The Phantom of Artistic Truth

     Artists have no privileged access to truth.  This qualification in no way diminishes their expertise in their own métiers.  They are specialists in the making of beautiful objects only and are no more likely than anyone else to have accurate ideas about other topics.  While this proposition may seem self-evident, it nonetheless contradicts assumptions accepted from archaic times until quite recently.  Further, it also challenges the intuitions of many readers who feel they find in works of literature, for instance, a depth of understanding of not only grand themes such as philosophy, divinity, mortality, but also usable lessons in human psychology and the ordering of society. 

     The origins of this idea are ancient indeed.  Though decorative art existed in prehistoric times, much sculpture, poetry, and dance of oral cultures is religious or magical, promising rewards beyond the aesthetic, including otherwise unavailable truths.  The conflation in the roles of poet with wise man and priest is universal at that stage and appears in Classical antiquity as inspiration by the gods or the Muses reflected in the Latin use of “vates” (prophet) for poet. [1]  The archaic kinship of special poetic knowledge with shamanistic trance is evident in the etymology of that Latin word for priest which has been traced to Proto-Indo-European *weh₂t- (“excited, possessed”), the same root that gave rise to Old and Middle English wod meaning mad or frenzied.  In Asia, Africa, and America as well as in Europe, artists were thought to benefit the community by providing the insights they gained from their special insight.  The evidence from modern hunter-gatherer cultures is quite clear.  Artists were considered capable of traveling in supernatural realms and then returning with more authoritative truth than was available to others.  They certainly provided spectacle and entertainment, but they were also considered to be the source of functional answers to the profoundest questions.  What is real?  From where does the rain come?  How should people behave?  What should we do next?

     By historical times a bifurcation had occurring, separating the delivery of messages from higher entities from the pursuit of beauty for its own sake, what the Romans called “nugae” (trifles) meant for amusement.  With the coming of Christianity the source of prophetic wisdom moved from the Muses to the Holy Spirit as Bede’s story of Caedmon‘s inspiration in the field makes clear.  Bede says explicitly that he was given the gift of song “not from people or through people,” but rather, like the apostle Paul, by God himself. [2] 

     In spite of his reaction against a youthful taste for the theater, Augustine had come to allow a place for art if it facilitated access to religious truth and thus promoted salvation.  Due to the authority of the church, the poet no longer needed no longer to communicate directly with deities, allowing others at least vicariously to experience the divine; poets might adopt the more modest expectation of reformulating accepted teaching.  This didactic role is prominent in Philip Sidney for whom “virtuous action” is “the end of all earthly learning,” and poetry, as the likeliest method to “bring forth” virtue, has the “most just title” of prince of all pursuits.  Similarly, even for the atheist Shelley, poets are not merely “the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society.”

      The association of poetry with truth likewise is central to Matthew Arnold’s view that only culture could, by influencing people’s behavior, save society from anarchy, and Eliot’s wish to link his art with his Christianity, just as Ginsberg and Kerouac among the mid-twentieth century Beats, who reacted against Eliot, sought to proselytize Buddhism or to reinvent prehistoric spirituality like Snyder and Rothenburg.  All regarded poetry as a unique medium for conveying the highest truth.  

     The same assumption of art as a source of truth is evident in most middlebrow discussion of books (especially in today’s group discussions) which address “issues” raised in reading and insights offered by the author.  Pedagogical practice likewise generally centers on theme.  Teachers will deploy the dreadful expression ”What is the author trying to say?” as though that answer will sum up the reading.  Encouraging students to “learn something” from the text is far more conveniently handled in class than attempting to cultivate a taste for beauty or an understanding of artistic practice. 

     Indeed, through the years, probably the most consistent justification for literature is the claim that it reveals a truth otherwise unavailable.  Yet how might artists attain this privileged access to truth?  They have no unique source of knowledge and must depend like all others, on their own all-too-fallible judgement, sensibility, and experience.  Judging from artists’ biographies and English Department faculty gossip, neither the writing nor the reading of quantities of poetry seems to produce people of extraordinary good sense or exceptional morality. 

     The truth of art does indeed exist, though, in spite of the artist’s knowing no more than anyone else.  It is precisely because no one has privileged knowledge yet everyone is intimately familiar with one version of subjectivity.  Whatever medium might be used, the artist constructs in durable form a work that reflects an individual take on reality, a plausible representation of consciousness, not imitating experience but twisting, altering, and refracting it in ways that paradoxically make it more real.  What art records may not always look sublime, but that is because human experience is not regularly conducted in the empyrean.  Art records human consciousness, drawing on all the objects and events that compose a life, and making concrete not merely an impression of a physical milieu and a set of actions, but adding as well the elements that make life meaningful to our species.  Unlike other fields of intellectual work, the artist’s product incorporates the affective tone which with endless variety accompanies our every moment.  The retreat from pain and pursuit of pleasure that characterizes all conscious life is incorporated into every objet d’art.  The aesthetic imagination is, like our ordinary consciousness, more likely to be directed by irrational motives than by logic, Art can precisely express the contradictions, ambiguities, and mysteries everyone experiences but which resist the reductive simplicity of most propositions. 

     In all these ways art delivers the “truth” of human experience far more meaningfully and, indeed, accurately than other modes of discourse.  These very same factors that make human accounts of events significant also differentiate the stories that art tells from those that science relates.  The scientist describes what happens in the laboratory and seeks results that others can replicate, whereas in life every event is experienced differently by each person present and that singularity is as significant as any common ground. 

     Thus art thrives within the limits of subjectivity.  Yet even there its truth is problematic.  From the start it is already at one remove from lived experience.  Rather than trying to reconstruct a photo-realist rendering of memory, the author builds a new one, making aesthetic choices at every word.  Every poem or novel might begin with the words, “This is how someone, sometime, might have thinking; this is what that someone might have seen.”  The reader may then experience, not so much another’s vision of truth as a simulacrum of reality, constructed in imagination, though using, of course, materials derived from the writer’s past.  Using different language, Aristotle described the same contrast when he says poetry is more “true” than history. [4]  

     Artists have no particular grasp on truth other than their skill in putting together what looks to their fellows like a vision frozen in words, sometimes flamboyantly idiosyncratic, sometimes accepted by others who see in it their own humanity in a novel form.  We know nothing but our precious subjectivity and it is there that art makes its stage, there where all that matters most to our species is transacted, there where desire’s imperatives are acknowledged.  In that territory a claim to objective truth seems not so much fraudulent as irrelevant.     

     When Emily Dickinson wrote “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant,“ she implied the same superiority of artistic imaginative truth over mere observed facts.  The obliqueness of poetry arises from the techniques that have been found to be effective in infusing a wholly synthetic representation of experience with those subjective elements ordinarily absent from discourse and in this way lending life and a profounder sort of truth to a fantasy.  Like mythology and religion, art is truer than true, yet the artist crafts a creation without access to any knowledge beyond that possessed by others.  The strength of art lies in fact specifically in the fact that a mediated, obstructed, partially invisible truth is in its very deficiencies a human truth; certainty is unavailable to anyone.  The artist embraces this limitation and proceeds to make something beautiful, meaningful, and moving.  Because the artist is “whistling in the dark,” proceeding with no reassuring foundation of verities, that art is poignant and appealing and human and as true as anything can be on the surface of this dark earth.

 

 

1.  See Vergil, Eclogue 9.34 and Ovid Amores 3.9 and a great many other passages. 

2.  Ecclesiastical History IV, 24.  Bede alludes to Galatians 1:1 which notes in the Vulgate that Paul’s authority came “nōn ab hominibus neque per hominem, sed per Jesum Christum, et Deum Patrem.”

3.  Sidney’s emphasis was surely influenced by the fact that his essay was a response to Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse, containing a pleasant invective against Poets, Pipers, Plaiers, Jesters and such like Caterpillars of the Commonwealth (1579) which was provocatively addressed to him.

4.  Generally translated “more philosophical,” the word φιλοσοφώτερον is rendered “more scientific” in in Poetics 1451b by W.H. Fyfe.  Surely what Aristotle meant was simply “truer.”

The Hazardous Lives of the Sonneteers

  

This essay is an attempt to be more popular and journalistic than usual.  I shall be curious to see what readership the following piece attracts. I am contemplating a similar article on the scandals of the Romantic poets.

  

     Were an Elizabethan or Jacobean sonneteer to appear in a cartoon strip, he would probably be depicted as a mincing aesthete, a sort of Percy Dovetonsils in doublet and breeches, yet anyone with the sketchiest knowledge of history would know that poetry was associated with powerful men in those days.   The sonnet form in particular was associated with courtiers who were, of course, warriors as well, suffering the chances of combat, including becoming prisoners of war.  In addition a significant percentage of prominent poets in Elizabeth’s time were imprisoned at home by their own queen, always on the lookout for signs of opposition to her will, while others fell afoul of the ordinary criminal laws.  The life expectancy of members of the ruling class was limited by the fact that under an absolute monarchy in which the will of the ruler is law, a court will inevitably be filled with back-biting and tale-telling among ambitious aristocrats quite willing to sacrifice their rivals while seeking to advance their own prospects.

     The link between high nobility and the arts was emphasized in Castiglione’s The Courtier, published in English translation by Thomas Hoby in 1561, which emphasized that the best courtier, the noblest aristocrat, must cultivate excellence of all sorts, not only athletic and martial abilities, but aesthetic skills as well, including the practice of music, painting, and poetry.  Verbal skills, honed by literary study, Castiglione argues, allow the courtier to be at once more beautiful and more persuasive.    

     Since his own time, Sir Philip Sidney has been considered the embodiment of Castiglione’s ideal.  Strikingly handsome, valorous in war and accomplished in sports, quick and clever in conversation yet discerning in judgement, he was always the faithful servant of the queen.  The center of his career was his work as parliamentarian, soldier, ambassador, and counsellor to Elizabeth.  His masterful sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella was not published until five years after his death and then only because faulty pirated editions were already circulating. 

     Dead before his thirty-second birthday from a wound received at the Battle of Zutphen, his character inspired legends immediately.  He was said to have removed the thigh armor that could have prevented his mortal injury when he noticed that one of the men under his command had incomplete armor.  As he lay bleeding, water was brought which he was said to have declined, offering it to a comrade with the words "Thy necessity is yet greater than mine."

     Despite his conformity to his culture’s standards, even Sidney might have suffered an even earlier end due to his bold advocacy in a time of customs that seem today savage.  Though at the age of eighteen he was a member of the embassy sent to seek to arrange Elizabeth’s marriage to the Catholic Duke of Alençon, as a Protestant partisan he fervently opposed the union and quarreled with Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, to the point of challenging de Vere to a duel.  Fortunately for literary history the queen ordered that they not fight.  The young Sidney persisted in writing a letter detailing his strong opposition to the match, attracting her disapproval of his presumption and prompting his temporary absence at court. 

    The sonnet form had been introduced in England by Sir Thomas Wyatt with translations of Petrarch and original compositions.  Though his father had been incarcerated and tortured under Richard III, the elder Wyatt then became Privy Counsellor when Henry VII and after him Henry VIII succeeded.   By his late teens the son was already a prominent figure in court, taking a ceremonial role, for instance, as the champion of the Castle of Loyalty during the Christmas celebrations of 1526.  As a teenager he was named Esquire of the Body serving as a personal attendant and confidant of the king and a few years later acquired the remarkable title of Sewer Extraordinary. 

     Though popular, Wyatt was known as an impulsive, headstrong individual, and, from the testimony of his contemporaries as well as from his poetry, a passionate lover.  With a reputation as a ladies’ man, he surprised no one when he separated from his wife after three years and accused her of adultery while conceding as well his own infidelity. 

     He was meanwhile active as a negotiator, ambassador, and advisor to the throne.  On a mission to Italy in 1527 he insisted on parting with his company, saying he was “desirous to see the country” and was taken prisoner by forces controlled by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V who demanded a substantial ransom for his release.  A captive of unpredictable soldiers on the edge of mutiny, he was certainly in mortal danger, but he did go free.  It is unclear if the money was paid – some think he was repaying the debt for years --  or if perhaps he escaped, but he did manage to return to his own country unscathed.

    Before long however, he aroused Henry’s ire.  He had been a childhood friend of Anne Boleyn, and some whispered that he was paying particular her attention even when she was the queen consort.  The unfortunate Boleyn had given birth to Elizabeth but subsequently suffered three miscarriages, trying the king’s patience.  Henry turned his attentions to Jane Seymour and sought to remove Boleyn.  She was seized and placed in the Tower of London, accused of a series of ill-documented crimes including treason, and beheaded.

     Doubtless suspicious about the dashing courtier’s relationship with his wife, and likely thinking that he could at any rate get some useful information about her from Wyatt, Henry had the poet put into the Tower of London, accused of an affair with her.  From his cell, Wyatt probably witnessed Boleyn’s death and must have felt that his own survival was again in doubt. 

     Surely shaken by this experience, Wyatt stayed out of trouble for a time, but in a few years he was again arrested and himself charged with treason.  The poet’s charm may have saved his life, as the current queen consort Catherine Howard intervened on his behalf and obtained his release with the condition that he must reconcile with his wife.  It was not long before Howard in her turn was led to the executioner’s block.   After her death, it was whispered that the king had his eye on Wyatt’s wife, but, as it happened, Wyatt died of natural causes shortly thereafter.  (His sole legitimate son, Thomas Wyatt the Younger, was executed under Queen Mary.)

     Though Wyatt managed to avoid the headsman, the other poet credited with introducing sonnets to the English language (and the originator of the English or Shakespearean sonnet rhyme pattern) the contentious Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, did not.  The poet, well aware of the dangers of royal service as a first cousin of both Boleyn and Howard, was made Lieutenant General of the King on Sea and Land and fought in France.

    His pride and temper were as well-known as his gallantry under fire.  Though he (and his father as well) had taken the crown’s part in opposing the Lincolnshire rebels who had taken up arms against the dissolution of the monasteries, a fellow courtier suggested that he had been in fact sympathetic to their cause.  Offended, Surrey struck the man in the park at Hampton Court and was imprisoned for breaking the peace in the king’s domain. 

     After his release he was for a time absent from court but he returned to royal favor after a few years.  In 1543 he was accused by the Privy Council of a nighttime adventure in which he (in company with Wyatt and others) broke windows of London homes using a sort of crossbow that could hurl stones in what must have been a drunken revel, and a second charge – eating meat during Lent – was added.  Once again, his friends were able to secure his release.  In “A Satire on London” he makes the unlikely claim that his disorderly actions were meant to awaken the citizens to their sins. 

    The poet’s ego, however, led eventually to his downfall.  Though immensely proud of his descent from the Plantagenets, he and his family had long been loyal to Henry and the Tudors.  As the king aged, afflicted by health problems, he became increasingly suspicious that Surrey meant to usurp the throne from his son, the future Edward VI.  When Surrey’s sister, Mary FitzRoy, widow of Henry’s illegitimate son, was to be married to Jane’s brother Thomas Seymour with the blessings of her father and of the king, she and Surrey objected and the match was called off.  According to her statements, Surrey then tried to persuade her to seduce the king, suggesting that she might as a palace mistress "wield as much influence on him as Madame d'Etampes doth about the French King."  In response, she flatly declared that she “would sooner cut her own throat.”

     With the tensions over succession rising, in 1546 at Kenninghall Surrey chose to include on his quartered shield (quartering allowed more visible connections to highly placed lines of descent) the arms of Edward the Confessor.  In spite of the fact that the rules of heraldry allowed this usage and that Surrey had collared the leopards in the royal arms and placed them in the secondary quarter of his shield, he was arrested on the excuse that he had symbolically indicated his own ambitions on the throne.  Once he was prisoner, he was questioned not about his arms but only about his attempted use of his sister as an informer, his supposed plans to depose Henry, claims of his heterodoxy, and his preparations to leave the country.  He mounted a full defense of his innocence, yet was executed.  His father would have been beheaded as well had Henry VII not died whereupon the Privy Council removed the death penalty but seized his lands and kept him locked up for years.  

     Another of the group known as the “silver poets” for their eloquence was Sir Walter Ralegh, whose name is known in this hemisphere for his role in early colonization.  He campaigned in France for the Huguenots, and for his service in suppressing the Irish received considerable estates there, but he had little success in inducing English tenants to emigrate.  He turned his attention to the New World, sponsoring the failed settlement that became known as the Lost Colony of Roanoke.   Dubious about his ability to fund settlements that, beyond being self-supporting, could make him rich, he set out to find El Dorado in South America but there too had little success. 

    A few years before his South American venture, he had impregnated and secretly married one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting.  When their relationship was discovered, he and his wife were sent to the Tower.  He was temporarily released to oversee the spoils of a ship captured from Spain, but then returned to the Tower, only to be again set free and assume a seat in Parliament.  His influence rose once more, though he was accused (and acquitted) of atheistic views.  He fought to capture Cadiz, to repel the Armada, and became governor of the Isle of Jersey.

     Yet, with the demise of Queen Elizabeth, his loyalty to James was suspected, and he was arrested for involvement in the “Main Plot” to replace James with Lady Arbella Stuart.  The evidence was slight, and Ralegh claimed he could exonerate himself if he were allowed to question his friend the Baron Cobham, the main witness against him, but this was not allowed and he was incarcerated for thirteen years during which he worked on his Historie of the World.  Even in this scholarly enterprise he attracted the doubts of the king who found the book "too sawcie in censuring Princes."

     He was freed in 1617 after thirteen years confinement to lead another expedition to South America during which men commanded by his friend Lawrence Kemys attacked the Spanish outpost of Santo Tomé de Guayana in violation of the Anglo-Spanish treaty and Ralegh’s instructions.  In this conflict his son Walter was killed and Ralegh was arrested when he returned, having spurned chances to flee into exile.  The Spanish demanded his execution, and he was beheaded.  (His subordinate Kemys committed suicide.)

     A sonneteer might encounter all manner of other calamities.  Virtually every biography includes episodes of violence of harsh legal judgements.  The account of all these tumultuous events would be voluminous.  Some are entertaining enough to seem as though written for the stage.  Attorney and Parliamentarian as well as sonneteer, John Davies was disbarred for attacking a colleague with a cudgel upon which he promptly repaired to Oxford for the next year where he devoted himself to literature.  He was later made attorney-general of Ireland.  In 1613 he was the king’s candidate for speaker of the Irish Parliament but was opposed by the Catholic members who instead proposed Sir John Everard.  The dispute led to an absurd scene in which Everard seized the speaker’s chair, refusing to vacate it until Davies’ supporters carried the stout poet and placed him on Everard’s lap.  Edmund Spenser, who wrote the Petrarchan Amoretti, was also an Irish landlord whose castle in North Cork was taken and burned by rebels after which the writer died in London “for want of bread,” according to Ben Jonson (though this statement is surely inaccurate).  Politics also made Henry Constable a convict, largely over his urging of toleration of Catholics.  The prolific Samuel Daniel was praised for his sequence of love sonnets Delia but called before the Privy Council for supposedly seditious implications of his play The Tragedy of Philotas.

     Several were at least suspected of common crimes including murder.  Barnabe Barnes, who wrote a sequence called Parthenophil and Parthenophe (Virgin-lover and Virgin-voiced), engaged in ferocious pamphleteering polemics and was tried for attempting to poison a man, though he escaped custody and was never recaptured, doubtless due to the influence of powerful friends.  The prolific George Gascoigne who came between Wyatt and Surrey, was a noble soldier when taken prisoner during the Siege of Leiden, but a common criminal as well, arrested more than once for debts and apparently also for attempted murder.  He had served in Parliament, but in a re-election bid was disqualified as a man not only “noted for manslaughter" but also "a common Rymer.”  A poet might also be a crime victim.  Fulke Greville, a protégé of Sidney, was stabbed by a servant.  His learned physicians filled the wound with pig fat and he died a lingering death.  A number of writers, including William Percy, the writer of Sonnets to Coelia, and the middle-class Henry Lok who wrote religious sonnets were imprisoned simply for debt.

     A few years later after the tumultuous careers of these poets Hobbes was to describe human life in general as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” characterized by “continual fear, and danger of violent death.”  While everyone half a millennium ago suffered equally from the lack of effective medical knowledge and the draconian, often arbitrary, legal system, and the poor contended with a constant fear of malnutrition, belonging to the power elite was no guarantee of longevity.  Those at the top faced the perils of war, but combat was hardly a greater threat to them than their own monarch’s disfavor.  Perhaps the beauties of their poetry, and the sonnet during this period became one of the most subtle and expressive forms in all of literature, far from conflicting with a hazardous life, proved the best response to uncertainty and danger.  Many of us who are far from courtiers in the great chain  of being have found that, for us as well as them, love and art can make an otherwise intolerable life worth living.

Planetary Motions

This post is a draft of the introductory essay to Planetary Motions, a collection of new poems whose publication (from Giant Steps) is scheduled for June.



The planets were so-called because the name signified in Greek “wanderers,” and Mars and Venus, unlike the fixed stars, seemed to ramble about aimless in the heavens. From a later heliocentric perspective, however, the movements of these heavenly bodies appear elegant and predictable. I can conceive a day that scientists might announce that Venus and the rest were vagabonding after all and the regularities the astronomers had reported were simply mirror images reflecting their own minds in their more rational, if operatically grand, moments.

My own course pretends to little design. The chaos theorists have shown, however, that systems lurk even in what is apparently arbitrary, and, of course, all patterns break up when viewed from a different angle or a slightly altered consciousness. How do I happen to dwell in this town? I simply find myself here. Why do I believe as I do? Because of everything that has come before. Course of study, course of life make little difference in the great tidal movements of mind which are likely in the end to resemble the slow unfolding of a tree’s shape over decades, the distribution of stars in the sky, or the histories of slugs and snails told in silvery mucus.

The boldest claim I would make for the driftings of the consciousness I know best is similar to that made by Marcus Aurelius for what he saw before him on the table: “some splits appear in the crust of baking bread, and these have nothing to do with the baker’s plan, yet these have always a certain rightness.” A rightness like that of the shore-marks of the sea’s waves, or the undulations wrought in the Sahara’s sands by wind, or the swirls and stripes on my tabby’s back.

These things, though, are untouched by intention, so a work of art represents always its object, not only transformed by the conventions of human senses and brains, but then further shaped by desire, fear, and vision. Poetic events, like those observed on the quantum level, come into existence only when observed.

Everything is a matter of aesthetics in the end. Ethics requires defining what sort of a person one would find it becoming to be. Viciousness is quite simply ugly. My ideologies resemble my home’s interior decoration though the former are more easily portable. Each person constructs a nest of what seems right and judges others for their taste rather than their ratiocination, and this procedure is quite in order for we know what we like and must settle for that as a human sort of Truth. Poems and other forms of art are naked about this. As Sidney said, the “Poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.” A few hundred years later, Keats called a similar willingness to suspend “any irritable reaching after fact and reason” Negative Capability. A millennium and a half earlier another writer with medical training, Sextus Empiricus, had recommended ἐποχή, withholding judgement on all issues, as the likeliest path to serenity.

Lacking a destination might seem to some to entail lacking a purpose, yet, though miles behind, I would like to think that I follow the footsteps of Fa Yen who, when he declared that he was on a pilgrimage without a destination, wandering without goal, was assured by master Kuei Ch'in that such undirected movement was exactly right whereupon Fa Yen attained enlightenment. I can promise no such reward, only a few snapshots of consciousness reflecting glints of shattered truth which I wave in the dark like a blessedly naïve child with a sparkler the bright lights of which provide a sort of promise in spite of their evanescence. Looking then down, a crystal ball is surely available in the reflections and refractions of every puddle in the gutter!






This story I paraphrase is case 20 of the Cóngróng lù, or Book of Equanimity by Wansong Xingxiu, in Japanese called the Shōyōroku.

Poetry Amid the Fierce Chaos of the World

     In an essay titled “Will the Humanities Save Us?” (available on the New York Times website) Stanley Fish asks himself “of what use are the humanities?” and concludes “the only honest answer is none whatsoever.” [1] Now Fish, who attained academic superstardom by being entertaining and provocative, would not be appearing in a general publication like the New York Times were he not willing to become all the more entertaining and provocative. His motives and authentic opinions are, however, irrelevant to the value of his challenge to the profession of letters either as poet or critic.
     Poets, even more than professors, are sufficiently embattled in twenty-first century America that they rarely feel the need to justify their pursuits, even to themselves. Further, the elevated spirits of artists, encouraged by two centuries of contempt for bourgeois philistines, have led to grandiose if largely unreasoned and unsupported claims. It is salutary now and then to glance at the foundation on which one stands. The question “Why read poetry?” is a serious one.
     For some pleasure is sufficient motive, but most readers have believed that poetry delivers a kind of truth as well. But what truth? How does it relate to the scientist’s truth? the priest’s truth? the truth of everyday life?


1. poetry as the fount of knowledge

     To the ancients, there was general consensus about the supreme value of poetry. [2] In his Poetics, Aristotle makes the celebrated claim that “poetry [indeed, the argument applies to art in general] is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history [meaning facts],” as “poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.” [3] Usually taken to mean that poets possess a higher, even “vatic,” vision, giving them privileged access to Truth, and thus the ability to prescribe dogma, values, and ethics, this view has been popular throughout history. How could poets “teach and delight” in the Horatian formula used also by Sir Philip Sidney [4] and by vulgar Marxists among a host of others, had they not greater knowledge than their readers?
     This tradition has been dominant for millennia. For instance, in the 16th century, Sidney argued that poetry leads to virtue. In the Romantic era, Percy Shelley, though widely considered a libertine and revolutionary, insisted that poets are the source not only of moral and civil laws but also of science.
     Could centuries of reliance on poetry to educate youth, in both character and cognitive skills, be wholly mistaken? Not only did the ancients trust that Homer was sufficient as a professor of theology; he also offered courses in ethics, etiquette, history, geography, seamanship, war and virtually every other topic of interest to his audience. For millennia in China the Confucian classics formed the heart of all academic study, while in India the Ramayana and the Mahabharata were thought to contain everything worth knowing. Parallels exist around the world: both illiterate and literate peoples considered poetry to be an epitome of knowledge.
     Both Sidney and Shelley cited what they knew of the historical and anthropological data in their defenses. According to Sidney all learning was originally couched in verse so poets are “Fathers in learning” possessing “hart-ravishing knowledge”. “Since, then, poetry is of all human learnings the most ancient and of most fatherly antiquity, as from whence other learnings have taken their beginnings; since it is so universal that no learned nation doth despise it, nor barbarous nation is without it.” All the fruits of culture: science, philosophy, morality, and civic virtue, are derived from poetry. Poetry is, in Sidney’s words, “directed to the highest end of the mistress knowledge . . . in the ethic and politic consideration, with the end of well-doing, and not of well-knowing only:” The poet will “imitate both to delight & teach, and delight to move men to take that goodnesse in hand.” Poetry’s raison d'etre is defined in moral/spiritual terms: “the finall end is, to lead and draw us to as high a perfection, as our degenerate soules made worse by their clay-lodgings, can be capable of.”
     Shelley likewise finds poetry’s origins no later than the origins of humankind. “In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful.” To him poetry is the source of the arts, of law and civil society, and even of the category that Sidney dared not fully include: religion. After all, Shelley says, “all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory.” Poetry is “at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all.”
     The idea that poetry produces knowledge is to such an extent normative that I will offer only a single further example: Keats, not generally regarded the most intellectual of poets, defines his goal in poetry as knowledge: “I mean to follow Solomon's directions of 'get Wisdom -- get understanding.’” [5]
     The use of poetry for all forms of knowledge in antiquity and in oral cultures could be purely mnemonic, of course, and the claim for poets as inculcators of morality is considerably more dubious. Centuries of moralistic edicts against singers and actors, and ever-popular anecdotes of poets with lives less tidy than the average would imply the opposite.
     Devotees of poetry in higher education have struck Fish as no more moral or more sagacious than other mortals; rather he asserts that their only special skill is in the understanding of texts. To demonstrate, he permits himself a well-turned explication of a line by George Herbert, only to note the utter uselessness of his acumen. “The satisfaction [from the interpretation of poetry] is partly self-satisfaction,” he says, “ – it is like solving a puzzle – but the greater satisfaction is the opportunity to marvel at what a few people are able to do with the language we all use.” For Fish, then, a taste for poetry resembles fondness for crosswords or appreciation of Olympic runners, having nothing to do with either wisdom or ethics.


2. poetry against reason

     The fact is that poetry betrays a deep internal vein of contradiction concerning its truth value, a dialectic absent from history or science or business records. Fish’s challenge has been inscribed in poetry’s written records as long as they have existed. Every imaginative work, after all, is a work of fiction and therefore, in a sense, a lie. Every lyric might be prefaced by the words, “Once upon a time a person might have said . . .” Though poets’ experience is linked to their writing, the idea of simple mimesis or reflection is inadequate to represent the relation between life and art. Even in letters, histories, and memoirs the author edits and selects and mythologizes and fabulates. Black marks on a white page can have only a highly-codified symbolic relationship to trees and stars and flesh.
     Poets themselves have often disparaged truth and reason. Thus Hesiod said the muses told him they could lie, and they could also speak the truth. Sidney provides the inverse formula, saying "the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth." For Shelley poetry is allied with “imagination” in a polar opposition to reason. He observes that poetry and religion alike are “allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true.” The witty and illusionless Earl of Rochester ridicules reason [6] after identifying himself as “One of those strange, prodigious creatures, man,” and goes on:

Reason, an ignis fatuus in the mind,
Which, leaving light of nature, sense, behind,
Pathless and dangerous wandering ways it takes
Through nature’s fenny bogs and thorny brakes,
Whilst the misguided follower climbs with pain

Poetry has often been associated with magic or madness; when it does produce “truth”, that truth, though sublime and lofty, is often said to be ineffable or unreachable by reason. [7]


3. what is knowledge?

     To determine the truth value of poetry it would be useful to be able to discern truth values in general. Every reader of Descartes knows that he sounds much more convincing when casting doubt than he does when striving to reconstruct the natural and supernatural worlds with which his readers were familiar. From Zhuangzi and Nagarjuna to Hume and Bishop Berkeley, many have questioned the certainty of even the most widespread convictions, and, more recently, post-structuralist thought has made a reflex of deflating received ideas.
     Gorgias the sophist, one of the greatest masters of words in classical Athens, was a thorough skeptic. He maintained [8] that nothing exists; second, that should anything exist, it could not be known by human perception; and third, that were anything known to one person, it could not be communicated to another. Yet, to this same Gorgias, the word is “a great thing,” divine, universal, the source of love for humankind, “potent like a drug.” Those “deceived” by poetry are nobler and wiser than the “undeceived.” [9] Those who heard him were moved as by “magic incantations.”
     Though such self-doubt might seem to lead to a dead end, both intellectually and pragmatically, later skeptics in the Pyrrhonian tradition developed this questioning of one’s own subjectivity into the concept of εποχη, or suspension [of certainty or belief]. This need not lead to inaction (indeed the very word skeptic means an active questioning, considering, “looking at” in the mind), but rather to a provisional truth based on experience, [10] fully cognizant of the limitations of the human sense apparatus and of reason, persuasive for the present, but ready to yield whenever a more likely answer rustles in the underbrush. This practical strategy resembles the method not only of meditation, but also of science, of much Buddhist thought, and, I think, of poetry.
     While from later antiquity until the Renaissance, the Christian thought police limited the philosophers’ options, making true skepticism unavailable for over a thousand years, in Asia certain Buddhist thinkers (following an early Hindu tradition) insisted on questioning the reality of observed phenomena and at the same time of the perceiving subject. Nagarjuna’s “middle way,” rejecting both a conviction of the reality of everyday experience and likewise their dogmatic rejection [11] provides a theoretical parallel to Sakyamuni’s rejection of asceticism and sensuality in behavior. A tangled forest of speculative commentary rose with roots in the Heart Sutra’s insistence "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form." According to this view, which has been compared with the discoveries of quantum physics, [12] what we ordinarily take to be reality is neither real (substantial) nor unreal (empty). Without considering the exact formulations which reached super-subtle detail in the lively debates of Buddhist scholars (not to mention the physicists), a broad consensus developed among Mahayana philosophers that agreed that, though reality can be neither affirmed nor denied, the thinker finds in this conclusion no cul-de-sac but rather the initial step marking a route toward enlightenment.
     As an example, Tung Shan questioned the Heart Sutra which states, “There is no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, or mind.” He suddenly felt his face and asked the teacher, "I have eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and so forth; why does the sutra say there are none?" and thereupon set out on his advanced studies. His own teaching practice was based neither in intricate logical structures nor in meditation and sutra-chanting. Tung Shan, very like a poet, would confront the mind with an image which, for the receptive consciousness, could precipitate enlightenment.
     The process remained free of both supernaturalism and positivism. In an anecdote asserting the uses of the useless, “Ti ts’ang Kuei-ch’in asked, ‘What is the purpose of your wandering?’ and Fa-yen said, ‘I don't know.’ (This stupor, this stupidity is utterly fruitful.)” [13] Specifically the lack of knowledge, the “stupidity,” becomes an aid to bring one closer to the liberating truth.


4. the poets’ truth

     Poetry is a similar kind of mental “wandering.” In fact specific descriptive data can have no meaning without their refraction through “the mind’s own light” of human consciousness. I once saw a stack of printouts that recorded collisions of subatomic particles. They looked like CIA messages: pages and pages of numbers in groups of ten. Yet this form of representing reality is no more stylized than our retina’s recording of the full moon. The numbers mean something to the physicist who knows the code, and the moon means something to me because of a lifetime of acquired information about its luminous disk. Chinese poems that seem to record reality directly are in fact heavily intertextual. All meaning is learned, socially-constructed meaning. The miniature solar system atomic structure we see in books is a metaphor, a useful one, no doubt, but thoroughly allegorical in that word’s original sense of saying something in place of something else. Poetry constructs new territories of meaning and fertilizes the fields of long-established significance.
     As long as Ultimate Reality cannot be put into words, all language is metaphorical. In a fascinating passage, Sydney says that, if a man is to be praised as wise, he might be called a “Cyrus.” This is thought to refer to a figure that once lived, but as Sydney says, we know the “real” Cyrus only from other texts. Even if one were to have been acquainted with the king from the sixth century BCE, one would gather from him no more than from the texts influenced by his existence, certain symbolic, perhaps misleading clues, a whiff in the air, what might be truth’s tail disappearing around a distant corner.
     The “lie,” then, would arise from the literal-mindedness of those who take appearances for reality and miss the point by seeking to eliminate the humanity of consciousness, our proclivity for pleasure, our irrationality, our absorption in sense impressions, our affect, our tolerance for ambiguity, contradiction, and paradox, our obsession with certain mysteries (which may in shorthand be labeled god, sex, death, etc.). The fact is that, as “objectivity” is impossible (and is, in fact, simply another pose), to accommodate such “distortions” affords art a more precise register, encoding more accurate data, not less. For a poet like Sidney “moving [the emotions] is of a higher degree than teaching.” He records the algorithms of mind as concrete exhibits based inevitably on his own consciousness, which may then elicit a sympathetic response from the consumer.
     Shelley noted the uncertainty principle arising from the interdependence of subject and object: “All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient.” Art recognizes the true nature of the human consciousness by privileging those elements (catalogued above) that dominate our own minds. In Shelley’s words, poetry “reproduces [or recreates] all that it represents.” This approach toward the “lamp” as opposed to the “mirror” (in Abrams’ terms) requires conditioning thought to make it human, “mind acting upon those thoughts so as to color them with its own light.”
     Donne’s “Busy old fool, unruly sun,” may reflect the experience of a particular morning, waking with a lover, or it may be wholly “fictional.” Historicity is not an issue, just as the historicity of Troy or Jesus or Madame Bovary is irrelevant. These texts are “truer than true;” universality arises not because they express some dogma, but because the mood of a Briton four hundred years ago is a mood I own as well as do all readers with sufficient imagination. The reader’s response to the poem is based on the joy of its rhythms, the clash of its phonemes, the passions shared by author and reader for both an intellectual dance and sexual desire. By saying he could extinguish the sun with a blink and insisting “nothing else is” except for his love-bed, the poet asserts the primacy of subjectivity.
     In this way poetry does not deign to attempt dogma or, as they say in the classroom, “great truth.” Art is always tentative, provisional, exemplary, a matter of impressions and expressions: saying “the world could have looked this way at one time to a person whom I can imagine.” This vision, though, may be precise and significant, detailed and beautiful, the nearest human approach to truth, and its revelatory details are available only to the observer with a straight and penetrating gaze. If you wish to learn what’s most important about death, love, and god, will you consult biologists, psychologists, and theologians? The poet’s truth delivers more data but brings beauty as well, which, like grace, hovers, shedding a numinous glow over people and people alone.
     This is precisely what Keats had in mind when he wrote the famous letter defining Negative Capability, “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” [14] And Shelley, though hostile to Christianity, praises its symbolic restructuring of the world as a creative triumph. Claiming that the Christian trinity is a second-hand appropriation of Plato, he is nonetheless enthusiastic: “But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and blood of this fierce chaos! how the world, as from a resurrection, balancing itself on the golden wings of Knowledge and of Hope, has reassumed its yet unwearied flight into the heaven of time. Listen to the music, unheard by outward ears, which is as a ceaseless and invisible wind, nourishing its everlasting course with strength and swiftness.” The resurrection here is not the mere physical magic-act of the fundamentalist imagination, but a redemptive work in words, a work the effects of which are altogether real, though stimulated by a fiction. Both the “fierceness” of life, the “iron gates” of which Marvell wrote, and the “chaos,” its frightening unintelligibility, are inevitable. Unable to alter the conditions of existence, the mind may yet influence itself by images and stories and outbursts of song.


6. conclusion

     To many thoughtful people nineteenth century advances in Higher Criticism, comparative religion, and anthropology have made the claims of revealed religion obsolete. In general, logic as social consensus gets us through the day: the most widely supported ideas are called self-evident, while those with more complex underpinnings are considered rational. Any dissenter is simply exiled from the discourse as stupid or prejudiced or mad or wrong, though a diachronic view will show that heretical views sometimes displaced the accepted. Furthermore, philosophy is obliged to rely on words, and those slippery things are never quite up to the task.
     No consensus can be sufficient to answer the skeptic’s questioning the only human means of perception, cognition, and expression. Archimedes was famous for having said, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.” We have no psychic equivalent of a place to stand outside the human consciousness. Readily conceding this impossibility, poetry has found a way to concede the vulnerability and even to make it a virtue.
     Though I have relied on Sidney and Shelley most of all, similar ideas persist in George Santayana, Wallace Stevens, Charles Olson, Frank O’Hara and many of the leading poet/theorists of the twentieth century. [15] Socrates and Nietzsche practiced poetic philosophy in their skeptical searching, their pursuit of an answer that may never appear, their letting go of the pretense of certainty and with it dogma. They recognized the strength of the mysterious, the irrational, the sensual, and the aesthetic (the unacknowledged sources of most of our actions, reinforced though they may be with rationalization).
     It is as if Orpheus, instead of singing to trees and touring the underworld of the subconscious, adopted the guise (one of the thousands available to that old confidence man) of a film noir detective tailing Ultimate Reality through a district of poorly lit warehouses, each dark and misty street of experience leading to others, never quite making the collar, but never on that account ceasing the restless ardent pursuit. That he is sometimes plugged or drugged or blackjacked and is often dead wrong shows only that he is human, all-too-human, and for this reason the viewer or reader or listener can accompany him and redeem the “fierce chaos” of the world with words.



1. John Carey’s What Good Are the Arts? generated a similar discussion in Britain. Carey, like Fish, trivializes art to a mere pastime. Unlike Fish, though, in the end Carey reserves some value for verbal art, asserting that words do have the capacity to represent reality and to represent moral concepts essential to humanity. Fish goes no further than grudgingly to grant art some mysterious “intrinsic” value without qualities.

2. In Plato, of course, the question is more conflicted, specifically because of the affective and irrational power of poetry. Though in many passages Plato affirms poetry’s divine power, his Republic can function more smoothly without its potentially subversive influence.

3. This translation is Samuel Butcher’s.

4. Through this essay, I refer primarily to Sir Philip Sidney’s “An Apologie for Poetrie” (also called “A Defence of Poesie and Poems”) and Percy Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry” as they are two of the most significant theoretical essays written by major poets.

5. Keats’ April 24, 1818, letter to John Taylor.

6. From John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, “A Satyr against Reason and Mankind.”

7. This widely distributed association was especially popular during the Romantic era. For details on the concept of the Romantic furor poeticus, see Frederick Burwick. Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Burwick treats both representations of madness and the reception of writers considered mad.

8. In a book with a title that sounds nearly Buddhist, Concerning Nature, or What is Not.

9. These terms are from the Helen and the Paladon. I discuss Gorgias further in my article "Gorgias of Leontini," Ancient Greek Authors. Ed. by Ward W. Briggs, Jr. , Dictionary of Literary Biography series no. 176. Brucolli Clark Layman.

10. Sextus Empiricus, who wrote an authoritative and compendious exposition of Pyrrhonian skepticism, was called “empiricus” both because of his reliance on experience and experiment in his medical practice, and his approach to philosophic questions.

11. In the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā.

12. See Christian Thomas Kohl, “Buddhism and Quantum Physics: A strange parallel of two concepts of reality.” Available at http://www.newdualism.org/papers/C.Kohl/Buddhism-QP-Parallel.htm.

13. Shoyoroku, Case 20, translated by Robert Aitken Roshi and Yamada Koun Roshi, unpublished manuscript, Diamond Sangha. Ti ts’ang Kuei-ch’in (Dizang Guichen), (Jizo-in Shino), 869-928.

14. Letter to George and Thomas Keats dated December 21, 1817.

15. Charles Olson. “Equal, That Is, to the Real Itself” from The Poetics of the New American Poetry (175-181) Olson invokes Keats’ Negative Capability, declaring that mere facts end in Supermarket triviality: “the exact death quantity does offer.” On the other hand, he quotes Melville: “By visible truth we mean the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things.” This implies that observed reality is the only entry-point through which one can glimpse truth. Olson notes that his goal as a writer has been “trying to get a measure of language to move himself into a book [that is, his unique “take” on things] and over to another man’s [subjective] experience.” To Olson 20th century physics confirms his consciousness-centered epistemology as “man, knowing how well he was folded in,” is implicated in all reality: “Nothing was now inert fact, all things were there for feeling, to promote it, and be felt.” For him “things, and present ones, are the absolute conditions; but that they are so because the structures of the real are flexible, quanta do dissolve into vibrations, all does flow, and yet all is there to be made permanent, if the means are equal.” Wallace Stevens continues to mystify readers with his successful business career. (The type may seem rare, but not unique. For example, R. Gordon Wasson, whose fascinating and scholarly work was a product by his enthusiasm for psychedelic substances, was a vice-president of J. P. Morgan. Two varieties of psilocybin mushrooms are named after him.) Hartford Accident and Indemnity’s corporate vice-president wholeheartedly endorsed Rimbaud’s call for the “dereglement de tous les sens” and declared flatly that “life is mysterious.” “By the aid of the irrational [the poet, according to Stevens] finds joy in the irrational.” He defines his goal in writing as “to apply my own sensibility to something perfectly matter-of-fact. The result would be a disclosure of my own sensibility or individuality” “Manner . . .means the attitude of the writer, his bearing rather than his point of view. His bearing toward what? Not toward anything in particular, simply his pose.”
In a more offhand way, Frank O’Hara’s “personalism” expresses similar values. “ Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.”
Compare also, Santayana’s comments, on the one hand: “Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.” [The Sense of Beauty, Pt. IV, Expression] Yet at the same time and from the same text: "To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be. The poets and philosophers who express this aesthetic experience and stimulate the same function in us by their example, do a greater service to mankind and deserve higher honor than the discoveries of historical truths."