The Thinking Corner

Science and Poetry

Have you read I. A. Richards's Science and Poetry? If you have not, you have missed a very sharp and well-phrased formulation, within a brief compass, of both the value and defect the poetic expression and poetic response in life have for a scientific-minded literary critic. Richards has a genuine concern for the general health and balance of human nature. He makes no denial of the richness poetry brings us. A most apt remark of his runs: "To live reasonably is not to live by reason alone - the mistake is easy and, if carried far, disastrous — but to live in a way of which reason, a clear full sense of the whole situation, would approve." And a clear full sense of the whole situation demands, according to Richards, a yielding of ourselves emotionally and imaginatively to the spell of poetry even though what poetry speaks of may be contrary to what science declares. In Richards's view, poetry enriches and nourishes that part of the mind which science with its unemotional, logical, mathematical temper leaves bare and starved. Only, we must steer wide of the notion that poetry has any bearing on truth, for poetry, to Richards, is the moved voice of desire and hope, not the speech of impartial and impersonal analysis of phenomena. Such an analysis alone can give truth - and the value of poetry is to be judged by another standard than that of truth or falsity of its statements: the relevant standard here, says Richards, is "serviceableness to the complete personality".

Richards's exposition of how poetry works and how it renders service is acute as far as it goes. He realises that words here are of immense weight and that they are to be taken not as mere signs standing for idea and intellectual meaning but with their entire body of sound and texture, their form which for Richards consists of the rhythm and feel of them individually as well as in collective arrangement. The effect of this form is on what he calls the complex of our interests, each stir therein shaking up our total system of

Page 8

inner needs until a new poise is attained. The new poise marks a balance of our conflicting impulses, an equilibrium and integration which account for the delightful and satisfied and fulfilling state poetry produces in us no less than for our perceiving a felicitous inevitability in poetic speech - an inevitability representative of the harmonised mood at work in the poet himself. The elaborate agitation and reorganisation of our interests by poetry has two branches: one is thoughts of what the words mean, the other and more important an emotional response leading to the development of attitudes or preparations for actions which may or may not occur. The emotional response comes before the meaning is fully grasped and does not altogether depend on it: it is the peculiarity of the poetic utterance that by its word-body, by the movement and sound of its words, it plays deeply and intimately upon us even though the meaning be elusive and seem as if almost absent. Richards cites as examples some of Shakespeare's Songs and, in a different way, much of the best of Swinburne.

All this is admirable psychology and artistic observation; but it is thwarted from reaching down to bedrock by a set of postulates Richards brings forth on the strength of his "science". Science, a la Richards, has outgrown the Magical View of the universe: that is, we have found that there are no worlds of Spirits and Powers which control events and which can be evoked and, to some extent, be themselves controlled by human practices. Now, argues Richards, there is the common assumption that poetry is divinely inspired - blown through the poet's mouth by the Gods; but as science has made a clean sweep of the Gods in favour of blind inexorable laws what poetry speaks need not be truth. The argument is, to my thinking, superfluous. If it is said that poetry does not use the coldly observing analytic intellect as its instrument and so does not give truth in the scientific sense, nobody can demur. Nor should anybody demur if it is said that even truth in the philosophic sense is not the business of poetry. Nor, again, ought there to be a demurring if it is further said

Page 9

that poetry is not an enouncer of truth in the mystic sense. Not truth in the historic sense either must be deemed poetry's objective. Poetry devotes itself to embodying in beauty of inwardly animated word and rhythm any phase of consciousness. Whether that phase of consciousness corresponds to any truth in the various senses mentioned above is not its main concern. Does it create beauty that lives and is not just put together? If it does, no more is necessary: the poet is left free to imagine, his mind is allowed to range as it likes. To aver that he fails to utter truth because science has done away with the Magical View and with the possibility of the divine afflatus is to import into the discussion a point that logically does not arise. It is a shot quite beside the mark, since poetry is never obliged to be an enouncer of truth.

Richards lets fly the shot because he wants to kill the defence of certain special statements made by many poets -statements about supernatural beings, statements about God. Science has banished all unearthly agencies and therefore their possible afflatus for poetry: how then, he asks, can poetic assertions about them be correct, how can these assertions have any authority? The double conclusion is in order, but it rests upon a double premiss with which it is easy to join issue. In my opinion, Richards's shot is not only beside the mark: it is also pretty feeble. The drift of recent physics away from mechanistic and materialistic theories cannot be neglected: a host of front-rank scientists have set their course towards the Magical View. Even apart from the idealistic "fifth column" within the camp of science itself, the Magical View can stand up and fight - and not on pure reasoning alone. Facts of observation, facts of experience can be enlisted for many levels of "Magical" reality - from occult creatures to the illimitable Ancient of Days. Anthropological scrutiny leaves a definite residue of genuine witchcraft; psychical research an undeniable residue of genuine spiritualism; experiments in telepathy and clairvoyance an impressive residue of hidden non-physical ranges of man's own powers; study of Indian yogic practice a cogent residue

Page 10

of superhuman states of existence beyond the body and brain, states partaking of a deathless In-dweller, a Cosmic Consciousness, a luminous Transcendent. It is an extremely facile and narrow survey that slurs over this evidence. Our scientific knowledge of the universe has increased, but the old magical dealing with it is not disproved; only the fatuous superficial side of that dealing is undermined - room enough is left for countering Richards on several grounds and for considering poetry a medium of supra-mundane truth diversely enouncing itself against the claims of his so-called science.

The point, however, is that no such room is wanted by poetry's essence. At the same time we must admit that Richards's shot is provoked by the ambiguity with which the poetic art is often conceived by poets themselves. Many poets feel that their job is to utter great metaphysical mysteries, to embody in words eternal verities pushing from behind the veil of the mortal and the transient - and it may be that they do act on occasion as authentic truth-enouncers. At least science has produced no conclusive testimony against the infinite Godhead and the immortal soul nor against occult presences. But a poet is not a poet inasmuch as he is a mouthpiece of "magicism" or mysticism. Whether he is such a mouthpiece or no is not the primary condition: the primary condition is word and rhythm beautifully expressing intense psychological activity on his part. What the poet keenly sees and feels is all the content required: it does not matter a whit in what direction the seeing and feeling is done. Poets may be seers and prophets of the Divine, but they are just as poetic when they talk of secular things - love and death and Nature's colourful complexity. Innumerable bursts of poetry occur with no reference, explicit or implicit, to the Magical View of the universe. Hear what John Presland makes a woman cry to her lover:

I am yours

Utterly, wholly; when I walk abroad,

Page 11

Jewelled and brocaded, I feel all men's eyes

Can see me naked, and from head to foot

Branded in red-hot letters with your name.

Or read the stanza in which Housman's death-obsession comes over his sight of an army marching away to the sound of its own band:

And down the distance they,

With dying note and swelling,

Walk the resounding way

To the still dwelling.

Or let the same lyrist present a bit of Nature:

The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing

In leafy dells alone.

Presland's verses, piercing, powerful, passionate, and Housman's of a melancholy at once exquisite and majestic in the first quotation and of a delicate sympathetic felicity in the second - have they anything to do with God or superhuman Spirits? If excellent poetry can be created without speaking of such entities, the Magical View does not essentially determine or affect the content of the poetic utterance. Poetry can take birth without the writer stating or implying a belief in that View. Its essence is not dependent on the enouncing of supra-mundane truths.

Having said this to disinfect the air of magico-mystical no less than scientific prejudices where poetic content is in question, we must look below the surface of the former. A probing is surely called for, since the Magical View of the universe is too persistently associated with poetry to be brushed aside as a sheer irrelevance. A sheer irrelevance it is in respect of poetic content. For it does not invariably reside there. To the message of first-class mystical and spiritual poetry the immediate counterblast is that of first-class poetry

Page 12

of an anti-mystical anti-spiritual kind. One can just as poetically deny as affirm the Divine. Poetry is as wide as man's being and echoes the thousand dissimilar moods of it. So we must leave content alone. But content is not all that is to poetry: there is also form. Is the idea of inspiration, of the divine afflatus bearing eternal verities - an idea as old as history - engendered by something in poetic form? I have already indicated that the existence of a divinity behind things has not yet been shown to be impossible: hence it is not absurd to ask whether poetic form gives invariably a glimmer of God. Let us, then, mark how poetry speaks rather than what it speaks. Poetry takes up any aspect of things, be it ever so grotesque, terrible, tragic or unspiritual, and by a wonderful mode of expression obtains out of it a form of irreproachable and perfect loveliness. Recall any line of true poetry: here is a pessimistic despairing note from Meredith -

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul

When hot for certainties in this our life!

And here is Meredith in a rapture over mortality -

Into the breast that gives the rose

Shall I with shuddering fall?

In both instances we have a sense of flawless form in the expression, a beautiful finality and absolute, an utter loveliness as of some Archetype. The visions, the emotions, the attitudes that have found voice are almost opposed: but either of the two bursts of poetry brings equally the contact of a supreme power of beauty. In doing this it appears to exercise a mode of consciousness that goes deeper than Richardsian science and to touch a perfect reality, a divine existence of which Richardsian science has no inkling.

Not in poetic content but in poetic form, in the inwardly animated manner of poetic speech, the Magical View seems basically involved and the Divine's touch disclosed. Only

Page 13

when we grasp this we shall discern why and how the poetic statement acts as it does. Unless we accept a divine disclosure by form we shall never have proper insight into the power of poetry. Because there is a divine disclosure the poetic word seizes us and works upon us so magically and because the disclosure is essentially by form it does so even when the meaning is hazy. Richards, though marking the strange satisfying and fulfilling effect of poetry and giving form importance, misses the profound issues of both. He chops logic over the poetic content and puzzles over the question whether it can be said to convey truth. He is knocking at the wrong door. Confronting the form which has already struck him as paramount, he should have tried to see all that it holds. If he had perceived the Perfect and Archetypal Presence there, he would have understood why when reading poetry we always get the feeling that compelling truths are spoken to us. Our intellects may not agree, our whole system of thought may be antagonistic to a poetic statement, yet we feel somehow as if a truth were expressed and as if we had to believe it. Whence the compelling power? It comes from the extreme of beauty with which the poetic statement is made. That archetypal extreme brings the force as of an incontrovertible ultimate truth, a supreme Real laying bare its secrets in language, and casting a spell of belief on us and bewitching us into conviction. What constitutes the seeming truth-impact on us is our experience of some divine absolute Loveliness which poetry unveils through every expression, so carving out every statement, so casting it as to make it figure forth that Loveliness. It is this experience through form that is misunderstood and sought to be supported or contradicted in terms of content when poetry speaks of the Godhead in any aspect.

Not gripping the sense in which the Godhead is an inalienable portion of poetry, Richards's fine psychological as well as artistic observations stop short half-way to the bedrock. His standard of "serviceableness to the complete personality" does inadequate justice to the delight as of

Page 14

revelation which is ours through the poetic experience. To grant poetry a useful enriching influence simply because it feeds the emotional side of us which finds no nourishment in neutral scientific truth-enunciations is to assume a semi-patronising attitude and ignore the vast civilising and evolutionary potentialities of poetic literature. Poetry does not just feed and balance the emotions: it touches indirectly the divine spark in the human, the beatific harmony hidden within. Richards's explanation of the feeling stirred in us of rightness and inevitability by the poet's word and rhythm as being caused by a movement of some emotional need or interest seeking to confirm itself or order itself with its fellows is left in the air if no stock is taken of the ecstatic finality, the transcendent perfection which great verse gives the impression of revealing. Unless we look on poetry as the hand laid upon our being by a divine Loveliness, we can in toto neither recognise the service it renders nor attach to it the value it deserves. Richards has the right instinct in holding poetry high, but he fumbles vaguely and off the track in justifying his instinct.

Once we note the defects of his book, there is no harm in praising its good qualities. In a lot of things it is a striking eye-opener for indiscriminate enthusiasts of poetry. And it carries many sensitive remarks on the poetic effect. One of the best is that a scholar, steeped in the poetry of the past and moved by a keen emulation and a passionate desire to place himself among the poets, will often produce work looking extraordinarily like poetry, his words may seem as subtly and delicately arranged as words can be, his epithets as happy, his transitions as daring, his simplicity as perfect, but in spite of everything his rhythm will give him away. Rarely does a critic appreciate with such definiteness the crucial role of rhythm. Richards has the feel of poetry in his blood; else he would not-respond so intensely to rhythmical nuances. Rhythm represents the inmost vitality of poetry, for it echoes the very pulsation without which the poetic excitement can never be the very heart-beat of the furor poeticus. It

Page 15

is regrettable that Richards should allow his natural equipment of unusual receptivity to be on the one hand hindered by a scientific dogmatism shutting out the Divine and on the other mis-engaged by the aesthetic fallacy of those who forget that form, not content, transmits the touch of divine authority we always get in poetry and that this touch is independent of any mystical or spiritual pronouncement poetry may make.

Once we note also the defects of the partisans of the Magical View - their identifying the essential function of poetry with the enunciation of this View - we can freely stress the insufficiency of the so-called scientific. Accepting the absolute of beauty, with which poetic masterpieces appear to be charged, as the contact their form gives of an archetypal Loveliness living and rejoicing within, behind, above the world and pressing for manifestation everywhere, we may affirm that the Magical View, with such a Loveliness as its peak-vision of reality, is automatically accepted the moment we appreciate poetry. For the very act of appreciation implies that we have secretly thrilled to that Loveliness through poetic form though poetic content may be secular or even materialistic and atheistic. Therefore, a scientist saying he appreciates poetry despite the Magical View being disproved is a curious spectacle. Equally curious is the spectacle of materialistic and atheistic poetry: it gives us the sense of a divine denial of divinity! The fundamental paradox of poetry is that however much it may voice Richardsian science its power of form is itself an indirect proof that the Magical View is valid and that the Godhead and the supra-terrestrial planes of Spirits are no fiction.

Page 16