"radical 'poetical' processes of late-Protestant thought"?

Carter Kaplan
Intellectual Wild Man

A few days ago, I noted that Carter Kaplan had sent me a copy of his International Authors (IA) edition of The Scarlet Letter, and I closed with a quote from Carter's essay, a quote that defends Locke and criticizes Continental philosophy:

[John] Locke has . . . been identified as part of a larger Enlightenment straw man that is the target of those seeking to advance the authoritarian agenda of Continental philosophy, which as a program, in anthropological terms, seems to be the logical systemic outcome of an increasingly corporate, nihilistic and authoritarian Academy. (Kaplan, "'A' is for Antinomian: Theology and Politics in The Scarlet Letter," p. 236)

I wondered what Carter meant by this, for it seemed linked by contrast to a remark in his opening paragraph, a remark that speaks favorably of Anglo-American science and philosophy:

[T]he novel's complex philosophical dynamics . . . resonate with the anthropological and political understanding that attends skeptical-empirical science and analytic philosophy. As a phenomenon of intellectual history, The Scarlet Letter represents an important formulation of the classic liberal ideas that mark the emergence of the modern world. (p. 230)

When I came upon a similar remark later in the essay, I copied it down for more reflection:

[T]he American Revolution is properly an outcome of radical "poetical" processes of late Protestant thought. In more modern terms, this revolutionary mindset is characterized by patterns of investigation sharing close affinities with analytic philosophy and critical synoptics. Before, however, analytic and synoptic perception is possible, thought has to be set free to range beyond the limits of conventional knowledge. Custom and tradition must be left behind. Thought must fly above and beyond the law. (p. 248)

I needed to know more, so I sent Carter an email asking for an explication and received a brief response that he dashed off, practically on his way out the door:

I am leaving for Boston tomorrow morning, then Scotland Monday. Please excuse brevity.

The alienation [that the protagonist] Hester experiences [in The Scarlet Letter] enables her to effectively "think outside the box." Perhaps this is also a point of departure for considering what Wittgenstein says about "the bloody hard way [in philosophy]." That is, learning to "think outside the box", and do it right, is not easy, and, as Hester's experience illustrates, it comes with some wear and tear. The "radical 'poetical' processes of late-Protestant thought" here refer to Milton's tremendous effort to sort out the universe and give us the modern world.

As my readers might imagine, I now have even more questions, but they will have to wait until Carter has time. My retort as historian of science would be, "I believe it was Newton who gave us the modern world!" But that would be to misconstrue Carter's point. Milton attempted to sort out the universe not scientifically, but 'humanistically'! He did, after all, set forth to "justify the ways of God to men."

Carter himself is thinking outside the box, and is thus hard to follow thoughtfully . . .

Poetry: Further Reflections from the Milton List

Yesterday, I speculated that if one takes prose and puts it into recognizably poetic form, then it takes on the quality of poetry. James Rovira on the Milton List took my suggestion to parodic lengths:

One last bit about the poetic nature of the Tractatus. I said earlier that Wittgenstein's "drawing of a cube [in proposition] 5.5423 deserves special attention." I realize now that if you were to take this drawing of a cube and give it line breaks consistent with modern poetry:

____________
____________
____________
____________
____________
____________
____________
____________
____________
____________
____________
____________

you'd have a poem roughly akin to most of Billy Collins's or Charles Bukowski's work, though lacking some of their charm.

Thanks very much for you indulgence. I think I'll stop now as I don't believe it's possible to get any more ridiculous than this.

More ridiculous? Probably not, since Rovira's example lacks words, but it nevertheless led me to some further reflections, which I posted to the list, and which I now post here (accompanied by an image borrowed from the CRS Archives):

Yes, Jim, that would take your counterexamples to their 'logical' absurdity. But poetic form is hardly recognizeable here since words are absent. All that I see are "fill-in-the-blanks" awaiting words, possibly a grocery list. No reason even to assume that a poem is lurking there in its Platonic form, ready to shape words toward an ideal.

But your parody nevertheless raises a question for me: Can a real image be an essential part of a poem? Consider John Updike's "Shipbored," which includes an eight-line drawing to which it refers:

Shipbored

That line is the horizon line. (1)
The blue above it is divine. (2)

The blue below it is marine. (3)
Sometimes the blue below is green. (4)

Sometimes the blue above is gray,
Betokening a cloudy day. (5)

Sometimes the blue below is white,
Foreshadowing a windy night. (6)

Sometimes a drifting coconut
Or albatross adds color, but (7)

The blue above is mostly blue.
The blue below and I are, too. (8)

Is the image part of the poem? It's not a poem by itself, but it seems to be part of the poem, drawn by the author to illustrate and clarify in such a way that it becomes the first reference of the poetic lines, thereby drawing our attention on to the scene at sea.

By analogy, Wittgenstein's "cube" would need to retain its cubic form and accompany words in poetic form, which the cube would serve to illustrate and clarify. The cube could then be an essential part of the poem but not if abstracted from the words -- as little a poem as Updike's drawing abstracted from the words.

And there the discussion now stands.

Poetry: Reflections from the Milton List

Choose Your Muse

"Muses Sarcophagus"

The Nine Muses and their Attributes

Marble, 2nd Century AD

Found by Via Ostiense

(Image from Wikipedia)

A discussion about the distinction between prose and poetry has emerged on the Milton List. The discussion began when someone noted that "poem" in the seventeenth century could include works that we would now call prose. Carrol Cox, one of the list's older scholars, wrote:

I would use "poem" that way. (I think in ordinary usage "poetry" and "poem" differ somewhat.) A poem or a fiction is a "made thing," a verbal artifact. (I wouldn't use it for movies.) I would also use it for many texts that the Renaissance would have called "history." Tillyard in his book on the "English Epic" included Gibbon's Decline and Fall. Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory is a beautiful artifact as well as a science text, and I don't see why "poem" could not, in some contexts, include that. "Work of literature" is awkward, and the best single word for it is "poem." There's a tragic rhythm in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, and an epic sweep to Rusell's Human Knowledge.

James Rovira responded:

The question of what is or is not poetry has a long and distinguished history, of course, but doesn't it tend to follow two currents?

-Plato's distinction between poetry and philosophy, which emphasizes content rather than form.

-An emphasis upon form rather than content.

The question seems to me to get particularly confused when we try to blend these two types of responses. Those who emphasize that poetic form makes poetry can recognize occasional poetic qualities in Wittgenstein's Tractatus but would never call it a poem -- which would be a rather strange poem indeed because it includes calculus. If math is poetry then everything is poetry and the word itself ceases to function at all. Those in the first camp would exclude the Tractatus from poetry simply because it is philosophy. Both camps would also exclude history from poetry unless it were written in verse form.

I joined the discussion at this point:

Jim, while I generally agree with your critique of Carrol's use of the term "poem," I found much to admire in what Carrol said.

Anyway, concerning your remarks on Wittgenstein's Tractatus:

"Those who emphasize that poetic form makes poetry can recognize occasional poetic qualities in Wittgenstein's Tractatus but would never call it a poem -- which would be a rather strange poem indeed because it includes calculus. If math is poetry then everything is poetry and the word itself ceases to function at all. Those in the first camp would exclude the Tractatus from poetry simply because it is philosophy."

Did he use calculus in that work? I haven't read it in a while. At any rate, when I read it in German back in 1986, I had to read it slowly, and I was struck by Wittgenstein's choice of a numbering system that began with one and ended with seven. As I read the opening line, "1. Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist" ("1. The world is all that the case is"), I realized that Wittgenstein was 'creating' a world in seven days, and on the seventh day, he rests: "7. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen" ("7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof must one be silent"). There's a sort of poiesis to that.

I once wrote up a brief summary of my views on Wittgenstein's biblical allusion (and possible numerology), for I was interested in the way that he was subverting the logical-positivist endeavor even in a work where he seemed to be applying its principles, but that has gone missing in my many moves over the years as a gypsy scholar.

The discussion then segued into a series of posts in which James Rovira cast prose into 'ironic' poetic form to show that it does not work as poetry:

Maybe the poetic qualities of Wittgenstein's Tractatus would be more evident if I broke his lines up as poetry?

"Thus I do not

write

'f(a,b).a=b',
but 'f(a,a)'
(or
'f(b,b)');
and not
'f(a,b).

~a=b',

but

'f(a,b)')"

James later added:

Yes. The fact that a philosopher can talk about poetry intelligently (or say intelligent things that we can apply to the study of poetry) does not mean he is writing poetry when doing so.

Forgive me, let me correct myself:

Yes
The fact that
a philosopher can
talk about poetry
intelligently
(or say
intelligent things that
we can apply
to the study of
poetry)
does not
mean
he is writing
poetry
when doing
so.

About this 'poetry', I noted:

Jim, what I find interesting in the . . . is that you have taken prose and changed it into poetry by imposing a recognizably poetic form onto it. We are forced to read it as poetry -- perhaps bad poetry, but poetry nonetheless.

This doesn't quite disprove your point, since the form is a distinction between prose and poetry, but it does put offer a different perspective on things.

And there the discussion stands, for now.

But further opinions are welcome, so amuse yourselves to death.