Kathleen Raine: Poetry as Truth

Kathleen Raine: Poetry as Truth

Ladies and Gentlemen, I think I am the wrong person on the podium today. The subject and the eminent person delivering this lecture deserved better. Mr. William Radice is going to speak on Ms. Raine, Milton, Blake, and Tagore. I am no scholar of any of these poets. In fact I am no scholar of anything at all. Prof. Radice is also going to speak on how poetry leads to truth. Now my acquaintance with the last named attribute is rather perfunctory. But I’ll do the best I can.

Poetry and truth have different connotations for different people. If a poet is writing about the sea and his verses remind me of, or shall we say sound like, the coming in of the tide, for me that is a poetic truth. When Kathleen Raine says

After the seventh colour

And before the first

Lies darkness

(The Invisible Spectrum)

we are facing a factual truth that can be borne out by physics. But it is not the truth the speaker is seeking. Nor will Prof. Radice be interested when Blake rails against the dark satanic mills. When Derek Walcott in his poem “Another Life” talks of that ‘most unpalatable subject’, the desire of the dark-skinned man to look fair, I take it as truth.

“O

mirror, where a generation yearned

for whiteness, for candour, unreturned.”

The poet has touched a profound racial vein here with daring unselfconsciousness. Or when Milton starts with his complaint, “What boots it with incessant care…” I for one take it as a great truth, something that gives solace to poets on their bad days. And talking of two sides I may be permitted to quote Walcott again, from his poem “Goats and Monkeys,” however irrelevant it may seem:

Virgin and ape, maid and malevolent Moor,

their immortal coupling still halves our world.

That is a trip along racial divides. It rings absolutely true. I don’t wish to anticipate Prof. Radice. It would be presumptuous of me to do so. Kathleen Raine’s world has a different divide—between the upholders of tradition and the avid modernists, between the mystic and the materialist. Hers is an older world. The poets she admires are of a bygone era—Milton and Blake, Shelley, Coleridge, Yeats and among the newer ones, Edwin Muir and Vernon Watkins. Sometimes even the phraseology sounds archaic. For instance she says “No poem (Shelley’s Skylark) is more suffused with ‘the Elysian light’ wherein nature is apprehended as a region of the imagination..” (Pp146) Whoever uses the word Elysian now? Hers is a world of archetypes and divine energy, (the divine is ever present in her writings) of the Tree of Life or Yggdrasill, (“the whole of manifested being”[i]). “The Jewish mythical tradition of the Cabala is based upon the great symbol of ‘the tree of God’”, she tells us. Alchemists and Gnostics wander in. The mountains are mythical and holy—“Olympus, Meru, Carmel, Zion , the Holy Mountain under whatever name”[ii] , and so on. The thread of tradition starts with Plato and Plotinus and his neo-Platonists, and the thread runs through Milton and Blake and the rest of her favourites.

All is inspiration, the muses are fiery energies, and perspiration never enters the discourse. Shelley is quoted: “Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, compelled to serve the power which is seated in the throne of their own soul…” A bit too high flown and wind-blown for me. Critically, there will probably never anything definitive on Shelley. His reputation oscillates from high to low with every quarter century.

There are visions. Poets are supposed to have them. William Blake of course saw visions. In Peckham Rye at the age of eight or ten Blake claimed to have seen “a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” (His father thought he was lying and wanted to beat him up, but his mother—shall we say regrettably-- intervened). When he sketched in the Westminster Abbey, he would see in his visions processions of priests and monks. Ms. Raine tells us that “Edwin Muir spoke of a theme of a Paradise lost by the Fall as a part of ‘the fable’ which he saw in a waking vision.”[iii] And there is the paradise archetype, and its main features are “the tree, the river, the wall, the singing birds, the clash of swords, the serpent, the fruit.” She also tells us that no single vision encompasses the lot.

Kathleen Raine is obviously at odds with the materialist view of reality. She plays the intellect down (as far as poetry is concerned) and asserts that “the work of a poet is not analysis but synthesis.” The poet’s job is “always creating wholes and harmonies”. This finds echoes in her poems as well. For instance she says in “Isis Wanderer”, obviously referring to the killing and dismemberment of Osiris

This too is an experience of the soul

The dismembered world that was once the whole god

Whose broken fragments now lie dead.

The passing of reality is itself real.

The ‘world for her consists of (various) planes of reality and consciousness. Imagination is not just another reality. According to Blake it was “the body of God”, of “human existence itself.” Kathleen Raine supports this: “William Blake’s out-and-out affirmation that we imagine even the visible world into apparent existence no long (er) seems perverse.”[iv] She quotes Blake:

“…in your own Bosoms you bear your Heaven

And Earth & all you behold; tho’ it appears Without, it is within,

In your imagination..”

“The visible world itself is but a scene in the mirror of consciousness and may be nothing more”, she tells us.

In her critical writings she has left markers in regard to poetry and truth. In her essay on Shelley, whom she admires very much, and considers “the most Platonic of poets,” she tells us that Shelley “calls the truth of poetry ‘eternal truth’; in either case the order of truth is metaphysical.” Later in the same essay she tells us, “Shelley, like Yeats, believed that ‘the poet may embody truth, but cannot know it.’”

Kathleen Raine rails against demythologized naturalism. She is for harmony and wholeness against detail, for the collective myth (‘product of many minds’) rather than the particular, emanating, say, from a personal dream. She is for the personal vision transposed into common language. In Europe the symbolic language of poetry is platonic. She isn’t in tune with the Twentieth century negations. “For no renaissance has ever yet come of iconoclasm and rejection of the past, but on the century (contrary?), from renewed contact with tradition: as the Gothic architecture from the renewed study of the Greek philosophy of numbers; the Florentine renaissance and all that followed from Ficino’s Latin edition of the Platonists…”[v]

Her essay “On the Symbol” starts almost as an admission of defeat. She says she was in her younger days, tentative among writers of her generation. She attributed to her own ignorance her preference for Yeats and Keats and Shelley, whom they despised. She is candid about what the Positivists[vi] thought of her. “I did not like their poems any more than they liked mine.”[vii] She thought that the poets now out of favour in critical esteem must have been supplanted for good reason “after a process of comparison.” “that the new values represented a failure of perception did not occur to me till many years later.”[viii] She had not read Plato, Plotinus nor Vedantic literature nor Coomaraswamy till then.

Ms Raine condemns both social realism and surrealism. “Surrealism is just as much a materialist art as is social realism…Its symbols, released by ‘pure psychic automatism’ provide no bridge or ladder from which contemplation may pass from effect to cause, from lower to higher.” (Pp 113)

A crass generation had not enough time for her. She was fighting a losing battle

as far as literary tastes were concerned, defending styles, values, belief systems that had gone out of vogue. (She could hardly believe that John Donne was being preferred to Milton.) Her rejection of the creed that “the poet should confine himself to simple themes, sensible appearances and personal emotions”[ix] and her emphasis on “the metaphysical roots of poetic thought” pitched her against the modernists, the avante garde and basically the literary currents of the twentieth century.

Keki N. Daruwalla

25-3-2008