Poetic Experience

Author(s): Jacques Maritain

Source: The Review of Politics, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Oct., 1944), pp. 387-402
Published by: Cambridge University Press for the University of Notre Dame du lac on
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 Poetic Experience

By Jacques Maritain

THE subject I am discussing here deals with a very peculiar kind

of knowledge - a kind of knowledge whose means is not concepts
and reasoning, but affective inclination or affinity, and which is often
disregarded by philosophers interested only in the rational kind of
knowing. Henri Bergson liked to quote a sentence he found in the
letters of a French philosopher; the sentence was as follows: "I have
suffered from this friend enough to know him." When I know a
friend to the core - not through having submitted him to a complete
series of psychological tests, but because I have suffered from him and
have got in myself the habit of his nature - then we may say in
philosophical language that I know this man by connaturality.

My subject is the nature of poetic knowledge. Now the notion of

knowledge by connaturality, or by inclination, not by intellectual con-
ception, has been consecrated by Thomas Aquinas, when he explained
how the mystical contemplators know divine things not by having
learned them, but by having suffered or undergone them. Thus the
virtuous man knows the matters of his virtue by listening to his own
inclination, not by learning moral philosophy. Yet the sort of knowl-
edge or experience of which I am speaking is a knowledge by con-
naturality quite different from mystical experience. It is the special
character of poetic knowledge which we shall try to analyze and cir-
cumscribe.

I don't know whether this analysis would satisfy the claim for an
ontological criticism that Mr. John Crowe Ransom made in his book,
The New Criticism. At any rate, the need for ontology seems to me
the crucial need of aesthetics as well as of philosophy in our day.

The subjects I should like to discuss in this connection are: FIRST,

1 The Aristotelian conception of politics is so wide and wise as to include all exper-
iences affecting "the common interest," all the various activities "useful for the purposes
of life." In any human society, the nature and function of art is, as Aristotle recognized,
a problem of the greatest interest and importance. It is in this Aristotelian spirit that the
editors present this essay, delivered in January of this year at the University of Chicago.
387

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388 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

the specific character of artistic activity, which essentially tends, not to

know, but to make;

SECOND, the basic element of knowledge, of experiential knowl-

edge, which is nevertheless at the core of poetry;

THIRD, yet the fact remains that poetic knowledge or poetic ex-
perience is essentially a source of creative activity, and finds its expres-
sion not in conceptual statements, but in the very work made;

FOURTH, this poetic knowledge is knowledge by connaturality;

FIFTH, what is the object of this poetic knowledge;

SIXTH, what is its specific means;

and SEVENTH, the fact that the poet's work is both an object and
a sign.
I

When a philosopher reflects on poetry, he observes first of all that

poetry lies in the line of art or of creative activity. And art as such
does not have as its end knowledge, but producing or creating - not
after the fashion of nature, as radium produces helium or as a living
being begets a living being, but rather in a mode proper to spirit and
freedom: the point here is the outward productivity of the intellect.

The intellect is by its nature expressive; it produces inwardly the

mental words or concepts which are for it means of knowing, but which
are also effects of its spiritual abundance, expressions or internal mani-
festations of what it knows.

And by a natural superabundance, the intellect tends of itself to

give expression and manifestation outwardly - to sing. It flows not
only into its concepts or internal words, it demands that it overflow
into a work: a natural desire which, since it seeks to cross the frontiers
of the intellect itself, cannot be realized except by means of the move-
ment of the will and the appetitive powers, which thus enable the in-
tellect to go beyond itself according to its natural desire, and which
thereby determine in an entirely general way the original dynamism
of art's activity.

Reduced to its pure and essential metaphysical exigency, such is,

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 POETIC EXPERIENCE 389

I believe, the deepest root of the poetic activity in the sense of artistic
activity. This metaphysical root can be enmeshed by a tremendous
amount of empirical conditioning, psychological and sociological, and
by more obvious purposes of utility which we may see, for instance,
in the purposes of magic in the most primitive painters, or in the natu-
ral human need for implements: but the metaphysical root is pre-
supposed by these purposes and by this conditioning.

The activity of art thus understood does not of itself refer to

a need to communicate to another (this need is real, and in fact inter-
venes inevitably in artistic activity, but it does not define that activity);
the activity of art refers essentially to the need to speak and to achieve
manifestation in a work-to-be-made out of a spiritual super-abundance,
even though (what would, moreover, be a cruel anomaly) there may
be nobody to see this work or to hear it. As for the very public with
which the artist wishes to enter into communion, the fact is that he
suffers from it as much when he is "appreciated" by it as when
he is not "appreciated" - and perhaps he suffers more profoundly.
To be appreciated takes something away from him, leaves him out of
his element; and he begins to wonder if the work does not lack the
one thing which, if it were there, would be incommunicable. In the
remarkable lecture he recently gave at the University of Chicago, Igor
Strawinsky rightly insisted on the active participation which is required
from the listener. Yet genuine listeners are rare. I wonder whether a
composer, when thousands of listeners cheer his work, is not tempted
to think: "If they are so satisfied, there must be something silly in my
work." It is the same with philosophy. When I am approved by my
fellow-philosophers, I start suspecting myself. (And when they dis-
approve of me, I suspect myself also.) It is not for men that the artist
produces his work; at most it is for some future generations which he
conceives as somehow immaterial beings because they have no existence
now. His wish is not that he might be appreciated, but that he might
endure in history.

In any case, the activity of art is not of itself an activity of knowl-

edge, but of creation; what it aspires to is the making of an object
according to the inward demands and the proper good of that object.
And poetry lies, by its own nature, in the line of art. This is my
first point.

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390 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

II

The second point is as follows. Poetry, when it reaches the state

of self-consciousness, nevertheless becomes aware of being first and
originally a kind of knowledge or experience - so much so that it
then runs the risk of becoming intoxicated with knowledge and of
entering into conflict with art, in burdening itself, illusively, with the
functions proper to metaphysics, ethics and sanctity.

Let us note here the importance of the phenomenon of taking

consciousness of oneself. It corresponds to a characteristic of activity
in the spiritual order.
We may admit that it was in the nineteenth century, with the roman-
ticist preparations and above all with Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire
and Rimbaud that poetry began, among the poets, deliberately and
systematically to become conscious of itself.
A first phase in the prise de conscience of poetry as poetry is
related still, it seems to me, to a specific function of art; that is, the
creation of an object. But poetry transfigures this function and this
need: it is not an object of art which it labors to create. Rather, it is
a world; the poem alone will be unto itself a sufficient universe, with-
out any need to mean anything outside itself, a world to which the
soul must come blindfolded to be locked in, to receive - as though
through the pores, as though through the whole surface of the body -
the emanations of night which penetrate to the heart without our
knowing how. I am as dark as feeling, wrote the French poet Pierre
Reverdy, and his poems are just as dark. In order to discover their
beauty, which is great, we must consent first to this obscurity. Indeed
such a preliminary consent - I mean consent to the intentions of the
artist - is always required for the understanding of the work of art
and the communication which this understanding presupposes.

A second important phase in the progressive self-awareness of

poetry relates, I believe, to the essences of the poetic state; there we
see poetry flung into an infinity of mystery to be explored and to be
known, below consciousness and above it. A great contemporary poet
like T. S. Eliot is more interested in and more aware of what the
poetic state consists in than Milton or Donne were.
In a lecture given at Buenos Aires in the summer of 1936, Henri

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 POETIC EXPERIENCE 391

Michaux admirably described the despoiling required by the relentless

task to which poetry feels today committed, of discovering and laying
bare the truth of its own pure substance and its proper inspiration.
Rhythm, rhyme, lines and verses, all the clothing of words, of music,
of human intelligibility, to which the poem seems to owe its texture -
none of these is what we are seeking and all are obstacles to the search
we are pursuing. Are we then to reduce poetry to the impossible in
order to test its resistance? Or perhaps we shall enter into a kind of
dark night wherein the hidden essence of poetry will be attained in an
incommunicable experience, and whence we shall return later to the
company of men - all our means of expression transformed and
purified by a fire which seems to exhaust them but which really releases
unknown energies in them.
Meanwhile, the very work, inasmuch as it yields to the efforts
toward self-knowledge which we are considering, the very work done is
placed in singular conditions of asceticism: it ceases to be a song, as
it demands to be by its very nature; it would become rather a hidden
revelation of the secret working of poetic powers in the substance of
the poet - a hidden revelation which could no more than try to strike
us at the heart in forbidden ways.
I have been speaking of a second phase or moment in the awaken-
ing of poetry to itself, as poetry, a moment which concerned chiefly
the poetic state. I think we can, at least by abstraction, discern now
a third, more profound phase, which is related most of all to poetic
knowledge - I mean to say, knowledge of reality, of the inwardness
of things, or of their reverse sides; a knowledge proper to poetry or to
the spirit of poetry.
The more deeply poetry becomes conscious of itself, the more
deeply it becomes conscious also of its power to know, and of the mys-
terious movement by which, as Jules Supervielle put it, it draws near
to the sources of being.
At this point we may observe that every taking consciousness of
oneself, every attempt toward self-scrutiny is accompanied by a risk
of perversion. The risk here was that poetry might wish to evade the
line of work and turn back to the soul itself, thinking to flood the
soul with pure knowledge, and to become the absolute end, the god
of man.

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392 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

It is surely true that one can be a poet without producing - with-

out having yet produced - any work of art; but if one is a poet, he
is virtually turned toward operation: it is essential to poetry to be in
the line of operation just as the tree is in the line of the fruit. But in
becoming self-conscious, or aware of itself, poetry releases itself in some
measure from the work to be done. For knowing itself means turning
back upon itself, upon its inner sources. Thus poetry enters into con-
flict with art, though by nature poetry is bound to follow the way of
art. Whereas art requires an intellectual shaping according to a crea-
tive idea, poetry, under such circumstances, asks to remain passive, to
listen, to descend to the roots of being, to the unknown which no idea
can circumscribe. "Because I is another," said Arthur Rimbaud2- and
how can we better define this descent into the lived-in subject, which is
poetic knowledge? One moment of dizziness is enough then. If poetry
lose foothold here, it is cut off from its operative ends. It becomes a
means of knowledge; it no longer seeks to create, but to know. While
art asks to produce, poetry, freed from its natural ties, asks to know.
But knowledge - what a temptation, and what an absolute! That
very knowledge which involves the whole of man, and which gives the
world to man, letting him suffer the whole world within himself! If,
released (or believing itself to be so) from the relativities of art,
poetry finds a soul which is claimed by nothing else and which offers
no opposition, it will develop a terrible appetite for knowledge, a
vampire's appetite which will drain all the metaphysical sap which is
in man, and even all his flesh.
The experience of Arthur Rimbaud is decisive here.
And the conclusion, announced with an astonishing lucidity in
Une Saison en Enfer, was inevitable. Poetry, in order to realize itself
in its plenitude, aspires to free itself from every determined and limited
condition of existence, poetic knowledge exalts itself even to the point
of claiming for itself the gift of absolute life; and thus poetry becomes
engaged in a dialectic of self-destruction. It wishes to be all things
and to provide all things - act, holiness, transubstantiation, and
miracle: it assumes the burden of humanity. But whatever it may do,
it is really kept by its nature to one line only - and one which is
utterly particularized and very humble indeed: the line of art and of
2 Lettre a Izambard (Lettre du Voyant).

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 POETIC EXPERIENCE 393

the work to be done. Finally there is nothing else to do but to keep

silent, to renounce at the same time art and poetry. Rimbaud not only
ceased to write; he revenged himself on poetry: he attempted to cast
it from himself as a monster.3'

III

Thus - here is my third point - we realize that poetic expe-

rience, if it is relieved of the temptation to which Rimbaud yielded,
and considered in its very nature, tends by itself toward creation, and
cannot escape this law without destroying itself and the poet. And
here I must make it clear that when I speak of poetry and poetic expe-
rience, I do not speak only of the activity of the poet, but also of the
painter, the composer, the architect; I speak of poetry and poetic ex-
perience as the inner source and animating soul of all kinds of arts.
Why does poetic experience tend by itself toward creation? Why is
the content of poetic experience, as such non-conceptualizable, not to be
known but to be expressed in a work, to be cast into being? Why is
it a source of creative activity?
To reply to this question we must first bring our attention to bear
on subjectivity as such. Man's subjectivity is linked to the privileges
of spirituality and of self-immanence proper to personality. Subjectivity
is spiritual, it is that very center of our root-activities, the source of the
super-existence of knowledge and the super-existence of love; and if for
its activities all specification derives from the object, all vitality, in
return, and all vital productivity derives from subjectivity itself; sub-
jectivity appears thus, according to its most profound properties, as a
center or universe unto itself of productive vitality and spiritual em-
anation.

Now subjectivity, when it knows by means of concepts and ideas,

does not grasp itself, but the known object. If subjectivity can be
grasped insofar as it is subjectivity, this will happen only when it is
grasped insofar as it is a center of productive vitality, as it is pro-
ductive, not insofar as it is knowing by means of concepts and ideas.
And if an experience of oneself by oneself takes hold of the subject

3 Cf. my article "Poetry's Dark Night," in The Kenyon Reviem, Spring 1942. Note:
For permission to reprint here some portions of this article the Editors of the REVIEw
or PoLITIcs are very grateful to the Editors of the Kenyon Review.

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394 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

insofar as it is subject, that is to say, insofar as it is the root principle

of productive vitality and of spiritual emanation, such an experience
will, for that very reason, be a fecundation of that productivity. And
such a grasping of the substance of the subject can take place only
in a non-conceptual and non-logical fashion, therefore in an essentially
obscure manner, in the instant and by the same stroke that a reality
of the universe will be taken hold of in an intuitive emotion in which
the universe and the subject together will reveal themselves to the
subject as in a ray of darkness. For it is by awakening to the world,
it is by dimly grasping some substantial secret of things that the soul
of man dimly grasps itself.
Thus it is that poetic experience is necessarily formative or operative,
because poetic experience refers to subjectivity in the very exercise of
the latter; because this experience awakens and actuates the subject as
subject, or as a center of productive vitality and of spiritual emanation,
and because, on the other hand, such an experience, in attaining reality
as embodied in subjectivity itself and therefore as impossible to express
in a concept, is unable to emerge into ideas and conceptual statements,
into that fruit of knowledge which is formed within the mind. As a
result, it can emerge only into a work externally produced.
That is poetic experience or poetic knowledge, where subjectivity
is not grasped as an object, but as a source and in the very grasping of
things by resonance in the subject; knowledge mainly unaware; knowl-
edge which is a minimum of knowledge but a maximum of germinal
virtuality; and which will come to objectivation only in the work, in a
thing made.
It follows from these considerations that poetic knowledge, if it is
placed in the line of making, is not, for all that, simultaneous with the
poem itself. Between it and the poem there is the entire intellectual
elaboration of art, and first of all that formative idea which forms
itself progressively and by degrees. The shock of poetic intuition can
be felt in the depths of the subject and remain there as in a latent
state; poetic intuition will thus endure for a long time; or, after a
first brilliance fall into inertia, and reappear later on in spiritual mem-
ory, without having lost anything of its emotional or realizational
power. And finally the poet will also be able, thwarting the nature of
things, to turn this intuition away from its operative finalities, and

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 POETIC EXPERIENCE 395

seek in it, by violence, and for his own misfortune, as I have tried to
point out, pure knowledge. There is no poem without poetic experience.
There may be poetic experience without a poem (although there is no
poetic experience without a secret seed, no matter how small, of a
poem).
IV

As for my fourth point, I should like to insist upon the mode or

manner proper to poetic knowledge: such a knowledge comes into
existence in virtue of vital union or connaturality.
An act of thought which by its essence is creative, which shapes
some thing into being instead of itself being formed by things - what
does it express and make manifest in producing the work, but the very
being and substance of the one who creates? Yet the substance of the
man is a darkness to himself; it is in receiving and suffering things,
it is in awakening himself to the world that man awakens himself to
himself. The poet cannot express his own substance in a work except
on condition that things strike their resonance in him and that in him,
in the same revelation, they and he are stirred from their slumber.
Everything that he discerns and divines in things is thus perceived as
inseparable from himself - and more precisely, as identical with him-
self. And all this he perceives in order to grasp his own being darkly
within himself, by a knowledge which achieves itself only in being
creative.4 That is why, as Jean Cocteau has said, the poet can show
the Grail to others, but he cannot see it himself.5 His intuition, the
creative intuition or emotion, is an obscure grasping of self and things
together in a knowledge by union or connaturality, which takes form
and fructifies only in his work, and which moves with all its living
burden toward making and producing. Here is a knowledge different
indeed from that which we commonly call knowledge; a knowledge
which is not expressible in ideas and judgments, but which is rather
experience than knowledge, and creative experience, for it seeks to
express itself and is expressible only in a work. This knowledge is not
preliminary to or presupposed by the creative activity but is intimately
one with it, consubstantial with the movement toward the work; and it
is properly this that I call poetic knowledge.

4 Cf. Frontieres de la Poisie, p. 197.

5 In Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde.

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396 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

It must be clearly understood that the word "knowledge" is an

analogical term which designates here a knowledge in which the mind
does not tend, as it were, to its repose in "becoming other things," but
to "producing a thing in being." Poetic knowledge is thus, as I pointed
out a moment ago, the secret vital force of this spiritual seed which
the ancients called the idea of the work, the working or artistic idea.

Coming now to ray fifth point, that is, to the object of poetic
knowledge, I would observe that Poetic Knowledge has become con-
scious of itself at the same time that poetry has become self-aware; or
rather this piercing divination is poetry itself, it is the spirit which, in
the sensible and by the sensible, in passion and by passion, in obscure
densities and by them, captures the secret meanings of things and of
the self in order to cast these secret meanings into matter; the same
meaning being at once the meaning perceived in being and the meaning
which animates the work to be done. This meaning may be called
the melody of every genuine work of art; a meaning or melody in
which the work and the depths of existence and of the subject com-
municate - and are two in one song.
Thus poetic experience proceeds from a natural and eminently
spontaneous movement of the soul, which seeks itself by communing
with things through the sense and imagination permeated with intelli-
gence. Poetic contemplation is as natural to the spirit as is the return
of the bird to its nest, and it is the entire world which returns with the
spirit to the mysterious nest of the soul. Poetic emotion is sovereignly
determined and individualized; and if poetry is, as Aristotle believed,
more philosophical than history, this is because it is related to the most
intimate of essences and qualities in which the real and the singular
abound. And this is why poetic intuition and the object created abound
in significance, give to the spirit, in one fell swoop, the universe in a
countenance. As William Blake said,

To see a World in a grain of sand,

And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.

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 POETIC EXPERIENCE 397

Poetic experience, however, does not tend to grasp essences and to

form ideas expressing the nature of things, which is the job of philos-
ophy, not of poetry. Its mode is entirely existential. Applied to the
mode, to the manner of knowing, to the manner of taking hold of the
real, no expression is too strong to avert from poetic intuition the laws
proper to the conceptual understanding of essences. For, as I have
noted, the content of poetic experience is grasped as non-conceptualiz-
able.

Poetic experience is not ordered to grasp essences. It is ordered to

give utterance to the subject, it awakens subjectivity to itself so that
the inner recesses of the artist may manifest themselves insofar as they
are transparent to some ray of being and in act of communication with
the world - however fleeting and light, however small may be the
ray which sets up the contact. If such a ray is allowed to pass, an
almost silent poem of two lines is of more value than a large noisy
machine working to decipher the alphabet of essences. The volume of
the work counts certainly, according as, in art, it is itself a qualitative
element. All things being equal, a large poem is more valuable than
a small one, but on condition that it be as humble and as movable in
the breeze as the divine little cloud of intuitive emotion in the inner
sky of the poet. Poetry dislikes noise.

There is a poetic knowledge of the world, but it is not made for

knowing nor for knowing the world, it is made to reveal the creative
subject dimly to itself and to fertilize it in its spiritual sources. If you
try to make use of poetic knowledge for knowing, it vanishes in your
hands.

The poet is not, as Paul Claudel believes, a hierarch who "calls all
things into being by giving each thing its inalienable and proper name";
the poet would rather be a child who tames things by giving them
the name of his loves, and who creates with them a paradise. They
tell him their names in riddles, he enters into their games, blind-folded,
he plays with them the game of life and death.

Things are not only what they are; they constantly pass beyond
themselves, and give more than they have, because from every side
they are pervaded by the creative influx of the first cause. They are
better and worse than themselves, because being superabounds, and

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398 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

because nothingness attracts that which comes from nothingness. Thus

they communicate in existence, in an infinity of modes and by an in-
finity of actions and contacts, correspondences, sympathies and malices,
breaks and reboundings of being. This communication in existence
and in the spiritual flux from which existence proceeds, communication
which brings to things the secret creative sources - that above all
is perhaps what the poet experiences and suffers, and grasps without
knowing it, or knows as unknown. At the culmination of our knowl-
edge we know God as unknown, St. Thomas said, after the pseudo-
Dionysius, with regard to mystical contemplation. We must say of the
poet: at the source of his creative movement he knows things "as
unknown," together with his own soul; he knows as unknown the
communion of things (among themselves and with himself) in the
passages of the spirit which causes things to be; and this is still another
way - altogether different from contemplation - of being a neigh-
bor to God.

To summarize all this, let us say that the object of poetic expe-
rience concerns things in their existential inter-communications and
intermeanings, insofar as the divine creative impulse in which they
commune fills them with particular and concrete significance.

VI

I have spoken of the mode and of the object of poetic experience.

Another point - my sixth point - must be examined, namely the
means of this experience. Here I should first like- to observe that in
the case of the poet, contrary to other men (particularly those engaged
in civilized life) the soul, doubtless considered not in its substance
but in its faculties and at the very root of the latter, remains,
so to speak, available to itself, retains a reserve of spirituality not
absorbed by the exterior and by the work of the faculties; and this
profound unemployed reserve of the spirit, being unemployed, is so to
speak, a sleep of the soul; being of the spirit, it is in act, I mean
virtually, by means of a tension and a virtual reversion of the spirit
to itself and to everything which is in it. The soul sleeps but its heart
keeps watch, let it sleep. And often it is in mature age, when the spirit
has been nourished with experience and suffering and returns to itself,
that it best knows this sleep; which also exists in another, more pre-

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 POETIC EXPERIENCE 399

carious, fashion, and with the tartness of overly young saps, in the
child or the primitive.

Now when to the depths of such a secretly vigilant sleep and of

such a spiritual tension, of such a dormant flame, emotion comes sud-
denly, then spiritualized emotion delivers the very world of which it
is pregnant, it conveys this world to the poet, in the vitality of the
expectant intellect virtually turned towards the substance of the soul
and all its treasures. Then it is that emotion becomes intentional and
intuitive, and passes to the state of grasping reality: because emotion
is then engrossed in the vitality and productivity of the spirit, to which
productivity it brings a determination in the manner of a seed. In such
intuitive emotion the real and the subjectivity, the world and the soul
coexist actively. Then sense and sensation, images and imagination
are brought back to the heart, blood to the spirit, passion to intuition.
And by means of the vital actuation of the intellect all the faculties
are also actuated in their depth and at their root. It is the soul which
becomes known through the experience of the world and it is the world
which is known through the experience of the soul, by means of a
knowledge which is not aware of itself, for where is the concept by
means of which such a knowledge would express itself? What it knows,
I said a while ago, it knows as unknown, and not to know but to
produce. Objectivation will take place in the object made, in the work.
It is to creation that this experience tends.

We see that in poetic knowledge the most immediate is the expe-

rience of the things of the world - because it is natural for the human
soul to know things before it knows itself; but the most important is
the experience of the subject - because it is in a knowledge of oneself,
however obscure it may be, that the productive vitality wherein the
emotion becomes intentional and sees is awakened and actuated.

We also see that in using in this analysis the term emotion, I have
used it in a quite particular sense. Here it is not a question of emotion
as a particular state of consciousness and a merely affective phenom-
enon, offering matter to be enclosed in and expressed by the work.
Creative emotion, as I just tried to explain, is permeated with intelli-
gence and spirit. Creative emotion is not a matter of the work of art,
it is, on the contrary, the form forming this work; it is not emotion

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400 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

as a thing, as a given object, but an intuitive and intentional emotion,

which bears in itself much more than itself. It is the Self of the poet,
his most mysterious substantial identity in act of spiritual communica-
tion and of a gift of itself, which is the content of this emotion.

In order to avoid any misunderstanding, I should like to insist upon

the distinction I just made between merely affective emotion and crea-
tive or intuitive emotion. I deeply distrust any emotional or senti-
mental art, I hate the idea that art should aim at communicating emo-
tions or suggesting thrills or ecstasies. To have the feelings or emo-
tions of other persons, even sublime poets, planted inside ourselves
through the magic spells of art, would be, in my opinion, exceedingly
disgraceful and immodest. Even when it is a question of ideas, I re-
member what the French painter Degas said after a conversation with
a raseur, that is, a zealously boring person: "Well, we exchanged some
ideas; I feel quite dull-brained." Yet the ideas of our neighbors can
provide us with some truth, and it is good fortune and a joy to com-
mune with our neighbors, with scientists or philosophers, in truth per-
ceived and known.

In the same way it is good fortune and a joy for the mind to com-
mune with the artist and the poet in the beauty of the work and in the
truth, the truth inexpressible in concepts, which they have perceived in
virtue of their poetic experience. When I speak of creative or intuitive
emotion, what I mean is the very means or instrument through which
the artist has perceived this truth in the realities of the world. Such
an emotion is but one with the imagination and the intellect. It has
been spiritualized; it awakens the subconscious sources of the spirit; it
brings into these sources an intellectual seed; here we have the in-
tellect, the imagination and the emotion brought to unity, in the depths
of the root activity of the soul. Reason is there at work, more than
ever. But reason in its more profound and hidden life, reason in its
intuitive function, in that intuitive cloud, full of eyes and vision,
which precedes the labor of logical conceptualization; and which, in
the poet and the artist, will actualize itself not in a set of conceptual
statements, but in the very work to be done. Creative or intuitive emo-
tion is but the experiential name of what is in truth the subconscious
flash of the spirit, the subconscious intuitive act of creative reason, of

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 POETIC EXPERIENCE 401

the creative intellect, when it grasps obscurely existential reality in

virtue of the vital impact of imagination and emotion, at the common
root of all the powers of the soul.

I think that no poet has been more aware of this intellectual in-
tuition, immersed in imagination, than Charles Baudelaire. Yet it is
enough to remember Giotto or Michael Angelo, or Rembrandt, or Ce-
zanne - or Bach or Mozart or Moussorgsky - to verify the presence
of this poetic intuition at the root of every great work of art.

To sum up, the means of poetic experience is the intuitivity and

intentionality with which emotion is endowed when it is involved in
the creative sources of the spirit and of the intellect.

VII

Seventh point - a last characteristic must be pointed out: the poet's

work is an object which is at the same time a sign, and which abounds
and overflows with signs and meanings. For if the experience which
we have tried to describe is at the source of poetic action, and if the
obscure grasping of resonant reality in creative subjectivity is by the
same stroke the obscure grasping of his own soul by the poet, the work
done must be at the same time the manifestation of both.

This work is an object and must always keep its consistency and its
inherent value of an object, and at the same time is a sign, both a
"direct" sign of the secrets perceived in things, of their avowal, of
some unimpeached truth of their nature or adventure pierced by creative
intuition, and a "reversed" sign of the inner potentialities and in-
side story of the poet. And as all things commune in being, and as
being abounds in signs, so too the object abounds in meanings, and
will say more than it is, and will make available to knowledge, at the
same time as itself, something other than itself, and something other
than that other, and, if possible, the entire universe as in the mirror of
a Monad. By a sort of poetic amplification, Beatrice, remaining the
woman that Dante loved, is also, in virtue of the sign, the Wisdom
which leads him; Sophie von Kuhn, remaining the dead fiancee of
Novalis, is also, in virtue of the sign, the call of God which captivates
him.

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402 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

There would thus be no poetic work, but a merely servile one,

if the object were only object. And if the object were only a sign,
there would be no poetic work, but allegory. And it is only by and in
the object, by and in the visible signs in which the object abounds, that
at the end of the poetic operation the content of poetic experience
is finally and in addition manifested and known in a communicable
manner. In short, the object created by the poet, the poem, the paint-
ing, the symphony, is like the glory of the poet, and it is in this glory,
by means of which he makes himself manifest to the world, that he
makes himself manifest also to himself and becomes definitely aware,
but in an inevitably imperfect and unsatisfactory manner, of his origi-
nal experience.

If I looked for a poem incarnating in itself and manifesting in the

finest way poetic experience as I have tried to describe it, I would
suggest Gerard Manley Hopkins' sonnet entitled God's Grandeur:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs-
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Here a powerful intellectual matter has been vitalized and brought

to a creative spiritual unity in the inner flame of intuitive emotion,
and the created object appears as necessary in each of its syllables and
as abounding in meanings as a fully rounded world, because every-
thing in it has been formed and vitally determined by this intuitive
emotion.

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