Poetry's Evolving Ecology

Poetry's Evolving Ecology

Our language and our culture are as much a contingency, as much a result of thousands of small mutations finding niches (and millions of others finding no niches), as are the orchids and anthropoids. – Richard Rorty

The trouble about this insistence on the values of discipline and integrity is that the critics who insist on them make judgments that prove as fallible as those of critics who don’t. – Stephen Spender


In his book The Marginalization of Poetry, Bob Perelman suggests that the absolute contact with nature, often attributed to other animals but lost on humans because of their need for mediation, isn’t attainable, and does so as he reviews language poets’ attempt at progress toward it. He frustrates the notion of a forward trajectory and progress in poetry. However he leaves the door open to its evolution. He tells the reader, “The administered dioramas of literary history contain scenes that on a gross scale can be read clearly enough so that we can watch revolutionaries battling conservatives and fighting against genres and the genres themselves flourishing, fading, and mutating” (38-57). Terry Eagleton uses the “crude fabular form” of biblical genesis to explain how humans have moved from a more immediate world and culture of the nature’s absolute and suggests how poets might regain paradisiacal relevance in The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Both of these authors address the growing irrelevance of poetry to the populace, including the educated, who conventionalize mediation, including their alienation, what Eagleton calls “dissociation of sensibilities” among politics, ethics, and aesthetics (366-415).

Marjorie Perloff in her essay “On Steve Mcaffrey’s ‘Lag’” recognizes a dialectic between popular culture and poetry as worth watching during the “evolution” of the twentieth-century poetic when she writes about McCaffrey’s Black Debt (114). The deteriorating situation between poetry and any audience is a continuation of the crisis in the humanities that postmodern theorists argue began with the Enlightenment. The idea of evolution whether it means change or progress toward an unmediated poetry is an often disputed idea in the arts, yet an unmediated poetry may be the only way to attract a larger audience in late capitalism. The scientific language used by these authors in their discussion of poetry is not new to poetry. Indeed, evolution may be helpful as a loose metaphor to explain the effects of globalization and of multiculturalism on the formative imagination of the poet, and thus how that imagination may help shape the idea of world literature. If evolution is a helpful term, then using the idea of the ecology of poetry as the formative imagination may also be helpful.

The formative imagination for the poet Stephen Spender is the ever-metamorphosing imagination responding to contingency as it builds or deconstructs its world through the language the poet uses. In two lectures for Audio-Forum, Sound Seminars earlier last century, Stephen Spender tracked the origins of what is today meant by contingency. One is titled Necessity of Being Absolutely Modern and the second is Poetic Vision and Modern Literature. In the title of the first lecture Spender is referring to Arthur Rimbaud’s genius as one believing in the magic of language. Spender recounts his having lived the modernist movement from beginning to end in a span of two years. In the second lecture, he explains the inverted nature of visionary writing by modern poets and novelists. For poets such as Blake, New Jerusalems are described in full. For modern poets they are alternative values referred to or gestured toward merely. There too he comes back to magic; not the magic of language only, but a magic of cultural creation mythology. The magic acts of modernism seem to have been an attempt through therapy to heal what Valery called a schism in the modern mind of Europe.

In the first lecture Spender refers to a “melting back of the formative imagination” as the magic of poetry to re-create reality and cure the early 20th Century affliction (Absolutely Modern). He uses this idea convincingly to illustrate Rimbaud’s disillusion with modern poetry and Ezra Pound’s insisting from a cage in Italy that he speak with Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt. Pound believed that with the right combination of words he could convince them that they were on the wrong side in the war. Spender suggests that modern poets believed that the melting back of the formative imagination to the creation myth of Western culture would allow them to start again, fresh in Eden, I presume, perhaps the moment before the fall, this time correcting mistakes and doing it right.

In his second lecture on visionary modernism, Spender explains how modern literature’s utopian impulses thrash around the suffering of the artist who is stuck with aristocratic sympathies and the fading of Christianity in an ever shrinking or globalizing and industrialized world. He concludes the lecture with the idea that the impetus of a movement beginning with Baudelaire has changed and “the main spring” of the impetus has been removed (Poetic Vision). He suggests to the reader that the main spring is the artist’s cultural search for a pathway back to some mythic utopian Judeo-Christian cultural beginning. The holocaust and the intermingling of cultures via political and economic imperialism, or through other desperate and democratic motives, removed from modernism the metaphor “main spring” of cultural creation mythologies. Language’s contingency, caused by the aporia between signified and signifier, has replaced it. Language’s contingency is a matter of all languages and so a broader appeal for poetry of all cultures. The magic may now be in the naming. It is the wall against which all poets get to beat their heads.

Formative imagination is important because it implies that impress or evolutionary inheritance may be malleable, sensitive to its environment, it ecology. Just as the stem cell can produce any cell, the formative imagination is an active agent and it promises to transform impress through the contingency of postmodern / post-avant poetry. However, instead of melting the imagination back to Eden, formative imagination may itself be seen as an evolutionary mechanism marking time in its contingency, the place of possibility, allowing a world literature, culture, and perhaps language to emerge. The national impresses of languages, nationalism and religion may stall or prevent a world culture, literature, and language from forming. However, as with species of plants and animals, the world is losing languages all the time in the postmodern world. If we look at the development of language and literature in the once colonial America and the struggle of modernism in the West we might infer how on a larger scale world literature may evolve.

The war between modernists Eliot and Williams may have been inspired by petty jealousies on perhaps both sides, but it is the crossroads. The struggle of modernism may be seen as one of direction by Western nationalism and its cultures in response to Valery’s psychological diagnosis. If so, then Eliot’s and Pound’s guarding as gatekeepers of Western and national histories and high cultures was one direction. Williams’ iconoclastic “It’s the words, the words we need to get back to, words washed clean. . . . Stein has gone systematically to work smashing every connotation that words have ever had, in order to get them back clean. . . . It can’t be helped that the whole house has to come down. In fact the whole house has to come down. . . . And it’s got to come down because it has to be rebuilt. And it has to be rebuilt by unbound thinking” was another (163). Though Wallace Stevens’ poetry may have been more successful with Williams’ aim, Williams’ articulation was to point the direction of art and culture upon the victory of the allies in World War II. Of course at the time the implications of the victory to culture and nationalism were not obvious.

The victory of the allies was going to mean movement toward capitalism and democracy in the West and the opening of cultural gates so that the “barbarians,” local under-served, subaltern, and foreign populations alike, could perhaps take part whether they wanted or not. For this to happen, the cultural symbols had to begin to fall away. (Claude Levi Strauss saw this happening and disliked the “developments” in the contemporary world of collapsing cultures. The falling away of cultural symbols was easy in the United States where the impress of Britain could easily be denied and where artists such as Williams and Stevens were attempting to create an American literature. In fact, Northrop Frye went so far as to say that the USA may have indeed created its own literature (43-44 Educated Imagination). However, for European countries identity expressed itself in distinct, individual symbols for centuries and not simply by the elite. Today, the European Union may to some inside and outside the Union appear to be a stew of symbols. The significance of poets and populations responding to these circumstances is their questioning or abandoning of historical narratives and cultural symbols as sacred texts and their embracing or at least acknowledging the function of what Spender calls the “formative imagination” as the adapter or threshold to contingency. This appears to be both difficult and urgent with immigration threatening core cultural values, such as freedom.

The response to the identity crisis in the West meant a victory for the merchant class or capitalism over the aristocracy, church, and even the state. It also meant that modernism’s Freudian attempt at a therapeutic embracing of and exploring symbols was not going to be effective in societies and the marketplace, even with a last minute, half-hearted effort to educate the masses. Capitalism and technology brought the need for perpetual social change. When a society’s experience is continuous change, history and symbols do not address the experience. Myth doesn’t have time to form. When a society respects change as its paradigm it must embrace chance, contingency. Tradition no longer gives off the illusion of holding time still, nor do totems, creation myths, nor symbols suffice to describe shared experience. In fact shared experience is fractured. Only metaphor and irony address society with nimbleness worthy of chance and rapid change, not necessarily with therapeutic intensions but with an ability to manage that experience, or perhaps create new descriptions of it.

Richard Rorty tells us that the only effective philosophical way of addressing our situation is “to redescribe lots and lots of things in new ways, until you have created a pattern of linguistic behavior which will tempt the rising generation to adopt it, thereby causing them to look for appropriate new forms of nonlinguistic behavior . . . to drop the idea of ‘intrinsic nature,’ . . . to face up to the contingency of the language we use” (9). Here he brings change and chance to language, recognizing its metamorphic powers, bringing Kuhn and Wittgenstein together. In doing so he acknowledges intellectual history as the history of metaphor not an explanation of an evolutionary biologist. He goes on to explain that new epochs in art and science happen when someone notices that two descriptions conflict and then invents a replacement (12-16). Rorty implies that symbols may be used, but only when the replacement metaphor is adopted by society.

I am suggesting that we have been and are in at least an epoch of redescribing, both personal and as western societies via paralogy, using new images and metaphors in an attempt to find perhaps replacement symbols—and only perhaps— or to rid the world of metaphysics and foster the embracing of contingency. Due to capitalism’s globalization and multiculturalism, symbols won’t hold for any culture. This period, known as postmodern, if described in Darwinian language, is a generation producing many mutations into its ecology, many metaphors, and may continue until there is a world literature that fills the definition that Goethe famously left blank.