Defence of Poetry 2000: Evgeny Rein

January 18, 2006 For lack of a generally accepted definition of poetry, we can agree at least on this, that poetry parallels the Universe, or rather is a reflection of the Universe in human consciousness. So it was in prehistoric times, confining itself originally to the creation of myths. And together with myths, it embarked on a lengthy journey, the same as was undertaken by human thought as such, reflecting and focusing Space and Time.

Individual consciousness, whatever stage it may have reached, directly or indirectly stems from the attempt to define one’s place in the universal scheme of things. Some basic questions follow: Who am I? What is my purpose? As time passes and the further we advance, the more elaborate become these questions. Empirical experience alone is not sufficient to answer them. Something more than this is necessary. And we know that that Something does exist.

This attribute of human consciousness is usually called fantasy, imagination, which is precisely what lies at the root of poetry.

At no historical point does spontaneous experience, as registered by sight and hearing, touch and smell, suffice. Just as he did a thousand years ago, Man today needs a general picture, in its temporal and spatial dimensions. And if a mind, a personage, a destiny, in a word, a poet appears, capable not only of answering these questions, but also of producing a solution to them in terms of images, then that is how an answer, quite different to the empirical one, is formulated.

The Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid – and not only these, but the Babylonian epics and many others as well – constitute an authentic cosmogony, a response to the possibly unacknowledged feeling of each human spirit that must be accounted for in the non-accidental and exceptional nature of the personal life.

Not for nothing did Odysseus return to his native Ithaca ‘full of space and time’ – in the words of the brilliant Russian poet Osip Mandelstam.

Since one cannot be all-inclusive, extending our inquiry southward and eastward, we shall limit ourselves to pre-European and Western Classical treatments of our subject.

As we know, Odysseus’s journey embraced not only the Mediterranean, but also Erebos, the Kingdom of Hades. In Book XI of the Odyssey, the King of Ithaca descends into the realm of death. He converses with Agamemnon and Achilles. He listens to their grievous tales. And Achilles answers him, as if predicting for many centuries to come the basic poetic themes of grief and horror. ‘I would rather be the last tenant farmer on earth, than monarch in this realm of shadows.’

A closer look will show that already in the Hebrew myths, in the Homeric poems, the foundation has been laid for a bipolar model of the world, which includes Elysium and Hades – two forms of the eternal life, to which man is condemned after his earthly and consequently provisional existence. But even on Olympus not only are there gods, but there are heroes too, for example Heracles, who was granted immortality. As regards the kingdom of the dead, though, it should also be observed that in ancient times its locks were not yet so strong nor its gates so impregnable as they were to become.

According to the Homeric notion, in the future life souls lose their capacity for thought and their memory, and it is only a mortal visitor who can resurrect them through blood sacrifice. There is a certain symbolic significance in this, in that it is poetry itself that makes the dead speak.

After the first few centuries of Christian civilization, poetry once again recreates the world in its true dimensions, including humanity’s moments on earth. But by now it is a different world. Hell and paradise are already perfectly graspable concepts, insofar as they can be defined and described verbally. Somewhere within these confines is to be found the realm of poetry.

However, Dante’s contemporaries were convinced that he had indeed visited hell, purgatory and paradise. Lutum non omnia finit – not everything ends with death – as the ancient Romans put it. The great majority of mythologies and religions agree on this point. But what really succeeds human life? It is hardly surprising that such conjectures produce similar results in every part of the world, from the islands of Oceania to Hyperborea. Their coordinates are not only horizontal – legends, cosmogonies, religions are derived from the same model. Posthumous life is generally conceived of as bipolar – darkness and light, suffering and blissfulness, recompense and punishment.

Why did humanity stop at this idea, this formula? What is its significance? Perspicacity that goes beyond personal experience, or imagination, with which we are invested by the supreme power, the power which in fact has created all that exists. What is undeniable is that while this knowledge was bestowed upon humanity, its proof was not disclosed. However deeply we penetrate into time, however many theologies and mythologies we apply, over and over again we encounter differently elaborated versions of the same thing. Any variation is possible. Paradise moved from Asia Minor to the heavenly spheres. Hell was to move from Jerusalem’s Gehenna into the bowels of the earth, re-emerging on the surface via volcanic craters. One needs only consult the encyclopedias and dictionaries to come up with a list. But now we are faced by a different task: to understand how mythologies and theologies merge, how a bipolar model becomes applicable in thousands of poetic works, either wholly or in certain specific respects.

In any case, Dante’s Divine Comedy is indispensable. In some geometrical utopias, parallel lines do converge. Similarly, there is a point of intersection and reference in the present instance, this of course being the great Florentine’s masterpiece.

To begin with an incontrovertible proposition: that material existence, in all its forms – having to do with power, politics, religion, history and so forth, including the minutiae of everyday life – is the basis of poetry. In the millennial perspective, the events described by Dante are already close to us; we are separated from them by a mere seven or eight centuries. We already recognize those medieval Italian cities, the names of the popes, aristocrats, kings, inhabitants of fortresses and palaces. The Christian tradition, too, which preceded contemporary views of the Catholic Church is familiar to us. This poet of unparalleled fantasy, of incomparable talent, who established an individual identity for each one of the hundreds of characters in the Comedy, cleaves to the same model – hell and paradise (including purgatory, inevitable for Catholicism). He appointed Virgil as his guide, Beatrice as his heavenly protector. But it was as if the plan of action was dictated to him from above. And this is not by chance.

The fact is that no other possibility exists for the absolute expression of reality. At least in Greco-Christian culture. Whether this be a matter for conjecture or conviction, the idea of hell and paradise is no human invention, not pragmatic, but rather ontological. It is a consequence of conceiving of life as the creation of the supreme power, which bestowed free will and freedom of choice on humankind. In this sense, Hell and Paradise are a reflection of good and evil, the two poles between which all material existence is located. The poet’s task – his images, theme – may be arbitrary, but the foundation on which all this is based was established beforehand.

‘The unified scheme of Dante’s Comedia is itself the product of a lofty genius’, said Pushkin. We agree, but would add that Dante’s merits are not limited by this scheme. He placed Hell, Purgatory, Paradise within each of his characters. The unprecedented power of his fantasy, his verbal art was revealed constantly in the course of the Comedia. It united the material and the symbolic, the author’s political predilections and his secret theology. Strictly speaking, even today Dante’s terza rimas represent a summit of poetic art. Examples may be cited at random. For instance, Canto 28 of the Inferno:

I saw it, I’m sure, and I seem to see it still:
    A body with no head that moved along,
    moving no differently from all the rest;

he held his severed head up by it hair,
    swinging it in one hand just like a lantern,
    and as it looked at us it said: ‘Alas!’

Of his own self he made himself a light
    and they were two in one and one in two.
    How could this be? He who ordained it knows.

This is how Bertran de Born, condemned to suffer torture, speaks of himself. I doubt very much whether poetry in the last seven centuries has progressed beyond such verses.

The more closely Dante adhered to his imperishable model, the greater his poetic freedom and virtuosity. Such a poet is also the instrument of the divine will. He can situate hell and paradise wherever he wishes. Raise them to the heavens or bury them in the bowels of the earth. It is all a matter of the imagination, especially as regards individual scenes, details, touches. Of course, the age dictates the subject: the struggle between the Guelfs and Ghibellines, between popes and kings, Protestants and Orthodox. But instinct tells each poet that it is impossible and unnecessary to avoid a decision already taken by the supreme intelligence.

The vast edifice of Dante’s Comedy is like a single colossal crystal, based on the multifold extension and reiteration of a particular unit – the three-line terza rima. Hence the three-part structure. Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, each section of the triad comprising thirty-three cantos. The reader who manages to find his way through these territories, will have experienced everything created by fantasy, the spirit, the intellect, fused into poetry. He will realize that all of it springs from a single seed – theologically speaking, Christian dogma.

Consider how often poetry has been productive in the spiritual domain of hell and paradise. How often the works of heaven and hell became indispensable instruments for poets. There are thousands of examples. Everybody knows them. It is far more important to try to understand the reason for this affinity. Has it to do with the nature of poetry itself? Perhaps these connections are similar to the relationship between the trunk of a tree and its leaves – the sap or life force flowing through the trunk nourishes the crown.

The times and conditions of human life change. But the idea itself remains unchanged. It embraces poetry, telling it what its objectives and limitations are. Even when it has been set the most grandiose task, poetry stays within a shell, which has already determined the fate of human existence from the point of view of Eternity. The poet’s task is to define and describe in detail and to corroborate the idea itself – which is primary and fixed.

This was perhaps most fully demonstrated in Milton’s poetry, since his theme is no less than the historiography of hell and paradise. Both Dante and Milton were products of their time. Both sat in judgment over political events. Dante is the child of medieval Christian scholasticism, Milton of the Reformation and its bloody outcome in the English revolution.

Poetically they understood their tasks quite differently. Dante was heir to the Hellenic and Latin world, Milton a creator of new paths, of reformed Christian theology. Both Dante’s Comedy and Milton’s great poem are endlessly diverse and complex, both are self-sufficient poetic works. But they are based on the same foundation, which their genial originators considered it out of place to question. Because the more solid these foundations, the greater the freedom guaranteed to poetic creativity. The world has already been created by a higher will, the task of the poet being to describe it, to populate it, to pass judgment upon it.

I do not doubt for a moment that for Dante and Milton and many others not mentioned here, this was not relative, not a pragmatic assumption. Hell and paradise were a projection of the Supreme Intelligence, which was a more certain, more patent reality than everyday existence. It is precisely for this reason that their poetry had solid foundations to base itself upon with as great a hope and certainty as their contemporaries entertained of a future eternal life.

Narrating the story of the revolt of Saturn and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise, Milton was answering the questions that arose in any theological system, questions about the omnipotence and all embracing benevolence of the divinity. Three centuries separated Dante and Milton, a powerful papacy gave way to the Reformation, and in the conversation of Heaven and Earth the emphases changed. The most essential question was that of free will. And towards the end of his epic poem Milton answers through the mouth of the Archangel Michael.

        To whom thus Michael. Justly thou abhorr’st
        That Son, who on the quiet state of men
        Such trouble brought, affecting to subdue
        Rational Liberty; yet know withal,
        Since thy original lapse, true Liberty
        Is lost, which always with right Reason dwells
        Twinn’d, and from her hath no dividual being 

Was poetry ever tied to history and its dramatic unfolding? No doubt it was. Divided into genres, oscillating between epic, lyric, satire, it always reflected historical events. Events embodied in the word, took place in human society and in the poet’s soul. But they were always drawn from the depths of poetic consciousness and however deeply this conscience was immersed in itself, whatever it invented, whatever topic of the day it concerned itself with, however much it busied itself with contemporary aesthetic tasks, it always came up against the same fundamental idea.

This idea could be both unitary and all-embracing, as with Dante and Milton; it could be broken up into countless fragments; it could create new characters, as with Goethe, Byron, Lermontov; it could be reduced to the atomic state and reveal itself in the poet’s subconscious, this being most characteristic of our modern literature.

Ages pass, but what remains is the primary image of a single tree with foliage permanently renewing itself. Sometimes it seems that social utopias, concrete events transform poetry. But a closer examination shows that they only provide it with new material, increasing the number of facts, and setting poets new questions. As for the answers, the poet has always to delve as deeply into himself.

Positivism may have somewhat altered this situation. After all, weren’t objective masterpieces such as Byron’s Don Juan, Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin, the poetry of José-Maria de Hérédia and Leconte de Lille produced? This is a rhetorical question. No doubt reality was here recreated with the greatest degree of verisimilitude – not for nothing did Pushkin call Eugene Onegin ‘a novel in verse’. It would be foolish to isolate these great works of art from world poetry. But that they are all products of their time, a tribute to the establishment of realism as a literary method is surely relevant. The poet hides behind the stage, upon which the self-contained action takes place.

Byron’s and Pushkin’s poetic narratives and a number of other nineteenth-century works were essential stages in the evolution of literature.

Rationalism did not abolish hell and paradise, but rather personified them. The action shifted to the territory of the real: the man of thought became the hero, to a certain degree the poet’s alter ego. And it was no longer Satan but a devil of a lesser order who chose to be his companion. Incidentally, Goethe himself in Faust hinted that Mephistopheles was no more than the embodiment of irony and the skepticism of rebellious human thought.

    I am the spirit of perpetual negation:
    And rightly so, for all things that exist
    Deserve to perish, and would not be missed –
    Much better it would be if nothing were
    Brought into being. Thus, what you men call
    Destruction, sin, evil in short, is all
    My sphere, the element I most prefer.

    (translated by David Luke, 1987)

But these works were not the final stage. Perhaps drama and prose gave audience and readers a more complete or (to be precise) more facile conception of reality. In the final analysis, poetry’s course was unchanged, although the flow, endlessly changeable, transformed itself.

And now to return to our theme. It is precisely the path that poetry followed from the second half of the last century (now already the century before the last) which brings us back to its first and deepest roots. I have in mind the arrival on the scene of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé and Rimbaud, in whose poetry the subjective, vague, ambivalent predominate. The fantasy, exoticism and symbolism of Rimbaud’s Le Bateau Ivre (the Drunken Boat) returns us to the struggle of hell and paradise in all its possible manifestations. Looking beyond the literal significance of the characters that appear among his visions, whom is the poet addressing?

    I have dreamed of the green night of the dazzled snows,
    the kiss rising slowly to the eyes of the seas,
        the circulation of undreamed-of saps, and the yellow-blue
        awakening of singing phosphorus!

    I have followed, for whole months on end, the swells
    battering the reefs like hysterical herds of cows, –
    never dreaming that the luminous feet of the Marys could
    muzzle by force the snorting Oceans!

(plain prose translation by Oliver Bernard, 1962)

    (J’ai revé la nuit verte aux neiges éblouies,
    Baiser montant aux yeux des mers avec lenteurs,
    La circulation des sèves inouïes,
    Et l’éveil jaune et bleu des phosphores chanteurs!

    J’ai suivi, des mois pleins, pareille aux vacheries
    Hystériques, la houle à l’assaut des récifs,
    Sans songer que les pieds lumineux des Maries
    Pussent forcer le mufle aux Océans poussifs!)

This use of language, the multi-layered imagery, symbolism immerse us once again in the poet’s consciousness. We encounter again the principle to which poetry has adhered from the outset.

Neither distance from, nor closeness to our time enables us to appreciate absolutely the meaning of this theme. Except in the cases of Dante and Milton who address it directly. But it is embodied in hundreds or even thousands of works; it is the subsoil or even the chief instigator of poetry.

Let me turn now to contemporary Russian poetry. As soon as this poetry finds itself having to make moral judgments, we perceive the colouring, often of a hellish hue, by which it is identified with the catastrophic circumstances of modern Russian history. Take Anna Akhmatova’s ‘Requiem’. Political terror, torture and execution, the anguish of a mother who has lost her son – these fragments comprise a picture of what we may justly call hell-on-earth.

Behind the verbal design, the lyrical subject, one discerns more or less clearly the myth concerning the destiny of the human spirit. It may be personified in the angelic or in the satanic; it may appear before us in a variety of shapes as fragments of visions, conditions, or memories. But, in any case, what possesses the poet is a mythological and religious awareness of the eternal bipolarity of hell and paradise, of responsibility for his choice.

Genres and literary methods change. Open contact with the readers is replacing hermeticism, which is on the way out, while neo-classicism is making a come-back. But poetry, as mythology, as religion, is still trying to answer the eternal questions. Only it is doing so within the bounds of a single individual’s experience, this individual being the poet.

We have restricted ourself here to a limited number of quotations and cases, because often these simply repeat one another. A summation is what is needed. I should have preferred to formulate it as follows: Poetry, as we understand it, and the extra-pragmatic world idea spring from a single source – human self-knowledge. In this sense they have developed along parallel lines and frequently complement one another. If I had to chose a single example, insofar as in poetry there is nothing more substantial than the author’s intuition, it would be that of the great Russian poet Alexander Blok, who, in his poem ‘Retribution’, summarized his experience as follows:

    Life is without beginning or ending,
    And chance lies in wait for all of us.
    Above is the inevitable twilight
    Or the brightness of God’s Countenance.
    But you, artist, believe firmly
    In beginnings and endings. You must know
    That hell and paradise lie in wait.
    Yours is the gift of dispassionately
    Measuring everything you see.

(literal translation by D. Weissbort and V. Polukhina)