The flaw in Enlightenment thought was to erect an intellectual hierarchy that could explain many phenomena, but which found itself inadequate to comprehend the realm of the traditional, the sacred, the intuitive, and the knowledge which is for ever just out of our grasp, like Tantalus’s.
The great French philosopher, Simone Weil (1909-1943), one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century, was much preoccupied with the age-old conundrums of truth, goodness, and beauty. She wrote:
“There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.”
The flaw in Enlightenment thought was to erect an intellectual hierarchy that could explain many phenomena, but which found itself inadequate to comprehend the realm of the traditional, the sacred, the intuitive, and the knowledge which is for ever just out of our grasp, like Tantalus’s.
Prominent among those works of genius, for many people, are the great poems of a language. If one aspires to be a poet of substance, one should heed the advice of the great practitioners; T.S. Eliot suggested that most poetic impulses do not survive beyond the age of twenty-five: after that, to be a poet requires commitment to a way of life that must be authentic, that must not lie. The huge task is to be at once true to oneself as a unique historical being, while also accommodating the “burden of the past,” that massive accretion of cultural capital that no serious writer can afford to ignore. The ideal is to be both particular and universal; if one isn’t, why bother? One is just playing with what Joyce calls “the big words that make us so unhappy.”
The inheritance of poetry in the English language, and associated languages, is extraordinarily rich. The great poets give us perhaps the closest skirmish with truth that we are likely to encounter in this sublunary world, and they do that through metaphor. Metaphor is not a frill or a dressing up of “ordinary” language; it is intrinsic to the poet’s vision, a way of disposing oneself to the universe that lets in the light. All lasting thought, scientific as well as humanistic, is metaphorical; it brings into play what Coleridge calls Imagination as opposed to Fancy. According to the latest research into the two hemispheres of the brain, as expounded by the great neurologist, Iain McGilchrist, we live in an age more and more tending towards an exclusive respect for left-brain processing. All great art, however, relies heavily on right-brain processing: we need Enlightenment rationality and reason, but also Romantic intuition and imagination. We need to learn by heart, not just by head.
The flaw in Enlightenment thought was to erect an intellectual hierarchy that could explain many phenomena, but which found itself inadequate to comprehend the realm of the traditional, the sacred, the intuitive, and the knowledge which is for ever just out of our grasp, like Tantalus’s grapes. Poetry is a disposition towards the world that allows, in its humility, for flashes of insight into the hidden/occult, the numinous, the sacred, the “dazzling darkness” of the deepest spiritual truths, which are always paradoxical, at a profound level where the “coincidence of opposites” takes place.
The intellect alone cannot cope with what a philosopher has called “the fearful inarticulacy of our inner life.” One great poet who struggled with this all his short life was Gerard Manley Hopkins. I would like to hold up as exemplary a stanza from one of his greatest poems. I will neither analyze nor expatiate upon this poem, just admonish you to read it out aloud many times and test it against your deepest convictions. It does not lie. For me, it is one of those works of art that redeem humankind from its usual sleep of abject and destructive materialism:
“As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying “What I do is me: for that I came.” 