The Philosophy of Poetry (Pt. 2): Eliot and Brodsky, the Experience of Poems

See Part One here: The Philosophy of Poetry (Pt. 1): Eliot, Theory and Criticism

 

Eliot and Brodsky, the Experience of Poems

 

This kind of "theorising about the nature of poetry" is essential to the understanding of poetry, and it is, indeed, the duty of the poet to engage in the philosophy of poetry. The philosophy of poetry goes beyond criticism, however, and beyond just poets. More on the latter shortly. Many prominent poets have engaged in the philosophy of poetry. The Russian-born American poet Joseph Brodsky is a prime example; his extensive collection of essays on a wide range of subjects, including other poets, contains important insights into the essence of poetry.

In his lecture to the Library of Congress, entitled "An Immodest Proposal," in his capacity as Poet Laureate in 1991, while lamenting the "plight of the audience" for poetry, he postulates:

A poem, as it were, tells its reader, "Be like me." And at the moment of reading you become what you read, you become the state of the language which is a poem, and its epiphany or its revelation is yours. They are still yours once you shut the book, since you can't revert to not having had them.

This passage has always struck me; I think it captures the poetic experience, "our experience of poems," quite well. Brodsky is referring to a form of poetic mimesis, as he calls it "linguistic osmosis." In his 1987 Nobel Lecture, he writes

If art teaches anything [...] it is the privateness of the human condition. Being the most ancient as well as the most literal form of private enterprise, it fosters in a man, knowingly or unwittingly, a sense of his uniqueness, of individuality, of separateness - thus turning him from a social animal into an autonomous "I." Lots of things can be shared: a bed, a piece of bread, convictions, a mistress, but not a poem [...]. A work of art, literature especially, and a poem in particular, addresses a man tete-a-tete, entering with him into direct [...] relations.

The emphasis on "the privateness of the human condition" is prevalent in Brodsky's essays and lectures. Are we then to draw from these two quotes that a poem that says "be like me" draws the reader into a private experience? Brodsky provides us with an answer:

A novel or a poem is not a monologue but a conversation of a writer with a reader, a conversation, I repeat, that is very private, excluding all others - if you will mutually misanthropic. And in the moment of this conversation a writer is equal to a reader, as well as the other way around [...]. This equality is the equality of consciousness. It remains with a person for the rest of his life in the form of memory, foggy or distinct; and sooner or later, appropriately or not, it conditions a person's conduct.

A theory of poetic experience can be distilled from these quotes. The conversation between reader and writer is mediated through the metaphoric experience of the reader's "being like the poem," his "becoming the state of language that is a poem." The "autonomous 'I'" is, in fact, a metaphoric conglomeration of reader and writer - I would argue this conglomeration includes all potential readers of the poem, but I am getting ahead of myself. A poem cannot be shared, but the experience can be had by any competent reader. It is perhaps a paradox: the experience is private, but it is a private experience anyone can have.

For Eliot, the poet is a "catalyst" in the poetic experience: this is the essence of his Impersonal theory. The poem comes about as a result of the "depersonalisation" of the poet in the creative process; the experience of that poem, then, is not so much a conversation between reader and writer, but it is, nevertheless, a transformational experience. Eliot elaborates this depersonalisation by way of analogy: the poet, he argues, is like a shred of “platinum […] introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.” The platinum is integral in catalysing the two gases into sulphurous acid, yet “the platinum is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged.” Eliot says directly: “the mind of the poet is the shred of platinum.”

The poet, is the catalyst in a transformation. In the poetic experience it is the poem that acts as the catalyst; this I believe is the intention of depersonalisation in Eliot’s Impersonal theory. This is supported by another of Eliot’s theories: the objective correlative. He says,

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

At the risk making a bad metaphor worse, the objective correlative can be seen as the sulphurous acid that has been catalysed by the platinum, the mind of the poet. The purpose of the objective correlative is to evoke emotion in the mind of the reader, but according to Eliot’s Impersonal theory, the poet has receded into the background.