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Sign In. Advanced Search. Search Menu. Article Navigation. Close mobile search navigation Article Navigation. Volume Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. Institutional Login. LOG IN. Anything less tangible than atomic matter — anything resistant or invisible to the instruments of science — can be dismissed, if you wish, as hocus pocus.
As an undergraduate I came face to face with this prevailing brand of rationalism in my university philosophy department. I admit to being swept up in the stylish scepticism that I found there, in imposing journals, rakish tutors and alluring weekly reading lists. Contemporary philosophy provided a clean, elegant solution to the problem of fathoming the world: not an eternal catfight over abstracts like Love and Justice — which nobody could even define without controversy, much less talk about sensibly — but the sober attempt to sort through what we did understand, discarding all the extraneous rubbish along the way.
Sounds good, right? For three years I relished the challenge of eliminating weasel words, deepities and redundant concepts. It was a time when I learned a great deal about how to think and write, but a time of ultimate dishonesty as well.
Deep down I still believed in Love, Justice, Right, Wrong, and all the other pesky abstractions I was gleefully weeding out. As well as spirited essays on moral realism, I began writing poems around this time. Yet ultimately, the wisdom that places materiality on top of a poetic hierarchy and abstraction at its bottom, the breed of thinking which doubtlessly has strengthened the verse of many poets, nonetheless has become a kind of dogma that stifles poetic expression and repels us from exploring a crucial escarpment upon the peaks of Mount Parnassus.
Think of the people whose lives we have rubbed up against, even briefly, and how some modicum of their influence remains; how a detail from the future can remind us of a person from the past; how in fact we are in a kind of orbit around the people, places, and ideas that we once held so close and have since let go of, and that at any given moment we are approaching perihelion or aphelion with respect to these past selves.
Yet to grade this lyric with the tools given us by the culture of workshop, we would have to judge it a failure. The content is airy, abstract, and impossible to pin down in any concrete detail. In fact, I would argue, were this poem to show up in a college workshop, not known to have been authored by Rilke, it would be garroted and bathed in red ink by student and professor alike.
Also, to take an analogy from the world of visual representation, modernity is characterized by a movement towards greater and greater concreteness. The entire trajectory can be seen as gradually foregrounding the material from which a painting is composed and gradually diminishing its content, until eventually the content becomes the material, or, in the words of cultural critic Marshall McLuhan, "the medium is the message.
This impulse toward materiality, strengthened by the ascension of science and the decline of religion, is felt in poetry as well, where the poet is taught that the wilderness of inner life needs, as T.
Eliot put it, "objective correlatives," in order to appear in the body of the poem. This is not, incidentally, the true working out of the formula posited by visual artists. It is only the school of language poetry that seems interested in unmooring words from contexts and foregrounding the materiality of language as language.
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