The Fourth Dimension of a Poem

by M H Abrams

  14. Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, translated by R. M. Montgomery, 3 vols. (The Hague and Paris, 1970), vol. 2, p. 31.

  15. William James, A Pluralistic Universe (New York, 1912), p. 111.

  16. On the scriptural texts which served the Church Fathers as grounds for attributing to God the term “beauty,” see Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, vol. 2, pp. 4–9, and Edgar de Bruyne, L’Esthétique du moyen âge (Louvain, 1947), pp. 7–12. On the merging of the self-sufficient Absolute of Greek thinkers with the biblical God, see A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), pp. 43–45.

  17. The Confessions of St. Augustine, Book X, section xxxiv, translated by F. J. Sheed (London and New York, 1944), pp. 196–97.

  18. Relevant quotations from Augustine will be found conveniently gathered in the footnotes of Nygren’s Agape and Eros, especially pp. 503–48. See also Svoboda, L’Esthétique de St. Augustin, pp. 102ff.

  19. E.g., Characteristics, Book II, pp. 131–32: In statues and other “well-fabricated pieces . . . there is no principle of beauty in body. . . . The beautiful, the fair, the comely, were never in the matter, but in the art and design; never in body itself, but in the form or forming power,” which is “mind, or the effect of mind.” On the elusiveness of Kant’s treatment of aesthetic “form,” see Francis X. J. Coleman, The Harmony of Reason: A Study in Kant’s Aesthetics (Pittsburgh, 1974), pp. 112, 156–57.

  20. Select Sermons of Dr. Whichcote (London, 1698), p. 213; also pp. 147, 151, 216, 409.

  21. Cited by John M. Robertson in his “Introduction” to the Characteristics.

  22. K. P. Moritz, “Versuch einer Vereinigung aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften unter dem Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten,” in Schriften zur Aesthetik und Poetik, edited by Hans Joachim Schrimpf (Tübingen, 1962), pp. 3–4 (the emphases are Moritz’s).

  23. Moses Mendelssohn, “Betrachtungen über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften” (1757), in Schriften zur Philosophie und Aesthetik, edited by Fritz Bamberger (Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt, 1971), vol. 1, pp. 170–73. In his Morgenstunden Mendelssohn wrote: “We contemplate [betrachten] the beauty of nature and of art without the least motion of desire, with pleasure and satisfaction. . . . It pleases even though we do not possess it, and though we are far removed from the desire to possess it” (Morgenstunden [Berlin, 1785], p. 120).

  24. “The Origin of the Doctrine of Literary Autonomy,” delivered at the Conference of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature, Orono, Maine, May 9, 1980.

  25. K. P. Moritz, Anton Reiser, in Deutsche Litteraturdenkmale des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, edited by Bernhard Seuffert (Heilbronn, 1885), vol. 23, pp. 5–7.

  26. Moritz, Schriften zur Aesthetik und Poetik, pp. 5–8. In his Götterlehre (1791), Moritz neatly summarized his view of the nature of the art object: “A true work of art, a beautiful poem, is something finished and complete in itself, which is there for its own sake, and whose value lies in its own self and in the well-ordered relationship of its parts” (Schriften zur Aesthetik und Poetik, p. 196).

  27. Schriften zur Aesthetik und Poetik, pp. 71–72, 85, 92–93. Friedrich Schlegel, who had assimilated Moritz’s “Formative Imitation of the Beautiful,” in the mid-1790s supplemented the concepts of internal completeness and self-sufficiency with the term “autonomy”:

  The unity of the beautiful object as such, as beauty, requires the appearance of self-sufficiency [Selbstgenügsamkeit], of internal completeness [Vollständigkeit]; and by that very fact makes the merely beautiful object (whose accident and attribute is beauty) into an independent beauty (whose essence and substance is beauty). One could also call this property a maximum of autonomy [Autonomie].

  “Von der Schönheit in der Dichtkunst,” from Friedrich Schlegel’s manuscript remains, in Neue philosophische Schriften, edited by Josef Körner (Frankfurt, 1935), p. 376.

  28. See J. H. W. Stuckenberg, The Life of Immanuel Kant (London, 1882), pp. 1–52.

  29. See Joseph Pieper, The End of Time (London, 1954), pp. 68–105; also M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York, 1971), pp. 204–6, 348.

  30. Mark Boulby, Karl Philipp Moritz (Toronto, 1979), pp. 207, 222–23. For the echoes of Moritz’s theory of art in Wackenroder, see Mary Hurst Schubert, “Introduction,” Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder’s “Confessions” and “Fantasies” (University Park, Pa., 1971).

  31. Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1797), with an introduction by Karl Detlev Jessen (Leipzig, 1904), pp. 100–3. On Wackenroder’s Pietist vocabulary, despite his assumed persona of a Catholic friar, see Schubert, “Introduction,” Wackenroder’s “Confessions” and “Fantasies.”

  32. The World as Will and Representation, translated by E. F. J. Payne, 3 vols. (Indian Hills, Colo., 1958), vol. 1, pp. 185–99 (sections 36–38).

  33. “The Poetic Principle” (1848–49), in Edgar Allan Poe, Representative Selections, edited by Margaret Alterton and Hardin Craig (New York, 1935), pp. 382–85.

  34. See John Wilcox, “The Beginnings of l’Art pour l’Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 11 (1953): 366–68.

  35. Victor Cousin, Leçons sur le vrai, le beau et le bien, 23rd ed. (Paris, 1881), p. 140. The first French translation of Kant’s Critique of Judgment was not published until 1846.

  36. Cousin, Leçons, pp. 175, 191, 141–42, 169, 424.

  37. Cousin, Leçons, pp. 185–86.

  38. “Il faut de la religion pour la religion, de la morale pour la morale, comme de l’art pour l’art.” Victor Cousin, Cours de philosophie . . . pendant l’année 1818, sur le fondement des idées absolues du vrai, du beau et du bien, edited by Adolphe Garnier (Paris, 1836), pp. 223–24. The first known occurrence of the phrase “l’art pour l’art” had also been a rendering, although by hearsay, of Kant’s aesthetic views. In his Journal intime for February 10, 1804, Benjamin Constant reported a conversation with the youthful Henry Crabb Robinson: “His work on the Esthetics of Kant has some very forceful ideas. L’art pour l’art without purpose, for all purpose perverts art. But art attains a purpose that it does not have.” See Rose Frances Egan, “The Genesis of the Theory of ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ in Germany and in England,” Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, part II (1921): 10–11; also Wilcox, “The Beginnings of l’Art pour l’Art,” pp. 360, 363.

  39. Théophile Gautier, “Du Beau dans l’art,” Revue des deux mondes, 17 (1847), pp. 898–905.

  40. Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (New York, 1919), p. 9.

  41. Paul Valéry, The Art of Poetry, translated by Denise Folliot (New York, 1958), p. 40.

  42. Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres Complètes, edited by Y.-G. Le Dantec and Claude Pichois, Pléiade edition (Paris, 1961), p. 788.

  43. Œuvres completes de Charles Baudelaire, edited by F.-F. Gautier and Y.-G. Le Dantec (Paris, 1933), vol. 10, pp. 25, 29–31, 35.

  44. See M. H. Abrams, “Coleridge, Baudelaire, and Modernist Poetics,” in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism, edited by Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton, 1979), pp. 174–76.

  45. Clive Bell, Art (1913; reprint, New York, 1958), pp. 17, 54.

  46. Bell, Art, pp. 28, 54–55, 181.

  47. Bell, Art, pp. 175, 189, 182–84, 34. Also p. 181: “What might Art do for Society? Leaven it; perhaps even redeem it; for Society needs redemption.”

  48. Iris Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists, based upon the 1976 Romanes Lecture (Oxford, 1977), pp. 76–78. Murdoch characterizes Plato’s description, in the Phaedrus and the Phaedo, of our soul’s vision, before birth, of the Forms, “entirely separated from the sensible world (‘dwelling elsewhere’),” as “an aesthetic conception.” This passage exemplifies our tendency to read histor
y backwards, interpreting Plato’s theory of knowledge according to categories of the aesthetic which were not established until more than two thousand years later—and established on the very model of Plato’s doctrine of cognitive contemplation which, by historical reflex, is then regarded as an aesthetic concept.

  49. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 33.

  Spiritual Travelers in the

  Literature of the West*

  THE JOURNEY OF life is an enduring master trope by which the postclassical West has made sense of human existence by endowing it with purpose, structure, and values. The trope—the Latin term for it is peregrinatio vitae—images the life, both of each individual and of the entire human race, as an extended journey through alien lands. Its primary source is the early books of the Hebrew Bible, with their narratives of literal journeys that came to be the archetypes for a variety of figurative applications. The most prominent biblical journeys were the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden to sojourn in a fallen world; the punishment meted out to Cain, to wander as a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth; and the exile of Ishmael, son of Hagar, to live as “a wild man” whose hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him. The most sustained, detailed, and richly suggestive of the biblical journeys is the exodus of the Hebrews “out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage,” their long wanderings in the wilderness in quest of the land promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the journey of Moses up Mount Sinai to encounter Divinity; and his later ascent of Mount Pisgah for a glimpse of the Promised Land, to which access was denied him but was later granted his people.

  The tendency to allegorize these and other stories of expulsions, punishments, escapes, quests, and migrations began in the later books of the Hebrew Bible itself and was given great impetus in the Christian Scriptures. Three scriptural passages—all of them probably written in the middle or later part of the first century—proved to be of great consequence for later forms and applications of the trope of the journey. In his Epistle addressed to the Hebrews (11:8–16), Paul represented the spiritual history of the Hebrew people hitherto in the vehicle of biblical narratives of exile, wandering, and pilgrimage in quest of a promised land—a promise that can now be fulfilled by the higher goal of a heavenly city. “By faith” Abraham and his descendants “sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country,” but died (as had Moses) “not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off . . . and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country. . . . But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God . . . prepared for them a city.”1

  The second and closely contemporary passage is Luke 15:11–32, which is explicitly identified as a parable, or short allegory, and is invested with the authority of Jesus himself. The passage represents the spiritual events of sin and repentance in human life in the narrative vehicle of the prodigal son who left home and father “and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living.” Starving and penitent, he returned to his father, to be greeted with joy and feasting, “for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.” In the process of time, this parable assimilated other biblical journey-narratives, was endlessly reiterated, and was often used to represent the totality of human history, from the fall and expulsion out of Eden to a coming redemption at the end of time. Of special historical consequence was the fact that the story of the prodigal son figured the spiritual history of humanity as, specifically, a circular journey that ends at the point of departure. Later commentators often interpreted the assertion of Jesus in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me,” as signifying a roundabout journey—from home and father, into a far country, and back home.

  The figure of the totality of human history as a circular return was abetted, and importantly supplemented, by a third passage, the vision of the end of earthly history that concludes both the Book of Revelation and the scriptural canon. There the last things—to be accomplished by the God who is himself “the beginning and the end, the first and the last”—are described as a replication of the first things. The creation of heaven and earth “in the beginning” is to be matched by the advent of “a new heaven and new earth” at the end; the original felicity in Eden is to be restored, in that “there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying,” for “there shall be no more curse,” while the locale of that felicity will include the “river of water of life” and “the tree of life” that had been essential features in the Garden of Eden. What had been a garden, however, is now replaced (as in the Epistle to the Romans) by a city; and this, in a portentous new development, is represented as not only a city but also a woman, “the holy city, new Jerusalem . . . prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” The consummation of history is accordingly imaged as a sacred marriage between the Lamb of God and this woman, his bride, while the compulsion to the human quest for consummation is described—in a way that was to resonate through later Western literature, whether sacred or profane—in the language of ardent desire: “And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come.”

  Crucial to the development and widespread adoption of the Christian motif of the circular journey were the Enneads of the pagan philosopher Plotinus. Writing in the third century, Plotinus formulated a cosmic scheme in which everything emanates from the One (who is ipso facto the Good) through stages of increasing remoteness and division, to the ultimate stage of the material universe and the supervenience of evil. Counter to this eternal procession, however, is a ceaseless “epistrophe,” or return to the origin; for “to Real Being we go back . . . to that we return as from that we came.” (The Neoplatonist Proclus later formulated this radical metaphysical metaphor as, “In any divine procession the end is assimilated to the beginning, maintaining by its reversion thither a circle without beginning and without end.”)2 Repeatedly, Plotinus represents the longing of the soul to return to its origin in images that are consonant with those in the Christian Scriptures. The soul, for example, is pictured as a lover and the One as the beloved. Alternatively, the soul is described as an errant daughter who abandons her father for a mortal lover but later repents and once more seeks the father, and finds her peace. And in a reading of the Homeric epic that was to be echoed by many later writers, Plotinus interprets the circular voyage of Odysseus as an allegory for each person’s internal journey in quest of the spiritual home and father he had earlier abandoned. Plotinus quotes the Iliad 2.140, “Let me flee to the beloved Fatherland”: “This is the soundest counsel. But what is this flight? . . . For Odysseus is surely a parable to us when he commands the flight from the sorceries of Circe or Calypso. . . . The Fatherland to us is There whence we have come, and There is The Father.”3

  Wherever it came to be known, this world-scheme, with its root metaphor of emanation and return, exerted a profound attraction upon Christian theology, with the result that the personal God of the Bible, creator and redeemer of humankind, was to various degrees assimilated to the utterly abstract and impersonal first principle of Neoplatonic metaphysics. Conversely, however, the cosmic circulation of the Neoplatonic metaphysical system—timeless, unembodied, and as Proclus said, “without beginning and without end”—was by Christian exegetes temporalized, embodied in the process of human history, and figured as a single circle that at its end will return to its beginning, then stop.

  By the close of the fifth century all these varieties of the spiritual journey, Christian and pagan, were deployed in the extraordinarily erudite and innovative writings of St. Augustine. He adapted Plotinus’ allegoric reading of Homer to the Christian pilgrimage: “Is the sentiment of Plotinus forgotten?—We must fly to our beloved fatherland. There is the Father, there our all. What fleet or flight shall convey us thither?”4 With t
his pagan figure of the circular voyage Augustine fused the narratives of exile, wandering, and quest for a promised land in the early books of the Bible, the figurative pilgrimage to “a better country” in the Epistle to the Hebrews, the circular journey of the prodigal son back to the home and father he has left, and the culminating vision in the Book of Revelation of the sacred marriage, supplemented by the candid expressions of erotic desire in the Song of Songs. As a result, Augustine established the full and enduring Christian topos of the peregrinatio vitae—the figure of fallen man, generic and individual, who wanders as an exile in an alien land, on a toilsome journey in quest of a city in another country that, when reached, turns out to be the home and father he left behind, and that often turns out also to be the dwelling of the bride he abandoned in the beginning. And, on the tacit assumption of early biblical hermeneutics that images signifying the same spiritual thing can be substituted for each other, Augustine often represented the conjoint origin and goal of the spiritual journey as a conflation of places, persons, genders, functions, and relationships that bewilders a reader untutored in the interchangeability of the signifiers in Christian typology:

  Let me enter into my chamber and sing my songs of love to Thee, groaning with inexpressible groaning in my pilgrimage, and remember Jerusalem with my heart stretching upwards in longing for it: Jerusalem my Fatherland, Jerusalem which is my mother: and remembering Thee its Ruler, its Light, its Father and Tutor and Spouse. . . . So that I shall not turn away but shall come to the peace of that Jerusalem, my dear mother. . . .

  For that City the friend of the bridegroom sighs . . . for he is a member of the Spouse of Christ; and he is jealous for it, for he is the friend of the bridegroom.5

  Through the Middle Ages and beyond, spiritual renderings of biblical accounts of exiles and journeys, pilgrims and prodigals, served as commonplaces in numberless commentaries, sermons, homilies, and works of literature. In extended form, the peregrinatio constituted the total plot of that familiar allegoric narrative in which the protagonist is named Everyman, or Mankind, or Christian; in which the allegory signifies the normative course of a Christian life; and in which the goal of the traveler’s laborious and dangerous quest is a land or city where one truly belongs, which frequently is also the dwelling place of a woman of irresistible sexual attractiveness.