity while the great majority of the population consumes poetry only through the medium of popular music.

    These attitudes are often quite self-conscious.  Flaubert and Baudelaire sought to distance themselves from social norms [2].  Verlaine considered the modern writers he admired to be Les Poètes Maudits and Mallarmé cultivated an obscure style. French Symbolism and Italian Hermeticism gloried in vaguer signification, while Realism, Naturalism, and Tendenzromane of both right and left strove in general for unitary, clearly prescribed meanings.   

     “L’Étranger,” one of the prose poems in Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose or Spleen de Paris (1869) and Verlaine’s “Art Poétique” from Jadis et Naguère (Formerly and Recently) (1884) both promote underdetermination in service of rather different styles.  While both poets share with Gautier the view that beauty is the primary desideratum of art, Gautier’s “L’Art” promotes a Parnassian style with attention focused on form and precise concrete description.  For Gautier a poem is a cunningly crafted object like Cellini’s gold, enamel, and ebony salt cellar, its shapes well-defined, with solid heft.  Though Gary Snyder would scarcely be classed with Gautier, he expresses a similar notion in “Riprap”: Lay down these words/ Before your mind like rocks.”  Both Baudelaire and Verlaine depend on a different aesthetic, with beauty based on more elusive meaning.

     Baudelaire’s stranger prefers clouds the very excellence of which arises from their imprecise suggestiveness.  After denying that he loves what others do – family, friends, country, and wealth – the speaker hedges on beauty, saying that what is called art he finds not always beautiful or divine.  He chooses instead to celebrate the clouds.  Surely this is a manner of saying that he revels in his own imagination.  The clouds themselves bear no meaning, it is only his reception of their appearance that lends them appeal.  In other words, he is affirming his own sensibility as the source of aesthetic delight.  He follows here the Romantic celebration of genius and anticipates not only the obscurity associated with Symbolist imagery, but also the notion of idiosyncratic taste inherent in hip, camp, and kitsch appreciation.  Classical standards of beauty and monosemous theme are dismissed or ignored.

     Verlaine’s “Art Poetique” advocates a similar aesthetic, though with considerably more elaboration.  In fact his “nuance” (also nuance in English) shares an etymology with Baudelaire’s ”nuage” (cloud).  Like Baudelaire he condemns traditional eloquence using vivid terms, even saying it should be throttled).  Like Pater in The Renaissance saying that all art aspires to the condition of music, he declares that music, the most abstract of the arts, must rule [3].  His enemy is the obvious: a cheap laugh, too much garlic, showy costume jewelry.  For him beauty lies in the subtlety of a scent in the breeze, a musical phrase, the flight of a bird.  Equivocation becomes a part of charm.

   Baudelaire’s “L’Étranger” used the open form of the prose poem, employed by Aloysius Bertrand in Gaspard de la nuit (1842) and later to shattering effect by Rimbaud in in Illuminations (1886).  Though Verlaine inveighs against rhyme, he rhymes nonetheless (sometimes in slant rhymes such as midi/attiédi, énergie/assagie, and matin/thym).  The eight syllable lines are not entirely predictable, as they are varied without pattern with seven and nine syllable lines, and one of ten [4]. 

     This freedom is consistent with the expression of novel content and the elevation of art to a quasi-religion.  The appeal of the poets’ underdetermination arises in part from its suggestion that the artist is a kind of shamanic conjurer dealing in spells, but the reader, too, shares in the creation of meaning not through mechanical decoding but in a kind of collaborative construction of signification.  By violating conventions and establishing new ones, the poets help bring to birth new forms of literature.

      

 

 

1.  Roland Barthes’ S/Z distinguished between readerly (lisible) texts and writerly (scriptable) ones   Since for him certain further assumptions and value judgements are associated with these terms, underdetermined and highly determined are preferred here.  (Overdetermined should be reserved for cases in which too much information is given resulting in potentially tiresome replication.)

2.  Flaubert ridiculed the bourgeois, for instance, in Bouvard and Pecuchet and the Dictionary of Received Ideas, and Baudelaire praised the “dandy” whose style indicates his aesthetic concerns.  In another clear sign of transgressive intent, both were prosecuted for obscenity.

3.  Pater in 1873 was far from alone in his sentiment.  In Poe’s “The Poetic Principle” (1850) he said "It is in Music perhaps that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles -- the creation of supernal Beauty.”  Verlaine had described Poe as malin though naïf and even puéril in a letter of May 16, 1873 to Edmond Lepelletier.  Many others have voiced similar ideas.  For instance, Susan Sontag in Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 says “Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts— it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure— and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.”

4.  I find two lines of seven syllables, ten of eight, twenty-three of nine, and one I count as ten: 8899 8899 8998 9979 10998 9999 9898 9997 9989.

 

 

 

 

The Stranger

 

 

     “Whom do you love better, mystery man, tell me: your father, or mother, your sister or brother?”

    “I have no father, mother, sister, or brother.”

     “Your friends?”

     “You are using a word the meaning of which has always been unknown to me.”

     “Your country?”

     “I don’t even know its latitude.”

     “Beauty?”

     “I would gladly love her as an immortal goddess.”

     “Gold?”

     “I hate it just as you hate god.”

     “So, what then do you love, you extraordinary stranger?”

    “I love the clouds – the clouds which drift by – like there – and there! The marvelous clouds!”

 

 

L’Étranger

 

— Qui aimes-tu le mieux, homme énigmatique, dis ? ton père, ta mère, ta sœur ou ton frère ?

— Je n’ai ni père, ni mère, ni sœur, ni frère.

— Tes amis ?

— Vous vous servez là d’une parole dont le sens m’est resté jusqu’à ce jour inconnu.

— Ta patrie ?

— J’ignore sous quelle latitude elle est située.

— La beauté ?

— Je l’aimerais volontiers, déesse et immortelle.

— L’or ?

— Je le hais comme vous haïssez Dieu.

— Eh ! qu’aimes-tu donc, extraordinaire étranger ?

— J’aime les nuages… les nuages qui passent… là-bas… là-bas… les merveilleux nuages !

 

 

 

The Art of Poetry (Paul Verlaine)

 

Before all else the verse must swing,

so build a rhythm just off-beat,

dissolved in air and not too neat,

no weighty or prescriptive thing.

 

You must not choose your words without

allowing polysemy in. 

Grey songs have aways finest been

where certainty contends with doubt.

 

Behind a veil a lovely eye,

or noonday trembling in the sun.

Blue stars arrayed when day is done

across the mild autumn sky.

 

Nuance alone is what will suit

No color, just nuance alone!

For only by nuance is shown

The links of dreams or horn to flute!

 

Fly far then from the deathly spot,

the cruel shade, the laugh so cheap

which makes the very sky to weep

like too much garlic in the pot.

 

Take eloquence and twist its neck! 

A little work and you’ll do well

To calm the rhymes for a short spell

If we don’t curb them, there’s no check!

 

Why, who rhyme’s wrongs can ever know?

And what deaf child or crazy slave

to us this shoddy jewel gave

which proves so false when studied close.

 

It’s music always wins the prize!

Your verse must be a thing in  flight,

an active soul alone can write

which takes to other loves and skies.

 

So may your verse fly with the birds,

and swim in morning’s breeze so chilled,

with mint and thyme aromas filled

and all the rest is only words.

 

 

Art Poetique

 

Paul Verlaine

De la musique avant toute chose,

Et pour cela préfère l’Impair

Plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air,

Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.

 

Il faut aussi que tu n’ailles point

Choisir tes mots sans quelque méprise :

Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise

Où l’Indécis au Précis se joint.

 

C’est des beaux yeux derrière des voiles,

C’est le grand jour tremblant de midi,

C’est, par un ciel d’automne attiédi,

Le bleu fouillis des claires étoiles !

 

Car nous voulons la Nuance encor,

Pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance !

Oh ! la nuance seule fiance

Le rêve au rêve et la flûte au cor !

 

Fuis du plus loin la Pointe assassine,

L’Esprit cruel et le Rire impur,

Qui font pleurer les yeux de l’Azur,

Et tout cet ail de basse cuisine !

 

Prends l’éloquence et tords-lui son cou !

Tu feras bien, en train d’énergie,

De rendre un peu la Rime assagie.

Si l’on n’y veille, elle ira jusqu’où ?

 

Ô qui dira les torts de la Rime ?

Quel enfant sourd ou quel nègre fou

Nous a forgé ce bijou d’un sou

Qui sonne creux et faux sous la lime ?

 

De la musique encore et toujours !

Que ton vers soit la chose envolée

Qu’on sent qui fuit d’une âme en allée

Vers d’autres cieux à d’autres amours.

 

Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure

Éparse au vent crispé du matin

Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym…

Et tout le reste est littérature.

Baudelaire’s “Painter of Modern Life”

Numbers in parentheses refer to the translation of Baudelaire’s essay readily available at http://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Baudelaire_Painter-of-Modern-Life_1863.pdf. The French text may be read at https://www.uni-due.de/lyriktheorie/texte/1863_baudelaire.html among other sites. Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.


     In “The Painter of Modern Life” Baudelaire managed to define the character of the art of his own time with sufficient acumen and aptness that much of what he said remains useful today, a century and a half later. Indeed, to many literary historians Baudelaire is the first modern poet. In his own time, Verlaine declared that he represents “puissament et essentiellement l’homme modern” [1], and this opinion has since become a commonplace. [2] Baudelaire’s exemplary painter (called in the essay M.G. but since identified as Constantin Guys) is described as self-taught, transcending earlier aesthetic standards. The artist’s peculiarly modern excellence is a result of his radical rebellion and his absorption in the modern scene, his fascination with the tumult and confusion of mass life in the present urban-centered era, redefining what has become of “the work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction,” in Benjamin’s phrase. In many ways Baudelaire’s vision was prescient, extending the trajectory of artistic Bohemia beyond his own day and anticipating twentieth century concepts of hip, while in certain respects, in particular the willful facelessness of Monsieur M.G., Baudelaire’s judgement seems wide of the mark.
     Going far beyond those who contributed to the Salon des Réfusés, Baudelaire chooses to champion a self-taught artist (2) who worked primarily as an illustrator and cartoonist. This choice implicitly overturns not merely the specific taste represented by the Académie des Beaux-Arts’ Salon de Paris, the most prestigious French exhibit since the middle of the eighteenth century, which Manet and the impressionists were challenging. Baudelaire’s more far-reaching critique questions fundamental aesthetic values, thus anticipating the rhetoric of the twentieth century Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists.
     Indulging his taste for provocation, Baudelaire praises M.G. for not being an artist but rather a “man of the world” (“homme du monde”). He asserts that most artists are “very skilled brutes, mere manual laborers, village pub-talkers with the minds of country bumpkins.” This conventional type is “tied to his palette like a serf to the soil.” On the other hand with a bias toward the irrational that has been familiar since the Romantic era M.G.’s integrity is implied when he is said to paint like a barbarian, a child, a drunk, or a convalescent. (1,3) [3]
     This posture echoes the poet’s rebellious impulse to overturn values. The very title of his principal work Les Fleurs du Mal arises from a perverse wish to celebrate what the world condemns. [4] Often he does not trouble to provide justification, relying instead on the strength of his vituperation to stimulate a corrective review of values rather than straightforwardly making a case for alternatives. Who, indeed, would actually celebrate evil? What Parisian would feel only “spleen” while strolling the streets of the capital? Baudelaire’s fascination with lesbianism likewise signals more an attempt, successful as it happened, to be outré than a fetish of his own. Just as much supposed diabolism (in outlaw biker and heavy metal imagery, for instance) is not so much devil-worship as baiting the pious, Baudelaire seeks a rhetorical, not a logical, effect in his selection of the outstanding modern artist.
     The man of the world exemplified by his chosen artist is a “spiritual citizen of the universe” “who understands the world and the mysterious and legitimate reasons behind all its customs.” (2) How does he gain such hermetic wisdom? Baudelaire defines two types of privileged observers: the dandy and the flâneur.
     Both represent observers who are at the same time detached and wholly absorbed in the urban scene. The dandy expresses in what would today be called lifestyle choice “the aristocratic superiority of his mind.” Never “a vulgar man,” he “comes close to spirituality and to stoicism.” His personal cultivation of beauty, a “form of Romanticism,” implicitly reproaches the bourgeoisie. (10) The pose of the aesthete, the apostle of beauty, of course, flourished with the aid of Pater in Wilde and Whistler and then in Saki and Ronald Firbank. The dandy remained recognizable in the crowds at San Francisco’s Fillmore, done up in beads and crystals and feathers, gowns and robes and unlikely thrift store ensembles. Whether or not Baudelaire was correct in claiming that “dandyism is the last flicker of heroism in decadent ages,” representing ‘what is best in human pride,” it is quite certain that it represents “opposition and revolt.” (11)
     Yet M.G.is not exactly a dandy. Though Baudelaire says he “would have a sheaf of good reasons for the word ‘dandy’ implies a quintessence of character and a subtle under-standing of all the moral mechanisms of this worlds,” he resists using the label. While “the dandy aspires to cold detachment,” his artist friend is a passionate lover of life with even an “excessive love of visible, tangible things.” (4)


"Thus the lover of universal life moves into the crowd as though into an enormous reservoir of electricity. He, the lover of life, may also be compared to a mirror as vast as this crowd: to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, which with every one of its movements presents a pattern of life, in all its multiplicity, and the flowing grace of all the elements that go to compose life. It is an ego athirst for the non-ego, and reflecting it at every moment in energies more vivid than life itself, always inconstant and fleeting.” (4)


     This characterization becomes very nearly a definition of art in general for surely the “multiplicity” and “flowing grace,” of lived experience, even its “inconstant and fleeting” nature are not unique to modernity.
    The distinction between dandy and flâneur is elucidated by Baudelaire’s use of Poe’s story “The Man of the Crowd.” The narrator who had been idly observing the scene in the street in just the sort of receptive mood Baudelaire had praised as typical of the man of the world, “in one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui—moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs.” Enjoying this heightened consciousness he observes various easily categorized and understood types when he notices an old man and is struck by “the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression.” Motivated to pursue this enigmatic figure in an attempt to discover his secrets, he concludes after trailing him for an entire day and night, what he had suspected from the outset. He declares, without the slightest evidence, that the old man "is the type and the genius of deep crime.” Thus it is a mercy that he remains inscrutable: "es lasst sich nicht lesen.”
     The story’s narrator, then, resembles M.G. in his fascinated attachment to the outside world, while the man he is shadowing remains like the dandy, altogether beyond reach, detached, unreadable. Only the former can provide us, the readers, with a story, but the latter is similarly extraordinary, the first distinguished from the masses by his perceptive sensibility and the latter by his entire involvement in a mysterious but demanding game of engagement. One feels the “man of the crowd” sees through the charades of social life and, rather than withdrawing in reaction, submerges himself entirely in a principled but pointless act of performance art.
     The notion of the anonymity of the modern city in which everyone a “a man of the crowd” doubtless influenced Baudelaire in his most striking false prediction. He maintains that M.G. who is, after all, a journalist who typically does not own his work but sells it to a publisher who may or may not even credit him, embraces this obscurity. The reader is told that he “carries his originality to the point of modesty,” that he does not even sign his drawings. Baudelaire’s modern ideal is to “be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world.” (4) Absorbed in the crowd, wholly participating in the mass experience “the observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.” (4)
     Many phenomena of art since his time vindicate elements of Baudelaire’s idea of the modern. Dadaists, Surrealists, and others have reinforced his displacement of earlier ideas of beauty. Modern works tend to pervasive fragmentation (evident, for instance, in collage and in such poetic epics as Paterson and the Cantos). The investment of moderns in ephemera, in conceptual and performance works is entirely consistent with Baudelaire’s definition of the modern as foregrounding “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent.” The absorption of the artist in mass culture is evident in Pop Art, street art, and the crossovers into advertising by such figures as Man Ray and Andy Warhol. Indeed, in modern American culture such commercial works as Breaking Bad are often accepted as art even by highly educated people.
     If modern artists have more typically sought fame than emulating M. G.’s “modesty,” traces, perhaps of a contrary tendency may be seen in Pessoa’s concealment behind personae, Warhol’s dictum that “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes,” [6] some street and guerilla artists, the Diggers’ Communications Company and the Atelier Populaire in 1968 Paris.
     With the end of the old system of patronage, artists were thrown into the marketplace, while, at the same time, their alienation and rebellion led them to resent the bourgeoisie which had become their likeliest customer base. The replacement of the old dichotomy of courtly and popular art was supplanted by a shrinking field of “fine art” and an expanding one of mass commodified art. Baudelaire’s response to the dilemma of the artist in the modern world defined trends which have remained influential to the present day.



1. Verlaine, Œuvres posthumes, p. 8.

2. Among the more influential statements of this idea are in Walter Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” and Harold Rosenberg’s The Tradition of the New.

3. Other maneuvers meant to evade the conscious mind have included chance operations and outsider art.

4. Baudelaire’s wish to épater la bourgeoisie succeeded so well that the book could not be printed in its entirety in France until 1949.

5. Trailing after people on the street has been packaged as a work of art by numerous artists. The best-known version is doubtless Vito Acconci’s Following Piece.

6. On the screen of a television set by Banksy is written "In the future, everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes,"

Notes on Pan

Mythology is always elastic and dynamic, and Pan strikes me as more given to shape-shifting than some. A divinity that might have seemed likely to dwell in the humbler precincts of Olympus, half beast in fact, and patron of backward herdsmen, Pan developed into a personification of both principal god and devil. Though an importunate sexually aroused serial rapist, Pan has been as well the occasion for a vision of Ultimate Reality. These observations stubbornly would not cohere, so I present them as a series of notes.




Pan’s Sphere

     Pan’s name was derived from “pasturer,” and the god governed the opposite pole of Zeus’ royal court: those semi-wild heights, unowned by any so free to all, where sheep or goats could find fodder. His pipes resemble those used by Greek shepherds from the third millennium BCE. Like the land that could sustain domestic animals, he was a blessing, with the epithet of “luck-bringer,” but at times, both in the mountains and on the battlefield, he could bring on panicked terror as well. He personifies sexual desire, but sometimes pursues females with selfish passion, according to the stories of Echo and Pitys. His frightening aspect could be beneficent as in Pheidippides’ report of his aiding the Greeks by causing panic among the Persians is told by Herodotus, [1] but it gave even the Arcadians pause. His intimate appeal to the individual is perhaps implied in the fact that the archaeological remains reveal a great many dedications but few dedicated temples. Offerings to Pan were often left in the wilderness.
     Philologists tell us that the folk etymology pan = all (accepted in late antiquity) is inaccurate, yet it has a broad unfocused appropriateness for a deity of generation, and Pan has often been used to represent paganism as a whole. Human awe at the ability of life to generate new plant and animal life led to exaggeration of his sexual characteristics and his frequent ithyphallic representation in art.
     These characteristics are attested by the poets. Pindar refers to Pan’s archaic identity as an attendant of the Great Mother, a role consistent with his association with fertility. [2] Stories of Pan’s human mother (said to be Penelope in her wild older years) [3] doubtless encouraged people to feel closer to Pan than to the full Olympians. In Euripedes’ Helena Pan’s capacity for exciting terror is the focus, here with reference to the rape of a naiad. [4] Pan stands at the very opening of Theocritus’ Idylls. In an atmosphere both rural and erotic, Thyrsis praises the Goatherd’s music as second only to Pan’s, associating both with ample meat to complete the festive note, yet he also refers to the threat of Pan’s anger when disturbed at his siesta. One delights in food and in love only if one also is liable to the pains of a lack of either. The same interdependent complex is implied in Theocritus’ VIIth Idyll in which the poet appeals to Pan for success in love, but incidentally refers to the custom of flagellating Pan with onions when food proves insufficient.


Pan in Plato

     In his Cratylus Plato echoes Hesiod’s muses who warned humans (whom they called “mere bellies”) that, while they may deliver the truth, they also “know how to speak many false things as though they were true.” [5] Socrates tells Hermogenes that Pan is “double-formed” because “speech signifies all things (pan), and is always turning them round and round, and has two forms, true and false.” [6] This striking anticipation of modern concepts of the inherent limitation of language occurs in a dialogue which has, quite appropriately, itself been viewed with uncertainty by readers who cannot tell what is meant to be Socrates’ position on the issue of whether the signifier is linked to the signified or is wholly arbitrary. Socrates changes his mind, or at least the direction of his argument in mid-dialogue. Further, the lengthy presentation of fanciful etymologies has been considered satirical by some and serious by others.
     Socrates does trace a pattern in these weird imaginative speculations on the origins of words: the repeated mention of flux. To him this signifies a fundamental doubt at the basis of the world-view of the “name-givers” which has led them to insert hints of instability into the verbal code. “Namemakers believed everything to be in flux. Suppose it should prove that although those who gave the names gave them in the belief that all things are in motion and flux—I myself think they did have that belief— still in reality that is not the case, and the namegivers themselves, having fallen into a kind of vortex, are whirled about, dragging us along with them.” [7]
     In the end Socrates is not so distant from Huang Po who directed his listeners to gaze to the Mind behind phenomena, reinforcing rather than negating everyday experience in the process. Lacking the nonverbal intuition by which both Greek and the Chinese thinkers apprehended truth, Cratylus can only play the part of the absolute skeptic.
     In the Phaedrus Pan was Socrates’ god of choice to whom he offers a most philosophic prayer, directing his words also, in a pleasantly ecumenical gesture, to “whatever gods may be present.” Socrates asks for inner perfection and for only such possessions as a reasonable man can handle, noting that the only true wealth is wisdom. [8]


Pan and Christ

     Herodotus suggests that Pan is, along with Dionysus and Heracles, a younger god [9] yet he adds that, among the Egyptians (who, he assures his readers, kept excellent records) he is considered to be very ancient. The archaic character of his role as producing fertility, both plant and animal, in wild regions, might seem to support the latter judgment, at least as far as a local cult in Arcadia is concerned. He shares with Christ, Dionysus, and Heracles the non-Olympian characteristic of a mixed human/divine parentage and a career including the human experience of death.
     Plutarch [10] tells the story of Thamus, the Egyptian ship’s pilot, who learned in a divine vision of the death of the god, news which eventually reached Tiberius who launched an investigation. As the date of this incident happened to coincide, roughly, at least, with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the story has been used to signify the end of paganism and the triumph of the Christian deity with his resurrection. For Eusebius it added to what he saw as considerable evidence that the pre-Christian gods has departed to make way for his god. [11] By the time of the Renaissance, the death of Pan had come to signify not the departure of the Greek deities, but Christ’s redemptive death itself. Orthodox authors such as Rabelais (for whom, of course, Panurge and Pantagruel are heroes) and Guillaume Bigot identified the two gods and treated Pan’s death as a figurative way of speaking of Christ’s own. [12] Rabelais says, “For my part, I understand it of that great Saviour of the faithful who was shamefully put to death at Jerusalem by the envy and wickedness of the doctors, priests, and monks of the Mosaic law. And methinks my interpretation is not improper; for he may lawfully be said in the Greek tongue to be Pan, since he is our all. For all that we are, all that we live, all that we have, all that we hope, is him, by him, from him, and in him. He is the good Pan, the great shepherd, who, as the loving shepherd Corydon affirms, hath not only a tender love and affection for his sheep, but also for their shepherds.” [13]
     This reading of Pan as a symbol of Christ reached England as well. In the month of “Maye” in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar Pan is simply a code-word for Jesus: “When great Pan Account of Shepherds shall ask.” (54) Milton follows in his “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” in which the shepherds find that “the mighty Pan/ Was kindly com to live with them below.” [14]



Pan and the Romantics

     Wordsworth and Byron both used Pan as the representative of a paganism which for them meant primarily aesthetic values. When Byron recounts the story from Plutarch of Pan’s reported death in “Aristomenes,” Pan represents paganism as a whole. The loss of the pre-Christian world-view seems to the poet an aesthetic loss.


How much died with him! false or true—the dream
Was beautiful which peopled every stream
With more than finny tenants, and adorned
The woods and waters with coy nymphs that scorned
Pursuing Deities, or in the embrace
Of gods brought forth the high heroic race


     For Wordsworth this meant a gentle soothing landscape picturesqueness as in the sonnet “Composed By the Side of Grasmere Lake” in which “Great Pan” “low-whispers” “tranquility is here.” One recalls that in “The World Is Too Much With Us” the poet wishes that, as a pagan, he might be made “less forlorn” by such entertainments as the “sight of Proteus rising from the sea;/ Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.” This is religion reduced to the amusement of sight-seeing.
     In Shelley’s “Hymn to Pan” the god is not, as in Wordsworth and Byron, the representative of a picturesque and charming mythology, but is instead a model for the very human experience of delusive desire.


“I pursu'd a maiden and clasp'd a reed.
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!
It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed.
All wept, as I think both ye now would,
If envy or age had not frozen your blood,
At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.”


     (Mary Shelley for her part wrote a play Midas -- which I have yet to read -- with two lyrics by Percy to open with the music contest between Apollo and Pan.)
     Keats is far profound, original, and provocative in his use of Pan as a sort of objective correlative of negative capability. In Endymion [15] Pan is first described as a Romantic nature spirit ruling “desolate places, where dank moisture breeds/ The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth.” to whom “yellow-girted bees” offer their honey. He is associated with the sort of magic likely among farmers “Breather round our farms,/ To keep off mildews, and all weather harms,” yet for Keats he is above all mysterious. The “Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds,” and “Dread opener of the mysterious doors/ Leading to universal knowledge.” At the hymn’s conclusion this has become a virtual mystic via negativa:


be still the leaven,
That spreading in this dull and clodded earth
Gives it a touch ethereal—a new// birth:
Be still a symbol of immensity;
A firmament reflected in a sea;
An element filling the space between;
An unknown


Pan and Neo-Paganism

     The earlier use of Pan to represent all pagan deities persisted into the nineteenth century, though the associated values altered. Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the extended exclamations of “The Dead Pan” maintains a conventional preference for the new god, “one in Sion/ Hung for love’s sake on a cross,” but her successors did not prove always so orthodox. To some post-Romantic poets, this god’s resemblance to the Christian devil in his horns and cloven hooves proved more an attraction than an impediment to his renewed worship as an icon of eroticism, forbidden pleasure in general, and the unconscious.
     This use of Pan as a mask to protest appears in Baudelaire. In “La Muse Malade” Pan is recognized as god of poetry together with Apollo, but the recognition is largely nostalgic. This belated author’s muse is characterized by “folie et l'horreur, froides et taciturnes.” In “L'École païenne” Pan is identified directly with revolution and his return with the end of the tyrannical reign of Christianity. Baudelaire details this view in The Painter of Modern Life [16] he maintains “The birthplace of Painting is the Temple. Its roots are in religion. The modern temple and the modern Religion are the Revolution. Thus let us create the Temple of the Revolution and the Painting of the Revolution . . . Pan must kill god. Pan is the people.”
     Varieties of this counter-cultural Pan are discernable in paintings by Burne-Jones such as Psyche and Pan [17] in which a dubious looking naked female stands well below an amorous Pan whose coiffure is positively architectural. The excitable Swinburne identifies Pan with élan vital in “A Nympholept”; the even more irregular Aleister Crowley made Pan a major symbol of his Thelemic mysticism and sang wildly of his wish to “Thrill with lissome lust of the light.” [18] Most readers of poetry can call to mind e. e. cummings’ balloon man, at first called “little” and “lame,” then “queer” and “old,” until the cat is let out of the bag and he is said to be “goat-footed.” [19]






1. Histories, (I, 105).

2. Pythian iii. 77, fr. 6. 1.

3. Apollodorus Epitome (7.38) says Odysseus’ Penelope conceived Pan after she was ousted for infidelity by the hero.

4. 167-190.

5. Theogony, ll. 26-28.

6. 408.

7. 439c.

8. 279.

9. Histories, II. 145.

10. Moralia, “The Obsolescence of Oracles,” 419.

11. Eusebius of Caesaria, Praeparatio Evangelica, Ch. XVII.

12. By the beginning of the 18th century this trend had become sufficiently pronounced to be ridiculed. Thus Fontenelle comments, “Ce grand Pan qui meurt sous Tibere, aussi bien que Jesus-Christ, est le Maistre des Demons, dont l'Empire est ruine par cette mort d'un Dieu si salutaire a l'Univers; ou si cette explication ne vous plaist pas, car enfin on peut sans impieté donner des sens contraires a une mesme chose, quoy qu'elle regarde la Religion; ce grand Pan est Jesus-Christ luy-mesme, dont la mort cause une douleur et une consternation generale parmy leg Demons, qui ne peuvent plus exercer leur tirannie sur les hommes. C'est ainsi qu'on a trouve moyen de donner a ce grand Pan deux faces bien differentes.” This passage and many more are included in O. Weinreich’s article “Zum Tode des Grossen Pan,” published in ARW 13 (1910) pp. 467-73).

13. Book. IV, Ch. 24. This is Urquhart’s version.

14. ll. 89-90.

15. The passages cited all occur in the episode in I, 232-306.

16. In Chapter 10, “Philosophic Art.”

17. See also “The Garden of Pan” in which a buff lad plays his pipes for a pair of lovers while gazing directly at the viewer.

18. “Hymn to Pan.”

19. “in Just-“