Flogging Eliot

Falling upon the thorns

Raymon posted a comment a few days ago that I never properly thanked him for. I’m such a “bad blogger” because I’m often trying to turn this into some sort of narrative, with connections between the constituent parts. Shelley wrote some embarrassing lines in the midst of great poems, and it takes a certain forgiveness to negotiate the full catalogue of most great artists. I find myself returning to Shelley’s Defence of Poetry often, and enjoyed the article about it he suggested, Shelley’s Defence Today. When I read it, I was greeted with an argument I’d made myself before:

A negentropic practice of literature could be encouraged by a literary scholarship aware of "the roads that go from poem to poem" and at work on the "map of understanding." "Intertextual" criticism, certainly, makes a beginning; with less jargon, more adding up of results, it could become a genuine science. I believe that here something like objectivity, or at any rate intersubjective reliability, is possible - that there is a sort of order in our literary experiences which subsequent observations will go on verifying.

“Intersubjective reliability” is what modern Romantics seem to fall back on, myself included. But "a genuine science"? Bah. I wouldn't reduce it that way. I suppose intertextuality is what I’m really on about, as I revisit Walker Evans in the light of what I now know about Hart Crane and T.S. Eliot.

But like some people’s revulsion regarding Shelley, I feel the same way about Eliot. I really hate him, with a passion that is unfounded but profound. I blame him for too much, in the same way some people (like Eliot) vilify Shelley. But that’s not why I started writing this. . .

It was this fragment in a great post by Ray Davis:

Cognition doesn't exist without effort, and so emotional affect is essential to getting cognition done. Just listen to their raised or swallowed, cracked or purring voices: you'll seldom find anyone more patently overwhelmed by pleasure or anger or resentment than a "rationalist," which is one reason we so often lose debates with comfortably dogmatic morons.

This was precisely Shelley’s argument in the Defence, which I was driven to remember while revisiting one of Hart Crane’s influences, Edgar Allen Poe. Literature always drives me to revisit other literature, in search of that sort of “intersubjective reliability.” Shelley’s point is clear:

The great secret of morals is Love; or going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.

Emotional effect is the key to poetic rhetoric, a rhetoric which seeks to touch people in a lasting way. Note that the definition of a "good man" is one who "imagines intensively and comprehensively." It is through attempting to identify with others that we become enlarged. Note that for Shelley, the beautiful exists in thought, not in objects. This makes for an interesting "intersubjective" point with Poe.

Ultimately, any discourse seeks to move. The question is, move what? In “The Philosophy of Composition” Poe lays out an incredible description of his composing process:

I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping originality always in view — for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest— I say to myself, in the first place, “Of the innumerable effects or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion select?”

As he continues, he describes the poem as the best form for affecting the heart, and further:

Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem. A few words, however, in elucidation of my real meaning, which some of my friends have evinced a disposition to misrepresent. The pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful. When indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect— they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of the soul— not of intellect, or of heart — upon which I have commented, and which is experienced in consequence of contemplating “the beautiful.”

It is this sort of elevation, which for Shelley was love, and for Poe was the effect of elevation that comes from the cognition of the beautiful, which impels humanity forward. Ray is right. It doesn’t occur without effort, which is why Shelley made his impassioned plea for poetry as the means by which humanity is enlarged and improved. That’s why I always end up back there somehow, even if he did write some very sappy love poems.

Rational arguments are indeed, just gravy. As Ernesto Grassi says in “Rhetoric and Philosophy”:

The indicative or allusive speech provides the framework within which proof can come into existence. Furthermore if rationality is identified with the process of clarification, we are forced to admit that the primal clarity of principles is not rational and recognize that the corresponding language in its indicative structure has an “evangelic” character, in the original Greek sense of this word, i.e., “noticing.”

That for me is the foundation of documentary photographic practice as well. It is, fundamentally, about taking notice of the world we live in, and in Shelley’s terms, putting ourselves into the place of another. For me, that was the failure of Walker Evans. His focus was strictly on the beautiful, usually at the expense of love. I feel like he took they myth of "disinterestedness" a bit too far, and his engagement with aesthetic purity made moving people take a distant back seat. I blame T.S. Eliot. But then, I always do.