Читать книгу A Companion to American Poetry - Группа авторов - Страница 37

In 1917, Max Weber presented his lecture “Science as a Vocation,” which includes this influential passage:

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the “disenchantment of the world.” Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental, nor is it accidental that today only within the smallest and intimate circles, in personal human situations, in pianissimo, that something is pulsating that corresponds to the prophetic pneuma, which in former times swept through the great communities like a firebrand, welding them together. If we attempt to force and to “invent” a monumental style in art, such miserable monstrosities are produced as the many monuments of the last twenty years. If one tries intellectually to construe new religions without a new and genuine prophecy, then, in an inner sense, something similar will result, but with still worse effects.

(Weber 2009, p. 155)

Weber’s concept of disenchantment is fundamental to our inquiry, and is complemented by Charles Taylor’s formulation that a “shift to secularity…consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged, and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace” (Taylor 2007, p. 3).

Regarding these concepts, I wish to raise some questions. For modern poets, what constitutes spirituality in a world where “disenchantment” is supposedly a given? How does belief shape poetic practice for those poets who challenge secularism, remaining, at least partially, in an “enchanted” psychic realm? Weber asserts that “our greatest art is intimate and not monumental,” and that modern attempts to “force” a monumental style in art result in “miserable monstrosities.” He writes this during the period when literary modernism is coming into being: does it apply, therefore, to modern poetry? If “the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life,” can poets, with their traditional investment in these values, with their concerns for ultimate ideas and sublime expression, still produce, if not monumental works, then at least ambitious, large-scale poems that go beyond the intimacy of the lyric (which in itself, of course, is no small achievement)? Then there is Weber’s “prophetic pneuma,” which previously had the power to bind “great communities,” but is now felt only in small, “personal human situations.” In the wake of the visionary works of Romanticism, can twentieth- and twenty-first-century American poets achieve a prophetic mantle in a purportedly disenchanted, rationalized, secular world, in which a poetry of prophecy or of religious expression is beside the point?

Secularization and the disenchantment of the world, concepts that are closely related to modernity, have recently been challenged by a range of scholars in the fields of history and religious studies. For example, Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm demonstrates that enchantment and disenchantment, secularity and belief, faith and reason all constitute a complicated dialectic, which may indicate that the secularism which we associate with modernity (including literary modernism) is itself a myth. Josephson-Storm suggests that we “translate Weber’s famous phrase not ‘the disenchantment of the world’ but instead as ‘the disenchanting of the world.’” The forces of modernization and secularization, the forces of disenchantment, are engaged in a program that is not complete: “For there to be an active, ongoing disenchanting of the world, magic has to be intact—somewhere, among some groups” (Josephson-Storm 2017, p. 300). It is my contention that many modern poets make up one of those groups.

Revisionary religious scholarship is crucial to our understanding of modern poetry’s relationship to the sacred, and how poets negotiate matters of belief. According to Alex Owen, the “symbiotic relationship between the spiritual and secular, as exemplified by the occult self at the fin de siècle, is illustrative of the way in which occultism constituted a crucial enactment of the ambiguities of ‘the modern’” (Owen 2004, p. 116). Scholars such as Owen see magic, both in terms of belief and practice, as mediating between conceptions of science and religion under modern conditions: it is highly rationalized but subscribes fully to belief in the supernatural. But one need not be an occultist in order to write poetry which engages “the ambiguities of ‘the modern.’” Indeed, it is the rare poet who, in facing modernity, does not raise complex questions about belief, religion, faith, spirit, and the supernatural. In addressing some of these representative poets, I follow Josephson-Storm, aiming “to undermine the myth that what sets the modern world apart from the rest is that it experienced disenchantment and a loss of myth” (Josephson-Storm 2017, p. 8).

In what follows, I examine a range of responses to these matters by some modern poets whose work is at least partly a product of what we may term their spiritual quests. We must practice a mode of criticism that parallels Jeffrey J. Kripal’s understanding of religious studies. As Kripal argues, “we can detect within certain moments of the (post)modern study of religion a certain explosive fusion of faith and reason—a kind of mental matter and antimatter, if you will—that produces a distinctly third realm of knowing that resembles but cannot be reduced to what has traditionally been called gnosis” (Kripal 2007, p. 13). Coming from a number of spiritual traditions and representing a variety of poetic styles, the poets I will consider all ponder the problem that Michael Heller poses in his poem “Mappah”: “No one can safely say where the sacred leaves off, where the profane begins” (Heller 2019, p. 231). For poets and critics alike, the tension between the sacred and secular, the “explosive fusion of faith and reason,” is a problem of gnosis in Kripal’s sense of the term. Furthermore, Kripal observes that “The themes of inspiration and creativity…are fundamentally gnostic categories to the extent that they combine both rational and ecstatic dimensions and require at least two fields of consciousness to work at all” (Kripal 2007, p. 171). Our task is to map those fields of consciousness within the poem.