The Soul Is a Stranger in This World

Essays on Poets and Poetry

Micah Mattix

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781532660153
  9781532660160
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532660177
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

The Soul Is a Stranger in This World is a timely examination of some of the best modern and contemporary poets and a trenchant defense of poetry as a narrative, musical, and theological art. While it is common today to view the poet as a revolutionary, who breaks old forms in the name of aesthetic and political freedom, this volume begins with the classical view of the poet "as a man speaking to men," as Wordsworth put it. Poetry may challenge and shock, but it also consoles, probing the contours of the human soul in a broken world. Collected from essays and reviews first published in The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, Books and Culture, First Things, and other outlets, the volume traces these concerns in the work of modern masters such as Rilke and Eliot, avant-garde exemplars like Andre du Bouchet and Basil Bunting, and contemporary writers such as Dana Gioia and Franz Wright.

6

The Failure of Surrealism

Why has surrealism been such a success in painting and such a failure in poetry? Why do some of the most striking lines in twentieth-century poetry—“the sky flows into their nostrils / like a nutritious blue milk”—go forgotten and unread, if they were ever remembered in the first place? One of the twentieth century’s most recognizable images is Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory. But if asked to name a single surrealist poem or line of surrealist poetry, most people, critics included, would be stumped.

These were some of the questions that came to mind as I read Willard Bohn’s recent anthology, Surrealist Poetry. The volume is a bilingual collection of mostly French and Spanish surrealist poetry translated into English. All the big names are here—Louis Aragon, André Breton, René Char, Paul Eluard, Federico García Lorca, and Octavio Paz—as well as a good selection of minor figures like José María Hinojosa and Braulio Arenas.

Surrealism has had an “unprecedented global impact,” Bohn writes in the introduction, and he’s right about that impact being global, even if it hasn’t exactly been unprecedented. It is, without a doubt, the twentieth century’s most popular art movement. Unlike cubism or abstract expressionism, it spans all mediums—paint, stone, poetry, and film—and, as a technique for creating images, it has persisted for nearly a hundred years in the work of artists from all continents. The term has even entered everyday discourse. Any situation that is strange or violent, has dreamlike qualities, or evokes a sense of déjà vu is potentially “surreal”—from a Simpsons episode to a terrorist attack.

Yet, surrealist poetry “has languished.” Why? Bohn says one reason is the lack of English translations, world culture’s lingua franca. Hence the present volume. But the problem is further up the ladder. There are plenty of translations of Baudelaire and Proust, for example, because so many people think these writers are worth reading and, therefore, worth translating. So why do so few—comparatively, at least—think surrealist poetry is?

Bohn’s second reason for surrealist poetry’s obscurity is more convincing, though he fails to register the significance of what he is saying. The problem is the medium. The problem is poetry itself. Bohn writes:

Unlike printed texts, paintings and films offer the illusion of being immediately accessible. Although viewers may have no idea what they really mean, the visual images impinge upon their retinas without need of mediation. The fact that many of the images appear to be realistic, that many objects can actually be identified, reinforces the viewer’s impression.

In short, while the images of a surrealist painting are relatively clear (and often enchanting), even if their significance isn’t, the same is not true of poetry. Poetic images are constructed with words and syntax within an overarching narrative, if I can use the term loosely, be it discursive, descriptive, or dramatic. Paintings have narratives, too, of course, but they are always created by the images themselves—a gesture suggests a feeling, the light on the eye is a life story. It’s nearly the opposite with poetry, whose images work symbiotically within narratives.

Unlike painting’s images, the poetic image is revealed linearly. One word is encountered after another. Objects take shape by addition. Characters appear. They do things with objects. Speakers speak. These elements must work together in a specific sequence to create, if everything goes right, a complex whole.

The painterly image, however, is revealed in an instant. We might roam the surface, focusing on a detail here, a texture or color there, and relate them back to the whole, but the sequence of that roaming and relating doesn’t change the image one bit. Change the sequence of words in a poem, and you have a new poem.

But surrealism doesn’t care about narratives. It cares about images. It is an image-making, metaphor-making technique—a way of bringing disparate things together to create a new, strange one. In fact, its disregard for narrative is one of its defining characteristics. It is a form of play, of imagistic exploration.

Guillaume Apollinaire certainly had the free play of images in mind when he used the term on May 18, 1917 to describe the ballet Parade, for which Picasso had designed the set and costumes (Jean Cocteau wrote the scenario and Erik Satie composed the music). Unlike the “artificial” (“factice”) costumes and choreography in most ballets, Parade possessed “a sort of sur-realism,” Apollinaire wrote. What does he mean?

I don’t think it’s insignificant that one of Apollinaire’s favorite words is “reality.” Painters like Picasso, he writes, “are moving further and further away from the old art of optical illusion and local proportions. . . . Scientific Cubism is one of the pure tendencies. It is the art of painting new compositions with elements taken not from reality as it is seen, but from reality as it is known.”

Cubism, in other words, is a two-dimensional representation of the mechanics of the mind (“reality as it is known”) and it is in this sense, according to Apollinaire, that the flat paintings of cubism are more realistic than paintings that use illusion to represent how things look. If cubism is a two-dimensional representation of the workings of the mind, Parade, with its cubist horses and jesters, may have seemed to Apollinaire a three-dimensional one—a cubist painting in action—and so a “sort of sur-realism.”

The other aspect of Parade is its childlike play. It brings all the arts together in an expression of “universal jubilation” (“allégresse universelle”). It is both a hard-nosed “translation” of reality and a “free fantasy.” The ballet, Apollinaire remarks, “has done something entirely new, marvelously seducing, with a truth so lyrical, humane, and joyful that it will be able to illuminate, if it’s worth it, Dürer’s terrible black sun in Adrianeholia.” This last remark suggests, of course, that Parade does tell us something (all art does), but Apollinaire is less concerned with this than with the imagistic mingling of reality and fantasy.

André Breton, too, defined surrealism as a play of psychic images. However, for Breton, in the process of this play, a narrative would emerge from the images themselves, though, significantly, it would always be the same narrative: a critique of Hegel’s idealism, which favored reason over irrationality, “presence” over “absence.” Breton writes in his Second Manifesto that

Surrealism, although a special part of its function is to examine with a critical eye the notions of reality and unreality, reason and irrationality, reflection and impulse, knowledge and “fatal” ignorance, . . . tends to take as its point of departure the “colossal abortion” of the Hegelian system.

While still sharing Hegel’s method (and so not exactly a critique of Hegel’s system), surrealism shows, Breton claims, that Hegel’s hierarchical distinctions between beauty and ugliness, order and chaos, spirit and matter, are hobgoblins. Everything is one—ugliness is beauty, beauty is ugliness, spirit is ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• The Poet and Society
• Milton’s Morality
• Emily Dickinson’s Wisdom
• Rilke’s God
• Young Eliot and The Waste Land
• The Failure of Surrealism
• WWI Poets Reconsidered
• Fancy and Faith in Wallace Stevens
• Robert Frost’s Women and Men
• Cummings’s Ear
• Gertrud Kolmar’s Silent Speech
• What Happened to Basil Bunting?
• Elizabeth Bishop’s Artistry
• Yves Bonnefoy’s Pursuit of Presence
• André du Bouchet’s Fragments
• Vernon Scannell’s Wounded Music
• Allen Ginsberg, Bore
• Cracks in Language
• The Soul Is a Stranger in This World
• John Updike’s Occasional Verse
• Scott Cairns and the Promise of a Future Fullness
• Paul Lake and the Politics of Language
• A. E. Stallings’s Practiced Movements
• A Modern Martial
• Flarf and Form
• A Short History of Form
• Is Free Verse Immoral?
• An Avant-Garde Presbyterian
• Orpheus in the Bronx
• Life’s Duplicity
• Ernest Hilbert’s Street Music
• The Faithful Poetry of Christian Wiman
• Dana Gioia’s Articulation