What is Poetry? Answers on the Apocalypse

My post on the failed predictions of the End of the World (and, no, I'm not talking about the Warmers) has garnered some interesting comments, and, as I anticipated, some misunderstandings. What I said was several things (and I am adding a few things here that were not explicitly in the original post for purposes of clarification):

1. That the Book of Revelation was, like all works in the apocalyptic genre, primarily a poetic work rather than a prose work and that that matters when it comes to how you interpret it;

2. That a poetic work cannot be quantified in the way a prose work can and that therefore any attempt to interpret it as if it were prose is doomed from the beginning; and

3. That dispensationalists (like Harold Camping), because of their modernistic tendency to quantify the unquantifiable by treating poetic works as if they are prose, are particularly prone to this, as evidenced by the failed May 21 prediction.

Now I anticipated some misunderstandings of my statements here in part because most of us now are literary eunuchs, having been poetically castrated by a public education establishment that is not only incapable of simply teaching children to read and write, but which has given up on passing on Western culture, a significant aspect of which is its poetry.

We are the first generation that does not read poetry. All ages prior to our own read and understood poetry and were therefore familiar with poetic idiom. And since we don't read it, we don't understand it. In fact, I have argued elsewhere that poetic understanding is essential to a Christian worldview, since large swaths of Scriptural Revelation employ it and if we do not understand how it works, then we cannot understand large swaths of the Revelation.

I have only begun to realize the tragedy of this over the last 10 or 15 years as I have gone back and gotten the education I never got by reading Dante and Milton, and Eliot, as well as Yeats and Berry, and Wilbur.

So, in other words, I am not at all shocked that my comments here are misunderstood.

But let me address one of the comments here. One of my interlocutors, Lee, said the following:

One could read your post, Martin, and come away thinking that you believe poetic content is all that there is in Revelation. But I don't think John was so much a poet as he was the last of the great, fulminating Old Testament prophets. Much of the imagery he employs is in the style of earlier prophets predicting the end of great cities such as Babylon and Ninevah.

First of all, this statement assumes that the Old Testament prophets were not themselves using poetic expression. They clearly were. Ezekiel is probably the most obvious example of this.

Second, poetic expression does not limit the message of the author. To say that "poetic content is all there is" is to betray the belief that poetry is somehow more limited in its ability to communicate a thought than prose. As Chesterton has put it, "The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say." Well, what does that mean? For one thing, it means that poetic expression can communicate a lot more than prose because there are many more things a word does not mean than things that it does mean.

But let me see if I can articulate what poetic expression consists of to make my point clearer.

What I think Chesterton is saying is that poetic expression is analogical in nature, not univocal. That just means that the words it uses invoke a resemblance which many times cannot be completely captured by rational prose words. Poetic expression also has a different purpose: it is meant to appeal to the imagination and not the intellect. If I say

Love is a rose, but you better not pick it
It only grows when it's on the vine

This is not saying that love actually is a physical flower. It is saying that there is a relationship between the flower and the picking of it in the physical world that is similar to the relationship between the beloved and the act of trying to possess her. That "You'll lose your love when you say the word 'mine'." I have compared love to a flower, which, like love, often seems to wilt when we try to possess it. But saying it in this latter way is somehow insufficient. It does not encompass the full import or effect of the poetic expression because some truths are better apprehended by seeing them through the imagination than by understanding them through the intellect.

The "Love is a rose" example is a fairly direct kind of poetic expression. It is almost telling us what it is doing. "Love is a rose" is just one step away from saying "Love is like a rose," which would turn it from poetry to prose--and which would break the enchantment, because it would no longer be seen in soft light of imagination, but under the rude glare of the intellect.

Most poetry is not that obvious. It doesn't bother to telegraph what it is doing. It just leaps directly into the metaphorical:

And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.

This is about the purest form of poetry you can find. If you try to perform your intellectual surgery on it, you will kill it. It is meant for your imagination and the tool of the imagination is analogy, not analysis. To try to turn it into something univocal is like trying to grasp a bubble: it will disappear the moment you touch it.

This doesn't imply that the passage doesn't mean anything or that it means less than it otherwise would or that it doesn't communicate a truth. It most definitely means something--something more and maybe something less that what a poetically challenged person might want to attribute to it. But the main point is that its meaning will be most fully understood by taking it for what it is: an appeal to the imagination, and its meaning is just as likely to be misunderstood by treating it as an appeal to the intellect.

Gloria in Profundis

Carl Olsen, over at Ignatius Insight, the blog of Ignatius Press, the premier Catholic publishing house in the United States, re-ran Chesterton's great poem "Gloria in Profundis" the other day. Ignatius is the publisher of G. K. Chesterton's Complete Works. They're not finished with it, and I expect that it will take quite some time still to complete the set. I don't know, but I am guessing that they consider the project an act of publishing charity, since they can't be making much much money off of it and may even by losing money on the project. I hope they continue to plug along. It is a great work, and the publication of what is now the third book of Chesterton's poetry is not the least important part of it.

The poem itself is simply astounding. There are some lines here that you can just roll over in your mind and simply marvel at how someone could have put it that way. That's the way poetry is: it is a mode of expression, mostly foreign to we modern English who value our scientific abstractions so much, that allows us access to a whole other side of truth that prose can only inadequately negotiate.

Prose is restrictive in that it attempts to stuff all the content of a truth into its own limited mode of expression, lopping some of it off, like the Greek robber Procrustes, when it is too big in order to fit within the constraints of the words by which we may attempt to articulate it. It is prescriptive and reductionist. Poetry, on the other hand, does not require the truth to restrict itself to our own pitiful ability to tell it. It is descriptive and open-ended. It allows us to see, not by shrinking reality to a size that fits our field of vision, but by calling us to an acknowledgment of how great is the world, and how small is our ability to either comprehend or articulate it. The greater the poet, the more inadequate he knows he is before the magnitude of the thing he attempts to express. Through prose we ask truth to bow the knee to our own limitations. Through poetry, we bow the knee before the greatness of all that we know we cannot know.

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

The poem expresses a theme Chesterton returns to over and over again: the unlikely and startling truth of the Incarnation. Read it and marvel:

Gloria in Profundis
G.K. Chesterton

There has fallen on earth for a token
A god too great for the sky.
He has burst out of all things and broken
The bounds of eternity:
Into time and the terminal land
He has strayed like a thief or a lover,
For the wine of the world brims over,
Its splendour is spilt on the sand.

Who is proud when the heavens are humble,
Who mounts if the mountains fall,
If the fixed stars topple and tumble
And a deluge of love drowns all—
Who rears up his head for a crown,
Who holds up his will for a warrant,
Who strives with the starry torrent,
When all that is good goes down?

For in dread of such falling and failing
The fallen angels fell
Inverted in insolence, scaling
The hanging mountain of hell:
But unmeasured of plummet and rod
Too deep for their sight to scan,
Outrushing the fall of man
Is the height of the fall of God.

Glory to God in the Lowest
The spout of the stars in spate-
Where thunderbolt thinks to be slowest
And the lightning fears to be late:
As men dive for sunken gem
Pursuing, we hunt and hound it,
The fallen star has found it
In the cavern of Bethlehem.

Read Carl's post here.

Against Bitzer: Why Peter Ditzel doesn't know what a thing is

Peter Ditzel of WordofHisGrace.org has responded to an article of mine printed in the Classical Teacher magazine entitled, "Is Fiction False?" the point of which is that imaginative literature is often (not always) more effective in conveying truth than nonfiction prose writing. Ditzel responds to my point here as well as that of Douglas Jones at Canon Press:

In the Summer 2007 Memoria Press catalog, called The Classical Teacher, appears an article, “Is Fiction False?” by Martin Cothran. This author likens “modern people” to Thomas Gradgrind, “the schoolmaster in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, who, when he is introduced in chapter two of that book, asks his class to define a horse. He first asks Sissy Jupe, whom he calls ‘Girl number twenty,’ to define a horse. Her father is a horsebreaker, and she has lived around them her whole life; but when Gradgrind asks her to define what a horse is, she is perplexed and speechless.” Gradgrind then asks a boy named Bitzer, who pleases Gradgrind with his definition: “Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.”

Cothran then observes, “Of course, Sissy Jupe knew what a horse was better than anyone else in the class, including the knowledgeable Bitzer. She had seen a horse with her eyes, looked upon it, and her hands had handled it. She certainly knew the truth of the horse better than Bitzer, who had simply memorized sterile facts about it.” Yes, no doubt Sissy Jupe knew horses better than Bitzer. But I challenge Cothran to explain how Sissy knew horses apart from facts. Cothran, Jones, and others of their ilk disparage “arid intellectual descriptions,” “bare literal sentences,” and “sterile facts.” (They also sneer at “modern people” and seem to be intent on injecting medievalism—remember the good old Dark Ages when Latin was king and people were brainwashed by the Roman Catholic Church?—into the homeschooling movement.) But again, if Sissy had expressed her knowledge of horses, how would she have done so apart from facts?

So I have officially been challenged, and I accept. It is a duel I hope that both of us survive and which the only casualty will be someone's ignorance--mine or his.

Ditzel and I don't necessary disagree on our conclusions about the importance of fiction (and by 'fiction' I mean the 'poetic' in its broad sense): Both of us, I think, would agree that both the poetic an the non-poetic can convey truth and do it well. So where do we disagree? I think we disagree in a matter of some importance: namely, what is.

I will ignore Ditzel's simplistic view of the Middle Ages and address the horse issue: How did Sissy know a horse? By direct apprehension. Of the horse, that is. And it had nothing to do with any discursive explanation she had heard of the type that Ditzel seems to value so highly. She knew a horse not on the basis of arguments or assertions or even "facts". She knew a horse on the basis of an actual horse.

Ditzel seems to be confused about what things are, which is a great handicap under which to labor when discussing them. I claim that a thing is a thing. Ditzel can contest me all he wants, but I really don't see how the assertion is even debatable--despite the fact that Ditzel seems to want to debate it. Ditzel does not seem to think a thing is a thing. He thinks that a thing is a fact--or a collection of facts. But a fact is a piece of information and a thing is not a piece of information, as Ditzel seems to imply.

I suppose it is possible that Ditzel takes the term 'fact' to mean a thing--or as one dictionary has it, "any unit of being which is capable of bearing meaning"--but, if he does, then he shouldn't make it sound so much like he doesn't. In any case that certainly isn't the meaning Gradgrind--or Dicken's--is using in the passage which I quoted. To Gradgrind, facts mean bits of discrete and disconnected information. But a horse is not a bit of discrete information nor is it a collection bits of disconnected information, therefore a horse is not a fact.

Ditzel clearly does not understand the difference between a thing and the abstract idea of a thing, both of which exist and are useful in their place. But once confounded they lose their proper function and can only confuse.

Cothran has fallen for the notion that knowing something and knowing about it are two different things. What these people fail to do is satisfactorily explain how one can know something apart from knowing about it, and how we can know about something, perhaps know a lot about it, but not know it. We often hear this in regard to Jesus. A preacher might ask, “You might know a lot about Jesus, but do you know Jesus?” What is he talking about? It’s a good question.

Ditzel goes on with a fanciful story about a friend (Bill) whom he knows by spending some interesting time with him, and then concludes:

The real distinction between your knowledge of Bill and mine is degree. It lies in the number of facts and how well I understand the relationship between those facts. By spending so much time with Bill, in so many different circumstances, I have accumulated, both consciously and subconsciously, more facts about Bill than you have. I can put those facts together into a better understanding of Bill than you can. But knowing Bill is the same as knowing about Bill. There is no difference. You know a little about Bill: I know a lot about Bill.

Really? It's hard to answer Ditzel's assertion here other than to say it is so obviously and blatantly false that it's hard to imagine how anyone could believe it. On the other hand, it might help prove his case anyway, since his argument consisted of a fictional story which clearly did not support his position.

And why did he feel the need to resort to a fictional story in his case that fictional stories are not superior to abstract reasoning anyway?

Under Ditzel's view, the following two propositions mean the same thing:

I know about the President of the United States

I know the President of the United States

It's hard to believe that he really thinks so, but that is clearly what he is saying. He even goes so far as to say that knowing about Jesus and knowing Jesus is the same thing, and that the only difference between an unbeliever and a believer is that the unbeliever doesn't know enough facts:

Preachers who know what they are talking about know that knowing about Jesus and knowing Jesus are not what is at issue. What is important is that some people know many facts about Jesus, but they miss those that are essential, those that must be revealed by the Father in heaven. The unsaved person does not know Jesus as His Lord and Savior. Cothran’s distinction between knowing and knowing about is false because there is no way to know something other than knowing about it. It is a collection of facts and a synthesis of the relationship between the facts.

Gee, and I thought it had something to do with being born again. He truly seems to believe that faith is merely a matter of intellectual assent, a position that is not only not the protestant position--or the reformed position, but is totally outside the scope of Christian thought.

It is ironic that Ditzel has such a low view of the Middle Ages. It is, in fact, where he gets his philosophy. The early 14th century, to be precise. From William of Ockham.

Ditzel is a nominalist, a malady that afflicts many protestants. Nominalism is the belief that things do not possess natures, and that words therefore do not refer to their natures or essences. Words are simply labels we affix to groups of things that happen to have similar characteristics.

Here is Ditzel mouthing the nominalist credo:

Thomas Gradgrind may have been mistaken to think that a handful of scattered facts could sufficiently sum up what a horse is to his students. But the problem was not in the fact that they were facts; the problem lay in not having enough facts!

A thing is what it is only by virtue of the information that can be said about it, nothing more. This is, at bottom, the reason that people like Ditzel side with Bitzer against Sissy Jupe: they don't believe that you know things by direct apprehension--because there is nothing to be apprehended. Sissy cannot know a horse by direct apprehension because there is no horse to know--there is only a set of "facts"--bits of information--which, when culled together, are all that a horse really is. In fact, I think that's why Dickens named him "Bitzer": because all he knew was bits of information. He didn't really know the wholes that make up the world, and that are known not solely by the intellect, but by the whole person.

And what is a person to Ditzel? Humanoid. Omnivorous. 32 teeth: namely, 20 molars, 4 canines, and 8 incisive. Sheds coat (or parka or sweater) in the spring; in coastal places sheds shoes too. Soft feet, but requiring to be shod by Nikes. Age known by ability to use technology and by number of Facebook friends (the more they have, the younger they are).

This is Gradgrind's belief, and Bitzer's--and Ditzel's. Facts, nothing but facts. That's all Ditzel will have. Can we just call him "Ditzer"?

The Questions to Ask about Poetry

Happened to run across the following questions you can ask about any poem while reading Mark Van Doren's The Noble Voice, and related them to my English students. They're quite good:

• What is a given poem about?
• What happens in it?
• What exists in it?
• If too little of the world is in it, why is that?
• If all the world is there, By what miracle has this been done?
• Is tragedy or comedy at work, and what is the difference between those two, and what the resemblance?
• Are the facts of life accounted for in the unique way that poetry accounts for them, and is this poem something therefore that any man should read?
• Does its author know more, not less, than most men know?

Mark Van Doren, The Noble Voice, A Study of Ten Great Poems (Henry Holt & Co., 1946)

Three Poems for Easter

Three poems from several of my favorite writers came across my Google Reader today which I thought worth repeating here for Easter:

Seven Stanzas At Easter

By John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

He Rests in Rising

by Wendell Berry

What hard travail God does in death!
He strives in sleep, in our despair,
And all flesh shudders underneath
The nightmare of His sepulcher.

The earth shakes, grinding its deep stone;
All night the cold wind heaves and pries;
Creation strains sinew and bone
Against the dark door where He lies.

The stem bent, pent in seed, grows straight
And stands. Pain break in song. Surprising
The merely dead, graves fill with light
Like opened eyes. He rests in rising.

Easter

by Anthony Esolen

Rise, heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise
Without delays,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
With him mayst rise,
That as his death calcined thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and, much more, just.

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
With all thy art.
The cross taught all wood to resound his name
Who bore the same.
His stretched sinews taught all strings what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day.

Consort both heart and lute, and twist a song
Pleasant and long;
Or since all music is but three parts vied
And multiplied,
O let thy blessed Spirit bear a part,
And make up our defects with his sweet art.

I got me flowers to strew thy way,
I got me boughs off many a tree,
But thou wast up by break of day
And brought'st thy sweets along with thee.

The Sun arising in the East,
Though he give light, and the East, perfume,
If they should offer to contest
With thy arising, they presume.

Can there be any day but this,
Though many suns to shine endeavor?
We count three hundred, but we miss:
There is but one, and that one ever.

Good poetry where you would least expect it

I'm sure someone has said this before, but poetry is like violin playing: When it is good it is good, but when it is bad, it is really bad. For that reason, most people just should leave it to the experts. Much of what you see attempted by amateurs on the Internet in particular is simply atrocious, so when you see original poetry that is good, it ought to be noted.

For this reasons, I wanted to draw attention to Doug Groothuis. Groothuis is a philosopher of religion at Denver Seminary. Now for some reason, philosophers don't normally make good poets and when they are protestants to boot, it can be even worse. Good poetic insight involves a sort of incarnational thinking which minds schooled in abstraction find hard to understand, much less employ. Abstraction is, of course, the philosopher's stock in trade. And for protestants, particularly those of a nonliturgical bent, abstraction seems to be the chief mode of thought.

So to find decent amateur poetry being produced by a protestant philosopher is doubly surprising. His last one, "Antique Inscriptions (ca. 1880-1985)," was particularly good.

I didn't subscribe to Groothuis's blog for poetry, but that has turned out to be an unanticipated pleasure. I hope he keeps it up.