What Poetry Is Not

 

Poetry is not instructive.

     Poetry does not teach people wisdom; it offers no pointers toward enlightenment, no aid to being more moral or guidance on how to vote.  Artists have no privileged access to truth.  The apparent insights the reader may gain from a story or poem are generated by recognition of another take on reality, another vision, not necessarily sager but different from one’s own and thus broadening.  A poet need not be wise; his professional skill is limited to the manipulation of words and symbols made of words.  The historic claim that art teaches truths arose from its central role since archaic times in conveying received ideas like those implied by myth, ritual, and religion, and affirming people’s beliefs about politics and behavior in general.  In its inverted modern version, art’s critical role comes to the fore, exposing contradictions and opening the way for change.  Art’s reputation for teaching its audience one way or another has been heightened by a moralistic suspicion of the pursuit of pleasure in the contemplation of beauty for its own sake.

 

Poetry is not sincere.

     Poetry is always in the voice of a persona, always an artifice.  The pose of speaking directly from the heart is rhetorical as are other fictions.  Every lyric is not the author’s cri de coeur but rather a hypothetical statement of what some speaker might one day have said.  This does not contradict the fact that, coincidentally, the statement on the page may correspond closely to the conscious sentiment of its writer, but this is accidental and unrelated to the value of what is said.  In fact, creativity is more foregrounded in the depiction of attitudes that are not the author’s own, just as one is obliged as a reader to exercise greater imagination in identifying with fictional characters with views unlike one’s own.  Sincerity, while doubtless valuable in personal relationships, has no place in art.

 

Poetry is not therapeutic.

     The aim of a poem qua poem is not to work through personal experiences, neither to overcome grief nor, for that matter, to celebrate a joyful event.  The author’s state of mind, whether it be disturbed or serene has no relation to the success of the work of art.  Likewise, the reader’s feeling better or worse after reading has no aesthetic value.  When someone says a poem is inspired by a bout with disease or by a newly adopted child, the reader must be wary, though such an origin has, in fact, neither positive nor negative implications for the value of the work.  Any therapeutic (or other utilitarian) use for either a producer or consumer of art is entirely incidental.  Art is the playful manipulation of symbols; it is not designed to solve the problems of either creators or consumers. 

 

Poetry is not (in general) obscure.

     The qualification in this statement arises from the fact that, whereas in other discourses lucidity is the highest value, poetry is often more complex.  Some verse has always depended on subcultural knowledge, whether academic and courtly or based in folkways, rural or urban.  The pleasure of some literary work, too, derives, like that of riddles and puzzles, from the need for energetic decoding.  Still, most poetry is intelligible for any attentive reader.  With poetry’s exile from the center of the majority of  people’s artistic experience after the turn of the twentieth century, certain poets, such as Hart Crane and Gertrude Stein, indeed reacted by reveling in the density of their texts, but in earlier times no one complained that poetry was difficult to understand.  Nonetheless, since a significant amount of human experience is mysterious, contradictory, ambiguous, or irrational, these characteristics are replicated in many poems.  If a sentiment is reducible to a simple paraphrase, after all, there is no excuse for casting it in artistic form.  In art “meaning” is overappreciated in any event; in only a minority of cases does “meaning” provide the primary value of a work.

 

Poetry is not a specialized taste. 

     Every culture on earth, including those which have no written language, has poetry, often in genres similar of those of technologically advanced societies.  Homer, Sophocles, and Shakespeare were consumed by everyone.  Popular genres such as folksong and broadsheet verses among the uneducated and parlor poetry for the middle classes flourished until very recently.  All young children relish nursery rhymes and virtually all adults are moved by popular songs.    Poetry appears today still in advertising jingles and the word-play of graffiti, sound bites, jokes, and bumper stickers.  Dexterity in the manipulation of symbolic materials is the distinguishing characteristic of the human species.  It is only natural that we should all enjoy practicing this skill.

The Radical Aesthete: Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man Under Socialism

 

     Though only ten years have passed, some will recall already with nostalgia the iconic poster for Occupy Wall Street depicting a poised dancer, a leg raised in an arabesque atop Arturo Di Modica’s charging bull in bronze representing the fierce voracity of the capitalist class. [1]  The charm of the image arose from its play with structural oppositions: female/male, beauty/power, aesthetic/mercenary, in form sinuous/blocky, in attitude poised and elegant/aggressive and angry.  Such a dramatic contrast between art and money finds acceptance both among philistines to whom only wealth-seeking is a worthy activity and intellectuals and artists uninterested, even scornful, of economic activity.  For the former the arts at best are an optional taste and for the latter business could occupy only mediocre minds.  Friction between these attitudes periodically emerges, for instance, in the twentieth-century tensions between the Surrealists and the Communists in Europe or the Yippies and, say, Progressive Labor activists in the U. S.  

     One could scarcely imagine a more passionate advocate for the aesthetic than Oscar Wilde.  His flaunted hedonism and transgressive wit as well as his own class background and his place in society might suggest that he would be likely to be a defender of aristocratic privilege, but Wilde manages to turn this expectation, like so many others, on its head.  His “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” [2] succeeds as a novel and effective polemic for economic revolution without abandoning the characteristic epigrams and ironies familiar from his plays.  Moreover, he was able to construct a coherent argument for socialism while maintaining his provocative aestheticism. [3]  In a quite Wildean inversion, in his most important points he is on the mark when out of his field in politics, while his notions about art which he had made central to his value system, are neither reliable nor consistent.  

    He makes the essential point with appropriate broadness.  As capitalism is the source of poverty and other social ills, it must be overturned to make a real change. Wilde aims to “reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.” The first principle of the new society must be socialized ownership of the means of production.  “Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure the material well-being of each member of the community.”  This alone is crucial; all else may be settled by democratic means. 

     His motive is to beautify his country, but this requires an alteration in the economic system.  The state of the urban slums in Wilde’s time was horrific.  Reader of not only Marx but also Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell will know the desperate straits in which many ordinary people found themselves.  Even for those with employment, workers are “compelled to do the work of beasts of burden, to do work that is quite uncongenial to them, and to which they are forced by the peremptory, unreasonable, degrading Tyranny of want.”  The result of these savage conditions is a poverty-stricken class possessing “no grace of manner, or charm of speech, or civilisation, or culture, or refinement in pleasures, or joy of life.”  One can not avoid seeing such wretches, “tramping about the streets in a state of disgusting misery, or whining to their neighbours for alms, or crowding round the doors of loathsome shelters to try and secure a hunch of bread and a night’s unclean lodging.”  To him it is nearly incredible that “a man whose life is marred and made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance.”  If they do, it is surely because “misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering.”

     The affluent, on the other hand, due to their leisure, are “the real men, the men who have realised themselves, and in whom all Humanity gains a partial realisation.”  Yet at the same time, the system is profoundly unsatisfying even to the ruling class.  “The possession of private property is very often extremely demoralizing.”  Among its deleterious effects is to make the rich man tiresome.  “Property not merely has duties, but has so many duties that its possession to any large extent is a bore.”  For Wilde’s posing persona, nothing could be worse.  Yet, like most of the essay, it is not in the end a joke, for who could really be interested in enriching the boss, or in the financial concerns of another at all?  Display of wealth or designs on wealth are virtually always in poor taste.   Apart from requiring the exploitation of others the pursuit of money is ultimately disappointing even when successful, as it is based on a fundamental error.  “It has made gain not growth its aim.  So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be.”

    Though quite willing to sound like a genteel snob, Wilde’s motive is in fact that of all reformers whether they consider themselves aesthetes or not, a distaste for the sheer ugliness of capitalism which is, after all, centered in a repellant selfishness.  Yet at the same time he realizes that the game is in earnest and recognizes that such progress as the end of feudalism has come only through armed struggle, going so far as to say in his consistently aesthetic rhetoric, that “The very violence of a revolution may make the public grand and splendid for a moment.”  All force is not equivalent: “To the thinker, the most tragic fact in the whole of the French Revolution is not that Marie Antoinette was killed for being a queen, but that the starved peasant of the Vendée voluntarily went out to die for the hideous cause of feudalism.”  Apart from the suggestion that revolution is likely to arrive only through armed struggle (in contrast the programmatically gradualist Fabians [4]), though, Wilde says nothing about how the change in economic system is to arrive.   

     He quite properly attacks even the most well-meaning charity for prolonging rather than ending the system that produced the suffering the philanthropist seeks to ameliorate.  To him such efforts are “ridiculously inadequate” if not “impertinent.”  Reformers who call for anything less than social ownership of the means of production are displaying self-righteous vanity.  “It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.”  In the ringing tones of the soapbox, Wilde asks, “Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table?  They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it.”  For Wilde what is ugly is therefore “immoral” and the Victorian slums offered plenty of nastiness, both aesthetic and ethical.

     If Wilde’s militance is explicit, so is his libertarianism.  He states categorically that “No Authoritarian Socialism will do.”  He adds “Authority and compulsion are out of the question.  All association must be quite voluntary.  It is only in voluntary associations that man is fine.”  (The reader notices the similarity of the use here of “fine,” with the earlier cited “grand and splendid.”)  Any authoritarian system would result, he says, in “Industrial Tyranny” as oppressive as that of the robber barons.  The twenty-first century readers may consider Wilde’s warnings well-considered, having witnessed Leninist “democratic centralism,” Stalinist and Maoist cults of personality, and even more extreme “ultra-left” manifestations such as the Khmer Rouge or the Sendero Luminoso. 

     He aligned himself with Kropotkin’s anarchism, calling the Russian "a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ which seems coming out of Russia.” [5]  The keynote of the essay, the identification of individualism with socialism, while yielding insight with its provocative novelty generates weaknesses as well.  Some might worry that there is a contradiction in his definition: “The State is to be a voluntary association that will organise labour.”  This goal, so casually tossed off, ignores the tension (at best) between centralized planning and personal liberty.  Yet the reader does not notice in Wilde’s succeeding phrases, so balanced as to seem inevitable.  “The State is to make what is useful.  The individual is to make what is beautiful.”

     In general Wilde is little concerned with either the mechanisms that might bring a socialist revolution or the governing principles he would find ideal thereafter.  Much of his dreamier utopian rhetoric arises from his newfound anarchist loyalties.  It is all very well to say “Nothing should be able to rob a man at all” or “all authority is quite degrading,” but such absoluteness is elusive in practice.  It may be that best government for artists is none at all when it comes to encouragement of propaganda and discouragement of criticism, but many might find it a different matter if the issue were regulation of copyright and even outright social support of the arts as for other industries.  Wilde is surely willfully ignoring his own knowledge of human nature when he declares with confidence, “When each member of the community has sufficient for his wants, and is not interfered with by his neighbour, it will not be an object of any interest to him to interfere with anyone else.”  Perhaps having recently read Engels on The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, he tells us that “in communistic tribes jealousy is entirely unknown.”  Not just jealousy, it seems, will die out under socialism, but with it all forms of authority and of punishment.  As a part of ending coercion, “marriage in its present form must disappear” when women cease to be a commodity. 

     Wilde sounds something like an anarcho-syndicalist; he would have been sympathetic to the program of the I.W.W. which likewise envisioned a sort of voluntary organization of labor.  Considering the sensational success of his lecture to the miners in Leadville, Colorado [5], he might in fact have found a comrade in Big Bill Haywood.  Wilde’s program, however, unlike the Wobblies’, can only be workable with the assumption that unpleasant tasks can be all but eliminated by automation, a circumstance that would certainly be liberating were it possible.   Wilde claims that all “pleasureless activities” are “mentally and morally injurious to man.”  “Man,” he argues, “is made for something better than disturbing dirt.  All work of that kind should be done by a machine.” 

     Wilde maintains that the condition of the workers in the industrial age is paradoxically even worse than in times of less technology.   “As soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve.”  The root of the problem is capitalism.  “The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants.”  This analysis is quite accurate; the flaw is in the expectation that automation can render labor entirely optional and allow every individual to do as he or she pleases. 

     Fanciful as it sounds, this presumption is not peculiar to Wilde.    William Morris’s News from Nowhere, which had appeared the year before Wilde’s essay, likewise envisioned an end to marriage, schools, and coercion.  He, too, thought the magic of technology could undo the condemnation to labor laid upon Adam in the third book of Genesis, and his imagined future, as beautiful as Wilde’s, exhibits a similar dubious optimism. 

     While it may be true that modern people in developed countries spend more hours in work than hunter-gatherers, these utopian hopes are not wholly unfounded.  The mere fact that at the time of the Revolution over 90% of Americans were farmers whereas today the figure is only 1.3% indicates that our basic needs are today being met by the labor of a very few.  In the present inefficient system, another 12% are industrial workers.  Many of the rest are producing nothing but rather simply manipulating symbols on computer screens. 

     Prominent economists during the twentieth century shared portions of this happy vision of the of work’s coming obsolescence.  John Maynard Keynes in the ‘thirties predicted a fifteen-hour work week [6] and in the ‘fifties John Kenneth Galbraith said that automation was likely to “eliminate toil as a required economic institution.” [7]  During the ‘sixties, no shortage of prophets proclaimed the end of work, and, in more recent years, concepts such as the guaranteed annual income suggest that it is no longer necessary for everyone to have a job at all. [8]  Still, even a sympathetic reader must be troubled by Wilde’s easy progress from acknowledging that “civilisation requires slaves” to the prediction, vague and grand, that “there will be great storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs.”   

     If Wilde may be faulted for a failure to explain either how socialism might come to Britain or how production would then be organized, he must as well be credited with the novel insight fundamental to his essay: that socialism offers freedom and individualism in contrast to the slavish conformity required by capitalism.  Though Wilde will at times toss off whimsical throw-away paradoxes that bear little scrutiny, the equation of socialism and individualism is at once the most striking witty inversion of the essay and the heart of Wilde’s argument, the notion on which the practical value of Wilde’s ideas must stand or fall.

     This theme, announced with a bang in the first sentence which labels “living for others” as “sordid,” is repeated throughout.  “Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to Individualism.”  Under capitalism the individual has “absolutely of no importance.”  The promise offered by change is as clear as the current defect: “With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism.”  “Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to attain to.”  This individualism will have nothing in common with exploitation; rather, it seems to Wilde to be altogether benevolent, allowing one to “freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him,” and thus to experience the true pleasure and joy of living.”

     Wilde’s paean to evolutionary individualism, though using the new and “scientific” language of evolution, in fact betrays his enthusiasm more than it provides evidence. 

“It is to be noted also that Individualism does not come to man with any sickly cant about duty, which merely means doing what other people want because they want it; or any hideous cant about self-sacrifice, which is merely a survival of savage mutilation.  In fact, it does not come to man with any claims upon him at all.  It comes naturally and inevitably out of man.  It is the point to which all development tends.  It is the differentiation to which all organisms grow.  It is the perfection that is inherent in every mode of life, and towards which every mode of life quickens.  And so Individualism exercises no compulsion over man.  On the contrary, it says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be exercised over him.  It does not try to force people to be good.  It knows that people are good when they are let alone.  Man will develop Individualism out of himself.  Man is now so developing Individualism.  To ask whether Individualism is practical is like asking whether Evolution is practical.  Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolution except towards Individualism.  Where this tendency is not expressed, it is a case of artificially-arrested growth, or of disease, or of death.”

     Wilde’s strongest confirmation of this marvelous individualism is to cite artists as individualists who “have been able to realise their personality more or less completely.”  Absurdly claiming that “not one of these men ever did a single day’s work for hire,” he imagines that freedom from wage slavery will similarly illuminate the life of everyman, unleashing “the great actual Individualism latent and potential in mankind generally.”  The process is self-enforcing, since becoming oneself will also give a person pleasure.   “It is through joy that the Individualism of the future will develop itself.”  This will entail as well a flowering of loving actions since “when man has realised Individualism, he will also realise sympathy and exercise it freely and spontaneously.” 

     The reader may relish the wit of formulations like those in this passage.

 

A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress.  But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner.  Affectation, in such matters, consists in dressing according to the views of one’s neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid. 

 

Wilde claims that under this new order everyone will realize the greatest and most natural potential possible.  Consumerism will come to an end since “Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things.  One will live.  To live is the rarest thing in the world.”  One can hardly avoid concurring with Wilde’s regret “that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating and delightful in him. —in which, in fact, he misses”

     Wilde’s concluding line hints in a way at his willful impracticality.  “The new Individualism is the new Hellenism.”  He may have in mind such lines as these from the well-known speech of Pericles during the Peloponnesian War.

The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty. [9]

     Wilde is well aware that he is propounding unlikely claims.  To his sensibility that fact simply provides evidence of his imagination.  Utopianism, far from useless fantasy, is the motive for every step forward.  “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.  And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail.  Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”

     A further defect of Wilde’s essay deforms its structure without affecting his central points.  Much of the latter half of “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” is devoted to a lengthy and polemical treatment of art with little relevance the socioeconomic topic under discussion.  In addition Wilde’s primary contention here, which he goes out of his way to demonstrate, is simply wrong.  Wilde characterizes art as the idiosyncratic product of a wholly individual vision, “the unique result of a unique temperament.  Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is.  It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want.”  Wilde is quite emphatic on this point: “if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.” [10]  In his view readers and viewers must become more like writers and painters.  They need only be receptive.  “Now Art should never try to be popular.  The public should try to make itself artistic.”  To him popular taste is regularly lack of taste.

     His assumptions ignore the fact that art always confirms as well as criticizes presuppositions; it abides by some conventions while twisting or ignoring others.  All art is at once derivative and innovative, just as every verbal expression is based on what the speaker has heard before while not exactly reproducing the earlier utterance, even if the words are unchanged.  Yet works and genres of art vary tremendously in their place on the continuum that stretches from predictability to novelty.  Oral literature and folk materials in earlier times and works produced as commodities for a mass audience will tend toward the familiar side of the spectrum, while works of “high art,” produced for a sophisticated elite, are more likely to be transgressive in both form and content.  Wilde ignores the very real function of art to confirm and reinforce social norms, insisting that every individual vision is inherently beautiful and worthy and novel as well.  He goes further yet, finding the artist’s individualism a summum bonum, and yet condemning as “egotism” any criticism from a member of the public with little regard for the individuality of the consumer of art.  By insisting on making novelty and self-expression the criteria for excellence, he ignores the value of a good deal of human artworks and a portion of the rest.

     He is motivated in part by the appealingly decadent reputation of art for art’s sake, but also by his counter-culture instincts.  He liked to épater la bourgeoisie when that very idea was more or less fresh [11] and gamely tossed back the suggestions that some works (such as his own) were “immoral,” “morbid,” and “unhealthy.”  The essay was published five days after he was imprisoned.  Wilde’s “Sonnet to Liberty” notes that the “roar” of the masses, even their “reigns of Terror” and “great Anarchies” “mirror my wildest passions like the sea.”  For Wilde there can be little doubt that the personal was indeed unavoidably political.

     The contribution of Wilde’s essay is twofold: by a sort of rhetorical jiu-jitsu he reverses the widespread misconception that collectivism restricts freedom and he ties the pursuit of socialism which some may question to the pursuit of pleasure from which dissent is less likely.  And he is quite right.  The effete writer agrees with the Marx of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 that socialism offers liberation not only from want but from alienation as well.  If liberty means anything, it requires an end to exploitation.  One cannot be happy while another is constantly picking his pocket.  Even if labor fell short of being the fulfilling joy that Wilde thinks possible, it would at least no longer be wage slavery. 

     The essay has lasting value for both philosophy and politics as well as for literature.  The fact that it is most wise when speaking of politics and most mistaken when treating art is a contradiction Wilde himself might have relished.  “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” sketches out how art and the individual could be the ally of ethics and the masses.  In the ‘sixties I liked to say that I was not agitating for the benefit of Blacks or the poor, but for my own.  I like to imagine Wilde, in all his lace and velvet, demonstrating for Black Lives Matter.  He surely would have found our recent president unspeakably vulgar.  His élan is enough to excuse his rosy hopes.  If some epigrams fall with a bit of a thud, others generate new knowledge.  Here, in particular, Wilde’s clear-sighted recognition that social ownership if the means of production is a precondition for individual liberty emerges from his inversions of his readers’ expectations.

     Wilde is an entertainer.  His writing is animated with charm and wit, ornamented with figures of speech, and gilded by a gleaming utopianism.  Let there be many socialisms, and among them the great-hearted self-interest advocated by Wilde. 

 

1.  Further tropes include a number of satiric variations of the original Adbusters image: one replaced the poster’s advice “bring tents” with “bring deodorant,” while others substituted different figures for the dancer: Bernie Sanders, an executive with an attaché case.  The trope that attracted the most attention was Kristen Visbal’s 2017 Fearless Girl bronze facing the bull, which, though it had been produced as part of an advertising campaign for an investment management firm, was considered feminist and progressive by many.

2.  The essay was published first in the Fortnightly Review for February of 1891 as “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.”  When it was issued as a book in 1895 the title was simply The Soul of Man, but the longer version has been preferred in most reprintings since.

3.  Aesthetic and political concerns were combined by other Victorians.  Among the first to come to mind are John Ruskin and Bernard Shaw.  Perhaps apart from Wilde the best example is William Morris.

4.  Wilde wrote this piece shortly after hearing Shaw lecture.  Shaw reportedly reacted, commenting “it was very witty and entertaining, but had nothing whatever to do with socialism.”

5.  In De profundis.  Kropotkin expressed in return a sympathetic interest in Wilde’s work. 

6.  Leadville was a boom town at the time, full of bars, brothels, and firearms.  Wilde provides an entertaining account in Impressions of America which includes the supposed barroom sign “Please do not shoot the pianist.  He is doing his best.”  As a gag about America, this line had already been circulating in Britain at least since 1879, first described as posted by a church organist in Arkansas, but then relocated west to California but still in a church in another English paper, and in 1882 in the Washington Post it is placed in a Leadville church.  Wilde simply adaptedz the proven joke to his uses. 

7.  Keynes, ”Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930) and Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958).

8.  Among many more recent works exploring the idea are Jeremy Rifkin’s The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (1995) and Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015) by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams.

9.  This is Richard Crawley’s translation.

10.  The passage is really quite harsh.  “They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity.”

11.  The phrase has been used by a number of authors including Dumas père (in Le père la ruine).  The earliest usage seems to be in Alexandre Privat d'Anglemont’ Paris Anecdote (1855), p. 85.  In 1854 the phrase “il faut épater le public" appeared in Aristippe Felix Bernier de Maligny’s Nouveau Manuel Théatral: Théorique et Pratique.

Pater’s Renaissance

I used a 1959 Mentor volume of The Renaissance which sold for 50¢. Though the pages are brown and falling out, it sustained yet another reading. As no one else is likely to be using this particular edition I identify quotations here only by the chapter from which they come.


     During Walter Pater’s life, he suffered a degree of notoriety. Though a retiring and scholarly man, he was like Socrates accused of corrupting the youth by providing a justification for hedonism and denying religion. Wrong-headed though they were, his accusers, who included even such subtle thinkers as George Eliot, had reason. What his critics regarded as his baleful influence extends well beyond the author’s life; indeed, it even reached to mid-twentieth century Midwestern suburbs in America and indeed further still, to the very present.
     As a teenage aesthete I was deeply moved by The Renaissance. Probably to some extent under his influence I wrote a college admission essay that said nothing whatever about professional goals, but instead defined my main ambition as to experience as much as possible. The only concession I made to the role of higher education was to declare that by experience I included learning as much as possible and consuming the finest, most beautiful works of art and intelligence. I might have been taking my text directly from Pater’s famous conclusion. For better or worse my values remain unchanged over a half century.
     Immorality was, of course, never Pater’s aim, except for those to whom homoeroticism is a vice. [1] His radical theme was subjectivism. For all his denigration of “abstract theory,” his approach was founded on a thorough philosophic skepticism. Pater has been, I think, insufficiently recognized for the degree to which his ideas anticipate more recent thought in both aesthetic theory and philosophy more generally. Among the many trends for which Pater’s thought opened the way are Rorty’s “ironism,” the reader response theory associated with Stanley Fish, and Derridean Deconstruction.
     The author thought best to omit his “Conclusion” in the second edition for fear it “might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall.” Pater’s celebrated call “to burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life” has suffered the curse of success and become a cliché, but the “Conclusion” opens with a less-cited line from Herakleitos which Pater translated as “All things give way; nothing remains.” [2] Pater develops then an evocative passage describing the flux of experience, sounding like a Tang Dynasty Buddhist in his wistful insistence on the insubstantiality of what ordinarily passes for reality. He spares neither body nor consciousness, deploying images of whirlpool and flame to demonstrate that physical life is a “perpetual motion” which is “beyond us.” Sense experience is a mere ”swarm of impressions,” “that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.” The human ego is nothing but “an image,” a sort of recollection of memories of past moments. “Our life . . . is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.” Coherence, solidity, knowledge are all illusions.
     For Pater this meant no end of inquiry but rather the most powerful motivation to pursue his researches while privileging sensation. “While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend.” As “we are all condamnés,” to spend life “in art and song” is the best strategy for “getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time,” while recognizing that “art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.”
     Pater entertains no illusions and takes refuge in no mythic refuge. [3] His subjectivism as a critic emerges naturally from his skepticism as a philosopher. He quite correctly identifies his position as distinctly modern in his early essay on Coleridge. “Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the ‘relative’ spirit in place of the ‘absolute.’ … To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known, except relatively and under certain conditions.” [4] He later restates the theme, again with the emphasis on its modernity, noting that “according to the scepticism latent at least in so much of our modern philosophy, the so-called real things themselves are but spectra, after all.“ [5]
     It is curious but true that those who argue for impressionistic art criticism, while inviting the accusation that their judgements must be arbitrary and unfounded, are in fact the only critics who can present solid evidence. After all we know nothing of any topic whatever but the data of our senses imperfectly processed by our brains. Precisely in that interaction of subject and object is the spot where Pater correctly locates the aesthetic experience. In the “Preface” to The Renaissance he correctly locates aesthetic value neither in the author nor in the text, but in the reader’s reaction. “What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence?”
     While this focus on consumption is a productive approach, Pater does succumb to polemic’s temptation to overshoot the mark. He repeatedly claims that art has no relation whatever to lived experience, insisting, for instance, that “the Venus of Melos” “is in no sense a symbol, a suggestion of anything beyond its own victorious fairness.” “This ideal art, in the thought does not outstrip or lie beyond its sensible embodiment” [6] Any viewer of a human nude must react in part to a work’s content, in this case to the humanity, the femaleness, and the nudity of the statue. As for symbolism the viewer must realize that the object is in fact a religious cult image, meant for religious services.
     In another passage, Pater maintains that “in its primary aspect, a great picture has no more message for us than an accidental play of sunlight and shadow for a few moments on the wall or floor.” [7] Though stating it, he ignores the critical fact that the “play of sunlight” is, in fact, wholly “accidental,” lacking intention. Thus it cannot be a signifier unless one posits, as Pater would not, some artistic deity presiding over the enormous site-specific installation that is the cosmos. The distinction rests in the fact that every human artifact bears meaning whether consciously designed or not. Every objet d’art poses the question, impossible for natural phenomena, “what does it mean for a person to have made this?”
     Yet many have overestimated the role of truth in art. Art is by no means exhausted by a mimetic ideal. The maker may strive for the greatest verisimilitude, but books remain always black marks on a page and paintings smears of color on a surface, by all means “real” only in a qualified sense, and none “more real” than another. Truth occupies a place similar to realism in art. For some works such considerations are a part of the design, for others they are insignificant, while for yet others deviation and distortion of verisimilitude are intentional and effective. It is elementary that, while art may seek to seem “true” in one sense or another, such an end is merely one among a great many elements that may play a role in a work’s structure.
     Again, Pater has the passionate enthusiasm to go once more a bit too far. Discussing the meaning of false attributions to Giorgione, he comments that “in what is connected with a great name, much that is not real is often very stimulating.” [8] Even errors and misapprehensions are fruitful; indeed, like Freudian slips, they may provide the richest veins of meaning. Having no functional end, art resembles play. [9]
     Pater’s oft-quoted dictum declaring that the arts all aspire to the condition of music [7] does not, of course, suggest that in some way music is a higher or more perfect art than poetry or painting. He means only to clarify his claim that “the sensuous element in art” contains “almost everything in art that is essentially artistic.” Art differs from other human artifacts in that its form, its style, its manner is sufficient for its meaning, or, at any rate, those elements comprise the strictly artistic component of its appeal. A poem may have attractive ideals or a painting may include data of historic or scientific interest, but such considerations have no effect on its artistic worth.
     Pater is one of those like Frazer, Margaret Murray, Joseph Campbell, and others who made dramatic new readings of the materials of history and culture and who are liable to be picked to pieces by specialists far less capable of original thought. Of course, anyone who dares to suggest innovative readings of the past and attempts to synthesize great masses of data will be vulnerable to criticism, all the more as studies advance over the years, yet such work remains more significant, more beautiful, and more readable than any of those who point out their numerous errors. I might add even such names as Freud and Marx. All these are great artists, and from a literary point of view they are all true in the sense that the Iliad and the gospel of St. Matthew and King Lear are true. This would have been Pater’s point of view. In discussing Pico della Mirandola Pater says of Pico’s attempts to reconcile Greek religion and Christianity by imagining wildly fanciful allegorical interpretations “his thoughts, however little their positive value may be, are connected with springs beneath them of deep and passionate emotion” and this alone justifies them. Surely the very same may be said of Pater’s own deeply significant though highly idiosyncratic judgements.



1. No reader could deny what no one today will condemn, Pater’s homoerotic sensibility. We are inclined to be indulgent if his embattled tastes in life lead him slightly astray in theory. In accordance with his own notions, he approves Winckelmann’s “escape from abstract theory to intuition, to the exercise of sight and touch.” He proceeds In the same essay to venture a side comment, suggesting that homosexuality is associated with “an inborn instinct for beauty and art.” While this is a very dubious notion, it does not entirely lack evidence.

2. Pater’s translation and a lengthy discussion in Plato and Platonism, “Plato and the Doctrine of Motion”: “[Herakleitos says somewhere that] All things give way; nothing remains.” Plato, Cratylus 402 A.

3. Even his Marius the Epicurean is led only to the very edge of Christianity ten years after The Renaissance. Chastened by criticism and doubtless frightened by the outré behavior of some of his admirers, Pater hedged his bets, yet he still resisted making his hero a believer.

4. “Coleridge’s Writings,” Westminster Review 1866.

5. “Coleridge” in Appreciations.

6. See the “Essay on Winckelmann.”

7. In “The School of Giorgione.”

8. See “The School of Giorgione.”

9. In the same chapter, Pater links art and play in that neither has a functional end.

An Explication of Stevens’ “A Primitive like an Orb”

     Wallace Stevens’ late poem “A Primitive like an Orb,” like Beethoven’s late string quartets, is elegantly wrought and profoundly spiritual, though both the poet and the composer puzzled or put off a portion of their initial audiences. [1] The early work that established Stevens’ reputation was replete with lapidary images, at times tumbling one after another with such speed as to dizzy the reader, but generally sharply defined, solid, and earth-bound. “A Primitive like an Orb,” published when the author was sixty-eight years old, is far more abstract and assertively thematic, even tendentious. The poem, more explicitly than anything in Harmonium, more clearly even than his “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” proffers a spiritual, indeed a mystical, potential in art alone stripped of religion’s conventional clothing in mythology and supernaturalism. In Stevens’ terms god is a “supreme fiction,” known to be illusory but efficacious nonetheless when willfully believed. [2]
     Stevens is hardly alone in defining a non-supernatural route to illumination. In their various ways, Jains, some Stoics and Skeptics, pantheists, most Buddhists and some Hindus have done the same, but Stevens presents a modern sophisticated attempt to recover religion from the ruins left by the “death of God” in the nineteenth century.
     In “A Primitive like an Orb,” Stevens outlines what is at once his aesthetic and spiritual philosophy, with a majestic Olympian confidence beyond that of his often highly qualified and oblique prose musings. Using metaphors of surprising and illuminating originality (called “opulent” in stanza 4) and French-style syllabic alexandrines (for the most part) of such music that their authority is difficult to question, the poet soars above the decorative and ameliorative, seeing the eternal in the ephemeral, the pattern underlying each perception, the macrocosm in every microcosm, with a grand mystery parallel to that promised by mystics and occult savants.
     A linear paraphrase of this ambitious notion as it unfolds through the poem’s ninety-six lines may be useful though the idea is present from the start. I take the word “primitive” in the title in the sense of originary, though it bears traces as well of association with the religious paintings of the “Italian primitives.” The “orb” is the Platonic sphere of which, in the Timaeus, the philosopher says “the shape of a sphere, equidistant in all directions from the center to the extremities, which of all shapes is the most perfect” [4] The “perfect” shape is later the basis for the concept of the divine as “an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere” [5]
     To seek what is promised in the initial phrase “the essential poem at the centre of things” the poet first notes the necessity of recognizing that every significant perception entails an “apperception.” What one sees is not the discrete object outside but a connection, a relationship, a dyad of viewer and viewed. In this way the “cast-iron of our lives” is “gorged” with “good.” The process is aided by beauty, always a subjective, mind-created quality, in the poem signified by “nymphs” and “genii,” the graces that signify art. (stanza I)
     The possibility of a “supreme fiction” is suggested by the ambiguous veridical status of art. “It Is and is not and, therefore, is.” [3] The beauty of art, “its huge, high harmony,” affirms a validity and a reality distinct from that by which other discourses are tested (“a separate sense”). Once accepted, once it “captives the being,” the truth of art seems to inhere in the nature of things, to have always been there. (stanza II)
     The “captiving” of the senses that occurs with the apprehension of aesthetic vision brings immense and intimate pleasure (“what milk,” “what wheaten bread and oaten cake,” “green guests and table in the woods and songs”) at the same time as it remains powerful, divine, and mysterious. The “secluded thunder” of such revelation allows access to what was otherwise “too heavy for the sense to seize,” a truth manifest yet obscure. (stanza III)
     The rewards for the poem’s reader are not limited to delight, but rather extend without limit, until “last terms, the largest, bulging still with more.” Steven’s emphasis is on apperception. [6] It is neither the vision itself nor the subjective mind that can produce “the fulfillment of fulfillments” but only the connection, the link, the integration of the consciousness with the world. “One poem proves another and the whole.” [7] Only by infusing reality with passion may “the lover, the believer, and the poet” whose “words are chosen out of their desire” shape language to a reflection of themselves. In this way they “celebrate the central poem.” Is this not similar to the Chandogya Uphanishad’s assertion that the individual atman is identical to the cosmic Atman, though with aesthetic language substituted for the mythological? (stanza IV)
     Insistently repeating his theme, Stevens declares that through this process in which the mind and the world inform each other “by sharp informations” (precise imagery) until “the central poem became the world.” (stanza V) with a sensuality recalling erotic love. [8] We make love to creation through language ”each one the mate of the other.” The poet is “the mate of summer,” the refracted image of self “a self of her that speaks, denouncing separate selves” and exploding dualities. The process, like human love, is productive as “the essential poem begets the others.” (stanza VI) In the end “the central poem is the poem of the whole,” in which the cosmos as a whole has a coherence and a meaning like that of a well-crafted work of art. (stanza VII)
     This whole, this cosmos or Atman or god may also be called a vis, a strength or power. It is the broadest generalization of all things, “a principle or, it may be, the meditation of a principle, an “inherent order.” It is positive in influence, “a nature to its natives all beneficence, a repose,” allowing the mind to relax, having purchase at once on itself and on all else. This may be imagined as well as “muscles of a magnet” (invisible order perceived),and the mention of muscles suggests then the figure of “a giant, on the horizon, [i.e. barely visible] glistening [yet grand].” This giant becomes the dominant image of the poem’s conclusion. (stanza VIII)
     This vision is a surpassingly beautiful one “in bright excellence adorned,” “crested with . . . fire,” with “scintillant sizzlings,” “serious folds of majesty,” “trumpeting seraphs,” altogether “a source of pleasant outbursts in the ear.” (stanza IX) In spite of the fact that the mind cannot grasp his totality in any single vision, the “giant” of reality “imposes power by the power of his form.” The grand whole, the vision of the total whole lurks behind imperfect incarnations in the world and people and art though it always appears in truncated forms. (stanza X) Though barely glimpsed, this giant, “an abstraction given head” is divine, the “centre on the horizon,” god as the infinite sphere. (stanza XI)
     What more can be said? By imbuing nature with passion, the individual renders it holy and redemptive, though in the end it be “nothingness,” which is to say nirvana.


That’s it.” The lover writes, the believer hears,
The poet mumbles and the painter sees,
Each one, his fated eccentricity,
As a part, but part, but tenacious particle,
Of the skeleton of the ether, the total,
Of letters, prophecies , perceptions, clods,
Of color, the giant of nothingness, each one
And the giant ever-changing, living in change. (stanza 12)


     Various traditions have suggested that the glint of the divine might be discerned in any object at all: Among the more dramatic insights are the Zen assertion that “the Buddha is dried dung” [9] and the gnostic claim that Christ may be found in a split stick or under every rock. [10] Blake saw “a world in a grain of sand” and Huxley under mescaline in a vase of flowers. [11] However, none of these foci of meditation is an intentional work of art. Stevens does not say that any sight at all can lead toward the mystical giant, but rather that illumination may come through a profound gaze not on some appearance in the world but on the artist’s reception of an object. For him the connection between perceiver and perceived defines the link between microcosm and macrocosm the clear view of which has the potential for enlightenment. Stevens is developing to its furthest the late nineteenth century spiritual valorization of art and the Symbolist exploitation of underdetermined images.
     The spiritual validity of Steven’s “supreme fiction” accessible through meditation on poems can only be measured by practitioners. It is certainly true that devotion has many modes to suit the sensibilities of various human consciousnesses: some advance through charity, some must be ravished by devotional rapture, others climb to the sublime on intellectual concepts, while the rituals and formulae of established religions serve the needs of most. Stevens’ poem is elegantly crafted and subtly argued: surely his method deserves a place among the rest.




1. The poem first appeared as one of John Bernard Myers’ Banyan Press series, the Prospero Pamphlets in 1948 with two drawings by Kurt Seligmann. It was republished in Steven’s 1950 volume The Auroras of Autumn. The pamphlet’s notice in the New York Times for June 27, 1948 observes that “the poem, at times, eludes understanding." and makes no mention whatever of the artist or the images.

2. See Gregory Brazeal , “The Supreme Fiction: Fiction or Fact?” for a critic’s view that Stevens failed in his quest to define such a possibility and, indeed, that the very notion arose from a misreading of William James. (Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Fall, 2007), pp. 80-100). One might wonder in what sense a fiction can be fictional.

3. Descending from Hesiod and Aristotle all the way to Derridean deconstruction.

4. Timaeus 33b.

5. In the “Dialogue on Infinity” attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, but identical or very similar formulae appear in Empedocles, Augustine, the Liber XXIV Philosophorum, Alain of Lille, Nicholas of Cusa, Pascal, and Voltaire among others.

6. Cf. Steven’s claim may derive from, though it goes beyond Kant’s notion of transcendental apperception.

7. Cf. Eliot “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”

8. There is, of course, a vast mystical literature in which divine and human love are conflated: Krishna and the gopis, Mechthild von Magdeburg, Rumi, and John of the Cross, and a great many others.

9. In another passage, the Buddha is three pounds of flax. See The Gateless Gate, Cases 21 and 18,

10. Gospel of Thomas 77.

11. Doors of Perception.