Paz's Children of the Mire

3 Children of the MireAt least half of the history of modern poetry is the story of thefascination poets have felt toward systems fashioned by criticalreason. "Fascina te" in this context means bewitch, mesmerize-and deceive. As in the case of the German Romantics, repul-sion inevitably followed attraction. This group is usuallyconsidered Catholic and monarchic, and hostile to the FrenchRevolution. Nevertheless, initially most of them felt enthusiasmand syrnpathy for the revolutionary movement. Indeed, theirconversion to Catholicism and to monarchic absolutism was asmuch the consequence of the ambiguity of Romanticism-always torn between two extremes-as of the nature of thehistorical dilemma faced by this generation. The French Revo-lution had two aspects: as a revolutionary movement it offeredEuropean nations a universal vision of man and a new concep-tion of society and of the State; as a national movement itstrengthened French expansionism outside the country, and,within, the policy of centralization begun by Richelieu. Thewars against the Consulate and the Empire were simultaneouslywars of nationalliberation and wars in defense of monarchicabsolutismo For example, the Spanish liberals who collaborated

38 Children of the Mire

with the French were loyal to their political ideas but disloyalto their country, whereas other Spaniards had to resign them-selves to combining the cause of Spanish independence withthat of the wretched Ferdinand VII and the Church.Apart from political circumstances, the attitude of the Ger-

man Romantics was far from conservative. Holderlin comes tomind (though, like Blake, he is not strictly Romantic, and forthe same reasons: chronologically both slightly antedateRomanticism and extend past it, to reach us today). In the daysof the FirstCoalition against the French Republic (June 1792),he wrote to his sister: "Pray that the revolutionaries defeatthe Austrians, for otherwise the princes wl1 abuse their powerdreadfully. Believe me and pray for the French who are thedefenders of the righ ts of man." A little later, in 1797, hewrote an ode to Bonaparte-to the liberator of Italy, not to thegeneral who was to turn, he charged scornfully in anotherletter, into "a sort of dictator." The theme of Holderlin'snovel Hyperion is dual: love for Diotima is inseparable fromthe establishment of a community of free men. The point ofunion between love of Diotima and love of freedom is poetry.Hyperiori's struggle for his country's freedom is also his strug-gle to found a free society, and the establishment of thisidyllic community implies a return to Ancient Greece. Poetryand history, language and community, poetry as frontierbetween divine and human speech-these oppositions becamethe central themes of modern poetry.The dream of a free and egalitarian community, inherited

from Rousseau, reappears among the early German Romantics,

1

J


again linked with love, but more violently and sharply. Theysaw love as transgression of social bond s, and exalted womannot as erotic object but as erotic subject too. Novalis spokeof poetic communism, envisioning a society in which both theconsumption and production of poetry would be a collectiveacto In Lucinda (1799), Frederick Schlegel made an apology forfree love. His novel may seem naive today, but Novalis wantedto give it the subtitle, Cynical or Diabolic Fantasies. Thisphrase anticipated one of the most powerful and persistentcurrents of modern literature: the taste for sacrilege andblasphemy, the strange and the grotesque, the marriage of thecommonplace and the supernatural, in short, the love of irony,that great invention of the Romantics. It is precisely irony,in Schlegel's sense of the word-Iove for the contradictionwhich lives in each of us, and awareness of this contradiction-that nourishes and destroys German Romanticism. This wasthe first and most daring of the poetic revolutions, the first toexplore the underground regions of the dream, unconsciousthought, and eroticism. It was also the first to turn nostalgia forthe past into an aesthetic and a political programoThe English Romantics provide a similar example. While

students at Cambridge, Southey and Coleridge conceived theidea of Pantisocracy as a free, egalitarian, communistic societywhich was to combine the "innocence of the patriarchal epoch"with the "refinements of modern Europe." The revolutionarytheme of libertarian communism and the religious themeof the restoration of original innocence were thus interwoven.Coleridge and Southey decided to leave for America to foundtheir pantisocratic society on the new continent, but the former


changed his mind when he found out that Southey wanted totake a servant with him! Many years later Southey was visited inhis Lake District retreat by the young Shelley and his firstwife, Harriet. The old ex-Republican poet found his youngadmirer, "exactly as I was in 1794"; yet, writing of this visit tohis friend Elizabeth Hitchener (January 7, 1812), Shelley says"Southey is aman corrupted by the world, contaminated bycustom."Wordsworth first visited France in 1790. Ayear later, when he

was twenty-one years old and just down from Cambridge, hisenthusiasm for the Republic took him back to France, where hespent two years, first in Paris and then in Orlans. He was aGirondin sympathizer. This fact, together with his revulsion atthe revolutionary terror, explains his dislike of the J acobins,whom he called the "tribe of Moloch." As many twen tieth-century writers would do with the struggles of the RussianRevolution, Wordsworth took the side of one of the factionstrying to take control of the French Revolution: the losing side.In his autobiographical poem The Prelude-with that hyperbolicstyle filled with capitalletters which makes this great poetalso one of the most pompous of his century-he describes one ofthe happiest moments of his life. It was a day in a town on thecoast where "all that I saw or felt/Was gentleness and peace,"and he heard a traveler recently landed from France say:"Robespierre is dead." He feels no less antipathy for Bonaparte,and in the same poem tells how, when he learned that the Popehad crowned Napoleon Emperor, he felt it was "This lastopprobrium, when we see a people / ... take a lesson from thedog / Returning to his vomit."


Faced with the disasters of history and the "degradation ofthe era," Wordsworth returns to childhood and its moments oftranslucency. Time splits in half, so that, rather than lookingat reality, we look through it. What Wordsworth sees, as perhapsno one before or after him has seen, is not a fantastic world,but reality as it is: the tree, the stone, the stream, each firm,resting on its own reality in a sort of immobility which does notnegate movement. These blocks of living time, spaces flowingslowly before the mind's eye, are a vision of the other time,a time different from the time of history with its kings andnations under arms, its revolutionary councils and its blood-thirsty priests, its guillotines and gallows. The time of child-hood is the time of imagination, that facuJty called byWordsworth the "soul of nature," to signify that it is a powerbeyond the humano Imagination does not reside in man; ratherit is the spirit of the place and of the moment. It is not onlythe power that allows us to see both the visible and the hiddenaspects of reality, but also the means whereby Nature looksat herself through the poet's eyes. Through imagination Naturespeaks to us and to herself.The vicissitudes of Wordsworth's political passion can be

explained in terms of his private life. His years of en thusiasmfor the Revolution can be said to be those of his love forAnnette (Arme Marie Vallon), a French girl whom he abandonedas soon as he started to change his political opinions. The yearsof his growing hostility for revolutionary movements coincidewith his decision to leave the world and live in the countrywith his wife and sister Dorothy. But this simplistic explanationdiminishes us, not Wordsworth. There is another explanation,


an intellectual and historical one that has to do with Words-worth's poltical affinity for the Girondins, his repugnancetoward the esprit de sy strne of the J acobins, the moral andphilosophical convictions which led him to carry his Protestantdisapproval of papist universalism to revolutionary universalismand his Englishman's reaction to Napoleori's attempted invasion.This explanation combines the liberal's antipathy for revolu-tionary despotism with the patriot's antagonism toward thehegemonic pretensions of a foreign power, and, with reserva-tions, can be applied also to the German Romantics. To considerthe conflict between the early Romantics and the FrenchRevolution as an episode in the c1ash between authoritarianismand freedom is not totally false, nor is it completely true.No, there is another explanation. The phenomenon is seen

time and again in different historical circumstances, throughoutthe nineteenth century and afterward, with more intensity,down to the present. It is hardly necessary to cite the experi-ences of Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Mandelstam, and so manyother Russian poets, artists, and writers; the polemics of theSurrealists with the Third International; the bitterness of CsarVallejo, torn between loyalty to poetry and loyalty to theCommunist Party; the quarrels about "socialist realism" and-but why go on? Modern poetry has been and is a revolutionarypassion, but this passion has been an unhappy one. There hasbeen attraction and rejection; and it is not the philosophers but ~the revolutionaries who have banished the poets from theirrepublic. The reason for rejection is the same as for attraction:both revolu tion and poetry attempt to destroy the present,the time of history which is that of inequality, and to restore


the other time. But poetry's time is not that of revolution, thedated time of critical reason, the future of the Utopias; it isthe time before time, the time of la vie antrieure whichreappears in the ch!ld 's timeless glance.

Poetry's ambiguity toward critical reason and its historicalincarnations, the revolutionary movements, is one side of thecoin; the other side is its ambiguity toward Christianity.Again, attraction and rejection. Almost all the great Romantics,heirs of Rousseau and eighteenth-century deism, were religion-oriented, but what were the actual beliefs of Holderlin, Blake,Coleridge, Hugo, Nerval? One might ask the same questionof those who openly declared themselves irreligious. Shelley'satheism is a religious passion. In 1810, in a letter to ThomasHogg he writes: "O! I burn with impatience for the moment ofChristianity's dissolution; it has injured me ... 1will stab thewretch in secret." This is odd language for an atheist and fore-shadows the Nietzsche of later years. Rejection of religionand love for religion: each poet invents his own mythology, andeach mythology is a mixture of different beliefs, rediscoveredmyths, and personal obsessions. Holderlin's Christ is a sun god,and in that enigmatic poem called "The Only One," Jesusturns into the brother of Hercules and of that Dionysus who"yoked his chariot to a team of tigers and went down to theIndus." The Virgin of the poems of Novalis is the mother ofChrist and the pre-Christian Night, his fiance Sophie, andDeath. Nerval's Aurelia is Isis, Pandora, and the actress JennyColon, his unhappy love. The religions and loves of the Roman-tics are heresies, syncretisms, apostasies, blasphemies, conver-


sions. Romantic ambiguity has two modes, in the musicalmeaning of the word: irony, which in trod uces the nega tion ofsubjectivity into the realm of objectivity; and anguish, whichdrops a hint of nothingness into the fullness of being. Ironyreveals the duality of what seemed whole, the split in what sidentical, the other side of reason; it is the disruption of theprincipIe of identity. Anguish shows that existence is empty,that life is death, that heaven is a desert; it is the fracturingof religion.The death of God is a Romantic theme. It is not philosophical

but religious: as far as reason is concerned, God either existsor does not exist. If He exists, He cannot die; if not, how cansomeone who has never existed die? But this reasoning isonly valid from the point of view of monotheism and therectilinear and irreversible time of the West. The ancients knewthat the gods were mortal; they were manifestations of cyclicaltime and as such would come to life again and die again. Upand down the Mediterranean coastline sailors heard a voiceat night saying "Pan is dead," and this voice announcing thegod's death also announced his resurrection. The Nahuatllegendtells us that QuetzaJcoatl abandons Tula; immolates himself;becomes the double planet, Morning and Evening Star; and willone day return to claim his heritage. But Christ carne to earthonly once, for each event in the sacred history of Christianity isunique and will not be repeated. If someone says "God is dead,"he is announcing an unrepeatable fact: God is dead forever.Within the concept of time as a linear and irreversible progres-sion, the death of God is unthinkable, for the death of Godopens the gates of contingency and unreason. There is a double


reply to this: irony, humor, intellectual paradox; and also thepoetic paradox, the image. Both appear in all the Romantics.The predilection for the grotesque, the horrible, the strange, thesublime, and the bizarre; the aesthetic of contrasts; the pactbetween laughter and tears, prose and poetry, agnosticism andfaith; the sudden changes of mood, the antics-everything thatturns each Romantic poet into an lcarus, a Satan, and a clown isessentially anguish and irony. Although the source of each ofthese attitudes is religious, it is a strange and contradictory sortof religion since it consists of the awareness that religion ishollow. Romantic religiosity is irreligious, ironic; Romanticirreligion is religious, anguished.The theme of the death of God, in this religious/irreligious

sense, appears for the first time, 1 think, in lean Paul Richter. Inthis great precursor are merged all the trends and currents whichwill unfold in nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry- andnovel-writing-oneirism, humor, anguish, the mingling ofgenres, fantastic literature allied with realism and realism joinedto philosophical speculation. lean Paul's Dream is a dream ofthe death of God; its complete title is Speech of Christ, fromthe Universe, That There Is No God (1796). In an earlier versionof the work, significantly, it is not Christ but Shakespearewho announces the news. For the Romantics, Shakespeare wasthe poet by antonomasia, as Virgil had been for the MiddleAges. Thus, when lean Paullets the announcement come fromthe mouth of the English poet, he forecasts what all theRomantics will say later: poets are clairvoyants and prophetsthrough whom the spirit speaks. The poet replaces the priest,and poetry becomes a revelation rivaling the Scripture.s. The


de~i~itive version of lean Paul's Dream underscores the deeply~eIIglOUScharacter of this essential text, and, at the same time,its completely blasphemous nature. It is not a philosopheror a poet, but Christ himself, the son of God, who affirms thatGod does not existo And the place where this is made knownis a church in a cemetery. The time may be midnight, but howcan one know for sure, since the face of the clock has neithernumbers nor hands, and on its empty surface a black handtirelessly traces signs which disappear at once and which thedead try in vain to decipher. Descending into the midst of theclamoring shades, Christ says: "1 have explored the worlds,flown up to the suns, and 1have found no God. 1 ha ve be en tothe extreme limits of the universe, 1 have looked into the abyssand shouted 'Father, where are you?' but 1heard only therain falling into the depths and the everlasting tempest which noorder governs." Dead children crowd around Christ and ask"Jesus, have we no Father?" He replies, "We are all orphan;."Two themes are intertwined in the Dream: the death of the

Christian God, the universal Father and Creator of the world:and the absence of adivine or natural order regulating the 'movement of the universe. The second theme directly contra-dicts the ideas spread by the new philosophy among the cult-vated spirits of the time. Enlightenment philosophers hadattacked Christianity and its God made man, but the deists aswell as the materialists postulated the existence of a universalorder. With few exceptions the eighteenth century believedin a cosmos ruled by laws which did not differ essentially fromthose of reason. An intelligent necessity, divine or natural,moved the world. The universe was a rational mechanism.


Jean Paul's vision manifests the exact opposite: disorder,incoherence. The universe is not a mechanism but a vast form-lessness agitated in a way which without exaggeration can becalled passionate. That rain which is falling from the verybeginning into the endless abyss, and that everlasting storm ona landscape in convulsion are the very image of con tingency.In this lawless universe, this world cast adrift, this grotesquevision of the cosmos, "eternity les heavy upon chaos and whenit consumes it, eternity is itself consumed." We have beforeus the "fallen Nature" of the Christians, but the relationbetween God and the world is inverted. lt is not the worldfallen from God's hand that casts itself into nothingness, butGod himself who falls into the pit of death. This is an enormousblasphemy.iat once irony and anguish. Philosophy had conceiveda world moved not by a creator but by an intelligent order; forJean Paul contingency is a consequence of the death of God.The universe is chaos because it has no creator. Jean Paul'satheism is religious and clashes with the atheism of the philoso-phers, for he replaces the image of the world as a mechanismwith that of a convulsive world, endlessly in death throes yetnever dying. In the existential sphere universal contingency iscalled orphanhood. And the first orphan, the Great Orphan, isnone other than Christ. Dream scandalizes the philosopher aswell as the priest, the atheist as well as the believer.Jean Paul's dream was dreamed, thought, and suffered by

many poets, philosophers, and novelists of the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries: Nietzsche, Dostoevski, Mallarm, Joyce,Valry. It was known in France thanks to Madame de Stael'sbook On Germany (1814). There is a poem by Nerval, com-


posed of five sonnets and entitled "Christ on the Mount ofOlives" (1844), which is an adaptation of the Dream. J eanPaul's text is convulsive, abrupt, and exaggerated. The Frenchpoet does away with the confessional, psychological element.His is the account, not of a dream, but of a myth; not thenightmare of a poet in a cemetery church, but Christ's mono-logue before his sleeping disciples. A magnificent line, "le dieumanque a l'autel o je suis la victime " (There is no God at thealtar on which 1 am the victim), in the first sonnet broachesa theme not found in lean Paul and which the following son-nets bring to a climax in the very last line of all. It is the themeof the eternal return, which will reappear with unparalleledintensity and lucidity in Nietzsche, again associated with thetheme of the death of God. In Nerval's poem, Christ's sacrificein this godless world converts him into a new god-exceptthat he be comes a divinity who has little in common with theChristian God. Nerval's Christ is an Icarus, a Phathon , abeautiful, wounded Attis whom Cybele brings back to life.The earth becomes intoxicated with this precious blood,Olympus collapses into the abyss, and Caesar asks the oracleof Jupiter Ammon, "Who is this new god?" The oracle issilent, for the only one who can explain this mystery to theworld is "Celui qui donna l'rne aux enfants du limen" (Hewho breathed a soul into the children of the mire). This mysteryis insoluble, for He who breathes a soul into the Adam of mudis the Father, the Creator, that very God who is absent fromthe altar where Christ is the victim. A century and a half laterFernando Pessoa faces the same enigma and his answer issomewhat similar to Nerval's. There is no God but there are


gods, and time is circular: "Dios es un hombre de otro Dios msgrande; / Tambin tuvo cada, Adn supremo; / Tambin,aunque criador, l fue criatura" (God is aman to another,greater God, and .this greatest Adam also fell; Though thecreator, he was a creature).The poetic consciousness of the West has accepted the death

of God as though it were a myth; or rather, this death trulyhas been a myth, not merely an episode in the history of oursociety's religious ideas. The theme of universal orphanhood, assymbolized in Christ, the great orphan and elder brother ofthe orphan children who are all mankind, expresses a psychicexperience recalling the path of negation of the mystics. It isthat "dark night" in which we feel ourselves adrift, abandonedin a hostile or indifferent world, guilty without guilt, andinnocent without innocence. However, there is an essentialdifference: it is a night without an end, Christianity withoutGod. At the same time, the death of God awakens in the poeticimagination a sense of mythic storytelling, and a strange cos-mogony is created in which each god is the creature, the Adam,of another godo It is the return to cyclical time, the transmuta-tion of a Christian theme into a pagan myth. An incompletepaganism, a Christian paganism permeated with anguish for thefalI into contingency.These two experiences-Christianity without God, and

Christian paganism-have been basic elements of Western poetryand literature since the Romantic era. In both we face a doubletransgression. The death of God converts the atheism of thephilosophers into a religious experience and a myth; in turn thisexperience denies its very origin: the myth is empty, a play of


reflections on the lonely consciousness of the poet, for there isno one on the altar, not even Christ the victim. Anguish andirony: faced with the future time of critical reason and revolu-tion, poetry affirms the nonsequential time of sensibility andimagination, original time. In the face of Christian eternity,it affirms the death of God, the fall into con tingency, and theplurality of gods and myths. But each of these negationsturns against itself: the time of the imagination is not a mythicbut a revolutionary time; the death of God is not a philosophicbut a religious theme, a myth. Romantic poetry is revolution-ary, not with but against the revolutions of the century; and itsreligion is a transgression of religion.

In the Middle Ages poetry was the handmaiden of religion;in the Romantic era it was the true religion, the fountainheadof the Holy Scriptures. Rousseau and Herder had shown thatlanguage answered man 's emotional rather than spiritual needs;not hunger but love, fear, or wonder mde us speak. Humanity'sfirst credos were poems. Whether we are dealing with magicspells, litanies, myths, or prayers, the poetic imagination is therefrom the start. Without poetic imagination there would be nornyths or Holy Scriptures; at the sarne time, and also from thebeginning, religion confiscates the products of poetic imagina-tion for her own ends. The charm of myths does not lie intheir religious nature-these beliefs are not ours-but from thefact that in them poetic storytelling transfigures the worldand reality. One of the cardinal functions of poetry is to showthe other side, the wonders of everyday life: not poetic irrealitybut the prodigious reality of the world. Religion takes over


these visions, transforms works of imagination into beliefs, andbeliefs into systems. But even then the poet gives perceptibleform to religious ideas, transmutes them into images, and ani-mates them: cosmogonies and genealogies are poems, HolyScriptures are written by poets. lndeed, the poet is the geog-rapher and the historian of heaven and he 11: Dante describes thegeography and the inhabitants of the other world; Milton tellsus the true story of the Fall.The critique of religion undertaken by eighteenth-century

philosophy shattered Christianity as the basis of society. Thefragmentation of eternity into historical time made it possiblefor poetry to conceive of itself as the real foundation of society.Poetry was believed to be the true religion and knowledge.Bibles, Gospels, and Korans had been denounced by the philoso-phers as bundles of old wives' tales and fantasies. At the sametime, even materialists recognized that these tales possesseda poetic truth. In their search for a foundation predatingrevealed or natural religion, poets found allies among thephilosophers. Kant's influence was decisive in the second phaseof Coleridge's thought. The German philosopher had shownthat between the sense data and the understanding, the particu-lar and the universal, the "productive imagination" acted asintermediary. Through it the subject transcends himself:imagination projects and presents the objects of the sense datato the understanding. Imagination is the condition of knowl-edge: without it there could be no link between perceptionand judgment. For Coleridge the imagination is not only thenecessary condition for all knowledge, it is also the facultywhich converts ideas into symbols and symbols into presences.


Imagination is "a form of Being": no longer just knowledgebut wisdom. Coleridge believed there was no difference betweenpoetic imagination and religious revelation, except that thelatter is historie and changing, whereas poets (insofar as they arepoets, and whatever their beliefs may be) are not "the slavesof any sectarian opinion." He also said that religion was the"poetry of mankind." Years before, Novalis had written that"Religion is practical poetry" and poetry was the "first reli-gion of humanity." There are many such quotations, aIlwith the same meaning: Romantic poets were the first to affirmthe historical and spiritual priority of poetry over officialreligion and philosophy. For them the poetic word is thefounding word. In this bold affirmation lies the root of theheterodoxy of modern poetry in the face of religions andideologies alike.In the figure of William Blake are concentrated a11the con-

tradictions of the first generation of Romantics; they explodein an affirmation transcending Romanticism. Was Blake really aRomantic? Nature worship, one of the traits of Romanticpoetry, does not appear in his work. He considered the worldof imagination eternal, the world of generation finite andtemporal. The first was mental, the other was a "vegetableglass" distorting our vision. These ideas seem to link him withthe Gnostics, but his love for the body and his exaltation oferotic desire and pleasure ("sooner murder an infant in itscradle than nurse unacted desires") set him in opposition to theNeoplatonic tradition. Was he a Christian? His is not theChristians' Christ, but anude Titan bathed in the radiant seaof erotic energy, a demiurge for whom irnagining and doing,


desire and satisfaction are one and the same. His Christ remindsus of Satan; his huge body, like a gigantic cloud lit by lightning,is covered with the flaming letters of the proverbs of Hel!.In the earIy years of the French Revolution, Blake used to

walk about the streets of London with the blood-red Phrygiancap on his head. His political enthusiasm eventualIy waned,but not the ardor of his imagination, at once libertarian andliberating:

"All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the fol-lowing Errors: l. That Man has two real existing principIes:Viz: a Body and a Sou!. 2. That Energy, call'd Evil, is alonefrom the Body; and that Reason, call'd Good, is alonefrom the Soul. 3. That God will torment Man in Eternity forfolIowing his Energies."But the folIowing Contraries to these are True: l. Man hasno Body distinct from his Soul; for that call'd Body is aportion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inletsof Soul in this age. 2. Energy is the only life, and is from theBody; and Reason is the bound or outward circumferenceof Energy. 3. Energy is Eternal Delight."

The violence of Blake's anti-Christian affirmations prefiguredthat of Rimbaud and Nietzsche. He attacked the rationalisticdeism of the philosophers just as violen tly: Vol taire andRousseau were victims of his anger, and in his prophetic poemsNewton and Locke appear as agents of Urizen, the demiurgeof evi!. Urizen is the lord of systematic reason, inventor of themorality which imprisons men in its syIlogisms, divides them


one against the other, and each against himself. Urizen: reasonwithout body and without wings, the great jailer. Blake notonly denounced the superstition of philosophy and the idolatryof reason, but, in the century of the first industrial revolutionand in the country which was the cradle of this revolution, heprophesied the dangers of the cult of progress. The landscape ofEngland was starting to change, and hiIls and vaIleys werebecoming covered with the vegetation of industry: iron, coal,dust, and waste. He is in aIl things our contemporary.In Blakc's contradictions and eccentricities there is a larger

coherence not found in any of his critics. Eliot charged hismythology with being undigested and syncretistic, a privatereligion made up of fragments of myths and eccentric beliefs.One could accuse most modern poets of the same thing, fromHolderlin and Nerval to Yeats and Rilke; faced with the progres-sive disintegration of Christian mythology, poets-not excludingthe poet of The Waste Land-have had to invent more or lesspersonal mythologies made up of fragments of philosophies andreligions. In spite of this diversity of poetic systems-rather, inits very center-a common belief can be discerned. This beliefis the true religion of modern poetry, frorn Romanticism toSurrealism, and it appears in aIl poets, sometimes implicitly butmore often explicitly. I am talking about analogy. The beliefin correspondences between aIl beings and worlds predatesChristianity, crosses the Middle Ages, and, through Neopla-tionism, illuminism, and occultisrn, reaches the nineteenth cen-tury. Since then, secretly or openly, it has never failed to nourishWestern poets, from Goethe to Balzac, frorn Baudelaire andMaIlarm to Yeats and Pessoa.


AnaIogy outIived paganism and will probabIy outIive Christi-anity and contemporary scientism. It has had a duaI function inthe history of modern poetry: it was the principIe before allprincipIes, before the reason of phiIosophies and the reveIationof religions; and this principIe coincided with poetry itseIf.Poetry is one of the manifestations of analogy ; rhymes andal!iterations, metaphors and metonymies are modes of operationin analogicaI thought. A poem is a spiral sequence which turnsceaseIessly without ever returning completely to its beginning.If anaJogy turns the universe into a poem, a text made up ofoppositions which become resolved in correspondences, it alsomakes the poem a universe. Thus, we can read the universe,we can live the poem. In the first case poetry is knowledge; inthe second, it is action. In both it borders on philosophy andreligion, but only to contradict them. The poetic image shapes areality which rivals the vision of the revolutionary and that ofthe religious. Poetry is the other coherence, made not of reasonsbut of rhythms. And there is a moment when the correspond-ence is broken ; there is a dissonance which in the poem is cal!ed"irony," and in life "mortality." Modern poetry is awarenessof this dissonance within analogy.Poetic mythologies, including those of Christian poets, grow

old and become dust as do religions and philosophies. Butpoetry remains, and thus we can continue to read the Vedasand Bibles, not as religious but as poetic texts. Here again isBlake: "The Poetic Genius is the True Man ... al! sects ofPhilosophy are adapted from the Poetic Genius ... the Religionsof al! Nations are derived from each Nation's different receptionof the Poetic Genius." Although religions belong to history

and perish, in al! of them a nonreIigious seed survives: poeticimagination. Hume wouId have smiled at such a strange idea.Whorn can we believe? Hume and his critique of religion orBlake and his exaltation of imagination? For al! the founders-Wordsworth, Coleridge, Holderlin, lean PauI, Novalis-poetryis the world of nonsequential time, the time of the body andof desire. Beginning word: founding word. But also disintegrat-ing word, the breaking away from analogy through irony oranguish, through the awareness of history which in them is theknowledge of death.

56 Children of the Mire 57 Children of the Mire

4 Analogy and Irony

thing, but a profession of faith and an act. Even the doctrine of"art for art's sake," which seems to deny this attitude, confirmsand prolongs it, for it was an ethic as well as an aesthetic, andquite often implied a religious or political stance.Romanticism was born almost simultaneously in England and

in Germany, and spread throughout Europe like a spiritualepidemic. The pre-eminence of German and English Romanti-cism comes not only from chronological precedence, but from acombination of critical insight and poetic originality. In bothlanguages poetic creation is interwoven with critical reflectionson the nature ofpoetry, made with an intensity, originality,and penetration unparalleled in other European literatures. Thecritical texts of the English and German Romantics were truerevolutionary manifestos, and established a tradition which con-tinues today. The joining of theory and practice, poetry andpoetics, was one more manifestation of the Romantic aspirationto unite the extremes-art and life, timeless antiquity andcontemporary history, imagination and irony. By means of thedialogue between prose and poetry they tried to revitalizepoetry by immersing it in everyday speech-and to idealizeprose by dissolving the logic of discourse in the logic of theimage. As consequences of this interpenetration, we see through-out the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the emergence of theprose poem and the periodic renovation of poetic language byincreasingly strong injections of popular speech. But in 1800, asagain in 1920, what was new was not so much that poets werespeculating in prose about poetry, but that this speculation over-flowed the limits of the old poetics, proclaiming that the newpoetry was also a new way of feeling and living.The union of poetry and prose is a constant among English

A literary movement, Romanticism was also a new morality,a new eroticism, and a new politics. lt may not have beena religion, but it was more than an aesthetic and a philosophy:a way of thinking, feeling, falling in love, fighting, traveling-away of living and a way of dying. Frederick Schlegel, in oneof his programmatic writings, said that Roman ticism not onlyproposed the dissolution and mixture of literary genres andideas of beauty, it also sought the fusion of life and poetry bymeans of the contradictory but convergent actions of imagina-tion and irony. Even more, its aim was to socialize poetry.Romantic thought unfolds in two directions which end infusion: the search for that anterior principIe which makespoetry the basis of language and thus of society; and the unionof this principie with life and history. If poetry was rnan'sfirst language-or if language is essentially a poetic operationwhich consists of seeing the world as a fabric of symbols andrelationships between these symbols=then each society is builtupon a poem. If the revolution of the modern age is the move-ment of society back to its origins, to the primordial pact ofequal with equal, then this revolution becomes one with poetry.Blake said: "all men are alike in the Poetic Genius." Romanticpoetry, too, claims to be action; a poem is not only a verbal

58 Children of the Mire 59 Analogy and Irony

and German Romantics, although it is not visible in all poetswith the same intensity and in the same fashion. In some, suchas Coleridge and Novalis, verse and prose, despite their inter-communication, are clearly independent. We have Kubla Khanand The Ancient Mariner on one side, the critical texts ofBiographia Literaria on the other; or the Hymns to the Nigh t asopposed to the philosophical prose of the Fragments. In otherpoets inspiration and reflection blend equally in prose andverse. Neither Holderlin nor Wordsworth is a philosophical poet,fortunately for them, but in both thought tends to turn intoperceptible image. In a poet like Blake, the poetic image isinseparable from speculative thinking, and the frontier betweenprose.and poetry cannot be distinguished.Whatever the differences-and they are profound-which

separate these poets, they al! conceive of poetry as a vitalexperience involving the totality of the human being. A poemis not only a verbal reality; it is also an act. The poet speaks,and as he speaks, he makes. This making is above all a makingof himself: poetry is not only self-knowledge but self-creation.The reader repeats the poet's experience of self-creation, andpoetry becomes incarna te in history. Behind this idea Iives theold belief in the power of words: poetry thought and lived asa magical operation destined to transmute reality. The analogybetween magic and poetry, a recurring theme throughout thenineteenth and twentieth centuries, originates with the GermanRomantics. The conception of poetry as magic implies anaesthetic of action. Art ceases to be exclusively representationand contemplation; it becomes also an intervention in reality.If art mirrors the world, then the mirror is magical; it changesthe world.

Baroque and Neoclassical aesthetics insisted on a strictdivision between art and Iife. Although their ideas of beautywere very different, both emphasized the ideal nature of awork of art. When Romanticism affirmed the primacy ofinspiration, passion, and sensibility, it erased the boundarybetween art and life. The poem was a vital experience, and lifeacquired the intensity of poetry. For Caldern life is illusionand deceit because it has the duration and consistency ofdreams; for the Romantics what redeems life from the horror ofits monotony is that it is a dream. The Romantics see thedream as "a second Iife," a way to recover the true life, the lifeof primordial time. Poetry is the reconquest of innocence.How can we fail to see the religious roots of this attitude andits intimate relation with the Protestant tradition? Romanticismoriginated in England and Germany not only because i t was abreak with the Greco-Roman aesthetic, but because of itsspiritual link with Protestantismo The inward nature of religiousexperience stressed by Protestantism, as opposed to the ritual-ism of Rome, supplied the psychic and moral preconditionsfor the Romantic upheaval. Romanticism was above all a turninginward of the poetic vision. Protestantism made the individualconsciousness of each believer the theater of the religiousmystery; Romanticism disrupted the impersonal aesthetic ofthe Greco-Rornan tradition, and allowed the poet's ego tobecome the primary reali ty.To say that the spiritual roots of Romanticism lie in the

Protestant tradition may seem overly bold, especially if weremember the conversions of various German Romantics toCatholicism. Bu t the true meaning of these conversions is c1earif one considers that Romanticism was a reaction against

60 Children of the Mire61 Analogy and Irony

eighteenth-century rationalism. The Catholicism of the GermanRomantics was antirationalism, and it was no less ambiguousthan their admiration for Caldern. Their reading of the Spanishdramatist was more a profession of faith than a true reading;August Schlegel saw in him the negation of Racine, but he didnot realize that Caldern's plays contain a rational order no lessrigorous than that of the French poet, rather more so. Racine'stheme is aesthetic and psychological: human passions;Caldern's theme is theological: original sin and human free-domo The Romantic interpretation of Caldern confusedBaroque poetry and Catholic neoscholasticism with anticlassi-cism and antirationalism.The literary frontiers of Romanticism are the same as the reli-

gious frontiers of Protestantismo These frontiers were primarilylinguistic. Romanticism was born and reached maturity incountries whose languages did not originate in Rome. The Latintradition, central in Western culture up to that time, was finallybroken. Other traditions appeared: popular and traditionalpoetry from Germany and England, Gothic art, Celtic andGermanic mythologies. The rejection of the image of Greeceprovided by the Latin tradition caused the discovery (or inven-tion) of another Greece-the Greece of Herder and Holderlin,that will become Nietzsche's and our own. Dante's guide inHell is Virgil, Faust's, Mephistopheles. "The Classics!" saysBlake, referring to Homer and Virgil, "It is the Classics, notGoths or Monks, that desolate Europe with wars." And he adds:"Grecian is Mathematic Form but Gothic is Living Form." Asfor Rome: "a warlike State never can produce Art." From theRomantics on, the Western world recognized itself as a tradition

differing from that of Rome, and this tradition is not singlebut multiple.Linguistic influence unfolds on deeper levels. Romantic poetry

was not only a change of styles, but a change of beliefs, andthis is what distinguishes it radically from the other movementsof the pasto Neither Baroque nor Neoclassical art rejected theWestern system of beliefs. To find a parallel to the Romanticrevolution we must go back to the Renaissance, above all, toProvencal poetry. This last comparison is particularly revealing,because in Provencal as in Romantic poetry there is an undeni-able relation, still not completely understood, between themetrical revolution, the new sensibility, and the central positionoccupied by women in both movements. In Romanticism, themetrical revolution consisted of resurrecting the traditionalpoetic rhythms of Germany and England. There is a reciprocalrelation between the resurrection of rhythms and forms and thereappearance of analogy. The Romantic vision of the universeand of man was inspired by analogy. And analogy fused withprosody: it was a vision more felt than thought, and more heardthan felt. Analogy conceives of the world as rhythm: everythingcorresponds because everything fits together and rhymes. It isnot only a cosmic syntax, it is also prosody. If the universe is ascript, a text, or a web of signs, the rotation of these signs isgoverned by rhythm. Correspondence and analogy are butnames for universal rhythm.Although analogical vision inspires Dante as well as the

Renaissance Neoplatonists, its reappearance in the Romanticera coincides with the rejection of Neoclassical archetypesand the discovery of national poetic traditions. In unveiling

62 Children of the Mire 63 Analogy and Irony

their traditional poetic rhythms, the English and GermanRomantics resuscitated the analogical vision of the world and ofmano It is impossible to prove a cause-and-effect relationbetween accentual versification and analogical vision, it isimpossible also not to see that there is a historical relationbetween them. The appearance of the first, in the Romanticperiod, is inseparable from the second. Analogical vision hadbeen preserved as an idea by the occultist, hermetic, andlibertine sects of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries;when English and German poets translated this idea of "theworld as rhythm," they translated it literally, turned it intoverbal rhythm, into poems. The philosophers had thought ofthe world as rhythm; the poets heard the rhythm. It was notthe language of the spheres-although they thought it was-butthe language of men.The evolution of verse forms in the Romance languages is also

an indirect proof of the correspondence between accentualversification and analogical vision. The relation between theversification systems of the Romance and Germanic languagesis one of inverse symmetry. In the former, the stress of theaccents is secondary to the syllabic meter, while in the latterthe syllabic count is secondary to the rhythmic distributionof accents. Accentual versification is more akin to song than todiscourse; the danger of English and German verse lies not inintellectual dryness but in Iyric confusion. The distinctivefeature of Romance prosody is just the opposite. The tendencyto regularity, dominant since the Renaissance and fortified bythe influence of French Neoclassicism, was a constant feature inversification systems down to the Romantic periodo Syllabic


versification easily turns into abstract measurement and, as theexample of eighteenth-century French poetry shows, intodiscourse and reasoning in verse. Prose consumes poetry-notthe lively, colloquial prose which is one of the sources ofpoetry, but the prose of oratory and intellectual discourse.Eloquence rath~r than songo By the beginning of the nineteenthcentury, the Latin languages had lost their powers of enchant-ment and could no longer be vehicles for thought as antidis-cursive and essentially rhythmic as analogy.If the resurrection of analogy coincided in Germany and in

England with the return to traditional poetic forms, in Latincountries it coincided with the revolt against regular syllabicversification. In French this revolt was more violent andtotal than in ltalian or Spanish because syllabic versificationdominated French poetry more than it did other Romancelanguages. lt is significant that the two great precursors of theRomantic movement in France were prose writers, Rousseauand Chateaubriand; analogical vision unfolds more readilyin French prose than in the abstract meters of poetry. It is noless significant that among the central works of real FrenchRomanticism we find Aurelia, Nerval's novel, and a handful ofnarrations by Charles Nodier. Finally, among the great creationsof French poetry of the last century we find the prose poem,a form which realizes the Romantic desire to mix pros e andpoetry. Such a form could have developed only in a language inwhich the absence of tonic accents limits the rhythmic resourcesof free verse.As for verse: Hugo unmade and remade the Alexandrine: ,

Baudelaire introduced reflection, doubt, irony-the mental

65 Analogy and Irony

caesura which rather than breaking the regular meter tends toproduce psychic irregularity, exception; Rimbaud experimentedwith popular poetry, song, free verse. The prosodic renovationended in two contradictory extremes: the broken lively rhythmsof Laforgue and Corbire and the musical score/constellationof Un coup de des. Laforgue and Corbire had a profoundinfluence on the poets of both Americas, Lugones, Pound, Eliot,and Lpez Velarde. With Mallarrne was born a form whichbelongs neither to the nineteenth century nor to the first halfof the twentieth century, but to the present. This haphazardenumeration has only one purpose: to show that the generalmovement of French poetry during the last century can be seenas a revolt against traditional syllabic versification. The revoltcoinided with the search for the principie that rules the universeand the poem: analogy.

1 have already referred to "real French Romanticism."Actually there are two: one is the official Romanticism of thetextbooks and histories of literature-eloquent, sentimental,and discursive-exemplified by Musset and Lamartine; the other,which for me is the real one, is made up of a very small numberof works and authors: Nerval, Nodier, Hugo in his last period,and the so-called "minor Romantics." In fact, the true Frenchheirs of German and English Romanticism are the poets whocome after the official Romantics, from Gautier and Baudelaireto the Symbolists. These poets give us a different version ofRomanticism. Different, and yet the same, because the historyof modero poetry is a surprising confirmation of the principieof analogy: each work is the negation, the resurrection, and the


transfigura tion of the others. In this way French poetry of thesecond half of the last century-to call it Symbolist would be tomutilate it-is inseparable from German and English Romanti-cism: it is its prolongation, but also its metaphor. It is a transla-tion in which Romanticism turos back upon itself, contemplatesand supersedes itself, questions and transcends itself. This isthe other European Romanticism.In each of the great French poets of this period the fan of

analogical correspondences opens and closes; in the same way,the history of French poetry, from Les Chimres to Un coup dedes, can be seen as a vast analogy. Each poet is a stanza inthat poem of poems which is French poetry, and each poem isa version, a metaphor of this plural text. lf a poem is a system ofequivalences, as Roman Jakobson has said-rhymes and allitera-tions which are echoes, rhythms which play with reflections,identity of metaphors and comparisons-then French poetry asa whole becomes a system of systems of equivalences, an analogyof analogies. In its turo, this analogical system is an analogy ofthe original Romanticism of both Germans and Englishmen. Tounderstand the unity of European poetry without violatingits plurality we must conceive of it as an analogical system. Eachwork is a unique reality and at the same time a translation ofthe others-its metaphor.The influence of the occultists, Gnostics, Cabalists, alchemists,

and other marginal figures was also deeply feIt by the Frenchpoets. At times they drank from the same fountain as theGerman Romantics (Jakob Bohrne, for instance, was known inFrance through Louis Claude de Saint-Martin.) The occultisttradition, on the other hand, had become associated with

67 Analogy and Irony

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