While poetry has been a literary facet throughout history, its poetics or the subject matter and style of expression, have gone through considerable shifts. These alterations in the poetics of poetry have been critiqued fairly extensively by two of the greatest philosophes of our time: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Aldous Huxley. Although these two had slightly different opinions, they both held contempt for the industrial ages in which they lived, citing the blandness and lack of range in its poetic works. Because of this, both Huxley and Emerson explain ways of diversifying topics and expanding poetry outside of its mechanical stalemate.
For Huxley, one of his main concerns with the poetry of his time was the fact that its themes seemed shallow and narrow, not allowing for any philosophical ponderings or the presence of science. To Huxley this was troubling as he felt science is especially important as it conveys truth in a concrete and secular manner. The only problem he sees however, which is preventing science from being introduced into poetry, is the fact that the average man or woman at the time had very little knowledge of the subject and therefore would be unable to fully appreciate it. Also, this lack of knowledge too applies to the poet and his/her ability to convey the information. “All subjects- ‘the remotest discoveries of the chemist’ are but one unlikely theme –can serve the poet with material for his art, on one condition: that he, and to a lesser degree, his audience will be able to apprehend the subject with a certain emotion” (Huxley 92). Here, Huxley explains by quoting Wordsworth that the inclusion of more diverse subject matter can not only be by the delivery of the poet but must also include the reader as their aptitude to both endure and understand the subject matter will be crucial to the success of the piece. However, the main burden is still given to the poet as he must not only intimately understand the field which he chooses to write about but, must also have a great interest in it as well. From this one may draw that Huxley is commenting on the lack of integration in poetry. He does not agree that science and philosophy have no place in literature such as poetry, as many have separated the fields of science and literature completely, polarizing the two into their own distinct realms. The poet whom Huxley felt was the most apt at blending both science, philosophy, and poetry was Lucretius. Although Huxley felt that science should hold a place in poetry he also felt that the poetic world had not yet “Worked out a satisfactory artistic means of dealing with abstractions” (Huxley 94). “There was Lucretius, the greatest of all philosophic and scientific poets. In him the passionate apprehension of ideas, and the desire and ability to give them expression combined to produce that strange and beautiful epic of thought which is without parallel in the whole of history” (Huxley 94). One can assume that in this passage Huxley is referring to Lucretius’s epic poem “De Rerum Natura”, which translated means “On the Nature of Things”. Huxley uses some interesting diction to describe it, using the phrase “epic of thought” instead of epic poem. I do not think this was a mistake as Huxley is exceedingly diligent in his word choice. Instead, I think that Huxley purposefully chose to differentiate Lucretius’s poem from those of other poets for it is a work of insight and complexity which goes beyond the mere lyrical storytelling of many poets and draws on multiple scientific resources to develop a manifesto on how one should prosperously and happily live one’s life. In “De Rerum Natura” “Lucretius presents the principles of atomism; the nature of the mind and soul; explanations of sensation and thought; the development of the world and its phenomena; and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. The universe described in the poem operates according to these physical principles, guided by fortuna, “chance”, and not the divine intervention of the traditional Roman deities” (Fortuna). This break from religious influence which is replaced with a desire not only to understand the world from a purely scientific viewpoint but to examine life itself through a secular lens, may not seem as profound now within the context of our highly technological and scientific society yet, this work was years before its time, more resembling a piece from The Renaissance, Enlightenment or even the Twenty-First Century. However, this epic poem dates all the way to 1st BC Rome and still draws upon values and concepts which would not be widely accepted or even recognized until hundreds of years after his death.
In the time when people felt the weight of religion,
wallowing upon the ground and—a ghastly spectacle—
heaven scowled down upon them and showed no mercy,
a Greek man was the first to raise his eyes,
daring to make a stand against it.
He took no notice at all of the thunder and lightning,
religious recitations merely incited him;
He said he would expose the secrets of nature
and so, by force of intelligence, and no other (Epicurus).
The “Greek Man” whom Lucretius is referring to in his poem is the great philosopher Epicurus. “Epicurus taught that the basic constituents of the world are atoms, uncuttable bits of matter, flying through empty space, and he tried to explain all natural phenomena in atomic terms. Epicurus rejected the existence of Platonic forms and an immaterial soul, and he said that the gods have no influence on our lives” (IEP). When studying the ideas of Lucretius and Epicurus which negate religion, only acknowledging its fear mongering and its part in the degradation of society, while turning to science for truth, it is obvious why Huxley favored Lucretius as the best poet of all time. Like Huxley who felt that science was the concise and accurate means of determining truth and enlightening the masses, Lucretius felt that religion served only to intimidate and frighten the people into to blind obedience while science had no ulterior motives other than the pursuit of truth. Also, in his poetry Lucretius is not grandiose but instead gracefully states his convictions and praises the verdicts of others, raving about the intellectual matters of earthly science in a fashion which Huxley claims no other poet has been able to recreate.
Lucretius refers to Epicurus in his poem, stating that “religious recitations merely incited him” (Epicurus). That line really stood out as Epicurus’s journey for knowledge knows no bounds, even as he is submerged in a society which avidly values religion in a time where the scientific theories which he is discussing will not be validated till over a thousand years later. Huxley values the fact that Lucretius relies purely on personal knowledge and nothing else, certainly a more surprising and daring claim is him time than ours yet, nonetheless holds the ideals of a genius who was truly years ahead of his time.
Huxley also relays his frustration of how modern poetry flaunts its “newness” yet sticks to the same convention of attempting to depict modern life in a profound way, as Huxley cites how the same formula has existed since the writings of Homer. “There is nothing intrinsically novel or surprising in the introduction into poetry of machinery and industrialism, or labor unrest” (Huxley 94). To Huxley poetry on industrialism is just another way of elevating the generally uninteresting subject of “everyday life” while ignoring many of the things which make living so interesting in the first place, remaining formulaic and ignoring breakthroughs in science and philosophical ideas. He continues speaking about the topics of modern poetry saying: “That is not extending the range of poetry; it is merely asserting its right to deal with the immediate facts of contemporary life, as Homer and Chaucer did” (Huxley 94).
Huxley goes on to say that poetry should never be purely sensual or intellectual but, instead a blend of many things, a renaissance-like puree of ideas, senses, facts, and figments of the imagination. On content and inherent significance of poetry he comments: “An abstract idea must be felt with a kind of passion, it must mean something emotionally significant, it must be as immediate and important to the poet as a personal relationship before he can make poetry of it” (Huxley 92). From this, one can gather that part of what frustrates Huxley about the conventional writings which center around machinery, is the fact that he does not believe that the poets which write on such subjects have an intimate enough relationship with their machinery to merit them writing about it. To paraphrase Huxley, he is saying you must have not only an intense interest in your poetic subject matter but, in fact a deep love for it. Furthermore he is commenting on the grandiose and bland style of “contemporary” poetry. He remarks on the intimate relation between the poet and his poetry which he feels is necessary in order to compose a truly enlightening or provocative piece of poetry. As he argues much of modern day poetry is devoid of the passion and hunger for expression. He frowns on the poetry which is labeled as experimental or free-verse yet, takes no advantage of the “freedom” of free-verse which allows you to venture through endless topics, genres, and subjects.
Emerson also shares a disdain for the poets of his time saying “I could cite from the seventeenth century sentences and phrases of edge not to be matched in the nineteenth” (Emerson 452). He continues to further collaborate with Huxley’s concept that the modern poet is missing a more diverse range of subject matter and knowledge. He refers to poets like Ben Johnson saying “The manner in which they learned Greek and Latin before our modern facilities were yet ready, without dictionaries, grammars, or indexes, by lectures of a professor, followed by their own searching’s,-required a more robust memory and cooperation of all the faculties…” (Emerson 452). This idea builds off of the concept that a poet must have a wide range of subject matter from which to draw on and must not fall into the conventions of modern poetry which plagues so many. Emerson is remarking on the amount of work which it took the men who lived before many of the modern conveniences which we take for granted; not to mention the advances in technology which have come since his time and brought us lightning fast Google searches, spell check, online encyclopedias, and e-books, things unimaginable in a time where the invention of the assembly line was a mechanical breakthrough. Because of this the poets who had none of these resources yet retained a vocabulary by far more extensive than any modern poet, had a brutal wit, a perfect rhythm, and lyrical styles yet unmatched.
Ben Johnson lived during the 16th and into the 17 Century and had to rely only on a meager high school education from which to write his now famous poetry. After school Johnson became a bricklayer, yet still found time to be “A man of vast reading [who was in fact so well received that he] had an unparalleled breadth of influence on Jacobean and Caroline playwrights and poets” (Wiki). However, Johnson was not just a embellished poet, he was considered to be incredibly controversial for his time, writing satirical plays which at times bordered on farcical yet, still managed to have incredibly intricate plots and vivid descriptions as “ Coleridge, for instance, claimed that The Alchemist had one of the three most perfect plots in literature” (Wiki). I think Emerson appreciated not only Johnson’s comedic abilities paired with his knack for lyricism but, most enjoyed the fact that he pushed the envelope and was always expanding his literary boundaries. This is supported by Wesley Trimpi in a critique of Johnson in which he claims “That Johnson chose the plain style because it allowed him a range of subject matter which no other style allowed” (JSTOR). Johnson’s unique style and eclectic pairing of inspired prose and crude topics to Emerson must have seemed a whole planet away from the unimaginative and rigidly written poetry of the Industrial Revolution.
A Celebration of Charis:1.
His Excuse for Loving
-Ben Johnson
Let it not your wonder move,
Less your laughter, that I love.
Though I now write fifty years,
I have had, and have, my peers;
Poets, though divine, are men,
Some have lov’d as old again.
And it is not always face,
Clothes, or fortune, gives the grace;
Or the feature, or the youth.
But the language and the truth,
In this poem the words just seem to drip off the page, the rhymes so subtle, and the beauty so underplayed. Ben Johnson was a Renaissance poet, so it’s no wonder that Emerson appreciates his writing, as one of the central ideas of the Renaissance was that all schools of thought should be blended and integrated, not separated like in the contemporary poetry which Emerson felt failed to provoke thought and lacked depth. The last four lines of this passage from Johnson’s poem are the most telling. It seems almost as if Johnson was attempting to relay a concept in as little words as possible and had chosen love as his subject matter. His writing is superbly elegant and almost verges on overly simplistic, yet through his skillful diction Johnson makes the reader wonder: is there really anything more to love than communication and honesty? In such simple words Johnson conveys a huge amount of meaning and without withdrawing to romantic clichés conveys the message of the importance of trust and compatibility in a relationship. However, the poets of Emerson’s time either ignored or forgot the sweet purity of Johnson’s writing and instead strode off in the opposite direction, making their poetry more complex and convoluted.
Emerson also found that in his time poetry was being inundated by a different kind of formulaic writing than just the lack of “intimacy” which Huxley describes. Emerson thought that the science and the many conventions which came with it were counterproductive to the freedom of poetry and therefore that they should not exist in the same literary space. This is similar to Huxley’s thoughts, although instead of presuming that the proper method of joining poetry and science has just not yet been developed, Emerson instead prefers the freeness of philosophy and claims that analogy itself without fact should be sufficient for poetic expression. “Whoever discredits analogy and requires heaps of facts, before any theories can be attempted has no poetic power, and nothing original or beautiful will be produced by him” (Emerson 453). From this Emerson is implying that anyone who cannot simply analyze a text or subject and draw from it its essence without first doing an abundance of study and research simply has little imagination and a lack of any true analytical or poetic skills. He believes that philosophical reflection can hold great importance while science ponders nothing and instead seeks out truth with methodologies and procedures which remove the majority of human thought. Although Emerson valued science’s contributions to society and found it wholly interesting and necessary for our progress as a society, I believe that he also disliked its certainty and held contempt for its unchecked convictions, especially as the archaic science of his time is almost unrecognizable when contrasted against modern science.
While Emerson favored philosophy as the discipline which was most lacking in the poetry of his time and Huxley preferred scientific explorations to the sensual ramblings of the poets of the 1900’s, they both still provide interesting ways of thinking about the purpose and applications of poetry. To Aldous Huxley poetry must be a composite of both the fanciful world of figurative language and the concrete and fascinating realm of scientific discoveries. Ralph Waldo Emerson however, was perturbed by the conventions which science brought to poetry and sought instead to fully embrace the abstraction which poetry allowed through philosophy and analogy.
Work Cited
“Ben Jonson.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 05 Apr. 2013. Web. 07 May 2013.
De rerum natura 5.107 (fortuna gubernans, “guiding chance” or “fortune at the helm”): see Monica R. Gale, Myth and Poetry in Lucretius (Cambridge University Press, 1994, 1996 reprint), pp. 213, 223–224
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, and Charles William Eliot. Emerson: Essays and English Traits. Danbury, CT: Grolier Enterprises, 1980. Print.
“Epicurus.info : E-Texts : De Rerum Natura, Book I.” Epicurus.info : E-Texts : De Rerum Natura, Book I. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 May 2013.
Huxley, Aldous. Collected Essays. New York: Harper, 1959. Print.
“Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.” Epicurus []. IEP, n.d. Web. 07 May 2013.
Wesley Trimpi. “Ben Jonson’s Poems: A Study of the Plain Style.” Renaissance News. Chicago Journals, 1964. Web. 23 Apr. 2013.
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