3 Children of the Mire

At least half of the history of modern poetry is the story of the

fascination poets have felt toward systems fashioned by critical
reason. "Fascina te" in this context means bewitch, mesmerize-
and deceive. As in the case of the German Romantics, repul-
sion inevitably followed attraction. This group is usually
considered Catholic and monarchic, and hostile to the French
Revolution. Nevertheless, initially most of them felt enthusiasm
and syrnpathy for the revolutionary movement. Indeed, their
conversion to Catholicism and to monarchic absolutism was as
much the consequence of the ambiguity of Romanticism-
always torn between two extremes-as of the nature of the
historical dilemma faced by this generation. The French Revo-
lution had two aspects: as arevolutionary movement it offered
European nations auniversal vision of man and anew concep-
tion of society and of the State; as anational movement it
strengthened French expansionism outside the country, and,
within, the policy of centralization begun by Richelieu. The
wars against the Consulate and the Empire were simultaneously
wars of nationalliberation and wars in defense of monarchic
absolutismo For example, the Spanish liberals who collaborated
38 Children of the Mire
with the French were loyal to their political ideas but disloyal
to their country, whereas other Spaniards had to resign them-
selves to combining the cause of Spanish independence with
that of the wretched Ferdinand VII and the Church.
Apart from political circumstances, the attitude of the Ger-
man Romantics was far from conservative. Holderlin comes to
mind (though, like Blake, he is not strictly Romantic, and for
the same reasons: chronologically both slightly antedate
Romanticism and extend past it, to reach us today). In the days
of the FirstCoalition against the French Republic (J une 1792),
he wrote to his sister: "Pray that the revolutionaries defeat
the Austrians, for otherwise the princes wl1abuse their power
dreadfully. Believe me and pray for the French who are the
defenders of the rights of man." A little later, in 1797, he
wrote an ode to Bonaparte-to the liberator of Italy, not to the
general who was to turn, he charged scornfully in another
letter, into "a sort of dictator." The theme of Holderlin's
novel Hyperion is dual: love for Diotima is inseparable from
the establishment of a community of free men. The point of
union between love of Diotima and love of freedom is poetry.
Hyperiori's struggle for his country's freedom is also his strug-
gle to found afree society, and the establishment of this
idyllic community implies areturn to Ancient Greece. Poetry
and history, language and community, poetry as frontier
between divine and human speech-these oppositions became
the central themes of modern poetry.
The dream of a free and egalitarian community, inherited
from Rousseau, reappears among the early German Romantics,
1
J
39 Children of the Mire
again linked with love, but more violently and sharply. They
saw love as transgression of social bond s, and exalted woman
not as erotic object but as erotic subject too. Novalis spoke
of poetic communism, envisioning asociety in which both the
consumption and production of poetry would be acollective
acto In Lucinda (1799), Frederick Schlegel made an apology for
free love. His novel may seem naive today, but Novalis wanted
to give it the subtitle, Cynical or Diabolic Fantasies. This
phrase anticipated one of the most powerful and persistent
currents of modern literature: the taste for sacrilege and
blasphemy, the strange and the grotesque, the marriage of the
commonplace and the supernatural, in short, the love of irony,
that great invention of the Romantics. It is precisely irony,
in Schlegel's sense of the word-Iove for the contradiction
which lives in each of us, and awareness of this contradiction-
that nourishes and destroys German Romanticism. This was
the first and most daring of the poetic revolutions, the first to
explore the underground regions of the dream, unconscious
thought, and eroticism. It was also the first to turn nostalgia for
the past into an aesthetic and apolitical programo
The English Romantics provide asimilar example. While
students at Cambridge, Southey and Coleridge conceived the
idea of Pantisocracy as a free, egalitarian, communistic society
which was to combine the "innocence of the patriarchal epoch"
with the "refinements of modern Europe." The revolutionary
theme of libertarian communism and the religious theme
of the restoration of original innocence were thus interwoven.
Coleridge and Southey decided to leave for America to found
their pantisocratic society on the new continent, but the former
40 Children of the Mire
changed his mind when he found out that Southey wanted to
take aservant with him! Many years later Southey was visited in
his Lake District retreat by the young Shelley and his first
wife, Harriet. The old ex-Republican poet found his young
admirer, "exactly as I was in 1794"; yet, writing of this visit to
his friend Elizabeth Hitchener (J anuary 7, 1812), Shelley says
"Southey is aman corrupted by the world, contaminated by
custom."
Wordsworth first visited France in 1790. Ayear later, when he
was twenty-one years old and just down from Cambridge, his
enthusiasm for the Republic took him back to France, where he
spent two years, first in Paris and then in Orlans. He was a
Girondin sympathizer. This fact, together with his revulsion at
the revolutionary terror, explains his dislike of the J acobins,
whom he called the "tribe of Moloch." As many twen tieth-
century writers would do with the struggles of the Russian
Revolution, Wordsworth took the side of one of the factions
trying to take control of the French Revolution: the losing side.
In his autobiographical poem The Prelude-with that hyperbolic
style filled with capitalletters which makes this great poet
also one of the most pompous of his century-he describes one of
the happiest moments of his life. It was a day in a town on the
coast where "all that I saw or felt/Was gentleness and peace,"
and he heard a traveler recently landed from France say:
"Robespierre is dead." He feels no less antipathy for Bonaparte,
and in the same poem tells how, when he learned that the Pope
had crowned Napoleon Emperor, he felt it was "This last
opprobrium, when we see apeople / ... take a lesson from the
dog / Returning to his vomit."
41 Children of the Mire
Faced with the disasters of history and the "degradation of
the era," Wordsworth returns to childhood and its moments of
translucency. Time splits in half, so that, rather than looking
at reality, we look through it. What Wordsworth sees, as perhaps
no one before or after him has seen, is not a fantastic world,
but reality as it is: the tree, the stone, the stream, each firm,
resting on its own reality in asort of immobility which does not
negate movement. These blocks of living time, spaces flowing
slowly before the mind's eye, are avision of the other time,
atime different from the time of history with its kings and
nations under arms, its revolutionary councils and its blood-
thirsty priests, its guillotines and gallows. The time of child-
hood is the time of imagination, that facuJ ty called by
Wordsworth the "soul of nature," to signify that it is apower
beyond the humano Imagination does not reside in man; rather
it is the spirit of the place and of the moment. It is not only
the power that allows us to see both the visible and the hidden
aspects of reality, but also the means whereby Nature looks
at herself through the poet's eyes. Through imagination Nature
speaks to us and to herself.
The vicissitudes of Wordsworth's political passion can be
explained in terms of his private life. His years of enthusiasm
for the Revolution can be said to be those of his love for
Annette (Arme Marie Vallon), a French girl whom he abandoned
as soon as he started to change his political opinions. The years
of his growing hostility for revolutionary movements coincide
with his decision to leave the world and live in the country
with his wife and sister Dorothy. But this simplistic explanation
diminishes us, not Wordsworth. There is another explanation,
42 Children of the Mire
an intellectual and historical one that has to do with Words-
worth's poltical affinity for the Girondins, his repugnance
toward the esprit de sy strne of the J acobins, the moral and
philosophical convictions which led him to carry his Protestant
disapproval of papist universalism to revolutionary universalism
and his Englishman's reaction to Napoleori's attempted invasion.
This explanation combines the liberal's antipathy for revolu-
tionary despotism with the patriot's antagonism toward the
hegemonic pretensions of a foreign power, and, with reserva-
tions, can be applied also to the German Romantics. To consider
the conflict between the early Romantics and the French
Revolution as an episode in the c1ashbetween authoritarianism
and freedom is not totally false, nor is it completely true.
No, there is another explanation. The phenomenon is seen
time and again in different historical circumstances, throughout
the nineteenth century and afterward, with more intensity,
down to the present. It is hardly necessary to cite the experi-
ences of Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Mandelstam, and so many
other Russian poets, artists, and writers; the polemics of the
Surrealists with the Third International; the bitterness of Csar
Vallejo, torn between loyalty to poetry and loyalty to the
Communist Party; the quarrels about "socialist realism" and-
but why go on? Modern poetry has been and is arevolutionary
passion, but this passion has been an unhappy one. There has
been attraction and rejection; and it is not the philosophers but ~
the revolutionaries who have banished the poets from their
republic. The reason for rejection is the same as for attraction:
both revolu tion and poetry attempt to destroy the present,
the time of history which is that of inequality, and to restore
43 Children of the Mire
the other time. But poetry's time is not that of revolution, the
dated time of critical reason, the future of the Utopias; it is
the time before time, the time of la vie antrieure which
reappears in the ch!ld's timeless glance.
Poetry's ambiguity toward critical reason and its historical
incarnations, the revolutionary movements, is one side of the
coin; the other side is its ambiguity toward Christianity.
Again, attraction and rejection. Almost all the great Romantics,
heirs of Rousseau and eighteenth-century deism, were religion-
oriented, but what were the actual beliefs of Holderlin, Blake,
Coleridge, Hugo, Nerval? One might ask the same question
of those who openly declared themselves irreligious. Shelley's
atheism is areligious passion. In 1810, in aletter to Thomas
Hogg he writes: "O! I burn with impatience for the moment of
Christianity's dissolution; it has injured me ... 1will stab the
wretch in secret." This is odd language for an atheist and fore-
shadows the Nietzsche of later years. Rejection of religion
and love for religion: each poet invents his own mythology, and
each mythology is amixture of different beliefs, rediscovered
myths, and personal obsessions. Holderlin's Christ is a sun god,
and in that enigmatic poem called "The Only One," J esus
turns into the brother of Hercules and of that Dionysus who
"yoked his chariot to a team of tigers and went down to the
Indus." The Virgin of the poems of Novalis is the mother of
Christ and the pre-Christian Night, his fiance Sophie, and
Death. Nerval's Aurelia is Isis, Pandora, and the actress J enny
Colon, his unhappy love. The religions and loves of the Roman-
tics are heresies, syncretisms, apostasies, blasphemies, conver-
44 Children of the Mire
sions. Romantic ambiguity has two modes, in the musical
meaning of the word: irony, which introd uces the negation of
subjectivity into the realm of objectivity; and anguish, which
drops ahint of nothingness into the fullness of being. Irony
reveals the duality of what seemed whole, the split in what s
identical, the other side of reason; it is the disruption of the
principIe of identity. Anguish shows that existence is empty,
that life is death, that heaven is adesert; it is the fracturing
of religion.
The death of God is a Romantic theme. It is not philosophical
but religious: as far as reason is concerned, God either exists
or does not exist. If He exists, He cannot die; if not, how can
someone who has never existed die? But this reasoning is
only valid from the point of view of monotheism and the
rectilinear and irreversible time of the West. The ancients knew
that the gods were mortal; they were manifestations of cyclical
time and as such would come to life again and die again. Up
and down the Mediterranean coastline sailors heard avoice
at night saying "Pan is dead," and this voice announcing the
god's death also announced his resurrection. The Nahuatllegend
tells us that QuetzaJ coatl abandons Tula; immolates himself;
becomes the double planet, Morning and Evening Star; and will
one day return to claim his heritage. But Christ carne to earth
only once, for each event in the sacred history of Christianity is
unique and will not be repeated. If someone says "God is dead,"
he is announcing an unrepeatable fact: God is dead forever.
Within the concept of time as a linear and irreversible progres-
sion, the death of God is unthinkable, for the death of God
opens the gates of contingency and unreason. There is adouble
45 Children of the Mire
reply to this: irony, humor, intellectual paradox; and also the
poetic paradox, the image. Both appear in all the Romantics.
The predilection for the grotesque, the horrible, the strange, the
sublime, and the bizarre; the aesthetic of contrasts; the pact
between laughter and tears, prose and poetry, agnosticism and
faith; the sudden changes of mood, the antics-everything that
turns each Romantic poet into an lcarus, aSatan, and a clown is
essentially anguish and irony. Although the source of each of
these attitudes is religious, it is astrange and contradictory sort
of religion since it consists of the awareness that religion is
hollow. Romantic religiosity is irreligious, ironic; Romantic
irreligion is religious, anguished.
The theme of the death of God, in this religious/irreligious
sense, appears for the first time, 1think, in lean Paul Richter. In
this great precursor are merged all the trends and currents which
will unfold in nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry- and
novel-writing-oneirism, humor, anguish, the mingling of
genres, fantastic literature allied with realism and realism joined
to philosophical speculation. lean Paul's Dream is adream of
the death of God; its complete title isSpeech of Christ, from
the Universe, That There Is No God (1796). In an earlier version
of the work, significantly, it is not Christ but Shakespeare
who announces the news. For the Romantics, Shakespeare was
the poet by antonomasia, as Virgil had been for the Middle
Ages. Thus, when lean Paullets the announcement come from
the mouth of the English poet, he forecasts what all the
Romantics will say later: poets are clairvoyants and prophets
through whom the spirit speaks. The poet replaces the priest,
and poetry becomes arevelation rivaling the Scripture.s. The
46 Children of the Mire
de~i~itive version of lean Paul's Dream underscores the deeply
~eIIglOUScharacter of this essential text, and, at the same time,
its completely blasphemous nature. It is not aphilosopher
or apoet, but Christ himself, the son of God, who affirms that
God does not existo And the place where this is made known
is a church in acemetery. The time may be midnight, but how
can one know for sure, since the face of the clock has neither
numbers nor hands, and on its empty surface ablack hand
tirelessly traces signs which disappear at once and which the
dead try in vain to decipher. Descending into the midst of the
clamoring shades, Christ says: "1have explored the worlds,
flown up to the suns, and 1have found no God. 1have been to
the extreme limits of the universe, 1have looked into the abyss
and shouted 'Father, where are you?' but 1heard only the
rain falling into the depths and the everlasting tempest which no
order governs." Dead children crowd around Christ and ask
"J esus, have we no Father?" He replies, "We are all orphan;."
Two themes are intertwined in the Dream: the death of the
Christian God, the universal Father and Creator of the world:
and the absence of adivine or natural order regulating the '
movement of the universe. The second theme directly contra-
dicts the ideas spread by the new philosophy among the cult-
vated spirits of the time. Enlightenment philosophers had
attacked Christianity and its God made man, but the deists as
well as the materialists postulated the existence of a universal
order. With few exceptions the eighteenth century believed
in a cosmos ruled by laws which did not differ essentially from
those of reason. An intelligent necessity, divine or natural,
moved the world. The universe was arational mechanism.
47 Children of the Mire
J ean Paul's vision manifests the exact opposite: disorder,
incoherence. The universe is not amechanism but avast form-
lessness agitated in away which without exaggeration can be
called passionate. That rain which is falling from the very
beginning into the endless abyss, and that everlasting storm on
alandscape in convulsion are the very image of contingency.
In this lawless universe, this world cast adrift, this grotesque
vision of the cosmos, "eternity les heavy upon chaos and when
it consumes it, eternity is itself consumed." Wehave before
us the "fallen Nature" of the Christians, but the relation
between God and the world is inverted. lt is not the world
fallen from God's hand that casts itself into nothingness, but
God himself who falls into the pit of death. This is an enormous
blasphemy.iat once irony and anguish. Philosophy had conceived
aworld moved not by a creator but by an intelligent order; for
J ean Paul contingency is a consequence of the death of God.
The universe is chaos because it has no creator. J ean Paul's
atheism is religious and clashes with the atheism of the philoso-
phers, for he replaces the image of the world as amechanism
with that of a convulsive world, endlessly in death throes yet
never dying. In the existential sphere universal contingency is
called orphanhood. And the first orphan, the Great Orphan, is
none other than Christ. Dream scandalizes the philosopher as
well as the priest, the atheist as well as the believer.
J ean Paul's dream was dreamed, thought, and suffered by
many poets, philosophers, and novelists of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries: Nietzsche, Dostoevski, Mallarm, J oyce,
Valry. It was known in France thanks to Madame de Stael's
book On Germany (1814). There is a poem by Nerval, com-
48 Children of the Mire
posed of five sonnets and entitled "Christ on the Mount of
Olives" (1844), which is an adaptation of the Dream. J ean
Paul's text is convulsive, abrupt, and exaggerated. The French
poet does away with the confessional, psychological element.
His is the account, not of adream, but of amyth; not the
nightmare of apoet in a cemetery church, but Christ's mono-
logue before his sleeping disciples. A magnificent line, "le dieu
manque a l'autel o je suis lavictime " (There is no God at the
altar on which 1am the victim), in the first sonnet broaches
a theme not found in lean Paul and which the following son-
nets bring to a climax in the very last line of all. It is the theme
of the eternal return, which will reappear with unparalleled
intensity and lucidity in Nietzsche, again associated with the
theme of the death of God. In Nerval's poem, Christ's sacrifice
in this godless world converts him into anew god-except
that he becomes adivinity who has little in common with the
Christian God. Nerval's Christ is an Icarus, aPhathon , a
beautiful, wounded Attis whom Cybele brings back to life.
The earth becomes intoxicated with this precious blood,
Olympus collapses into the abyss, and Caesar asks the oracle
of J upiter Ammon, "Who is this new god?" The oracle is
silent, for the only one who can explain this mystery to the
world is "Celui qui donna l'rne aux enfants du limen" (He
who breathed a soul into the children of the mire). This mystery
is insoluble, for He who breathes asoul into the Adam of mud
is the Father, the Creator, that very God who is absent from
the altar where Christ is the victim. A century and ahalf later
Fernando Pessoa faces the same enigma and his answer is
somewhat similar to Nerval's. There is no God but there are
49 Children of the Mire
gods, and time is circular: "Dios es un hombre de otro Dios ms
grande; / Tambin tuvo cada, Adn supremo; / Tambin,
aunque criador, l fue criatura" (God is aman to another,
greater God, and .this greatest Adam also fell; Though the
creator, he was acreature).
The poetic consciousness of the West has accepted the death
of God as though it were amyth; or rather, this death truly
has been a myth, not merely an episode in the history of our
society's religious ideas. The theme of universal orphanhood, as
symbolized in Christ, the great orphan and elder brother of
the orphan children who are all mankind, expresses apsychic
experience recalling the path of negation of the mystics. It is
that "dark night" in which we feel ourselves adrift, abandoned
in ahostile or indifferent world, guilty without guilt, and
innocent without innocence. However, there is an essential
difference: it is a night without an end, Christianity without
God. At the same time, the death of God awakens in the poetic
imagination a sense of mythic storytelling, and astrange cos-
mogony is created in which each god is the creature, the Adam,
of another godo It is the return to cyclical time, the transmuta-
tion of aChristian theme into apagan myth. An incomplete
paganism, aChristian paganism permeated with anguish for the
falI into contingency.
These two experiences-Christianity without God, and
Christian paganism-have been basic elements of Western poetry
and literature since the Romantic era. In both we face adouble
transgression. The death of God converts the atheism of the
philosophers into areligious experience and amyth; in turn this
experience denies its very origin: the myth is empty, a play of
50 Children of the Mire
reflections on the lonely consciousness of the poet, for there is
no one on the altar, not even Christ the victim. Anguish and
irony: faced with the future time of critical reason and revolu-
tion, poetry affirms the nonsequential time of sensibility and
imagination, original time. In the face of Christian eternity,
it affirms the death of God, the fall into contingency, and the
plurality of gods and myths. But each of these negations
turns against itself: the time of the imagination is not amythic
but arevolutionary time; the death of God is not aphilosophic
but areligious theme, amyth. Romantic poetry is revolution-
ary, not with but against the revolutions of the century; and its
religion is atransgression of religion.
In the Middle Ages poetry was the handmaiden of religion;
in the Romantic era it was the true religion, the fountainhead
of the Holy Scriptures. Rousseau and Herder had shown that
language answered man 's emotional rather than spiritual needs;
not hunger but love, fear, or wonder mde us speak. Humanity's
first credos were poems. Whether we are dealing with magic
spells, litanies, myths, or prayers, the poetic imagination is there
from the start. Without poetic imagination there would be no
rnyths or Holy Scriptures; at the sarne time, and also from the
beginning, religion confiscates the products of poetic imagina-
tion for her own ends. The charm of myths does not lie in
their religious nature-these beliefs are not ours-but from the
fact that in them poetic storytelling transfigures the world
and reality. One of the cardinal functions of poetry is to show
the other side, the wonders of everyday life: not poetic irreality
but the prodigious reality of the world. Religion takes over
51 Children of the Mire
these visions, transforms works of imagination into beliefs, and
beliefs into systems. But even then the poet gives perceptible
form to religious ideas, transmutes them into images, and ani-
mates them: cosmogonies and genealogies are poems, Holy
Scriptures are written by poets. lndeed, the poet is the geog-
rapher and the historian of heaven and he11: Dante describes the
geography and the inhabitants of the other world; Milton tells
us the true story of the Fall.
The critique of religion undertaken by eighteenth-century
philosophy shattered Christianity as the basis of society. The
fragmentation of eternity into historical time made it possible
for poetry to conceive of itself as the real foundation of society.
Poetry was believed to be the true religion and knowledge.
Bibles, Gospels, and Korans had been denounced by the philoso-
phers as bundles of old wives' tales and fantasies. At the same
time, even materialists recognized that these tales possessed
apoetic truth. In their search for afoundation predating
revealed or natural religion, poets found allies among the
philosophers. Kant's influence was decisive in the second phase
of Coleridge's thought. The German philosopher had shown
that between the sense data and the understanding, the particu-
lar and the universal, the "productive imagination" acted as
intermediary. Through it the subject transcends himself:
imagination projects and presents the objects of the sense data
to the understanding. Imagination is the condition of knowl-
edge: without it there could be no link between perception
and judgment. For Coleridge the imagination is not only the
necessary condition for all knowledge, it is also the faculty
which converts ideas into symbols and symbols into presences.
52 Children of the Mire
Imagination is "a form of Being": no longer just knowledge
but wisdom. Coleridge believed there was no difference between
poetic imagination and religious revelation, except that the
latter is historie and changing, whereas poets (insofar as they are
poets, and whatever their beliefs may be) are not "the slaves
of any sectarian opinion." He also said that religion was the
"poetry of mankind." Years before, Novalis had written that
"Religion is practical poetry" and poetry was the "first reli-
gion of humanity." There are many such quotations, aIl
with the same meaning: Romantic poets were the first to affirm
the historical and spiritual priority of poetry over official
religion and philosophy. For them the poetic word is the
founding word. In this bold affirmation lies the root of the
heterodoxy of modern poetry in the face of religions and
ideologies alike.
In the figure of William Blake are concentrated a11the con-
tradictions of the first generation of Romantics; they explode
in an affirmation transcending Romanticism. Was Blake really a
Romantic? Nature worship, one of the traits of Romantic
poetry, does not appear in his work. He considered the world
of imagination eternal, the world of generation finite and
temporal. The first was mental, the other was a "vegetable
glass" distorting our vision. These ideas seem to link him with
the Gnostics, but his love for the body and his exaltation of
erotic desire and pleasure ("sooner murder an infant in its
cradle than nurse unacted desires") set him in opposition to the
Neoplatonic tradition. Was he aChristian? His is not the
Christians' Christ, but anude Titan bathed in the radiant sea
of erotic energy, ademiurge for whom irnagining and doing,
53 Children of the Mire
desire and satisfaction are one and the same. His Christ reminds
us of Satan; his huge body, like agigantic cloud lit by lightning,
is covered with the flaming letters of the proverbs of Hel!.
In the earIy years of the French Revolution, Blake used to
walk about the streets of London with the blood-red Phrygian
cap on his head. His political enthusiasm eventualIy waned,
but not the ardor of his imagination, at once libertarian and
liberating:
"All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the fol-
lowing Errors: l. That Man has two real existing principIes:
Viz: aBody and aSou!. 2. That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone
from the Body; and that Reason, call'd Good, is alone
from the Soul. 3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for
folIowing his Energies.
"But the folIowing Contraries to these are True: l. Man has
no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call'd Body is a
portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets
of Soul in this age. 2. Energy is the only life, and is from the
Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference
of Energy. 3. Energy is Eternal Delight."
The violence of Blake's anti-Christian affirmations prefigured
that of Rimbaud and Nietzsche. He attacked the rationalistic
deism of the philosophers just as violen tly: Vol taire and
Rousseau were victims of his anger, and in his prophetic poems
Newton and Locke appear as agents of Urizen, the demiurge
of evi!. Urizen is the lord of systematic reason, inventor of the
morality which imprisons men in its syIlogisms, divides them
54 Children of the Mire
one against the other, and each against himself. Urizen: reason
without body and without wings, the great jailer. Blake not
only denounced the superstition of philosophy and the idolatry
of reason, but, in the century of the first industrial revolution
and in the country which was the cradle of this revolution, he
prophesied the dangers of the cult of progress. The landscape of
England was starting to change, and hiIls and vaIleys were
becoming covered with the vegetation of industry: iron, coal,
dust, and waste. He is in aIl things our contemporary.
In Blakc's contradictions and eccentricities there is alarger
coherence not found in any of his critics. Eliot charged his
mythology with being undigested and syncretistic, aprivate
religion made up of fragments of myths and eccentric beliefs.
One could accuse most modern poets of the same thing, from
Holderlin and Nerval to Yeats and Rilke; faced with the progres-
sive disintegration of Christian mythology, poets-not excluding
the poet of The Waste Land-have had to invent more or less
personal mythologies made up of fragments of philosophies and
religions. In spite of this diversity of poetic systems-rather, in
its very center-a common belief can be discerned. This belief
is the true religion of modern poetry, frorn Romanticism to
Surrealism, and it appears in aIl poets, sometimes implicitly but
more often explicitly. I am talking about analogy. The belief
in correspondences between aIl beings and worlds predates
Christianity, crosses the Middle Ages, and, through Neopla-
tionism, illuminism, and occultisrn, reaches the nineteenth cen-
tury. Since then, secretly or openly, it has never failed to nourish
Western poets, from Goethe to Balzac, frorn Baudelaire and
MaIlarm to Yeats and Pessoa.
55 Children of the Mire
AnaIogy outIived paganism and will probabIy outIive Christi-
anity and contemporary scientism. It has had aduaI function in
the history of modern poetry: it was the principIe before all
principIes, before the reason of phiIosophies and the reveIation
of religions; and this principIe coincided with poetry itseIf.
Poetry is one of the manifestations of analogy ; rhymes and
al!iterations, metaphors and metonymies are modes of operation
in analogicaI thought. A poem is aspiral sequence which turns
ceaseIessly without ever returning completely to its beginning.
If anaJ ogy turns the universe into apoem, a text made up of
oppositions which become resolved in correspondences, it also
makes the poem auniverse. Thus, we can read the universe,
we can live the poem. In the first case poetry is knowledge; in
the second, it is action. In both it borders on philosophy and
religion, but only to contradict them. The poetic image shapes a
reality which rivals the vision of the revolutionary and that of
the religious. Poetry is the other coherence, made not of reasons
but of rhythms. And there is amoment when the correspond-
ence is broken ; there is adissonance which in the poem is cal!ed
"irony," and in life "mortality." Modern poetry is awareness
of this dissonance within analogy.
Poetic mythologies, including those of Christian poets, grow
old and become dust as do religions and philosophies. But
poetry remains, and thus we can continue to read the Vedas
and Bibles, not as religious but as poetic texts. Here again is
Blake: "The Poetic Genius is the True Man ... al! sects of
Philosophy are adapted from the Poetic Genius ... the Religions
of al! Nations are derived from each Nation's different reception
of the Poetic Genius." Although religions belong to history
and perish, in al! of them anonreIigious seed survives: poetic
imagination. Hume wouId have smiled at such astrange idea.
Whorn can we believe? Hume and his critique of religion or
Blake and his exaltation of imagination? For al! the founders-
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Holderlin, lean PauI, Novalis-poetry
is the world of nonsequential time, the time of the body and
of desire. Beginning word: founding word. But also disintegrat-
ing word, the breaking away from analogy through irony or
anguish, through the awareness of history which in them is the
knowledge of death.
56 Children of the Mire
57 Children of the Mire
4 Analogy and Irony
thing, but aprofession of faith and an act. Even the doctrine of
"art for art's sake," which seems to deny this attitude, confirms
and prolongs it, for it was an ethic as well as an aesthetic, and
quite often implied areligious or political stance.
Romanticism was born almost simultaneously in England and
in Germany, and spread throughout Europe like a spiritual
epidemic. The pre-eminence of German and English Romanti-
cism comes not only from chronological precedence, but from a
combination of critical insight and poetic originality. In both
languages poetic creation is interwoven with critical reflections
on the nature ofpoetry, made with an intensity, originality,
and penetration unparalleled in other European literatures. The
critical texts of the English and German Romantics were true
revolutionary manifestos, and established atradition which con-
tinues today. The joining of theory and practice, poetry and
poetics, was one more manifestation of the Romantic aspiration
to unite the extremes-art and life, timeless antiquity and
contemporary history, imagination and irony. By means of the
dialogue between prose and poetry they tried to revitalize
poetry by immersing it in everyday speech-and to idealize
prose by dissolving the logic of discourse in the logic of the
image. As consequences of this interpenetration, we see through-
out the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the emergence of the
prose poem and the periodic renovation of poetic language by
increasingly strong injections of popular speech. But in 1800, as
again in 1920, what was new was not so much that poets were
speculating in prose about poetry, but that this speculation over-
flowed the limits of the old poetics, proclaiming that the new
poetry was also a new way of feeling and living.
The union of poetry and prose is a constant among English
A literary movement, Romanticism was also anew morality,
anew eroticism, and anew politics. lt may not have been
areligion, but it was more than an aesthetic and aphilosophy:
away of thinking, feeling, falling in love, fighting, traveling-a
way of living and away of dying. Frederick Schlegel, in one
of his programmatic writings, said that Roman ticism not only
proposed the dissolution and mixture of literary genres and
ideas of beauty, it also sought the fusion of life and poetry by
means of the contradictory but convergent actions of imagina-
tion and irony. Even more, its aim was to socialize poetry.
Romantic thought unfolds in two directions which end in
fusion: the search for that anterior principIe which makes
poetry the basis of language and thus of society; and the union
of this principie with life and history. If poetry was rnan's
first language-or if language is essentially apoetic operation
which consists of seeing the world as a fabric of symbols and
relationships between these symbols=then each society is built
upon apoem. If the revolution of the modern age is the move-
ment of society back to its origins, to the primordial pact of
equal with equal, then this revolution becomes one with poetry.
Blake said: "all men are alike in the Poetic Genius." Romantic
poetry, too, claims to be action; apoem is not only averbal
58 Children of the Mire 59 Analogy and Irony
and German Romantics, although it is not visible in all poets
with the same intensity and in the same fashion. In some, such
as Coleridge and Novalis, verse and prose, despite their inter-
communication, are clearly independent. Wehave Kubla Khan
and The Ancient Mariner on one side, the critical texts of
Biographia Literaria on the other; or the Hymns to the Nigh t as
opposed to the philosophical prose of the Fragments. In other
poets inspiration and reflection blend equally in prose and
verse. Neither Holderlin nor Wordsworth is aphilosophical poet,
fortunately for them, but in both thought tends to turn into
perceptible image. In apoet like Blake, the poetic image is
inseparable from speculative thinking, and the frontier between
prose.and poetry cannot be distinguished.
Whatever the differences-and they are profound-which
separate these poets, they al! conceive of poetry as avital
experience involving the totality of the human being. A poem
is not only averbal reality; it is also an act. The poet speaks,
and as he speaks, he makes. This making is above all a making
of himself: poetry is not only self-knowledge but self-creation.
The reader repeats the poet's experience of self-creation, and
poetry becomes incarna te in history. Behind this idea Iives the
old belief in the power of words: poetry thought and lived as
amagical operation destined to transmute reality. The analogy
between magic and poetry, arecurring theme throughout the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, originates with the German
Romantics. The conception of poetry as magic implies an
aesthetic of action. Art ceases to be exclusively representation
and contemplation; it becomes also an intervention in reality.
If art mirrors the world, then the mirror is magical; it changes
the world.
Baroque and Neoclassical aesthetics insisted on astrict
division between art and Iife. Although their ideas of beauty
were very different, both emphasized the ideal nature of a
work of art. When Romanticism affirmed the primacy of
inspiration, passion, and sensibility, it erased the boundary
between art and life. The poem was avital experience, and life
acquired the intensity of poetry. For Caldern life is illusion
and deceit because it has the duration and consistency of
dreams; for the Romantics what redeems life from the horror of
its monotony is that it is adream. The Romantics see the
dream as "a second Iife," away to recover the true life, the life
of primordial time. Poetry is the reconquest of innocence.
How can we fail to see the religious roots of this attitude and
its intimate relation with the Protestant tradition? Romanticism
originated in England and Germany not only because i t was a
break with the Greco-Roman aesthetic, but because of its
spiritual link with Protestantismo The inward nature of religious
experience stressed by Protestantism, as opposed to the ritual-
ism of Rome, supplied the psychic and moral preconditions
for the Romantic upheaval. Romanticism was above all a turning
inward of the poetic vision. Protestantism made the individual
consciousness of each believer the theater of the religious
mystery; Romanticism disrupted the impersonal aesthetic of
the Greco-Rornan tradition, and allowed the poet's ego to
become the primary reali ty.
To say that the spiritual roots of Romanticism lie in the
Protestant tradition may seem overly bold, especially if we
remember the conversions of various German Romantics to
Catholicism. But the true meaning of these conversions is c1ear
if one considers that Romanticism was areaction against
60 Children of the Mire
61 Analogy and Irony
eighteenth-century rationalism. The Catholicism of the German
Romantics was antirationalism, and it was no less ambiguous
than their admiration for Caldern. Their reading of the Spanish
dramatist was more aprofession of faith than a true reading;
August Schlegel saw in him the negation of Racine, but he did
not realize that Caldern's plays contain arational order no less
rigorous than that of the French poet, rather more so. Racine's
theme is aesthetic and psychological: human passions;
Caldern's theme is theological: original sin and human free-
domo The Romantic interpretation of Caldern confused
Baroque poetry and Catholic neoscholasticism with anticlassi-
cism and antirationalism.
The literary frontiers of Romanticism are the same as the reli-
gious frontiers of Protestantismo These frontiers were primarily
linguistic. Romanticism was born and reached maturity in
countries whose languages did not originate in Rome. The Latin
tradition, central in Western culture up to that time, was finally
broken. Other traditions appeared: popular and traditional
poetry from Germany and England, Gothic art, Celtic and
Germanic mythologies. The rejection of the image of Greece
provided by the Latin tradition caused the discovery (or inven-
tion) of another Greece-the Greece of Herder and Holderlin,
that will become Nietzsche's and our own. Dante's guide in
Hell is Virgil, Faust's, Mephistopheles. "The Classics!" says
Blake, referring to Homer and Virgil, "It is the Classics, not
Goths or Monks, that desolate Europe with wars." And he adds:
"Grecian is Mathematic Form but Gothic is Living Form." As
for Rome: "a warlike State never can produce Art." From the
Romantics on, the Western world recognized itself as a tradition
differing from that of Rome, and this tradition is not single
but multiple.
Linguistic influence unfolds on deeper levels. Romantic poetry
was not only a change of styles, but a change of beliefs, and
this is what distinguishes it radically from the other movements
of the pasto Neither Baroque nor Neoclassical art rejected the
Western system of beliefs. To find aparallel to the Romantic
revolution we must go back to the Renaissance, above all, to
Provencal poetry. This last comparison is particularly revealing,
because in Provencal as in Romantic poetry there is an undeni-
able relation, still not completely understood, between the
metrical revolution, the new sensibility, and the central position
occupied by women in both movements. In Romanticism, the
metrical revolution consisted of resurrecting the traditional
poetic rhythms of Germany and England. There is areciprocal
relation between the resurrection of rhythms and forms and the
reappearance of analogy. The Romantic vision of the universe
and of man was inspired by analogy. And analogy fused with
prosody: it was avision more felt than thought, and more heard
than felt. Analogy conceives of the world as rhythm: everything
corresponds because everything fits together and rhymes. It is
not only acosmic syntax, it is also prosody. If the universe is a
script, a text, or a web of signs, the rotation of these signs is
governed by rhythm. Correspondence and analogy are but
names for universal rhythm.
Although analogical vision inspires Dante as well as the
Renaissance Neoplatonists, its reappearance in the Romantic
era coincides with the rejection of Neoclassical archetypes
and the discovery of national poetic traditions. In unveiling
62 Children of the Mire 63 Analogy and Irony
their traditional poetic rhythms, the English and German
Romantics resuscitated the analogical vision of the world and of
mano It is impossible to prove a cause-and-effect relation
between accentual versification and analogical vision, it is
impossible also not to see that there is ahistorical relation
between them. The appearance of the first, in the Romantic
period, is inseparable from the second. Analogical vision had
been preserved as an idea by the occultist, hermetic, and
libertine sects of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries;
when English and German poets translated this idea of "the
world as rhythm," they translated it literally, turned it into
verbal rhythm, into poems. The philosophers had thought of
the world as rhythm; the poets heard the rhythm. It was not
the language of the spheres-although they thought it was-but
the language of men.
The evolution of verse forms in the Romance languages is also
an indirect proof of the correspondence between accentual
versification and analogical vision. The relation between the
versification systems of the Romance and Germanic languages
is one of inverse symmetry. In the former, the stress of the
accents is secondary to the syllabic meter, while in the latter
the syllabic count is secondary to the rhythmic distribution
of accents. Accentual versification is more akin to song than to
discourse; the danger of English and German verse lies not in
intellectual dryness but in Iyric confusion. The distinctive
feature of Romance prosody isjust the opposite. The tendency
to regularity, dominant since the Renaissance and fortified by
the influence of French Neoclassicism, was aconstant feature in
versification systems down to the Romantic periodo Syllabic
64 Children of the Mire
versification easily turns into abstract measurement and, as the
example of eighteenth-century French poetry shows, into
discourse and reasoning in verse. Prose consumes poetry-not
the lively, colloquial prose which is one of the sources of
poetry, but the prose of oratory and intellectual discourse.
Eloquence rath~r than songo By the beginning of the nineteenth
century, the Latin languages had lost their powers of enchant-
ment and could no longer be vehicles for thought as antidis-
cursive and essentially rhythmic as analogy.
If the resurrection of analogy coincided in Germany and in
England with the return to traditional poetic forms, in Latin
countries it coincided with the revolt against regular syllabic
versification. In French this revolt was more violent and
total than in ltalian or Spanish because syllabic versification
dominated French poetry more than it did other Romance
languages. lt is significant that the two great precursors of the
Romantic movement in France were prose writers, Rousseau
and Chateaubriand; analogical vision unfolds more readily
in French prose than in the abstract meters of poetry. It is no
less significant that among the central works of real French
Romanticism we find Aurelia, Nerval's novel, and ahandful of
narrations by Charles Nodier. Finally, among the great creations
of French poetry of the last century we find the prose poem,
aform which realizes the Romantic desire to mix pros eand
poetry. Such a form could have developed only in alanguage in
which the absence of tonic accents limits the rhythmic resources
of free verse.
As for verse: Hugo unmade and remade the Alexandrine:
,
Baudelaire introduced reflection, doubt, irony-the mental
65 Analogy and Irony
caesura which rather than breaking the regular meter tends to
produce psychic irregularity, exception; Rimbaud experimented
with popular poetry, song, free verse. The prosodic renovation
ended in two contradictory extremes: the broken lively rhythms
of Laforgue and Corbire and the musical score/constellation
of Un coup de des. Laforgue and Corbire had aprofound
influence on the poets of both Americas, Lugones, Pound, Eliot,
and Lpez Velarde. With Mallarrne was born a form which
belongs neither to the nineteenth century nor to the first half
of the twentieth century, but to the present. This haphazard
enumeration has only one purpose: to show that the general
movement of French poetry during the last century can be seen
as arevolt against traditional syllabic versification. The revolt
coinided with the search for the principie that rules the universe
and the poem: analogy.
1have already referred to "real French Romanticism."
Actually there are two: one is the official Romanticism of the
textbooks and histories of literature-eloquent, sentimental,
and discursive-exemplified by Musset and Lamartine; the other,
which for me is the real one, is made up of avery small number
of works and authors: Nerval, Nodier, Hugo in his last period,
and the so-called "minor Romantics." In fact, the true French
heirs of German and English Romanticism are the poets who
come after the official Romantics, from Gautier and Baudelaire
to the Symbolists. These poets give us adifferent version of
Romanticism. Different, and yet the same, because the history
of modero poetry is asurprising confirmation of the principie
of analogy: each work is the negation, the resurrection, and the
66 Children of the Mire
transfigura tion of the others. In this way French poetry of the
second half of the last century-to call it Symbolist would be to
mutilate it-is inseparable from German and English Romanti-
cism: it is its prolongation, but also its metaphor. It is atransla-
tion in which Romanticism turos back upon itself, contemplates
and supersedes itself, questions and transcends itself. This is
the other European Romanticism.
In each of the great French poets of this period the fan of
analogical correspondences opens and closes; in the same way,
the history of French poetry, from Les Chimres to Un coup de
des, can be seen as avast analogy. Each poet is astanza in
that poem of poems which is French poetry, and each poem is
aversion, ametaphor of this plural text. lf apoem is a system of
equivalences, as Roman J akobson has said-rhymes and allitera-
tions which are echoes, rhythms which play with reflections,
identity of metaphors and comparisons-then French poetry as
awhole becomes asystem of systems of equivalences, an analogy
of analogies. In its turo, this analogical system is an analogy of
the original Romanticism of both Germans and Englishmen. To
understand the unity of European poetry without violating
its plurality we must conceive of it as an analogical system. Each
work is aunique reality and at the same time a translation of
the others-its metaphor.
The influence of the occultists, Gnostics, Cabalists, alchemists,
and other marginal figures was also deeply feIt by the French
poets. At times they drank from the same fountain as the
German Romantics (J akob Bohrne, for instance, was known in
France through Louis Claude de Saint-Martin.) The occultist
tradition, on the other hand, had become associated with
67 Analogy and Irony