situation about which most poetic statements are made is so complex that only such a statement can make it. Just as the equation may be proved useless because of errors about the data its symbols are based on, so may the poetic statement be ‘disproved’ because it is not sufficiently memorable – not semantically perceptive enough or, non-semantically, not well enough expressed. The better poet disproves the worse.
85 I think of two poets whose poetry I have a special love for: Catullus and Emily Dickinson. If their poetry were not to exist, no amount of historical and biographical information about them, no amount of music or painting they might have made, no quantity even (were such a thing possible) of interviewing and meeting them, could compensate me for the loss of the precise knowledge of their deepest reality, their most real reality, that their poems give. I wish there was a head of Catullus, I wish there was more than one miserable daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson, and a recording of her voice: but these are trivial lacks beside the irreplaceability the absence of their poetries would represent.
86 Poetry is under attack from every side; it is under attack from science, more than the other arts are, because like science it deals in meaning, though generally it is not meaning in the same situations or with the same purposes as technological science. It is under attack from the other arts, though this is indirectly rather than directly; and it is under attack from the historical situation.
87 Poetry is often despised because it is not an art with an ‘international language’ like music and painting. It pays the penalty for having the precisest tool. But it is this tool that makes it the most open art, the least exploitable and the least tyrannizable.
88 Many people maintain that the poets have only themselves to blame for the unhappy state their art is in. Certainly they are guilty – and have been guilty since the Symbolist Movement – of a dangerous confusion between the language’ of music and language proper. A note has no meaning in itself, but gains whatever meaning it has by being put in a series of other notes, and even then, in a harmonic group or melodic series, its meaning will vary with the temperament, race and musical experience of the listener. Music is a ‘language’ whose chief beauty is multiple meaning, and even then, nonlinguistic multiple meaning; in short, music is not a language, so the metaphor is false. But poetry uses a language which must have meaning; most of the so-called ‘musical’ devices in poetry alliteration, euphony, assonance, rhyme – are in fact rhythmical devices, adjuncts of metre. The true sister of poetry is dancing, which preceded music in the history of man. It is from this historic confusion between music and poetry that some of the uncontrolled spread of complex imagery and ambiguity in the postsymbolist arts has come. Mallarme and his followers tried to effect a shotgun marriage between music and poetry. They tried to put the shiftingness, the changing flow, the shimmering essence of Wagnerian and Debussyan music into their words, but the words could not bear the burden; and so, since the word sounds would not sufficiently shimmer, the word meanings had to. I am not belittling the courage or the beauty of Mallarme’s work; but the practical modern result in all the arts of this confusion is this: it is cleverness with symbols, ability to shift them about, to establish and dissolve patterns, to be oblique, to proceed by a semantic differential calculus when a simple addition would be enough, that is alleged to be specifically ‘modern’ and creatively most valid. Of course it can be modern and valid; it is the
89 Though, like all the arts, poetry condenses, selects, distorts and emphasizes in order to present its view of reality, its very precision and the enormously complicating factor of linguistic meaning make it less immediate; and in an age neurotically aware of the
90 If at the moment it seems less relevant it is because the sudden flood of mechanized techniques of presenting the visual and aural arts is producing a general linguistic anaemia, a debilitation of language, throughout the world. The majority, consisting largely at this stage of evolution of a recentiy emancipated proletariat to whom art is still much more an incidental source of pleasure than a fundamental source of truth, naturally
91 This bias could be corrected in our educational systems. Most large schools have art and music teachers. A poetry teacher is at least as important; and the ability to teach the writing of poetry is not the same as the ability to teach the grammar and literature of the language.
92 What is even more ominous for poetry is the fact that since the Second World War a new kind of intellectual has emerged in large numbers. He is chiefly interested in art, in the cinema, in photography, in dress fashions, interior decoration and the rest. His world is bounded by colour, shape, texture, pattern, setting, movement; and he is only minimally interested in the properly intellectual (moral and socio-political) significance of events and objects. Such people are not really intellectuals, but visuals.
93 A visual is always more interested in style than in content, and more concerned to see than to understand. A visual does not feel a rioting crowd being machine-gunned by the police; he simply sees a brilliant news photograph.
94 Poets are essentially defenders of order and meaning. If they have so often in the past attacked actual human orders and meanings, it was to establish a better order and meaning. Absolute reality is chaos and anarchy, from our relative human standpoint; and our poets are our ultimate corps of defence. If we think poetry of least concern among our arts, we are like generals who disband their best fighting troops.
95 Cherish the poet; there seemed many great auks till the last one died.
11
THE ARISTOS IN THE INDIVIDUAL
1 I hope it is now clear what kind of acceptances and sacrifices and changes I believe we must make to arrive at the Aristos, the best for our situation at this time. But the word aristos is also an adjective and can be applied to the individual. What can be said of the ideal man to achieve this best situation?
2 First and foremost we cannot expect him always to be the aristos. We are all sometimes of the Many. But he will avoid membership. There can be no organization to which he fully belongs; no country, no class, no church, no political party. He needs no uniform, no symbols; his ideas are his uniform, his actions are his symbols, because above all he tries to be a free force in a world of tied forces.
3 He knows the difference between himself and the Many cannot be one of birth or wealth or power or cleverness. It can only be based on intelligent and enacted goodness.
4 He knows everything is relative, nothing is absolute. He sees one world with many situations; not one situation. For him, no judgement stands; and he will not permanently join because if he permanently joins with others, however intelligent, however well-intentioned, he helps to constitute an elect, a Few.
He knows from history that sooner or later every congregation of the elect is driven to condone bad means to good ends; then they cease to be a congregation of the elect and become a mere oligarchy.
5 He accepts the necessity of his suffering, his isolation, and his absolute death. But he does not accept that evolution cannot be controlled and its dangers limited.
6 He believes that the only human aim is contentment; and that it is the best aim because it can never be fulfilled. For progress changes, but does not reduce, the enemies of human contentment.
7 He knows the Many are not only a besieged army; but starved of equality, a seditious besieged army. They are like prisoners vainly and laboriously trying to file their way through massive iron bars in order to reach a blue sky in which they could not possibly exist; while all the time, just behind them, their cell waits to be properly lived in.
8 He knows we all live at the crossroad of myriad irreconcilable poles, or opposing factors. Their irreconcilability constitutes our cell, and the discovery of living with, and utilizing, this irreconcilability constitutes our escape.
9 He knows all religious and political creeds are faute de mieux; are utilities.
10 He knows the Many are like an audience under the spell of a conjuror, seemingly unable to do anything but serve as material for the conjuror’s tricks; and he knows that the true destiny of man is to become a magician
