University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Typewriters and cooking smells: associated sensibilites in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, T.S. Eliot, and Jorie Graham

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Typewriters and cooking smells: associated sensibilites in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, T.S. Eliot, and Jorie Graham

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TYPEWRITERS AND COOKING SMELLS: ASSOCIATED SENSIBILITIES IN
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, T.S. ELIOT, AND JORIE GRAHAM

by

Amy Schroeder
___________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING)

August 2009

Copyright 2009 Amy Schroeder
ii
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the members of my committee, Susan McCabe, Carol
Muske-Dukes, David St. John, and Marjorie Becker for their overwhelming
encouragement and assistance in completing this project. I would like to thank my
family—both for their patience and their continued faith in me. Thanks also to Dr.
Daniel Arkfeld, William Arce, Brian Kane, Paula Mauro, Gretchen Mattox, Jeff
Solomon, P. B. Rippey, L.B. Thompson, and Dr. Patricia Wisne.
iii
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ii
Abstract iv
Chapter One: Introduction: Peering into the Well 1
Chapter Two: Shadows Deepened into Substances: Coleridge and the 18
Imagination

Chapter Three: The Shred of Platinum: Mr. Eliot’s Imagination 53
Chapter Four: Hybrids of Thought and Feeling: Jorie Graham 92
Chapter Five: Conclusion 113
Chapter Six: Coda: What to Do When You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling: On 117
the General Abandonment of the Genuine in American Poetry

Bibliography 124
Appendix: The Sleep Hotel 129
iv
Abstract
"Typewriters and Cooking Smells: The Associated Sensibilities of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, T. S. Eliot, and Jorie Graham" examines theories of the poetic
imagination. Positing a connection between critical thinking and emotional feeling,
this dissertation examines how poetry is created by an organic blending of the two.
Looking in particular at poets who are invested in the intersection of philosophy and
poetry, the dissertation argues that when poetry is being made, poets engage in a
particular kind of thinking; usefully, it has been called "lyric thinking" by the scholar
Robert Von Hallberg. The dissertation explores lyric thinking through the periods of
Romanticism, Modernism and Postmodernism, thus considering how cultural,
historical, and theoretical changes have impacted poetic creation. Coleridge's notions
of the Primary and Secondary Imagination are used as key concepts for
understanding early theories of the imagination; his idea of the "esemplastic" is also
a critical term for the dissertation. A genealogy is then traced from Coleridge to Eliot
through to Graham, looking at how the Romantic understanding of how the
imagination functions continues to affect poets today. Eliot's idea of dissociation of
sensibility is also central to the argument; the dissertation avers that, contra Eliot, in
true instances of poetic creation, there is no dissociation of sensibility. Rather, an
absolute association of thought and feeling occur. The dissertation comprises a
critical thesis and a creative manuscript; the creative manuscript, titled The Sleep
Hotel, is contained as an appendix. The poems in the manuscript address many of the
v
same issues as the critical thesis: they are metapoetic, attempting to trace the mind in
the act of making the poem.

1
Chapter One: Introduction: Peering into the Well
“I am certain,” writes Keats, “of nothing but the Holiness of the Heart’s
Affections and the Truth of the Imagination.”
1
This quotation is deeply familiar; iot
is cherished. It is flavored with that sweetness so characteristic of the beloved Keats;
it is indisputably Romantic, almost unbearably earnest, unashamedly idealistic. This
remark is so familiar that it seems self-evident that one must know what it means;
like a pious worshipper who has never paused to consider the meaning of the Nicene
creed, one has perhaps never stopped to ponder just what, precisely, Keats was
talking about. Holiness, heart, affection, truth, imagination—one feels comfortable
with these things; poets must traffic in them commonly, one thinks. But if one pauses
to think about these terms, one finds oneself very quickly slipping into quicksand; all
certainties and convictions slip from one’s hand as beads from a broken rosary. The
truth of the imagination? The truth of the imagination? I could propose a number of
meanings for this phrase: that, regardless of the fictional nature of works of the
imagination, they hold emotional truths. Or, conversely, that the imagination, being
in the Romantic sense that most revered faculty of mind, is not capable of producing
anything but the literal truth. Or perhaps Keats is merely saying that the very
existence of the imagination is true, a fact that cannot be brought into dispute.
Here we immediately see the troublesome nature of the matter I propose to
discuss here: the imagination. Like an eel, it slips and slides; it is impossible to hold.
Or like some sort of one-celled amoeba, it constantly changes shape; it is amorphous.

1
Keats, John, Letters of John Keats. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, 231.
2
Keats’ remark shares in common with nearly every other statement about the
imagination that one encounters: It does not actually mean anything, or it means
several different things, depending upon how one chooses to look at it. This is a
common problem, hardly reserved to the remarks of Romantic poets. While nearly
every thinker, writer, artist or philosopher of any stature has had something to say
about the imagination, what has been said has often been, variously: contradictory,
vague, ill-defined, indeterminate, patently inaccurate, or too specific to be helpful.
Thus, we must concede that the category of the “imagination” is infinitely elusive,
and therefore infinitely capacious; it contains everything whereby at the same
moment seeming to contain nothing, that is to say, it contains no actual thing, but the
possibility of all things. It has been variously described as a force of will, a faculty of
mind, a mode of action, a talent, a religious experience, a gift, an accident, a godlike
breath, a daemon, a demon. Efforts have been made to explain it since the first poet
strung syllables together to form a line of verse; efforts continue to be made. They
are useless—or perhaps it is more correct to say, they are of use only insofar as they
interest us. Definitions of the imagination are most helpful when they attempt to
replicate or describe the act of the imagination at work. They cannot—they never
will—take the place of what the imagination actually does. The investigation into the
nature of the imagination is an exercise in aesthetics; it comprises a sort of mental
gymnastics that ultimately may have very little to do with the actual making of art. In
his essay, “The Serious Artist,” Pound makes passing reference to this phenomenon:
“And on like account if you ask a good painter to tell you what he is trying to do to a
3
canvas he will very probably wave his hands helplessly and murmur that ‘He—eh—
eh—can’t talk about it.”
2

Furthermore, I think it is important—nay, it is inevitable—that at the outset
of this project, I admit defeat. To precisely define, name or determine the source and
function of the imagination is not possible. It is like the old parable of the three blind
men trying to describe the elephant; artists are able to describe some aspect of the
creative process, or some quality of it, or their own particular experience of it, but to
identify where the imagination comes from or what it comprises—ca, c’est
impossible. Perhaps the cognitive scientists of the future, with their PET scans and
advanced imaging technologies will be able to pinpoint what actually happens in the
poet’s brain when the real toads begin to hop in the imaginary garden, when the
mind is finding what will suffice, when the fire and the rose are one. For now,
however, we must content ourselves not with science, but with that slippery,
untrustworthy creature known as aesthetics—with what poets have had to say about
how poetry is written. Even if we frequently find what has been written to be
unsatisfying or even ineffable.
That very ineffability is a crucial aspect of the artist’s experience of the
imagination. Even the most craftsman-like of poets, the most purposeful, self-
conscious artists, will at some point admit to the mysteriousness of the nature of
creativity. W. H. Auden, who heavily emphasized the importance of technical skill,
saw the writing of poetry as a “game of knowledge, a bringing to consciousness, by

2
Pound, Ezra, “The Serious Artist.” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions,
1968, 98.
4
naming them, the emotions and their hidden relationships.”
3
The artist in the act of
the imagination is a person walking through a cave, uncertain of which tunnel to
take, uncertain about where the stone walls will open and the light of day emerge.
Imagination, at its supreme instantiation, is less about the will than about a surrender
to willlessness; it is about the readiness to be pervaded by mystery and then the
further readiness to let that mystery out into the world. This is the dark horse of it;
this is the dirty business of poetry that few are willing to speak about. The
unfortunate connotations come almost instantly to mind—the stoned hippie talking
about his most euphoric trip; the religious nut attempting to explain her rapturous
transport in the arms of the bleeding Jesus; the alien abductee discussing her probing
examination at the hands of little green men. Poets of the university, the learned few,
seem reluctant to place themselves in such unsuitable company. They are aware, as
Pound remarked, that “it has been held for a shameful thing that a man should not be
able to give a reason for his acts and words.”
4
Such poets prefer to stay out in the
light, with all cards on the table, talking about “projects,” “intentions,” and
“meanings.” That is all very well and good for the daylight. But any poet who has
made the journey from the mouth of the cave to in the inner darkness knows whereof
I speak. Much of the imagination is the pen moving by itself, the possession by an
unseen hand, the inhabitation by a force greater than ourselves. Or as Charles Simic

3
Carpenter, Humphrey. W. H. Auden: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981, 340.

4
Ibid, 50.
5
says, “the words have a mind of their own.”
5
While it is not irrational, neither is it
rational. Wallace Stevens puts this more clearly: “What interests us is a particular
process in the rational mind which we recognize as irrational because it takes place
unaccountably.”
6

It takes hold of us, and we are unable to take hold of it. We do not like to
speak of it not only because it embarrasses us, but also because we are superstitious.
What if we talk about where the poems come from and they never come again? T.S.
Eliot was prepared to go even further than I do here, asserting in “The Use of Poetry
and the Use of Criticism,” that we should “start with the supposition that we do not
know what poetry is, or what it does or ought to do, or of what use it is.”
7
I am
willing to grant that poetry can be defined. I am not willing to grant that we can
know, with utter certainty, the nature of the imagination.
To be sure, analysis of the imagination has not served its analysts well. In the
same essay, Eliot cautions us severely:
The extreme of theorizing about the nature of poetry, the essence of poetry if
there is any, belongs to the study of aesthetics and is no concern of the poet
or of a critic…Whether the self-consciousness involved in aesthetics and in
psychology does not risk violating the frontier of consciousness, is a question
which I need not raise here; it is perhaps only my private eccentricity to
believe that such researches are perilous if not guided by sound theology. It
may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed
feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely

5
Simic, Charles. “Notes on Poetry and Philosophy.” Wonderful Words, Silent Truth: Essays on
Poetry and a Memoir. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1990.

6
Stevens, Wallace. “The Irrational Element in Poetry.” Opus Posthumous. New York: Vintage, 1990,
164.

7
Eliot, T.S. “The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism. The Use of Poetry and The Use of
Criticism (Charles Eliot Norton Lectures). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986, 147.
6
penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and an
evasion of the visible and sensible world.

I think it hardly need mentioning that Eliot was the supreme master of self-evasion;
his generalization that we are all engaged in “a constant evasion of ourselves” is just
that, a generalization that cannot be proven. But my own experience in writing this
dissertation has demonstrated to me that some of what he has to say here may be
correct: theorizing about “the nature of poetry” is dangerous. It may be something
better left alone, or better left to those not simultaneously engaged in the attempt to
write poetry. Certainly, the effort to understand the imagination does not prompt the
imagination to action, and it may, as Eliot suggest, in fact, even hinder it. Eliot does
not halt here; he continues:
But to say all this is only to say what you know already, if you have felt
poetry and thought about your feelings. And I fear that I have already,
throughout these lectures, [the Charles Norton lectures delivered at Harvard]
trespassed a little beyond the bounds which a little self-knowledge tells me
are my proper frontier. If as James Thompson observed, ‘lips only sing when
they cannot kiss,’ it may also be that poets only talk when they cannot sing. I
am content to leave my theorizing about poetry at this point. The sad ghost of
Coleridge beckons to me from the shadows. (UPC 155)

Certainly, Coleridge is a most forbidding prospect, the saddest ghost in the darkest of
shadows. Long considered to be one of the most determined investigators of the
imagination, Coleridge wrote the Biographia Literaria in the wake of a desiccation
of his creative abilities. His experience is not unique; there is a longstanding anxiety
about looking too closely at the creative wellspring that is common to everyone from
poets to painters to composers. But for the purposes of this investigation, one must
don one’s armor; indeed, this project grew out of an interest—more specifically, an
7
anxiety—about the intersection between the nature of the cognitive and the creative,
or the conscious and the unconscious. The creative and the critical—I was worried
that one might overtake or submerge the other. To put the finest point on it, I feared
that the critical mind might destroy the creative.
We have a very long history of believing in a pure creativity, unrelated to
abstract or analytic thought. There is no question that the Romantics subscribed to
the notion of the poet divinely inspired. We can even refer ourselves to Plato to find
this original image of the poet, the poet as diviner, vehicle of the divine, the
deranged messenger of lyric expression. Writes Plato in Ion:
For all good poets utter those fine poems of theirs not through skill, but when
inspired and possessed, and good lyric poets do the same. Just as Corybantic
worshippers are not in their right minds when they dance, so too lyric poets
compose those fine poems of theirs when they are not in their right minds;
when they embark on melody and rhythm they become frenzied and
possessed like Bacchic women who draw milk and honey from rivers when
possessed and out of their minds; the souls of lyric poets undergo the same
experience as they themselves say.
8

This too is the poet of the final lines of “Kubla Khan,” who has drunk the milk of
Paradise and must needs have a circle drawn around him thrice. But I do not intend
to argue that the Romantic stereotype of the imagination is accurate—that poetry is
only created by the poet suffused by the vatic breath of the divine afflatus. Or that
poetry can only be created by some sort of automatic writing generated by
possession of the muse. In fact, we must remember that Plato didn’t like poets; he
wanted to throw them out of the Republic. And one might feel that it is demeaning to

8
Plato: Early Socratic Dialogues. Translated by D. Russell and T.J. Saunders. London: Penguin
Books, 1987.
8
suggest that what poets do is thoroughly out of their control. So, while I do strongly
believe in the mysteriousness of the origin of the imagination, I think that if we are
going to talk about the way that poems are produced we have to address the
fundamental interconnectedness between the creative and critical faculties, or what
can be referred to as “felt thought.” Thus, I am interested in examining the ways in
which certain poets—specifically, poets actively engaged with philosophy or
philosophical thinking—have attempted to explain or demonstrate the function of the
imagination. I am ceding from the outset that we will most likely find their
explanations to be insufficient. This will be unsatisfactory to some readers,
particularly because it seems to set us so squarely back in the realm of Simon Magus,
of the snake oil salesman promoting a cure-all from the back of a circus wagon. It
sounds like hocus-pocus, spiritualism, chiromancy, and tarot cards. It sounds like
nonsense.
But it is impossible to go forward without granting the impossibility of truly
explaining the imagination, because as we will see in the examples I will examine,
no one is able to explain it. Coleridge tries and fails; Eliot tries and fails, perhaps
even intentionally. The most successful analyst of the imagination may be Lorca, but
what exactly does the duende do for us, except to explain that there is no
explanation? The most that anyone is able to do is to explain aspects of what the
imagination can do, and perhaps how those aspects occur. The origins of inspiration
are hidden; its source is as unreachable as any Atlantis or El Dorado. What the
imagination is lies in some dark, wrinkled recess of the human mind, perhaps—
9
although one finds oneself wishing it will not be so—someday to be explained by
medical science. For the moment, the best we can do is to look at what those who
have gone before us have had to say about it, and attempt to understand their well-
intentioned, if meager, offerings.
The first mountain to tackle is that of the seemingly irreconcilable difference
between creative thought and critical thought. Paul Valery is immensely helpful to us
with this problem. In his essay “Poetry and Abstract Thought,” he writes, “The idea
of Poetry is often contrasted with that of Thought, and particularly that of ‘Abstract
Thought. People say ‘Poetry and Abstract Thought as they say Good and Evil, Vice
and Virtue, Hot and Cold.”
9
I have certainly found this to be true in my own
experience as a student, as a poet, and as an aspiring scholar. I have been
discouraged by creative writers from pursuing scholarly work, told that
overdeveloping my powers of analysis would cripple my creativity; by the same
token, I have been told my scholars that creative writing is silly, lacking in rigor,
lacking in intellectual demand. Thus the Grand Canyon between poetry and abstract
thought—however shall the twain meet? Valery, again, rises to this challenge: “Most
people, without thinking any further, believe that the analytic work of the intellect,
the efforts of will and precision in which it implicates the mind, are incompatible
with that freshness of inspiration, that flow of expression, that grace and fancy which

9
Valery, Paul. “Poetry and Abstract Thought.” Cahiers. New York: New Directions Publishing
Company, 1964, 136.

10
are the signs of poetry….”
10
I agree with Valery; however, as I will attempt to show
in the pages that follow I not think that it is exactly accurate to assert that poems
flow from “the analytic work of the intellect”—although perhaps it might be argued
that Valery is not exactly arguing that either. (Rather humorously, Valery also asserts
that the “simplicity” of this opinion leads him to suspect it to be of “scholarly
origin.”)
Ultimately, after some badinage about terminology and what he refers to as
“cleaning up the verbal situation,” Valery gets down to business: “I have, then,
noticed in myself certain states which I may well call poetic, since some of them
were finally realized in poems.”
11
This, I think, is an example of the best that we may
be able to do in terms of ultimately examining the nature of the imagination;
although I am going to, forthwith, present and analyze various theories of creativity,
I am of the opinion that a description of the feeling of the poetic state is by far the
best way to speculate about the imagination. Valery says, “I found myself for a time
jolted out of my habitual state of mind.”
12
Enlarging upon this experience, he
explains, “all possible objects of the ordinary world, external or internal, beings,
events, feelings and actions…are suddenly placed in an indefinable but wonderfully
fitting relationship with the modes of our general sensibility.”
13
He goes on:

10
Ibid.

11
Ibid, 141.

12
Ibid.

13
Ibid, 143.
11
There is something else, then, a modification, or a transformation, sudden or
not, spontaneous or not, laborious or not, which must necessarily intervene
between the thought that produces ideas—that activity and multiplicity of
inner questions and solutions—and, on the other hand, that discourse, so
different from ordinary speech, which is verse, which is so curiously ordered,
which answers no need unless it be the need it must itself create, which never
speaks but of absent things or of things profoundly and secretly felt as though
made by someone other than the speaker and addressed to someone other
than the listener. In short, it is a language within a language.
14

Poetry, then, is distinguished from other kinds of speech; it is created through
specialized means that we cannot quite lay our hands on, and those means are
changeable. But what is critical here is the fact that it arises out of a combination of
thought and what we might call “extraordinary discourse”—it is an amalgamation,
an admixture, a witch’s brew, neither entirely controlled by the poet nor entirely out
of the poet’s control. In the final pages of the essay, Valery declares that “every poet
is necessarily a first-rate critic. If one doubts this, one can have no idea of what the
work of the mind is: that struggle with the inequality of moments, with chance
associations, lapses of attention, external distractions…Every true poet is much more
capable than is generally known of right reasoning and abstract thought.”
15
It almost
sounds as if Valery is echoing Horace’s Ars Poetica: “To have good sense, is the
first principle and fountain of writing well.”
16

This is very elucidating, and may I say, even reassuring. We are not Plato’s
babbling idiots; we are Valery’s first-rate metaphysicians. Valery has even more to

14
Ibid, 143.

15
Ibid, 161.

16
Horace. “Ars Poetica.” Classic Writings on Poetry. Ed, William Harmon. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003, 71.
12
say in his essay “The Creation of Art,” where he quotes Wagner speaking about the
composition of Tristan and Isolde: “I composed Tristan under the stress of a great
passion and after several months of theoretical meditation.”
17
Valery explains the
experience of creation as “a closely reasoned, penetrating analysis, employing even
the resources of an abstract symbolism…to an order of facts that seem at first to exist
only in the realm of emotional, intuitive life.”
18
This formulation is very helpful; we
can see imaginative work as the result of analysis applied to the realm of the
emotional. Rather than existing merely as a confusing muddle of the two, like one
shade of paint swirled into the other, Valery asserts that in the creative act, the
analytical mind is placed as a lens over the turbulence of the emotions. “[S]uch a
calculation,” Valery avers, “is indispensable if the artist’s action and the work itself
are to achieve the highest degree of power and effectiveness.”
19
Later, Valery recalls
Coleridge’s definition of the secondary imagination when he declares that “any
speculation on artistic creation must pay ample attention to the ‘heterogeneous’
diversity of the conditions that impose themselves on the workmen and are
necessarily involved in the work.”
20

Thus: the best poems comprise fusions, yokings-together of image and figure
with emotion and thought. One way to understand this is as Valery describes it

17
Valery, Paul. “The Creation of Art.” Cahiers.New York: New Directions Publishing Company,
1964, 203. This recalls very closely a remark made by Eliot in a letter that his marriage to Vivien
Haigh-Wood produced the emotional situation necessary to creating The Wasteland.

18
Ibid, 126.

19
Ibid, 128.

20
Ibid, 129.
13
above—as the cool-headed consideration of emotion after the fact. But I think there
may be many different permutations of the fusion between emotion and intellect,
between the conscious and the unconscious, between the willed and the unwilled.
But to frame the question simply, this is the duality that governs this project: I am
interested in the ways that intellection and emotional creation intertwine in the act of
the imagination, and I am interested in the surprising unifications of disparate things
that are made through this fusion. Other dualities necessarily follow from these
two—the problematic split between subject and object, mind and body, material and
immaterial—and all of these will be seen at various points in the foregoing pages.
But my essential argument is this: Insomuch as we can understand where poetry
comes from, it comes from an essential admixture of the emotional impulse with the
rational mind, producing something new, a poem that combines—whether through
metaphor, figure or simply mode of thought—ideas, objects, feelings that have not
been previously combined. It would be helpful here to refer to Eliot’s theory of the
dissociation of sensibility:
When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly
amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic,
irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these
two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the
typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences
are always forming new wholes.
21

This process of linking together the unexpected (what Coleridge termed the
“esemplastic”) comes out of the process of a kind of heightened awareness that the

21
Eliot, T.S. Selected Prose. New York: Harvest Books, 1975, 64. (Hereafter referred to as SP).
14
poet experiences while in the act of writing the poem. This is quite similar to what
Valery described above as that feeling that everything is suddenly in genial, if
unexpected, relationship to everything else; all things seem to be harmonious. In
other words, in the moment of writing the poem, the world becomes more real,
somehow; things take on a kind of glimmering luminosity, pregnant with poetic
possibility. “One is engaged,” Lyn Hejinian explains, “in an active mental
(intellectual and emotional) operation in which one simultaneously searches for
something with active expectation while awaiting the unexpected, unpredicted
material.”
22
One is temporarily suspended in the in-between—one is working,
actively, yet also waiting, passively. Hejinian has also said:
The writing process is probably not very cogently divisible into stages.
Progress occurs, but not always and strictly in stages. But perhaps I could
identify three distinct elements of the process: the scrutinizing force that
language itself is; and the conscious writing of the poem and what results,
unforeseeable but fully intended.
23

This I hold to be at the root of my own experience as a poet: One means to write the
poem, or a poem, but the shape, the precise words that will be used, the images that
will appear in the mind, the sounds, the line breaks, knowing how to begin and
where to end—these are all discovered through the process of writing the poem, and
they are governed to a greater or lesser degree by the will of the poet. Which is to
say, sometimes they are not governed at all. Brenda Hillman has called this, in a
poem, “monsters of will and monsters of willlessness.” When engaged in the act of

22
Hejinian, Lyn. The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2000, 164.

23
Ibid, 165.
15
writing, one must necessarily place oneself in the jaws of both of these monsters,
even if one must close one’s eyes to do so. Charles Simic writes, “Everything would
be very simple if we could will our metaphors. We cannot.” But at the same time, in
my experience, one does will oneself to pick up the pen, to revise the poem, to alter a
phrase, to change a line. And metaphors are informed in multiple ways: through
reading—all kinds of reading, both scholarly and pleasurable—conscious decisions
in one’s quotidian life, conversations with others, education, teaching. It is clear that
the ways in which the rational mind informs the irrational mind is endless. What I
hope to do in this dissertation is to examine in some of the ways in which feeling and
thought come together to make poems.
In order to do so, I will address the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and
Thomas Stearns Eliot; they seem to me to be obvious choices because they are,
arguably, the foremost poet-critics in the canon of Anglophone literature. The third
chapter takes up Jorie Graham; she is not a critic; however, she can be classed as a
philosophical poet. Looking towards a book-length project, I would like to include
chapters on Shelley, Stevens, and Ashbery. For the purposes of this project, I have
restricted my examination of the poetry and critical writings of Coleridge, Eliot and
Graham; I have also attempted to create a kind of poetic genealogy or linkage
between the three. At the very least, I hope to demonstrate that both felt thought and
the phenomenon of the esemplastic is evident in all three poets.
Up to this point, I have spoken about both the esemplastic and associated
sensibility in rather abstract terms, but before I plunge into the closer examinations
16
of the individual chapters, it might be helpful to look at an example of what I am
trying to talk about. Metaphor may best exemplify the esemplastic; consider
Coleridge’s succinct contention: “An idea, in its highest sense, cannot but be
conveyed by a symbol.”
24
The root of metaphor is the idea of transformation:
Daphne turning into the tree, or Arethusa turning into a fountain, or more
horrifyingly, the damned souls of the 25
th
canto eternally being transformed into
serpents. I. A. Richards asserted that metaphor is the “supreme agent by which
disparate and hitherto unconnected things are brought together in poetry for the sake
of the effects upon attitude and impulse which spring from their collocation and from
the combinations which the mind then establishes between them.”
25
To understand
this phenomenon, let us dwell for a moment on a very familiar poem for the purpose
of illustration: Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro.” “The apparition of these faces on
the train / Petals on a wet black bough.” Well, we know that Pound is drawing a
comparison between the pale faces on the rainy train platform and the appearance of
petals on a tree limb—he is making something new; here, for in this instant, these
faces have become the petals. Both stand in stark contrast to their surroundings,
almost as though he is referring to the ancient antimony between light and dark. But
not only is Pound drawing a connection between two concrete things—the faces and
the petals, he is making use of an abstraction, “apparitions,” which connotes the
ghostliness or unreality of the faces. He combines, then, the abstract notion of the

24
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. London: J.M. Dent, 1906, 234.

25
I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1959.
17
apparitions, which conveys to us the sense of fleetingness, remove, perhaps even
alienation, with the striking image of the pale faces or petals contrasting with their
darker surroundings. This injects emotion into what might otherwise be mere word
painting; the speaker feels removed from his fellow travelers on the metro, although
he perceives that they are as beautiful as flowers. This then, will remind us of
Pound’s well-known dictum about what the image should be: “An emotional and
intellectual complex in an instant of time.” Pound’s two-line poem manages to
convey to us both an emotional and intellectual idea in the bare space of a few, well-
chosen words. (However, I do not mean, by virtue of this example, to assert that
Imagism is always an expression of associated sensibility.) Having looked closely at
one instance of associated sensibility, let me now enter into what must be the most
supreme of all supreme fictions—poets imagining about the imagination.
18
Chapter Two: Shadows Deepened into Substances:
Coleridge and the Imagination
There is a gaping hole at the center of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. Or
rather, there are many, many holes, strung together by uncertain embroideries of
autobiography, philosophical disquisition, literary criticism and genial spoutings-off
on a vast array of various topics. Reading the Biographia is not unlike delving into
an odds-and-ends drawer; nearly anything can be found there. And further like the
odds-and-ends drawer, one is unlikely to find the one thing is looking for. It is both
a deeply frustrating and satisfying experience, depending, of course, on the nature of
one’s temperament.
What is the missing link? The totality of the Biographia is driven toward the
desire to explain and examine the creative imagination. And that is the one crucial
thing that is missing from Coleridge’s great work; his efforts to explain creativity
point us only further in the murk of its inexplicability. We seem to be left, unhappily,
with Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent.” Like the
great unanswerables of all time, the question of the poetic imagination remains
unanswered by Coleridge. He makes many, many promises to answer this question,
just as he made many empty promises throughout his life, but as we know, it was not
a promise he was destined to make good on.
How is it possible to say that Coleridge failed to define the imagination? His
definitions of the primary and secondary imagination are some of the most famous in
literary history; perhaps he is more famous for these formulations that he is for the
19
handful of poems routinely anthologized in editions of canonical British verse. But it
is indisputable that at every moment in the Biographia that Coleridge promises to
bring us closer to an explanation of how the imagination works, he disappears. In
Chapter 13, he resorts, famously, to the “letter to a friend.” We are told that the
secondary imagination will be treated with greater length in future writings; he never
returns to it again. As critic J.A. Appleyard put it, “Coleridge promised to deduce the
imagination, but he never did so.”
26
In his book on Coleridge, Richards answers this
problem by declaring that:
It is better to say that with Coleridge that our concern is with the fact of mind
itself, the immediate self-consciousness in the imaginative moment which is
the source of the doctrines; and again that it is not the doctrines, abstractly
considered, that we have to discuss but the originative facts of mind that they
(sometimes only, alas) express, that we have to know or be. ‘Every object,
said Aristotle, ‘is best viewed when that which is not separate is posited in
separation as is done by the arithmetician.’ But this is the supreme exception.
Position, in separation, that which is not separate is the source of all
metaphysical difficulties—which is to say, of all metaphysics.
27

But this is difficult; how are we to concern ourselves with the immediate self-
consciousness of someone who has been dead for nearly 200 years? Furthermore, if
the problem is really this intractable, one feels defeated before one has even begun.
One is tempted to declare, “Well if Coleridge couldn’t figure out how it worked, no
one can.” And this does not feel far wrong. He is unsurpassed in the amplitude of his

26
Appleyeard, J.A. Coleridge’s Philosophy of Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1965, 82.

27
Richards, Coleridge, 172.

20
knowledge; he was, as Herbert Read remarked, a polymath.
28
But despite his
incredible reading—he himself claimed that there was nothing published that he had
not read—he was unable to service himself or readers with an accessible explanation
of how the mind makes art. As I have already asserted in the introduction, this is
likely because there can be no explanation. The mystery of how the mind creates is
elemental; it is divinely elusive. Where does the mind go? How does it get there?
Who knows?
But these sorts of questions do not get us very much further along the path of
understanding what Coleridge did do for us. We accept his failings; we remember
Carlyle’s damning description of him as the philosopher of the back yard, and Walter
Pater’s catty assertion that Coleridge may have found out the great secrets of life, but
neglected to write them down. In dealing with Coleridge, one has to be prepared to
put up with a lot. He frustrates, even and especially when he does not intend to do so.
He suffered from a world-class case of self-pity; he loved to blame others for his
misfortunes; he was simultaneously utterly without confidence and bloatedly
arrogant. These things are undeniable, and have given rise to a kind of half-
concealed contempt that continues to this day; if one were inclined to do so, one
might readily distribute the world into those who prefer the well-ordered world
according to Wordsworth, or the chaotic part-heaven-part-hell that is identifiably
Coleridgean. But if one is willing to throw one’s lot in with STC, one must be
prepared for a profound lack of answers. Rather, one has to accept that there are no

28
Read, Herbert. Coleridge as Critic. London: Faber and Faber, 1949, 27.
21
answers, there are only questions, endless questions, questions that lead to other still
more difficult questions, questions that proliferate like kudzu on the limbs of the
trees.
In a study that seeks to examine the workings of the poetic imagination, there
is no better place to begin. We begin knowing that there is no end. Although we will
see that Coleridge, more so than any of his Romantic contemporaries, was steeped in
the realms of philosophic, scientific, and political thought, his deepest inclinations,
his most passionately held beliefs place him squarely in line not with the materialist,
realist or pragmatic points of view, but with the idealists, the dreamers, the mystics,
the fanatics, the poets.

Part One: Multeity in Unity

Coleridge seems so very far from us now. Waistcoats and lemon barley
water, laudanum and thirteen-mile tramps across the moors—it all seems remote and
quaint, and thoroughly unrelated to contemporary life. It is not only Coleridge’s
milieu that seems distant, but also his style, his method, and most importantly, his
ideas about the imagination, particularly his obsession with the organic, his deep
desire to make everything connect. We live in the age of the fragment, the age of the
disconnect, what Frederick Jameson has described as “the breakdown of the
signifying chain”—we are more interested in liminal spaces and aporia, than we are
22
in understanding how everything in the world is part of everything else
29
. With the
advent of deconstruction, we dispatched the Romantic notions of unity and
organicism as cleanly and decisively as if amputating a gangrenous limb. Thus, when
one critic queries, “Has post structuralism disproved [Coleridge’s ] organic theory of
the imagination and made him a desiccated relic rather than a seminal thinker?”, the
answer seems that it must be a resounding yes.
30

But—and I say this hesitantly—from my perspective, the making of art
resists the theory du jour. To put it differently, if one believes in the concept of the
poetic imagination, then it is necessary to somewhat resist a theoretical structure that
promotes fragmentation. Thus, to begin to understand Coleridge is to, reluctantly or
not, embrace the idea of the organic, of the great interconnectivity of life and art and
mental processes. Coleridge was consumed by the desire to “only connect”; it was
perhaps the strongest motivating force in his writing, and his personal relationships.
“He prayeth best who loveth best / All things both great and small,” are the familiar
lines from Rime of the Ancient Mariner, followed by the admonitory declaration that
God “made and loveth all.”
31
In The Visionary Company, Bloom goes even further:
the act [of killing the albatross] … becomes pure act detached from
motivation or consequences and existence in itself. But the Mariner learns not
to bracket, and the poem would have us learn, not where to throw our date
shells, nor to love all creatures, great and small, but to connect all

29
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke
University Press, 1991.

30
Gallant, Christine, ed. Coleridge’s Theory of Imagination Today. New York: AMS Press, 1989, . ix.

31
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”The Works of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1994, 614-617.
23
phenomena, acts and things, in the fluid dissolve of the imagination: “O! the
one Life within us and abroad / Which meets all motion and becomes its
soul.’
32

Coleridge’s tenet of multeity in unity—borrowed from Schelling—is one of the
central tenets of his poetic theory, and in fact, his general philosophy of life. Unlike
the scholarship of today, which emphasizes difference—in race, gender or sexual
preference, in canonical status, in style and genre, in medium—Coleridge was
interested in same-ness, or rather, he was obsessed with the idea that disparate parts
come together to form a complete whole.
It is not difficult to trace biographical origins for this compulsion, although I
will readily grant the narrative fallacy. He writes on the first page of the Biographia
that, “It will be found that the least of what I have written concerns me personally,”
but perhaps a more patently untrue statement cannot be found in his work. All of the
Biographia concerns him personally, as does his theory of the organic. He felt
profoundly isolated for most of his life—perhaps the most oft-repeated lines in the
Notebooks are the self-pitying ones that address his notebook as his only true friend,
his only companion. Coleridge’s personal history is one of estrangement; he
perpetually estranged himself from family members, friends, associates and
colleagues. He was estranged too, from himself, and more importantly, from his
work. He rarely finished anything, never paid a bill on time, and was only present for
the birth of one child. (He was absent when another child died.) He made great
plans—for a mammoth biography of Lessing, for an epic poem called The Brook, for

32
Bloom, Harold. The Visionary Company. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971, 57.
24
a massive tome that would explain the PRODUCTIVE LOGOS, along with a
commentary on the Gospel of John—but none of these was realized. His poetry,
which he was only really able to produce with ease during the brief period he lived
near the Wordsworths in Nether Stowey, petered out, and declined in quality—a fact
which he knew, and despaired of mightily. He is one of the most famous
procrastinators of all time, a fact that has made his critical reception a varied one
throughout the history of literary criticism.
His writer’s block is, I think, intimately connected to his concept of the
organic. As I.A. Richards puts it, “The contrast between living power and lifeless
mechanism was no abstract matter with him, but a daily torment.”
33
Coleridge could
not bear division. He couldn’t bear the disjuncture between his desire to write—to
make—and the inability to do so. Coleridge’s theory of poetry is most essentially a
theory of re-making the world—it is a universalized system, that explains “the
aggregative and associative power.” As he tells us in Chapter XIV of BL, “the poet,
described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity.” When
Coleridge could not write, he could not connect. Thinking of him this way, we may
find our 21
st
century selves more in tune with the later Coleridge, the one of
fragments and inassimilable ideas and unfinishable projects. The Biographia is a
deconstructionist’s paradise; it is an Elysian field of non sequitors and paradoxes and
complicated, open-ended assertions. Thomas McFarland attributes this to

33
Richards, I.A. Coleridge on Imagination. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1960,
28.
25
Coleridge’s “need to connect rather than to complete,” explaining that “under the
pressure of this need, his understanding expanded in all directions.”
34

But Coleridge did not cherish this aspect of himself. He bemoaned his
inability to finish things; perhaps his overwhelming admiration for Wordsworth
stemmed in part from that poet’s unswervingly regular production of poems.
Coleridge wanted to finish; he wanted to be a part of the great sea of linked ideas; he
wanted to be connected. He was looking for a theory of everything. He attempted to
find it in his theories of the imagination; he believed—and this perhaps seems most
quaint of all—that if he could come up with a working theory of art, he would then
have a theory that encompassed all aspects of human life. He comes closest to
articulating his Uber-explanation in his Theory of Life, which was published
posthumously, and was written for his physician (and roommate—Coleridge spent
the last seventeen years of his life living with the Gillman family in Highgate) James
Gillman. In the Theory of Life, Coleridge discusses how life is “a given all into a
whole that is presupposed by its parts.”
35

What is key is to understand how the parts come together to form the whole;
this concept is critical to his theory of the imagination. This, too, is where
Coleridge’s notion of “Dynamic Philosophy” is essential; dynamic philosophy is
close to Hegelian dialectic. It is a profound belief in the marriage of opposites, a

34
McFarland, Thomas. Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the
Modalities of Fragmentation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981, 110.

35
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Miscellanies, Aesthetic and Literary, to which is added The Theory of
Life. London: G. Bell, 1911.
26
synthesis of counter posed forces. In The Creative Imagination, James Engell
explains it thus: “Dynamic Philosophy…gives ultimate precedence to the pole of
being, taking it as an unconditional postulate, which for him in the end meant God.
But the dynamic process in individuals involves all objects of experience until an
intimate union of inward intelligence and outward substance takes place.”
36
Engell
further comments that Coleridge even “proposed reform of the grammatical persons:
‘I’ would be thesis, ‘it + i = he’ the antithesis, and ‘Thou’ the synthesis.”
37
Coleridge
himself says in Biographia, “grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one
of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself
in this infinity, and I will cause the world of intelligences with the whole system of
their representations to rise up before you.”
38

The dissolution—and desired resolution—of subject and object is one of the
critical aspects of Coleridge’s philosophy. Coleridge asserted that men could be
distinguished into Platonists or Aristotelians; Thomas McFarland translates this as
meaning that people are either of the “I am” or the “it is” perspective.
39
What
Coleridge’s dynamic philosophy, or his “polar logic” sought to do was to melt the
distinctions between the “I am” and the “it is”; in other words, to merge the subject
and object, thus extinguishing the philosophical debate of Cartesian dualism. What

36
Engell, James, The Creative Imagination. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
1981.

37
Ibid, 335.

38
BL, 196.

39
McFarland, 112.
27
exactly does it mean to dissolve the distinction between “I am” and “it is”, or as
Coleridge put it, “the coincidence or coalescence of an OBJECT with a SUBJECT.”
I.A. Richards’ seminal work Coleridge on Imagination is helpful in elucidating this
problem: “ Coleridge’s Subject is the Self or the Intelligence, the sentient knowing
Mind; his Object is Nature, what is known by the mind in the act of knowing. The
coalescence of the two is that knowing (making, being) activity…”
40
He clarifies
further: “[T]he Subject for Coleridge is equally not a hypothetical abstraction, a
conscious ego about which nothing can be known; but it is an Act of knowing—‘a
realizing intuition.”
41
In the ultimate sense, what this seems to mean is that in the
“act of knowing” the subject and object merge; it may not be an overstatement to say
that in these cases the subject becomes composed of the object which it is perceiving.
All of this is taking us quite directly to Coleridge’s theory of the imagination;
we will recognize the idea of an “act of knowing” as the activity of the Primary
imagination. Before we attend to the definitions specifically, it is worth examining
where Coleridge began his long journey toward his understanding of the
Imagination. It is a long and winding road; his explanations of the imagination alter
throughout the course of the Biographia; at some points, it is very close to the
Kantian notion of the imagination as the intermediary tool between sensation and
perception. Coleridge declares, “In philosophical language, we must denominate this

40
Richards, 51.

41
Ibid,. 55.
28
intermediate faculty in all its degrees and determinations, the IMAGINATION.”
42

Coleridge’s struggle with the function of the imagination began with his engagement
with the materialists such as David Hartley (with whom Coleridge was so obsessed
that he named his first child Hartley), Locke, and Hume. As we know, these
materialists, or associationist philosophers, denied the possibility of the will; the
human mind is the tabula rasa. In other words, the materialists believed that the
mind was merely composed of sense impressions; external stimuli comprised the
internal mind. This conception of the mind gives no credence to the will, in that we
are composed purely through the circumstantial and coincidental accumulations of
sensory stimuli as we randomly move through life. Coleridge grew to loathe these
epistemologies; not only because it was nowhere in his temperament to be a
thoroughgoing materialist, but because he found himself unwilling to give up God.
Materialism leaves no room for the possibility of the divine.
Much of the Biographia—it must be said, much of the Biographia that is not
a pleasure to read—is devoted to Coleridge’s growing rejection of the Associationist
philosophy, and his eventual embrace of German idealism, along with his
engagement in orthodox Christianity. By the conclusion of these internal shifts,
Coleridge comes up with his theories of the Primary and Secondary imagination,
with which we are so familiar today. In their earlier forms, his writings on the
imagination do not swerve very much from previously established notions of the
imagination as purely mechanical imitation, “as the power of visualizing absent

42
BL, 86.
29
things, …as the total power of associative response…but most often as the faculty
which reproduces in various combinations images from the storehouse of memory.”
43
John Spencer Hill notes that in the years 1790-1801, Coleridge uses the terms
Imagination and Fancy interchangeably.
44
But by the writing of the Biographia, he
had thoroughly forsworn these neoclassical explanations for the imagination, seeing
it instead as a potent force capable not just of reproducing data copied from the
external world, but of altering the way the world is represented.

Part Two: The Great “I Am”

We know very well the words Coleridge used to define the imagination in
Chapter 13; for a long time, his definitions, errant, convoluted, and abstract as they
are, were taken as absolute explanations for creativity. I will repeat the definitions
here for the purposes of further discussion.
The IMAGINATION then, I consider either as primary or secondary. The
primary IMAGINATION I hold to be living power and prime agent of all
human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of
Creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary imagination I consider as an
echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical
with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in
the mode of its operation. It diffuses, dissolves, dissipates in order to re-
create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it
struggles to idealize and to unify.
45

43
Appleyard, 333.

44
Hill, John Spencer. A Coleridge Companion. New York: Macmillan, 1984.

45
BL, 235.
30
Much has been written about the Primary imagination; it seems now that it is
generally accepted as an expression of perception, of the instantaneous process that
takes place when human subjects encounter the objective world around them. Owen
Barfield suggests that the great “I AM” stands in for the unconscious act of
perception: “Primary imagination, then, is an act, but it is an act of which we are not
normally conscious…the only thing that could be called the ‘expression’ of primary
imagination as such is the familiar face of nature herself.”
46
Still others have pointed
out the distinct connections between the Primary Imagination and Kant’s explanation
of the imagination in the Transcendental Deduction:
What is first given to us is appearance. When combined with consciousness it
is called perception. Now since every appearance contains a manifold, and
since different perceptions therefore occur in the mind separately and singly,
a combination of them such as they cannot have in sense is demanded. There
must therefore exist in us an active faculty for the synthesis of this manifold.
To this faculty I give the name Imagination.
47

While there can be no doubt that this is a deeply valid perspective, I have found
another, alternate theory to be more helpful: The possibility that the primary
imagination has more to do with God that it does with poetry. Coleridge’s
Christianity was essential to him; he became increasingly reliant on it as he aged. It
is not a stretch to read “the infinite I AM” as a direct reference to God. In my
opinion, that “infinite I AM” is more likely to be of divine rather than of earthly
origin.

46
Barfield, Owen. What Coleridge Thought. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press,
1971, 77.

47
Warnock, Mary. Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976, 28.
31
While there is much more to be said about the primary imagination, I intend
to focus more directly on the secondary. Frustratingly, immediately after citing it in
Chapter 13, Coleridge abandons it utterly, never returning to explain it further. His
failure to expand upon the secondary imagination thoroughly demonstrates
Coleridge’s final inability to get at the root of the mystery; he could not further
explain the imagination because he could not imagine the explanation. So what
definition are we offered? What is the secondary imagination? Like the primary, it
perceives and creates. Coleridge asserts that the secondary imagination does not
differ in kind from the primary, but only in degree. In other words, the human
imagination apes the divine imagination in the manner that it functions, but it does so
on a smaller scale. It differs also “in the mode of its operation.” I take this to mean
that unlike the Creator, who made the world, humans can make art. We can make
poems.
But what is Coleridge actually telling us about how the imagination
functions? The key sentence is the final one of the quotation, with its tremendous
emphasis on fusion—the imagination “diffuses, dissolves, dissipates in order to re-
create.” The imagination diffuses in order to fuse; it dissolves in order to create a
new solution. It is interesting to note the materiality of these verbs—for Coleridge,
the making of an idea was inseparable from the making of an actual thing; for him
poetry and ideas were as real as nature. (Furthermore, all of these words seem
chemical in nature. It is interesting to consider the choice in diction here when one
thinks about Coleridge’s investment in the burgeoning scientific advances of the
32
time; he was personally acquainted with Sir Humphrey Davy.) For Nature, of
course, is what he believed we took in and remade. What Coleridge is speaking of
here is the esemplastic, a neologism he coined from the Greek for “to shape into
one.” Poetry comprises a fusion of disparate parts—separate pieces driven together
by the force of the poet to make a new thing. It is imperative to note the negative
nature of the verbs as well, for Coleridge is telling us that the poet must destroy
something—he must diffuse, dissolve, dissipate—in order to make something. In a
deeply old-fashioned work of criticism from 1937, Scepticism and Poetry, D.G.
James explains that “the artist has a necessarily destructive side which the primary
has not….it is in contrast to the primary imagination present in perception, which is
purely constructive.”
48
James goes on to assert that the destructive element is both
connected to the “passion to create” and “inspired by it.”
I would like to linger for a moment on the origin of the word diffuse, since it
is a word to which Coleridge perpetually returns. Its antonym, fuse, comes from the
same etymology; both originate from the Latin, fundere, which means to pour forth,
or to spread out. But the word “fuse” now means to join together, whereas diffuse
contains a wider variety of meanings—its first meaning in the OED, one notes with
some irony, is “confused, distracted, perplexed; indistinct, vague, doubtful,
uncertain.” Appropriate for Coleridge, one feels. A later definition offers a more
familiar definition: “widespread, scattered or dispersed.” Coleridge suggests is that
the poet, in the act of making the poem, scatters or disperses—what? In the sentence,

48
James, D.G. Scepticism in Poetry. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1960, 17.
33
“It diffuses, dissolves, dissipates…” the verbs contain no object; Coleridge does not
specify what the poet is diffusing, or scattering, or making uncertain. The poet thus,
is diffusing the entirety of the world, or whichever element of the world should seem
relevant at the time. But it is interesting that both words should contain essentially
the same original meaning—they both mean to spread out, although they now seem
opposed in meaning, they now seem to be antonyms. It is fitting that both “fuse” and
“diffuse” should hold the germ of the same meaning, because for Coleridge,
“extremes [always] meet.”
It seems like a contradiction, that the artist must destroy in order to create
something new, but this is very emblematic of the Coleridge’s governing principles.
The contradiction in terms can be explained by his dynamic philosophy, by his
terrific emphasis on “polar logic,” a term he borrowed from Giordano Bruno.
49
Polar
logic might be best explained in the words of the critic Walter Jackson Bate: “a
synthesis of opposing energies.”
50
Or as Coleridge says, in The Friend, “Extremes
meet!” One of the most problematic aspects of Coleridge’s emphasis on the organic
was his belief that all opposites eventually cohere; everything eventually comes full-
circle to meet its antidote, like the ourobouros, the snake eating its own tail. While
Coleridge held fast to this belief in his general approach to metaphysics, he applied it
most specifically to his explanations of the function of poetry. The most well-known

49
Owen Barfield, in an extended appendix to What Coleridge Thought, argues that he can find no
trace of “polar logic” in any of Bruno’s admittedly impenetrable writings. Barfield asserts that
Coleridge may have made it up himself.

50
Bate, Walter Jackson. Coleridge. New York: Macmillan, 1968.
34
description of “the reconciliation of opposites” occurs in Chapter 13 of the
Biographia:
[The poet] diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were,)
fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have
exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power, first put in
action by the will and the understanding, and retained under their irremissive,
though gentle and unnoticed, controul (laxis effertur habenis) reveals itself in
the balance or reconciliation of opposites or discordant qualities: of
sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the
image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and
freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion,
with more than usual order; judgement ever awake and steady self-
possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it
blends harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to
nature; the manner to the matter, and our admiration of the poet to our
sympathy with the poetry.
51

Much in this paragraph is utterly vague; much of it does not seem helpful to us. What
does it mean to say that the poet reconciles “sameness with difference?” The
sameness or difference of what? In what manner, or fashion? Is it even true to say
that poetry consists of a balance of opposites? One can think of many poems that do
not seem to rely at all on this; if anything, metaphor, the fundamental building block
of poetry, seems that it must rely upon the alliance of one things to another similar
thing. What is a “more than usual state of emotion”? Is the idea in fact so utterly
opposed to the image?
Let us put aside for the moment the importance of nature in the
underpinnings of Coleridge’s theory, and examine instead what it means to say that
art is a product of association, or fusion. Soon after the above quotation, Coleridge

51
BL, 234.
35
writes, “During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so
instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority belongs.
There is here no first and no second; both are coinstantaneous and one.”
52
This
notion of the fusion of the conscious with the unconscious fits in nicely with the
Coleridgean obsession with the organic. Thus creativity sustains an organic
combination of the subject and the object, of the thinker and the thought-about, the
internal and the external. From this point, I do not think it is a drastic step to say that
at the same time, the act of imagination combines both the conscious will with the
unconscious creative spirit. If we look at the beginning of the above paragraph, what
is most helpful—and most relevant to the overall purpose of this study—is to attend
to Coleridge’s examination of the double-pronged functioning of the poet’s mind.
The “synthetic and magical power,” also known as the imagination, is put into action
by the poet’s “will and understanding, retained under their irremissive, though gentle
and unnoticed controul.” I am very interested in the implications of this passage, for
it seems subtly different from the assertion of the definition of the secondary
imagination, which calls the imagination “co-existing with the conscious will.” The
secondary imagination does not suggest, as Coleridge seems to be doing here, that
the conscious will is the instigator of the imagination. The definition of the
secondary imagination seems to describe the relationship between the will and that
“magical power” as being more clearly defined—when he asserts that the two co-
exist, it seems that he is arguing for a symbiotic co-functioning. But in this latter

52
BL, 131.
36
passage, he seems to suggest that the imagination is first put into action by the will,
and then takes over, although all the while “retained by their irremissive, though
gentle and unnoticed controul.” This is a very complex formulation: First, the
imagination is engendered in a “synthetic and magical” mode; then, it proceeds to
create, while remaining unaware of the will that continues to exert control over the
creative choices that are being made. This seems a more confusing analysis than a
mere reconciliation of opposites—will and willlessness, mind and feeling, poetry and
abstraction. Rather, this explanation seems to imply that during the time that the poet
is at work there is at work a constant activity of mind, during which the creative
force is supervised by the rational mind, but it is unaware of that supervisory
function. In other words, while one is creating, one is making rational choices, but
one is not aware of the control being exercised to make those choices. If it feels as
though one is now reduced to the level of the dog chasing its own tail, perhaps one
is—for this, as I have stated earlier, is merely a speculation about the nature of the
imagination. I believe this to be the hinterlands of the mind. It is a theory. It cannot
be proven; nor can it be disproven. It cannot even be generalized; perhaps this was
only Coleridge’s experience of the creative act. But insofar as it offers one
methodology for the way that the imagination works, it is helpful.
Furthermore, Coleridge does not adhere to this position; he gives various and
different explanations in different works. Thus, one is left wondering what he
actually believed about the nature of the imagination. Did he, for example, believe
that the will induced the imagination, as a key turned in the ignition begins the
37
engine? Or did he believe that the imagination floated freely, occurring as
involuntarily as an epileptic fit, or to put it less distressingly, as involuntarily as the
working of the pulmonary or vascular systems? As he is in all things, Coleridge is
inconsistent on this point. In some places, he emphasizes the role of the will in the
creative act, but elsewhere, and more predominantly, he emphasizes the role of
willessness. In “On Poesy or Art,” the essay that is appended to the Biographia, he
writes, “In every work of art there is a reconcilement of the external with the
internal; the conscious is so impressed with the unconscious as to appear in it …He
who combines the two is a man of genius: and for that reason he must partake of
both. Hence there is in genius itself an unconscious activity; nay that is the genius in
the man of genius.”
53
This seems absolutely definite: “the (italics his) genius” is the
“unconscious activity,” the genius of the man of genius is the uncontrollable and
uncontrolled product of his unconscious mind. We must, however, take this with a
grain of salt—as I’ve already mentioned, he proposes several other formulations in
answer to this very same question.
Furthermore, and somewhat more problematically, this notion is drawn
directly from Schelling, as were many of Coleridge’s concepts about the organic.
Coleridge’s debt to Schelling (in plainer language, his theft from Schelling) was vast
and has been commented on at very, very great length. Mary Warnock helps us to
neutralize this problem by pointing out that at the very least Coleridge is responsible
for introducing German philosophy into England, even if he did so via plagiarism;

53
BL, 432.
38
furthermore, “the theory of imagination to be found in his work contains features
which, wherever they recur, seem to contribute to a true view of the imaginative
function.”
54
She also points out that plagiarism is a moral question, essentially
unhelpful in elucidating the realm of ideas.
55
If we are able to dispense with the
problem of plagiarism, and focus instead on the issue of what Coleridge means
exactly in his assertions about genius, it is most useful to go back to Schelling.
56
In
the mind of that German philosopher, “the function of Art is to resolve the conflict
between the conscious and the unconscious.”
57
He goes on to explain further:
The artistic faculty, as we saw, is the Imagination, which penetrates to the
ultimate ground of all reality and grasps this Identity of consciousness and
unconsciousness. This is proved by the fact that in the making of the work of
art the conscious merges with the unconscious: part of the work is made with
full consciousness and deliberate art, but part of it the artist produces without
being able to account for it and is therefore unconscious.
58

This is a much more general postulation about the interconnectedness of the
conscious and unconsciousness, the willed and unwilled; here, Schelling is simply
saying that both are at work in the making of art. He does not designate or impute a
specific function to the rational mind versus the irrational; he does not privilege one
over the other. He merely avers that both are present; his more radical statement is

54
Warnock, Mary. Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976, 73.

55
Ibid, 74.

56
Readers interested in the plagiarism in Coleridge’s work might consult Norman Fruman’s Damaged
Archangel.

57
Orsini, Gian Napoleone Giordano. Coleridge and German Idealism. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1969.

58
Ibid, 225
39
that the imagination “penetrates to the ground of all reality.” It is difficult to know
what this means, as the key terms at work here are exceptionally abstract.
Furthermore, the concepts of “reality” and “imagination” seem to be fundamentally
at odds, leaving readers, I am afraid, no further along than where they started.
If I am to believe that Coleridge most heartily believed that inspiration was
uncontrolled and uncontrollable, I must then consider that this belief gave him a
great deal of trouble. He was, more than any other Romantic poet, afflicted by the
desertion of the muse; perhaps this was because he believed so deeply in his inability
to control her comings and goings. The preface to “Kubla Khan” is the greatest
description ever written of the involuntary or unconscious act of art-making.
Coleridge was not just affected by inspiration when he wrote “Kubla Khan”; he was,
he claimed, literally unconscious, in the throes of an opium dream. The poem’s
subtitle, “A Vision in a Dream,” makes this apparent—Coleridge did not write the
poem, he witnessed it; he saw it.
The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of
the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that
he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that
indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him
as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions,
without any sensation or consciousness of effort.
59

As we know, Coleridge was then awakened by the debt collector from Porlock, and
promptly forgot all but 50 lines of the projected two to three hundred. Much
scholarship, particularly Elizabeth Schneider’s lucid Coleridge, Opium and Kubla

59
Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan,” 295.
40
Khan, has attempted to put the lie to Coleridge’s account of the writing of “Kubla
Khan.”
60
Schneider demonstrates quite authoritatively that it did not happen as
Coleridge said that it did, employing drafts and notes to reveal that “Kubla” was
written in more than one apoplectic fit of poetry. Moreover, another excellent
argument for this is simply that “Kubla Khan” is not much a fragment, as far as
fragments go; it can easily be read as a completed poem. But what is perhaps of most
interest to me is the materiality of the experience; Coleridge saw the lines of the
poem as things. This seems to suggest that they are even further distinct from an act
of the mind, or from ideas—they existed outside of his consciousness as objects, not
as aspects of his subjective experience.
What does “Kubla Khan” tell us about the nature of poetic act? Like its
preface, it relies heavily upon the Platonic concept of the artist as mystic. The
gripping final lines of the poem indicate this:
…Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
61

Here the poet is depicted as very nearly possessed; he is something to be feared,
something to be avoided. One must superstitiously draw a circle around him, as if he
were a threat. The reader must close her eyes with “holy dread”—the kind of dread

60
Schneider, Elisabeth Wintersteen. Coleridge, Opium and Kubla Khan. New York: Octagon Books,
1966.

61
“Kubla Khan:, 49-54.
41
one might experience in the face of a burning bush or the miraculous raising of the
dead. The poet has eaten “honey-dew,” which seems like it must be a reference to the
ambrosia of the gods, and “drunk the milk of Paradise.” The capitalization here of
Paradise seems to recall Eden, but the rest of the poem seems fairly devoid of
Christian overtones. Instead, we seem to be in the presence of a Greek god, a
partaker in an ancient and secret ritual, someone dangerous, exotic, and thoroughly
out of his right mind.
62

The poem in its whole, of course, emphasizes the exotic. Insomuch as it is an
expression of creative act, it embraces involuntariness, what cannot be controlled.
Kubla Khan’s pleasure-dome is in a “savage place, as holy and enchanted / As e’er
beneath a waning moon was haunted / By woman wailing for her demon lover!”
63

The water in the fountain is wild, “with ceaseless turmoil seething;” it spurts upward
in a “swift half-intermitted burst / Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail.”
64

(We will not dwell, as so many have done previously, on the overtly sexual nature of
the imagery.) Here, inspiration is described as a very nearly deadly force, and it is
wholly out of human hands. The poem is a “miracle of rare device, / A sunny
pleasure-dome with caves of ice!”
65

62
Critics have also suggested that Mount Abora recalls Milton’s Mount Amara, from Paradise Lost,
which could be considered another reference to Christianity.

63
“Kubla Khan”, 14-15.

64
Ibid., 20-21.

65
Ibid, 34-35.

42
However much of “Kubla Khan” may or may not have been written—
whether by craft or magic—Coleridge believed desperately in the mythology of
inspiration. We have only to look briefly at the “Dejection Ode” to see how fiercely
Coleridge believed that his creativity was out of his hands. In The Visionary
Company, Harold Bloom comments further on the passivity evoked by the poem:
“The logic of Dejection is that human process is irreversible: imaginative loss is
permanent, and nature intimates to us our own mortality always.”
66
His “genial
spirits” had failed him, even as he is in the midst of writing a beautiful and lasting
poem. It is, of course, a beautiful and lasting poem about writer’s block. The poem
commences with an invocation to the weather, a plea that the night “will not go
hence / Unroused by winds,” as without inspiration from the external natural world,
nothing can startle his “dull pain, and make it move and live!”
The poem is as much about suffering the throes of creative barrenness as it is
about pure despair: “A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear / A stifled, drowsy,
unimpassioned grief / Which finds no natural outlet or relief / In word, sigh, or
tear—“
67
We recognize this as depression, the blank lack of affect that afflicts those
suffering from major depression, who are unable to speak, or move, or even clean
themselves. But Coleridge’s despair here is traced to a particular origin, and it is the
primal disjuncture from the inspiring force of nature: He sees the thin clouds, the
crescent moon and the sparkling stars, he sees “them all so excellently fair, / I see,

66
Bloom, 238.

67
“Dejection Ode”, 22-25
43
not feel, how beautiful they are!” John Spencer Hill has described the dejection in
the poem to be fundamentally “a crisis [which] has its roots in a failure of
perception.”
68

Without the capacity to be moved by the external inspiration of nature, the
speaker feels deadened, silenced. His “genial spirits” have failed. His cares and
afflictions suspend “what nature gave [him] at [his] birth, / [His] shaping spirit of
Imagination.”
69
Although the end of the poem describes the onset of the storm that
the first stanza invokes, the poet is unable to feel moved by the violence of the wind
and rain. Writes M.H. Abrams: “By the agency of the wind storm it describes, the
poem turns out to contradict its own premises: the poet’s spirit awakes to violent life
even as he laments his inner death, achieves release in the despair at being cut off
from all outlet, and demonstrates the power of the imagination in the process of
memorializing its failure.”
70

The poem is paradoxical, without question. It is a great poem; Abrams put it
in the category of “greater Romantic lyric.” But it is a great poem about not being
able to write, and it is not inaccurate to characterize it as the last great poem that
Coleridge wrote. (While he continued to write poems for the rest of his life, none
achieved the grandeur of his earlier work.) The impairment which he describes here
is one that cannot be resolved by any surfeit of hard work or constant labor; the

68
Hill, John Spencer. A Coleridge Companion. New York: Macmillan, 1984, 177.

69
“Dejection Ode,” 85-86.

70
Abrams, M.H. English Romantic Poets. London: Oxford University Press, 1975, 137.
44
underlying import of the poem is an absolute belief in the mythology of the
creativity. Coleridge was not alone in his belief in this mythology; it was a popular
notion among his generation. Abrams’ The Mirror and the Lamp explores in detail
the tremendous emphasis on genius in the Romantic period; for the Germans in
particular, the idea of genius held great sway.
71
They fixated closely on Shakespeare,
as did Coleridge, as the preeminent example, and were fascinated by the idea of the
artist as the idiot savant, reeling off pages and pages like a medium in a trance.

Part Three: Cold Snuff on the Rim of the Candlestick

To believe in the will-lessness of art is to place oneself in a fundamentally
passive position: you can write only what you are given. Coleridge believed this,
despite all of his assertions about craft. While there are many theories about
Coleridge’s declining creative output, perhaps it was his absolute certainty about the
involuntary nature of the poetic process that so disabled him. Other reasons for
Coleridge’s withering flow of genuine poetic output are well-known; scholars have
cited his drug abuse, his wretched marriage, his family troubles, his struggles with
depression, his notorious laziness, his chronically poor health. But Coleridge
himself ascribed his creative failure to his long explorations in the metaphysical
realms; this idea, while now perhaps mostly dismissed, for a long time held both

71
Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953.
45
cultural and scholarly currency. Wordsworth himself thought it might have been
true; Arthur Quiller-Crouch asserted that
He had landed in Germany a poet…he embarked from Germany not yet
perhaps the ‘archangel a little damaged’ (as Charles Lamb described him
some sixteen or seventeen years later) but already—and worse for us—a poet
lost…The man came back to England intensely and furiously preoccupied
with metaphysics. This, I suggest and neither opium, nor Mrs. Coleridge’s
fretfulness, was the main reason why he could not recall his mind to poetry.
72

Coleridge himself first put forth the theory that philosophy had ruined his
poetry in several letters. In 1801, he wrote to William Godwin, that he had been
“undergoing a process of intellectual exsiccation.”
73
He explains that during a period
of illness he had spent many hours “of Darkness chasing down the metaphysical
game.” He reports that this has resulted in the drying-up of his creative powers: “
The Poet is dead in me—my imagination (or rather the Somewhat that had
been imaginative) lies, like a Cold Snuff on the circular Rim of a Brass
Candle-stick, without even a stink of Talow to remind you that it was once
cloathed and mitred with Flame. That is past by!—I was once a Volume of
Gold Leaf, rising and riding on every breath of Fancy—but I have beaten
myself back into weight and density, & now I sink in quicksilver, yea, remain
squat and square on the earth amid the hurricane that makes Oaks and Straws
join in one Dance, fifty yards high in the Element.”
74

He then goes on to say, “I am unfit to decide on any but works of severe Logic.”
75
In
a letter to William Sotheby, “when I wished to write a poem…instead of a Covey of
poetic Partridges with whirring wings of music, or wild Ducks shaping their rapid

72
Chambers, E.K. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938.

73
Coleridge, Selected Letters. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987, 73.

74
Ibid. .

75
Ibid, 73.
46
flight in forms always regular…up came a metaphysical Bustard, urging its slow
heavy, laborious earth-skimming Flight, over dreary & level Wastes.”
76
He told
Poole he hoped that “Philosophy and Poetry will not neutralize me and leave me an
inert mass.”
77

All this seems to be at odds with Coleridge’s simultaneous belief that “No
man was ever yet a great poet, without being a profound Philosopher.”
78
He asserted
that deep feeling must be accompanied by deep thinking; he wrote to Sotheby, “a
great Poet must be implicitly if not explicitly a profound Metaphysician.”
79
In
another letter, he declared “A Poet’s heart and Intellect should be combined,
intimately combined & unified…”
80

Where does all this leave us? Did the philosophy kill the poetry? Or did the
philosophy aid the creation of the poetry? Were the two wrapped in a kind of
symbiotic relationship, feeding each other? Coleridge could not make up his mind;
he seems to have wanted it both ways, or rather he felt both that philosophy was
necessary, but also that it was damaging to his creativity. (Many scholars now reject
this position.) We cannot, from our position more than two hundred years later, come
to any conclusions on this point, other than to say that while Coleridge wanted to
believe in a basic connection between philosophy and poetry, there are fundamental

76
Ibid, 37

77
Ibid, 54.

78
BL, 323.

79
SL, 106.

80
Ibid, 114.
47
differences between the two. Stevens is helpful to us here; in The Necessary Angel,
he articulates the distinction between the two by asserting that while philosophy
approaches truth through reason, poetry approaches it via the imagination.
81
He then
further claims that while philosophy seeks only to satisfy the reason, poetry seeks to
satisfy both reason and imagination.
82

Reason and the imagination, in this construction at least, appear to be utterly
opposed. They are polar opposites, to borrow Coleridge’s word; they have nothing to
do with each other. One is reminded of Coleridge’s assertion that the primary goal of
poetry should be pleasure. How can we reconcile all of this? What is the basic
connection between poetry and philosophy, between the search for reason and the
search for imagination, between the analytic and creative functions? Is it a case of
the twain that never shall meet, or is there a middle ground, a demilitarized zone,
where the search for explanations and the search for symbols can meet?
That is the most basic of the differences between the two—while philosophy
wants to state facts in plain language, poetry expresses via symbol. Coleridge
himself asserts this when he says, “An idea, in its highest form, cannot but be
conveyed a symbol.” The depth of his belief in this statement correlates to his faith
in the organic; because the function of symbols is to yoke together both the thing in
itself and that which describes it, a symbol is a perfect union, an example of the

81
Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. New York:
Vintage Books, 1951, 42.

82
Ibid, 43.
48
snake with its tail in its mouth. It is a dynamic synthesis of two separate entities,
which fuse to create a new expression of truth.
Thus poetry does not express truth in the same fashion as philosophy; this is
an undeniable fact. Coleridge, for all of his endless reading and re-reading of Kant,
knew this; he understood at the most basic level that poetry, while it resides in the
same truth-seeking realm of philosophy, it lives in a different time-zone, a different
country, a different dimension. Coleridge declares as much in the famous passage
from the Biographia: “Poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly as that of the
wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult,
because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more and more fugitive
causes.”
83
“A logic of its own.” It might not be inaccurate to say that what Coleridge
was really after all throughout his career was an explanation for that “logic of its
own.” What is the logic of poetry? How does one describe it? How does one engage
in it?
Here we enter again into the terrain of the ineffable, because what makes the
logic of poetry emanate from “fugitive causes” is its very inexplicability. It is
precisely the fact that poetry in these wild depths correlates more to the realm of the
religious mystics than to the philosophers that makes it very difficult to articulate
what precisely Coleridge means by “a logic of its own.” Coleridge, as we know, was
fascinated by mystics; his passion for philosophy was matched by his passion for the

83
BL, 4.
49
Neo-Platonist and for writers of esoteric or alternative philosophy, such as Jacob
Boehme and George Fox. The mystics, he writes,
contributed to keep alive the heart in my head; gave me an indistinct yet
stirring and working presentiment, that all the products of the mere reflective
faculty partook of DEATH, and were rattling twigs and sprays in winter, into
which a sap was yet to be propelled from some root to which I had not
penetrated, as if they were to afford my soul either food or shelter. If they
were too often a moving cloud of smoke to my by day, yet they were a pillar
of fire throughout the night, during my wanderings through the wilderness of
doubt, and enabled me to skirt, without crossing the sandy deserts of utter
unbelief.
84

I believe that statements like this one lead us to where Coleridge’s real allegiances
lay; not with the ratiocinative, and not even with some sort of combination of the
critical and creative powers, but with the purely supernatural. “From a child I had
been habituated to the vast,” he wrote in a letter, and the evidence that this is so is
very great.
85
While Coleridge spent years in pursuit of philosophical truths, his
primal affiliation was to the truth that can be explained only by means of faith. This,
I believe, is the reason why he suffered from writer’s block; why, in fact, he suffered
from such a failure to act in all aspects of his life. The position of the mystic is
fundamentally passive; the mystic waits for the divine to enter her; she relinquishes
control in order to be moved by the Godhead.
But, one might insist, what about Coleridge’s faith in reason? What about his
endless writings and lectures and talks about the need for reason in all things; what
about his indication of reason as the highest achievement of man. In his essay,

84
BL, 278.

85
BL,. 32.
50
“Aspects of Coleridge’s Distinction between Reason and Understanding,” Thomas
McFarland offers a useful way of thinking about this problem; he argues that for
Coleridge, the term “reason” did not hold the Enlightenment meaning of the light of
rationality. In fact, McFarland avers, Coleridge was utterly opposed to the guiding
philosophy of the Age of Reason; as we know, he hated Newton, Hume and Locke.
86

To this list, we might add the French philosophes Voltaire and Diderot. Reason did
not mean rationality for Coleridge; instead, it meant something much more universal,
even something holy. McFarland points out that “reason is the fullest translation of
the Greek word logos…[which] was a central term and conception for Coleridge’s
systematic philosophico-theological endeavour.”
87
He goes on to cite the following
from Coleridge’s Opus Maximum: “[R]eason is the irradiative power of the
understanding and the representative of the infinite.” Leslie Brisman addresses the
same issue in her article, “Coleridge and the Supernatural,” when she writes, “For
Coleridge, reason was supernatural.”
88

For Coleridge, reason lies much closer to faith than it does to analytic
thought. And Coleridge’s status as a man of faith should not be dismissed. He was
deeply religious, and he grew to be more so with time. He abandoned the near-
pantheism of his youth, and pursued the Protestant faith with ever increasing passion.

86
McFarland, Thomas. “Aspects of Coleridge’s Distinction Between Reason and Understanding,”
Coleridge’s Visionary Languages: Essays in Honor of J.B. Beer. Rochester, New York : Boydell &
Brewer, Ltd, 1993.

87
Ibid, 174.

88
Brisman, Leslie. “Coleridge and the Supernatuural.” Studies in Romanticism. 21 (June 1982) 123-
159.
51
Coleridge’s deeply held belief in Christianity allows for his simultaneous conviction
in the artist as a tool of his art; faith in one lends itself easily to faith in the other.
Thus, I do not think it is inaccurate to argue that Coleridge was ultimately more in
the camp of St. Teresa and John of the Cross, than of Kant and Fichte. But what
about his supposed belief in the organic? One way out of this bind is to think about
the fact that even though Coleridge believed his creative powers had failed as a result
of his forays into metaphysics, his notebooks make it transparently clear that this is
not so. While he may have ceased to write poems that he would have identified as
poetry, there is much in the journals and notebooks that is clearly poetry. He
illustrates concepts with verbal pictures, constantly, endlessly. He thought in images;
in short, he was a poetic thinker. If the end result of philosophy is more abstractions,
the end result of successful poetry is the concrete image, the thing that can be seen.
Examples of Coleridge’s figurative thinking abound, both in the Biographia and in
his notebooks. Although Coleridge may have believed that his powers of the
imagination had dried up, I would argue that he never stopped writing poetry. While
he produced a relatively small body of what he would define as poems, it now seems
clear that Coleridge never stopped writing poetry. Using a looser definition of poetry
that embraces metaphorically and figuratively rich prose, nearly everything he ever
wrote can be called poetry. This fact seems essential for an examination of how the
poetic mind works—what Coleridge called the “shaping powers of the imagination”
never failed him, although they may have changed form. He was constantly
translating philosophical ideas into poetic language.
52
Poetry is fusion. That is what Coleridge wants to teach us; from the fusion of
vehicle and tenor to the fusion of the heart to the mind, that is the overriding
principle of Coleridge’s Logos. Coleridge was a poet far more than he was a
philosopher, but he fused the two at the most basic level, in that he longed for a way
to understand the world, to understand the truth of the world.
53
Chapter Three: The Shred of Platinum: Mr. Eliot’s Imagination
Departing Coleridge’s poppy fields and laudanum dreams for Mr. Eliot’s
Sunday morning services, it seems that one must now be in safer hands. Surely it
must be so: Eliot of the bowler hat and perfectly center-parted hair, Eliot of the
walking stick and the desk at Lloyds Bank, Eliot of the precision turn of phrase.
Alas, we are not. Despite Eliot’s contributions to the lexicon of 20
th
century literary
criticism—the terms “objective correlative,” “impersonality of the poet,” and
“dissociation of sensibility” seem permanently lodged in the dictionary of the scholar
of poetry (at least, some scholars of poetry)—I do not believe that Eliot’s attempts to
explore or explain the nature of the imagination are much more satisfactory than are
those of Coleridge. However, while the problematic aspect of Coleridge’s
descriptions of the imagination lie in the vagueness of his description, I believe that
the difficulty with Eliot’s is that, to some degree, they directly negate his own
experience as a writer. To make such a charge it is important that from the outset I
explain that I will be thinking of Eliot from the perspective of a writer, not from the
perspective of a reader. It is a useful distinction, I think; one that permits for greater
latitude of guesswork and speculation, and even, I daresay, some sins of the
intentional fallacy.
With Eliot, one feels that one begins behind the colloquial eight ball. He is
not generally held, at least in our current critical clime, to be a particularly
sympathetic figure. Accusations of anti-Semitism and misogyny have been leveled;
his treatment of his first wife has been deplored at length, both in print and on
54
screen. (The film Tom and Viv depicts their relationship, condemning Eliot as the
callous, heartless genius, while beatifying Vivien Haigh-Wood as the hard-done-by,
devoted-till-death, abandoned wife.
89
) In photographs—at least in the photographs of
Eliot as a young man—he appears remote, recondite, reproachful. There are no
photographs of STC, but after spending some amount of time with him, it feels as
though he is knowable; he is, in some way, an identifiable quantity. Of Eliot, I do not
think the same can be said. More approachable, perhaps, in his later years (one thinks
of the Eliot of the jellicle cats, the Eliot who loved practical jokes, particularly those
of the whoopee cushion), the young Eliot is nearly impenetrable, both as a figure and
a writer. But it is the young Eliot with whom we must concern ourselves: His most
significant contributions to poetry and literary criticism occurred in the earlier part of
his career. For the purposes of my study, the plays are more hindrance than help, and
the later poetry—particularly The Four Quartets—may even undermine the ideas I
wish to examine.
How are we to traverse from Coleridge to Eliot? Particularly, since we ended
the last section with the assertion that “poetry is fusion,” these two giants of
literature seem to be utterly opposed. Eliot’s poetry would seem to us to be utterly
divergent from Coleridge’s realm of organicism; it seems, at first, well nigh
impossible to consider Eliot in the light of wholeness or union. We think, rather, of
the bleak marshes and ruins of The Waste Land, of the devastating coming of the
messiah in the “The Journey of the Magi,” the dismal streets and alleyways of “The

89
See Craig Raine’s sympathetic biography/critique for a different perspective on this issue.
55
Prelude,” the barren house of “Gerontion.” And not only how, but why should we
proceed from Coleridge to Eliot? At first blush, the two seem like strange
bedfellows: Coleridge, dipsomaniac, disorganized and dependent on others; Eliot,
effectively independent, employed, eminent. Where do these two cross paths, other
than in the papery leaves of the second volume of the Norton Anthology?

Part One: Sacred Woods

Perhaps we might begin by considering some of Eliot’s remarks about
Coleridge: In “The Perfect Critic,” Eliot remarks, “Coleridge was perhaps the
greatest of the English critics, and in a sense, the last.”
90
Here, it seems likely that
the young Eliot—for this essay appears in The Sacred Wood (1920)—may be placing
himself as the next in line, after Coleridge. But his remarks are not always so
salutary. In The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, he declares, “The author of
the Biographia Literaria was already a ruined man. Sometimes, however, to be a
ruined man is already a vocation.”
91
This is painful—but also, it seems, Eliot perhaps
knew whereof he spoke? Overall, Eliot mentions Coleridge quite a bit; much of what
he says is not complimentary. But most useful, perhaps, is the following observation,
also from the Charles Norton lectures: “Coleridge, with his authority due to his great

90
SP, 50

91
Use of Poetry, 60.
56
reading, probably did much…to bring attention to the profundity of the philosophic
problems into which the study of poetry may take us.”
92

Like Coleridge, Eliot had studied philosophy, and an argument can be made
that the study of philosophy created poetic problems for Eliot, rather than vice versa.
Eliot birthed three chief ideas which bear discussion. Two of them, at least, bear
relation to Coleridge’s notions of the imagination; it is not a stretch to say that Eliot
built upon some of the notions expressed in the Biographia. But I think that one must
take into consideration the fact that the ideas under discussion are the products of the
young Eliot; The Sacred Wood has flashes of the tyrannical—he can be as
unreasonable as petty tyrants tend to be, and as capricious. So much of what we think
of as the crucial instructions from Eliot could be characterized as the vainglorious
scribblings of an ambitious young man. Or as E.M. Forster declares, “Mr. Eliot does
not write for the lazy, stupid or gross.”
93
His tone, which remains essentially
consistent throughout his lifetime, is oppressive.
94
And perhaps this is what so many
have objected to in Eliot: Grandiloquent, absolute, and fatal, Eliot never falters. He
never considers the possibility that he might be wrong—at least in the writings of his
youth. And it has been pointed out that what is so magisterially pronounced is really
nothing more than a series of rather random claims: Referring to Eliot’s assertion
that “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man

92
Ibid, 70

93
Forster, E.M. Abinger Harvest. London: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1936.

94
One could certainly argue that the later Eliot became more self-deprecating and thus, easier to take.
57
who suffers and the mind which creates,” F.R. Leavis writes, “This, plausible or
discussible as it might for a moment seem, is a wholly arbitrary dictum, any
appearance to the contrary being a matter of the complexity, the ambiguities, and the
specious and tendentious inconsequence, of the total context.”
95
Other scholars have
asserted that what it was about The Sacred Wood that made Eliot’s reputation was
not any original thought he had about poetry; rather, it was his revision of the
English literary canon, and the ways in which he read and quoted from the
Metaphysical poets. Whatever one thinks of The Sacred Wood, there is no dispute
that Eliot’s reputation was in large part built upon it: It is no accident that the title of
his first collection of essays refers to the ritual described in the Golden Bough in
which a young priest must kill off the older one in order to become the new guardian
of the sacred wood of Dordona. Eliot was a lover of ritual, and his feeling for
literature was sacerdotal. He held poetry to be sacred, and he wanted to be the arbiter
of all that he held sacred.
The first of Eliot’s notions that must be examined is the idea of the
impersonal poet. Of all of his precepts, this perhaps held the most weight and was the
most influential; it gave rise to the New Criticism. Found, of course in his essay
“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot expounds upon the necessity for a poet
to have what he terms the “historical sense.”
96
He enlarges upon this idea: It
involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence;
the historical sense compels a man to write not with merely his own

95
Leavis, F.R. English Literature in Our Time and University. London: Chatto and Windus, 1969, 70.

96
SP, 38.
58
generation in his bones but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of
Europe…has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.
97

Eliot expects us, as Pound did, to read everything, to want to read everything. But
what is not important is the mere pedantry of having read everything worth reading;
what is important is the “continual surrender of [the poet] as he is at the moment to
something which is more valuable. The progress of the artist is a continual self-
sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”
98
This, then, is the chief thrust of the
essay. How effective is this as an expression of the nature of the imagination?
Randall Jarrell’s remarks about Eliot serve one very well here:
Won’t the future say to us in helpless astonishment: ‘But did you actually
believe that all those things about objective correlatives, classicism, the
tradition actually applied to his poetry? Surely you must have seen that he
was one of the most subjective and daemonic poets who ever lived, the
victim and helpless beneficiary of his own inexorable compulsions,
obsessions? From a psychoanalytical point of view he was far and away the
most interesting poet of your century…
99

And in fact, Eliot’s own comment at the end of the essay seems to put the lie to
much of what he has to say: “But, of course, it is only those who have personality
and emotions know what it means to want to escape from those things.” I have
always felt that this tossed-off remark, this aside to the audience gives the lie to the
whole essay; to escape from one’s personality is not to eliminate it or extinguish it.
Rather, an escape from personality is a further withdrawal into the poetry, which—
although this is going to sound a bit tautological—is ultimately, a further withdrawal

97
SP, 38.

98
SP, 40.

99
Jarrell, Randall. Fifty Years of American Poetry. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1963, 201.
59
into one’s personality. If not from one’s personality, then where do poems come
from? “The something which is more valuable” is unbearably vague; there is no
“something.” There is only the poet, and the material at the poet’s command: what
he or she has read, experienced, thought and felt.
In fact, I do not discount the notion of the impersonal—not because I agree
with Eliot that one seeks to turn away from one’s personality in the act of writing,
but because he is clearly echoing Keats, with whom I do unreservedly agree. Keats
had already put forth a theory of the impersonality of the poet, and he did it with
much less fuss and bother than did Eliot. “I mean Negative Capability,” writes
Keats, “that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts,
without any irritable reaching after fact or reason…”
100
He is speaking of something
that seems to me more in line with the Lorcan duende—Keats’ explanation might
even be construed as something closer to automatic writing, where the poet is so
purely filled with inspiration that he or she simply fills the page, without any
hesitancy as to the why or what of the poem. Eliot’s concept of the impersonal poet
has less to do the purity of inspiration than it has to do with a kind of brutal, clinical
separation of self from art; in order to write poems, one must sever one’s creative
mind from one’s emotions, in order to examine them coldly, clinically. Eliot’s
impersonal theory of emotion does not mean that there should be a lack of emotion
in poetry—as so many of the New Critics wrongly understood it to mean—he means,
rather, that the writing of poetry requires a necessary distance from one’s emotions.

100
Letters of John Keats, 43.
60
The poet must be able to take out his feelings, much like one would take out old
clothes from one’s closet, dust them off and examine them critically. In this manner,
the feelings must become like objects, so that the poet can write about them with
clarity. And one should not ignore what Eliot regards as the material of poetry: the
passions.
But more helpful still, I think are Eliot’s remarks in the same essay about the
way in which the esemplastic functions in the mind of the poet. Says Eliot: “The
poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings,
phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a
new compound are present together.”
101
Here is seems clear that Eliot is echoing
Coleridge’s secondary imagination. This, as I discussed above, bears remarkable
resemblance to the secondary imagination, particularly in its use of the terms
:particles” and “compound.” In this postulation, the mind of the poet acts as a kind of
holding facility, in which various items sit, like actors waiting in the wings for their
cue, until the poet’s mind is enlivened and able to string these various items together.
I would like to call attention to the use of the words receptacle, particles, compound.
Both STC and Eliot employ extremely technical diction to explain how the
imagination functions. Does this arise out of a desire to cement the ineffable firmly
in the world of provable, empirical thought? Earlier, Eliot makes an analogy between
the poet’s mind and the shred of platinum:

101
SP, 41.
61
The analogy was that of the new catalyst. When the two gases previously
mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form
sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present;
nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the
platinum itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and
unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or
exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more
perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who
suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest
and transmute the passions which are its material.
102

It goes without saying that while one can assert that the poet’s mind acts as a
catalyst like a shred of platinum, such a thing can never be proven. Leavis has a good
deal to say about this analogy, asserting that there are aspects that “Eliot does
nothing at all to explain” and that “yawning gaps” exist in the logic of his “theory or
diagram.”
103
However, I choose to differ, as I feel that the notions of digestion and
transmutation are descriptive of the poetic process, in that they depict the ways in
which poets compact and metamorphose objects and images in the creation of
poetry; moreover, they are the most Coleridgean aspects of Eliot’s theory of the
creative process, and in my opinion, by far the most useful. They most adequately
explain the manner in which poetry functions, that is, via metamorphosis. What is a
metaphor, if it is not the transmutation of one thing into another? When we say,
“John is a pig,” we are literally transmuting John into a pig.
104
While we know that
we do not actually mean that John has become a animal that lives in a sty and likes to

102
Ibid.

103
English Literature, 180.

104
See Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson for discussion of the literality of
metaphor.
62
roll in mud, and we know that a metaphor does not have the transforming power of a
magic spell, wherein a witch turns the prince into a frog, it does have the power of
change through comparison. For that one instant, John is imagined as a pig, and
thereby understood to be like a pig. For that instant, if only in the mind, John is
magically transformed into a pig.
Eliot’s second important contribution to the realm of literary criticism is the
notion of the objective correlative, contained in his essay on Hamlet. This famous
essay, which reveals a great deal more about Eliot than it does about the Prince of
Denmark, contains a reference to Coleridge in the first paragraph: “Coleridge, who
made of Hamlet a Coleridge…”
105
(In fact, Coleridge was not very far wrong in
seeing a similarity to himself in a melancholy, highly verbal, narcissistic man who is
unable to make a decision.) The notion of the objective correlative occurs three-
quarters of the way through the essay, when Eliot explains that,
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 situation, 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.
106

Eliot then goes on to illustrate this idea with the example of Lady Macbeth’s state of
mind being communicated “by a skillful accumulation of imagined sensory
impressions.” Eliot finds the character of Hamlet to be a failure because his emotion
is “in excess of the facts as they appear.” As many other scholars have pointed out, it

105
Sacred Wood, 95.

106
SW, 100.
63
is amusing to consider that Eliot considers Hamlet’s distress over his father’s murder
and his mother’s marriage to his uncle to be an overreaction. But we shall not linger
on the accuracy of Eliot’s consideration of Hamlet (it is enough to say, I think, that it
is mostly inaccurate and was probably intended to shock), as we will consider the
nature of the objective correlative. Like the idea of transmutation, what we have
again here is a way of talking about metaphor. The poet searches for a mode of
illustrating his or her emotions; he or she finds something physical, something
concrete in the world to express what is not concrete. What Eliot is talking about
here is in fact the most basic of all instructions meted out in creative writing classes,
that is to say Show, don’t tell. The reason that Lady Macbeth’s nervous disorder is
so apparent to the reader is because Shakespeare has externalized her fear and
anxiety through physical symptoms—sleepwalking, wringing her hands, muttering
insensibly. However, I think that the objective correlative is much less helpful as a
description of the function of the imagination than of describing what poems do once
they have been finished. I do not think that Eliot is suggesting that poets consciously
seek out external objects to which to chain their feelings; rather, I think he is saying
that when they do so, they are successfully expressing emotion.
The final notion that I will discuss is the most important to my project, as it is
most pertinent to the idea of “felt thought.” I refer, of course, to the idea of
“dissociation of sensibility.” The phrase first occurs in his review of a book about the
Metaphysical poets in 1921, later titled “The Metaphysical Poets: “In the seventeenth
century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered…”
64
Eliot goes on to explain that poets such as Donne were able to “feel their thoughts as
immediately as the colour of a rose.”
107
It is not only the synaesthesia that makes
this statement difficult to reconcile—one does not feel an odor—it is also the
presumption, on Eliot’s part, that this dissociation has, in fact, occurred. Other
aspects of the essay are easily enough comprehended: He rejects Gray for crudity of
emotion, and that he rejects Dryden for an over-emphasis on the ratiocinative. (The
terms of qualification are Eliot’s.) But when he asserts that, “A thought for Donne
was an experience: it modified his sensibility,” one feels that one has wandered
through the looking glass. Or rather, one may feel somewhat insulted: Why can’t my
thoughts modify my sensibility? What was so special about Donne? What is still
further unhelpful is Eliot’s rather bullheaded omission of explanation as to why this
dissociation set in; he simply asserts that it did, going on to explain that “this
dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the two most powerful poets of the
century, Milton and Dryden.
108
Milton, of course, stands in for the feeling poets;
Dryden, for the thinking poets. Or, to use employ Eliot’s terms: Dryden was a master
of wit; Milton a master of sensation. What is frustrating about this formulation is not
only that it seems so wrong-headed, but also that it is so simplistic; it seems patently
absurd to argue that Milton did not think while writing Paradise Lost, or that Dryden
had no feelings when he was writing Absalom and Achitophel. Or furthermore, that

107
SW, 64.

108
Ibid.
65
neither Milton nor Dryden experienced some combination of thought and feeling
while writing their important works.
What then are we to do with this complicated idea? Leavis explained the
dissociation by a marked lack of “arresting concreteness,” a consequence provoked
by a lack of “sensuous effects and …specific varieties of energy.”
109
Again, we feel
we are in vague and hazy terrain, as though we were walking through meadows of
clouds. The terms in use are so abstract as to be virtually without meaning. The
Indian critic Rajnath, who has written an extremely lucid, if obscure, book, titled T.S.
Eliot’s Theory of Poetry, points out that nearly all critics who have written about
dissociation of sensibility agree that “the theory rests upon ‘sensuous apprehension
of thought.’”
110
This is a very valuable distinction, for if we base our understanding
of dissociation of sensibility merely on the notion of feeling as emotion, we limit our
range of meaning for the phrase. But if we allow the phrase to mean both emotion
and sensory feeling, then the entire notion of dissociation of sensibility perhaps
begins to make more sense, if you will pardon the pun. In fact, Rajnath goes on to
explain that if we are to understand “unified sensibility,” we must accept that Eliot
uses it to refer to three separate states: emotion, feeling, and thought.
111
He goes on
to further explain that the word feeling is used by Eliot to mean both human

109
Leavis, F.R. English Literature in Our Time and the University. London: Chatto and Windus,
1969.

110
Rajnath, T.S. Eliot’s Theory of Poetry. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1980,
116.

111
Ibid, 124.
66
sentiment and the effect produced by a poetic image. Finally, there is the distinction
between feeling and thought: “The poet who ‘thinks,’ writes Eliot, “is merely the
poet who can express the emotional equivalent of thought.”
112
After discussion of
various critics regarding the validity of dissociation of sensibility (Cleanth Brooks
asserted that what is characteristic of metaphysical poetry is characteristic of “all
poetry, poetry being essentially one.”), Rajnath points out that more examples of
unified sensibility can be located in Eliot’s poems than in those of the Metaphysicals:
“But the unified sensibility may exist without metaphysical thought in the strict
sense, or for that matter, without feeling as poetic imagery. When the play of
intellect combines with feeling as emotion, we get such unified sensibility which
occurs more frequently in Eliot than in Donne.”
113
Even Eliot himself admitted for
the possibility that poets other than Donne, et alia, achieved associated sensibility. In
his essay, “Imperfect Critics,” Eliot actually admits that poets other than the
metaphysicals experienced sensuous thought: “There is a trace of it…in Keats, and,
derived from a different source, in Rossetti.”
114

Eliot’s loyalty to the notion of dissociation of sensibility can be explained, I
think, in part by his fierce longing for a imagined, lost, utopian time. He must have
believed that the England prior to the Civil War was a wonderful place—a better
one, certainly than the chaos of post-WWI London. Indeed, Leavis tells us, “No one,

112
SW, 72.

113
Rajnath, 131.

114
SP, 125.
67
I suppose will dispute that the 17th century witnessed an immense, comprehensive
and momentous change in ethos, in civilization, in the English language.”
115
(One
feels grateful, if only for Leavis’ sake, that he is not here to witness such immense,
comprehensive and momentous changes as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.) We
must not forget Eliot’s self-conscious assertion that he was “a classicist in literature,
a Royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion.”
116
Furthermore, I would
argue that Eliot’s nostalgia for a time when thoughts were feelings represents another
way in which he resembles Coleridge—both men were desperate for a mode of
thinking in which the subject and the object were merged. Coleridge was motivated
by loneliness; perhaps Eliot’s motivations were not so different. Not unlike
Coleridge, the details of Eliot’s personal life do seem relevant to an understanding of
both his poetry and his criticism. Brought up in a staid upper middle-class home in
St. Louis (his grandfather founded Washington University), he was the youngest
child of seven. His mother wrote poetry and biographies. He was educated in New
England, spending his college years at Harvard, and the claustrophobic nature of
post-Victorian Boston is evident in such poems as “Portrait of a Lady.” Eliot was
shy, diffident with girls, (in a letter written to Conrad Aiken when Eliot was 26, he
complained of still being a virgin) interested in philosophy and Eastern mysticism.
His social awkwardness continued through much of his life; Virginia Woolf noted in
her journals his rigidity and inability to converse. His first marriage to Vivien Haigh-

115
Leavis, F.R. The Seventeenth Century Background. London: Chatto and Windus, 1967, p. 294.

116
UOP, 59.
68
Wood has been much examined; to understate the situation mightily, it was not an
auspicious match, and Eliot was spectacularly unhappy during his marriage. Thus,
we might speculate that while Eliot suffered as much from loneliness as did
Coleridge; however, while Coleridge drove people away, Eliot never let them draw
near in the first place. Or as Forster puts it, “Mr. Eliot does not want us in. He feels
we shall increase the barrenness.”
117

If Coleridge struggled mightily with indolence, laudanum, and an over-
affection for metaphysics, Eliot’s principal demon was himself—his despair.
Although I remarked above that Eliot was extraordinarily unhappy during his
marriage, it should not be inferred that Vivien was the sole cause of his
unhappiness
118
; Eliot’s melancholy and clearly preceded his marriage. It is a
defining factor of his poetic persona. “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” is, of
course, a dramatic monologue, but I do not think I am stretching the bounds of
speculation to propose that it echoes Eliot’s emotional state. Prufrock is lonely,
unable to communicate with women, unnaturally stiff and mannered, and morbid. He
has heard the mermaids sing, “each to each,” but he does not think they will sing to
him. With his waistcoat tightly buttoned, his hair pomaded close to his skull, I think
we can fairly say that the young Tom Eliot, while brilliant, was a bulging
portmanteau of repressions and neuroses.

117
Forster, 36.

118
However, it is of interest that Eliot remarked that his marriage to Vivien “brought the state of mind
out of which came The Waste Land.”
69
Part Two: Explaining Light to a Blind Man

Like Coleridge, Eliot was steeped in the weighty articulations of philosophy.
Unlike Coleridge, however, who wrote his greatest poetry first and then transferred
the larger part of his energies to philosophy, Eliot began his adulthood intending a
career in philosophy. At Harvard, he studied under Santayana and Josiah Royce; he
also took a course in Eastern thought, even learning Sanskrit to study the religious
texts. Ultimately, it was the philosophy of British idealism that held his interest. In
1911, he began a dissertation on F.H. Bradley at Harvard; a note in The Waste Land
refers us to Bradley:
My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts and
feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle
closed on the outside; and with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque
to the others which surround it…In brief, regarded as an existence which
appears in a soul, the whole world is peculiar and private to that soul.
119

This note is made in reference to the lines at the end of the poem, “I have heard the
key / Turn once in the door and once only / We think of the key, each in his
prison.”
120121
The connection these lines bear to some of the fundamental themes of
the poem are obvious: Each of us is alienated, imprisoned in the barren cells of our
own minds. One of the criticisms of Bradley’s philosophy is that it seems to suggest
that the natural state of the human mind is a solipsistic one, although most scholars

119
Notes to The Waste Land, note 412.

120
TWL, 412-413.

121
Raine, 74.
70
have disagreed with this.
122
Craig Raine writes, “Bradley did not believe that
individuals were trapped in their own private worlds, martyrs to inescapable
solipsism.” Furthermore, it has been pointed out that Eliot misunderstands the
fundamental concepts of Bradley’s philosophy; he wrongly believes Bradley to be
speaking of a kind of terminal egotism, where we are unable to see or understand
past the limits of our interior selves.
To begin a discussion of Bradley, an important distinction to acknowledge is
that for Bradley the term feeling meant “the means of expressing that undivided
reality which consciousness divides into particular elements.”
123
Moreover, as
Bradley scholar Jane Mallinson explains, “in Bradley’s immediate experience, the
subject and object are one.”
124
. (The term “immediate experience” is called an
“unreal abstraction” by Mallinson.) Eliot’s doctoral thesis on Bradley is titled
Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley. To say that it is not
an easy read is an understatement; one critic calls it a “tormented book.”
125
Much of
it is difficult to follow; scholar Richard Wollheim has declared that “criticism that
sets out to understand Eliot’s achievement as a poet and as a critic by reference to it

122
See Richard Wollheim’s extremely cogent book on Bradley for further discussion of this.
Wollheim, Richard. F.H. Bradley. New York: Oenquin Books, 1969.

123
Mallinson, Jane. T.S. Eliot’s Interpretation of F.H. Bradley. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 2002, 8.

124
Mallinson, 10.

125
Jain, Manju. TS Eliot and American Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

71
is likely, very soon, to be brought up short.”
126
Eliot himself, in an edition of his
thesis published many years later, declared that he could not comprehend what he
had written: “Forty-six years after my academic philosophizing came to an end, I
find myself unable to think in the terminology of this essay. Indeed, I do not pretend
to understand it.”
127
However, I think that for an understanding of the origin of
Eliot’s poetic and critical ideas, it is necessary to examine this early document, even
if we find it difficult or obscure. Our early educations shape us, even if we later find
ourselves in opposition to our younger selves. Furthermore, I would argue that
assertions made in Eliot’s thesis are concretely related to his criticism, and in fact
negate some of the foundational tenets of his literary theory.
F.H. Bradley is a misty figure in the history of philosophy; his ideas have not
stayed with us. Scholar W. J. Mander remarks:
His way of tackling questions seems quite alien to anything we usually
encounter, his concepts obscure, and his jargon out of date; while his subject
matter, metaphysics, even if it is no longer something to dismiss out of court,
is a subject that, to this day, we rarely encounter undertaken in such a bold
and speculative fashion.
128

Thus, if the foregoing seems abstruse, that’s because it is. For example, one of his
key ideas was that of the “finite centre,” which might be, for example, a “painting,
the viewer, and all the other elements of the situation” according to scholar Jewel

126
Wollheim, 110.

127
Knowledge and Experience in Philosophy of F.H. Bradley, 10.

128
Mander, W. J. Perspectives on the Logic and Metaphysics of F.H. Bradley. Oxford: Thoemmes
Continuum, 1996, 1.
72
Spears Brooker; in other words, it is the intersection of being, feeling, and thought.
129

Still, more important was his notion of the Absolute, which was a combination the
idealistic notion that reality consists only of idea or experience along with substance
monism, “the claim that reality is one.”
130
In other words, the Absolute was an
ungraspable realm of sentient experience, “a pre-conceptual state in which there are
differences but no separations.”
131

Needless to say, Bradley is anachronistic—or at least, he appears to be so to
contemporary readers. But what is important about Eliot’s connection to Bradley lies
in Bradley’s ideas about the subjective and objective, or put it in more Bradeleyan
terms, the difference between the One and the Many. Bradley felt that “the identity
of content of a thing slides beyond” the limits its existence; he believed that we must
acknowledge that the content spreads out indefinitely and is continuous with the
content of any other existence. “The logical outcome here is monism, the belief that
reality is a unity, and not plural as the empiricists held.”
132
One scholar explains,
“Hence for Bradley, reality is broader than the basic categories of bourgeois thought,
subject and object, would allow. Subject and object are an interpretation of
experience by thought, but thought itself is a part of a broader experience.
133
” Thus,

129
Jewel Spears Brooker qtd. in Mallinson, 12.

130
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bradley/

131
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bradley/#Met

132
Habib, Rafey. The Early T.S. Eliot and Western Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999, 130.

133
Ibid, 131.
73
in the largest sense subject and object are united, in that they are part of a larger
whole that encompasses them. We are all part of a greater experience that
encompasses us, uniting subject and object, thought and feeling, individual and
populace. However, as I have already explained, what lies even beyond this larger
whole is the Absolute, which Jain asserts “represented the void of which Eliot was
terrified.”
134
He goes on to write, “It is worth stressing this point in view of the fact
that Bradley’s Absolute has so often been represented as the objective of Eliot’s
spiritual search.”
135
This is why the Absolute would be so terrifying to Eliot; he
could not countenance the idea of an experience that was not processed by the
mental faculties. Jain emphasizes the horror of unmediated life for Eliot: the
Absolute, or immediate experience could occur only “at either the beginning or end
of our journey,” and “is annihilation and utter night.”
136
This is explained by the
assertion that Eliot could not tolerate a world without differentiation.
137

However, he did long for a world of unity, particularly a unity with the divine
maker. Jain points out that Eliot believed the final canto of the Paradiso to be the
zenith of Western literature, but, significantly, while there union is achieved between
the three aspects of the trinity, the three are still differentiated. This is a valuable
point to bear in mind when we go on to examine The Waste Land, as I am prepared

134
Jain, 207.

135
Jain, 208.

136
KE, 31.

137
Jain, 221.
74
to argue that it too is an exercise of unity within differentiation, or to put it more
simply, differentiated unity.
Before we depart from Bradley and Eliot, it is key to consider Eliot’s
discussions of the Bradleyan views on feeling. “In feeling,” Eliot writes, “the subject
and object are one. The object becomes an object by its felt continuity with other
feelings which fall outside of the finite centre, and the subject becomes a subject by
its felt continuity with a core of feeling which is not related to the object.”
138
This is
very important for the larger consideration of the idea of dissociation of sensibility,
which, as we know, argues for an absolute division between thought and feeling.
Eliot goes on: “But the point at which a line may be drawn is always a question for
partial and practical interests to decide. Everything from one point of view, is
subjective, and everything, from another point of view, is objective.”
139
In this, he is
departing from Bradley; for Bradley there are no such divisions. All subjects and
objects are One.
But real revelations due occur in the following pages: Eliot begins to talk
about the nature of feeling, and here we see how he will later contradict himself. “To
say that one part of the mind suffers and another part reflects upon the suffering is
perhaps to talk in fictions.”
140
As we know, he says precisely the opposite in
“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” when he asserts that the more perfect poet will

138
Ibid, 32.

139
Ibid, 22.

140
Ibid, 23.
75
turn away from his feelings; but the next sentence is even more elucidating: “But we
know that those highly organized beings who are able to objectify their passions, and
as passive spectators to contemplate their joys and torments, are also those who
suffer and enjoy the most keenly.”
141
This reminds us of his remark about it being
those who have a personality being those who most want to turn away from it; I
hardly think it a leap of assumption to assert that Eliot was among those who
suffered and enjoyed most keenly… “And most of us,” he goes on to say,
are able to give a name to some of our feelings, to recognize in a vague way
love and hate, envy and admiration, when they arise in our own minds. This
naming of feelings, while it may give a very imperfect clue to their nature, is
nevertheless of the greatest importance. It is obvious that we can no more
explain a passion to person who has never experienced it that we can explain
light to the blind. But it should be obvious also that we can explain the
passion equally well: it is no more ‘subjective,’ because some persons have
never experienced it, than light is subjective because the blind cannot see.
142

I should like to comment, first, on the nature of the prose—already, even at this
stage, Eliot’s confident, eloquent style was manifest. The metaphor of explaining
light to the blind is a lovely one, perfectly suited to his argument. Furthermore, what
is clear here is the ground that is being laid for his later argument about felt thought;
however, here he is arguing that we can think our thoughts, or at the very least think
about our thoughts. We can name them. It is hard to know what the change was that
occurred between the writing of his doctoral thesis and the writing of the Sacred
Wood; one can merely speculate upon the nature of those emotions that were felt

141
Ibid, 23.

142
Ibid, 23.
76
most keenly and may have given rise to the desire to turn away from them. A few
pages later, he writes:
The error, then, would consist in any sharp division between enjoyment and
contemplation, either in general or at any particular moment, or in treating
the distinction of feeling and object as a possible scientific distinction.
Science may make the distinction between feeling of object and object of
feeling, but it cannot make a distinction between feeling and object as
such.
143

Even more clearly, in another section where he is negating Bradley’s assertion that
there is a distinction between thought and feeling he writes:
When we turn to inspect a lower stage of mind, child or animal, or our own
when it is least active, we do not find one or another of these elements into
which we analyze the developed consciousness, but we find them all at a
lower stage. We do not find feeling without thought, or presentation
without reflection: we find both feeling and thought, presentation,
redintegration and abstraction, all at a lower stage. And if this is the case,
such study of primitive consciousness seems futile; for we find in our own
knowing exactly the same constituents, in a clearer and more apprehensible
form.
144

I think there can be no question that this is directly opposed to the idea of
dissociation of sensibility; here, Eliot is clearly arguing that there is absolutely no
distinction between thought and feeling. I want to point to this in particular because
I will argue in the next section of this chapter that what Eliot’s greatest work, The
Waste Land, represents is a supreme example of associated sensibility. I recognize
that at first glance this statement runs counter to everything we think about that
poem; it is a poem about disjunction, dislocation, polyvocality—in a word,
dissociation. It seems absolutely bloody-minded to call the poem associative. But I

143
Ibid, 25.

144
Ibid, 17.
77
am not calling the poem, as such, associative—although I think a case can be made
for that as well.
145
For example, C.K. Stead argues that the poem is “fragmentary in
form yet also complete and self-sufficient, it was essentially a musical structure,
playing upon certain themes and motifs taken, many of them, from a context of
ideas.”
146
But I think that trying to prove whether or not there is unity to be found in
The Waste Land is like flogging a dead horse; as soon as the poem was printed,
critics were already arguing about that issue. Here, the pertinent issue is that The
Waste Land is an excellent example of felt thought, and if we are looking for ways to
explain the nature of the imagination, to look both at the poem itself and at the
circumstances surrounding its production, we may find much better insight into the
nature of the imagination than anything Eliot articulates in the Sacred Wood.

Part Three: Aboulie and Derangement

In his book on Eliot, the British poet Craig Raine wryly remarks, “One
should never underestimate actual experience in the making of poetry.”
147
The

145
Cleanth Brooks offers this explanation for the methodology of assemblage of TWL: “The basic
method used in The Waste Land may be described as the application of the principle of complexity.
The poet works in terms of surface parallelisms which in reality make ironical contrasts, and in terms
of surface contrasts which in reality constitute parallelisms. The two aspects taken together give the
effect of chaotic experience ordered into a new whole, though the realistic surface of experience is
faithfully retained. The complexity of the experience is not violated by the apparent forcing upon it of
a predetermined scheme.” from Modern Poetry and The Tradition. University of North Carolina
Press, 1939.

146
Stead, C.K. The New Poetic: from Yeats to Eliot. London: Athlone Press, 1998, 207.

147
Raine, Craig, T.S. Eliot. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, p83.
78
Waste Land was written after a particularly difficult period in Eliot’s life; Vivien had
been very ill, and her medical costs were draining the family finances. Eliot’s nerves
began to falter under the combined strain of financial, emotional and scholarly
demands; in addition to teaching in a secondary school, he was also writing a great
deal of criticism. He then began work at Lloyds Bank, where he was to continue
working for some time; he also investigated military service, but was turned down.
Concurrently, he was in negotiations with Knopf regarding the publication of his first
book of poems; all of these factors were very stressful to the young Eliot, who, as I
have earlier remarked, was very nearly a defining figure of neurasthenia. On
November 5, 1919, in a letter to John Quinn, he made the first mention of the writing
of The Waste Land. Continuing with his work at the bank, he also completed The
Sacred Wood, which was published in 1921. By the later part of that year, Eliot’s
health was very poor. After seeing a specialist, he went to the seaside town of
Margate for three months, where he composed the beginning sections of TWL. On
November 18, he headed to Switzerland, to consult “a specialist in psychological
troubles,” Dr. Roger Vittoz. It was there that he wrote the major part of the poem,
under the care of Buddhism-inclined Vittoz, who, according to a letter Eliot wrote to
his brother, had encouraged Eliot to “to use all [his] energy without waste, to be calm
when there is nothing to be gained by worry, and to concentrate without effort.”
Furthermore, he had written to Richard Aldington that he was satisfied that he was
79
not suffering from a disorder of the nerves, but from “aboulie and emotional
derangement which [have] been a lifelong affliction.”
148

The experiences to which he referred in the letter to his brother were the
nervous extremity and subsequent breakdown that led to the writing of The Waste
Land. It is an indisputably important fact that Eliot wrote his great long poem out of
serious mental disorder; for him, it was as close as he could come to Rimbaud’s
derangement des senses. It seems critical to consider the circumstances of the
composition of the poem with regard to Eliot’s stated theory of the imagination: the
absolute impersonality of the poet. Did Eliot’s mental state allow him to act as the
kind of impersonal receptacle that he describes in “Tradition and the Individual
Talent”? Or did his nervous collapse allow for the freeing of his creative energies,
creative impulses that had been previously stoppered by an overactive and repressive
critical faculty? These are, of course, questions which can never be answered, or
rather, be answered only speculatively. It is my principle view that it was emotional
turmoil that allowed him to write the poem. This is the Romantic view; this is the
poet we are familiar with from the last lines of Kubla Khan. As much as Coleridge
was fired by an opium haze, Eliot’s period of near-insanity acted as the honey-dew
and paradisal milk of the poet in the optimal state of creative production. Yet we can
even find support in contemporary theory for this sort of speculation: Rei Terada, in
her book Feeling in Theory, explains that “emotion arises because of a lack of fit

148
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the
Annotations of Ezra Pound. Valerie Eliot, Ed. New York: Harvest Book, 1971, xv.
80
between mind and world and between the mind and itself.”
149
This is an excellent
description of the way that the speaker feels in The Waste Land; the emotions of
despair, loss, hopelessness are due to his feeling of being out of sync with the rest of
the world.
It is of still further interest that Eliot, in later years, tended to reject criticism
that portrayed TWL as the representative poem of a generation. I.A. Richards and
F.R. Leavis, in particular, trumpeted the poem as the demonstration of the Modernist
soul, blasted by war, deprived of religious reassurances, and mentally adrift in an
existential chaos of alienation—a waste land, in other words. But Eliot rigorously
refused to accept such a garland of honor, declaring the poem to have been “the
relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of
rhythmical grumbling.”
150
I do not take this particularly seriously—while the older
man may have grimaced at the arrogance of his younger self, the man who wrote The
Sacred Wood would not have faltered at the idea of speaking for his entire
generation. And it is difficult to argue that he did not; The Waste Land, in polyphonic
expression, did give voice to the urban despair and spiritual anomie of everyone
from lower-class women in pubs to the high-strung paranoia of the drawing room.
Finally, Eliot tells us in his notes that the poem is meant to be seen as an organic
whole through the eyes of Tiresias, who can see a panorama of time, from the

149
Terada, Rei. Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject.” Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001, 21.

150
Gordon, Lyndall. T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1999, 672.
81
suffering of the ancient past (Philomel) to the awful decay of the present, and the
sterile future that lies ahead.
But what does The Waste Land itself tell us, really, about Eliot’s practice of
the imagination? It is not enough to consider the manner of its composition; can we
look to the actual poem to find an expression of Eliot’s theory of creativity? One
obvious problem with this task are the heteroglossic origins of TWL. Eliot’s original
version of the poem was heavily shaped by Pound’s editing; Eliot was later to refer
to Pound as il miglior fabbro, the better craftsman. The Waste Land does bear a great
deal more resemblance to the Cantos than to Eliot’s early poetry, which could
sometimes strays too far into the stiffened, arch realms of the Victorian gewgaw
cabinet. Pound removed, for instance, the “Fresca” section from the early draft of
WL. “The white-armed Fresca blinks, and yawns, and gapes / Aroused from dreams
of love and pleasant rapes…”
151
In all cases, Pound pressed the poem more toward
the “real” and away from the “artificial.” (his terms.) The combined method of
craftsmanship does complicate the poem’s status as an artifact of the imagination. It
is not possible, obviously, to regard it as the pure product of Eliot’s imagination. But
even if we accept that both Pound and Vivien Eliot had a hand in the drafting and
revising of the poem, I think we can still look to it as an exemplar of the Modernist
consciousness at work, more specifically as an examplar of the Modernist
imagination. More than that, given that while Pound edited the poem, he did not
write the poem.

151
TWL, 3-4
82
But can we look to Eliot’s greatest poem as a kind of ars poetica? If we find
his critical explanations about the origins of art to be insufficient, can his art itself
stand in as such? It seems, at first, extremely contradictory to search The Waste Land
for evidence about creativity; the poem is about nothing if not about infertility, loss,
desolation. “It is a poem of horror,” writes Forster.
152
It is not a creative landscape; it
offers a world that is utterly dirempt of creative, reproductive energy. That is a point
with which one can hardly argue: “And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no
relief, / And the dry stone no sound of water.”
153
Or “A rat crept softly through the
vegetation / Dragging its slimy belly on the bank / While I was fishing in the dull
canal.”
154
It is a mythic vision of sterility, referring to the ancient tale of the Fisher
King, the king rendered impotent by a wound to the groin. The relationships in the
poem are brutal and hopeless; rape, abortion, rejection, disconnection—these are the
hallmarks of transactions between men and women in The Waste Land. However, I
do not think that because the poem is about a feeling of nothingness, that that means
it does not contain feelings. Again, I refer to Terada: “feeling nothing is feeling
nothing, a feeling like any other, not an anesthetic suppression.”
155

Actually, this is precisely my point: the poet is feeling his thoughts. The
poem represents a more perfect representation of Eliot’s utopian dream of felt

152
Forster, 42.

153
23-24.

154
186-188.

155
Terada, 80.
83
thought: in its attempt to represent a mental wasteland through image and sound, the
poem clearly exemplifies a conflation of thought with feeling. Eliot’s experience of
“derangement and aboulie” are being demonstrated here through both image and
idea. Or as the critic William Skaff, in his (largely turgid) book The Philosophy of
T.S. Eliot, points out that when “unfamiliar and startling combinations of objects and
feelings [are made] we have come to associate [them] with the content of the
unconscious.”
156
If we define the idea of the poem as the form—the erratic,
dislocated, chaotic form of the piece—and if we define image as emotion—then I
think we can see a clear connection between thought and feeling. What was Eliot
thinking at the time? He admitted to disordered thinking; he was under the care of a
“nerve man.” What was he feeling? Emptiness, hopelessness, despair, betrayal—one
can go on. It seems eminently clear to me that the thought of the poem—to represent
the waste land of both the poet’s internal life and of the external world of post-WWI
Europe—and the feeling of the poem—what is shown in the images of rats, dead
weeds, etc—are thoroughly unified. Eliot was feeling his thoughts.
Furthermore, one might consider Johnson’s remark about the Metaphysicals
(he was the first to term them so, according to Eliot): he asserted that in their poems
“the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.”
157
By this definition,
as the scholar Rajnath pointed out above, one can discern that metaphysical writing
is demonstrably present in The Waste Land. How else, but by violence, are the ideas

156
Skaff, William. The Philosophy of T.S. Eliot. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1086,
p. 162.

157
SP 60.
84
of the poem “yoked together”? And what are they if not heterogeneous? This, too,
matches Coleridge’s definition of the esemplastic, so that while the poem is a string
of disjunctive allusions and images, it is a string; it is the “new compound” about
which Coleridge writes. The poem is rife with examples of mixings and blendings:
the “strange synthetic perfumes” in “A Game of Chess,” the various cards of the
Tarot pack, the cheek-by-jowl placement of the low with the high, the million
different allusions knitted together in pastiche. I do not think that is an overstatement
to assert that The Waste Land is a veritable performance of the secondary
imagination. I have averred earlier that Coleridge’s description of the imagination is
unsatisfactory; his terms are vague, his explanations first spotty and then abandoned,
left by the side of the road like unwanted pets. But Eliot’s poem, I believe, does what
Coleridge was unable to do—it corporealizes the theory of the secondary
imagination. That is not to say that any instance of pastiche, any moment of
juxtaposition, would have sufficed to make visible Coleridge’s theory. No, it is the
extreme nature of Eliot’s poem, its very innovativeness, that enacts the process of the
secondary imagination.
The Waste Land enacts the idea of “extremes meet[ing],”; it does so in the
very first lines of the poem. “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the
dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.”
158

Perhaps these lines are remembered best for their quality of surprise—it is a stroke of
genius to refer to the month of April as cruel—but it is also worth noting that these

158
TWL, 1-4.
85
lines unify themes of death with themes of birth and reproduction. Lilacs emerge
from the dead land, “mixing / Memory with desire.” The first lines of the poem are a
clear enactment of the notion of the secondary imagination; they bring together
disparate, even opposing ideas—life and death—and reunite them in an arresting
image of spring flowers growing out of the winter soil. Many of the lines in the first
section of the poem end in the present participle, increasing the poem’s sense of
fluidity, creation, invention.
Of course, Eliot is not praising the advent of spring in these opening lines.
Instead, he is criticizing its cruelty; the sense we must take away is the idea that
spring mocks us with a false sense of new life. Winter, on the other hand, with its
cold intransigence, “kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful snow, feeding / A
little life with dried tubers.”
159
These lines assert that “a little life with dried tubers”
is the more realistic, more comforting one, than the loveliness represented by new
lilacs. The inversions that Eliot participates in here—winter as warmth and spring as
death—are fundamental to the overarching message of the poem of death in life.
While Eliot’s assertion in the footnotes to the poem that Tiresias is the “most
important personage” in the poem can be called somewhat ambiguous, if not
downright suspect, his emphasis on Tiresias’ hermaphroditic nature is important. I
think we can see Tiresias as another example of the kinds of fusion that are being
vaunted in the poem. Here, again, Eliot emphasizes the notion of unity:

159
Ibid., 5-7.
86
Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants melts into the Phoenician
Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples,
so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What
Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.
160

Well, what Tiresias sees is what we call, in the modern parlance, date rape. I would
argue that rape is not actually the substance of poem; rather, it is what Tiresias sees
that is the substance of the poem, or is at least the aspect most relevant for my
argument. Tiresias is an example of the fused self—the male and the female united in
one body, the Platonic ideal of love, as Diotima tells us in The Symposium. Tiresias,
in his status as all people, is a figure of ultimate fusion. He represents here not only
the fusion of the male and the female, but also the poem’s other aspects of
collocation as well: the ancient with the modern, death with life, sight with
blindness. While the blind seer of Thebes may be of only qualified use as a means of
understanding the poem in toto, as a symbol for the methodology of Eliot’s writing
process, he is unsurpassed. He embodies the notions of fusion, association, union,
and correlation that form the underlying structure of Eliot’s theory of the
imagination.
The final section of the poem occurred as a piece of automatic writing, at
least according to Eliot, written while he was in Switzerland, recovering from his
nervous breakdown. Both the conclusion of the poem and its highest point of
emotion, it was left virtually intact by Pound. If one examines the facsimile of the
original manuscript, it is possible to see that Pound has only circled a few words,

160
TWL, note 218.
87
leaving most of Eliot’s work alone. I would argue that it is the final section of TWL
that not only expresses the notion of the secondary imagination, but achieves
something even further—it is an example of what must be called “poetic thinking,”
or what critic Robert von Hallberg called in a recent article, “lyric thinking.” In his
essay, von Hallberg looks to find the trace of the ratiocinative in lyric; I differ in that
I am looking for a particularly keen entanglement of the faculties. It is easy enough
to say that poetry is not discursive, it is does “not invoke the structures of
explanatory prose syntax and with them the conventions of intellectual activity that
govern philosophy and science.”
161
That is obvious enough; we already know that
poetry is different from philosophy and science. But it is different not because it
lacks intellection, or because it does not grapple with the same complex ideas.
Rather, poetry demonstrates a unique mode of intellection, which explores the same
hefty subjects as philosophy, but in a non-discursive, non-linear fashion. Plotinus
described the ultimate act of the imagination as one in which one does not even feel
that one is thinking. The nexus of my argument about the nature of the imagination is
that it requires a kind of rational, sensible thought that goes on almost without the
awareness of the thinker. This, of course, is a radical departure from the idea of the
dissociation of sensibility. But as a poet myself, I feel compelled to make this
departure, and to make it rather decisively. I believe that poetic thought so
completely fuses the emotions and thoughts of the poet that the poet is not aware of
the connections and leaps that he or she is making, she simply makes them.

161
Von Hallberg, Robert. “Lyric Thinking.” Ploughshares. 34:5 (Spring 2004)
88
Eliot himself points to a similar mode of creation in the essay “The Use of
Poetry and the Use of Criticism”; he begins by acknowledging that there is “an
analogy between mystical experience and some of the ways poetry is written.”
162

Those who find the notion of the poet’s lack of control over his or her “felt thought”
may find Eliot’s phrase “some of the ways” to be revealing—to me, it is merely an
example of Eliot’s precision. (In other words, not all poetry is written in this manner;
we might think of Coleridge’s notion of Fancy.) He goes on to explain that “some
forms of ill-health, debility or anaemia may (if other circumstances are favourable)
produce an efflux of poetry in a way approaching the condition of automatic
writing.”
163
One might note the use of the word “efflux” here; “flux” was then in use
as a term for gastro-intestinal disorders—the poem thus issues from the poet in the
manner of uncontrollable bodily fluids. Eliot elaborates further:
[T]he material has obviously been incubating in the poet, and cannot be
suspected of being a present from a friendly or impertinent demon. What one
writes in this way may succeed in standing the examination of a more normal
state of mind; it gives me the impression, as I have just said, of having
undergone a long incubation, thought we do not know until the shell breaks
what kind of egg we have been sitting on. To me it seems that at these
moments, which are characterized by the sudden lifting of the burden of
anxiety and fear which presses on our daily life so steadily that we are
unaware of it, what happens in something negative: that is to say, not
‘inspiration’ as we commonly think of it, but the breaking down of strong
habitual barriers—which tend to re-form very quickly. Some obstruction is
momentarily whisked away. The accompanying feeling is less like what we
know as positive pleasure, than a sudden relief from an intolerable burden.
164

162
UOP, 89.

163
SP, 89

164
SP, 89.

89

Thus, “What the Thunder Said” represents most completely in Eliot’s work an
example of poetic thought. The crescendo of his oeuvre, it was written all as a piece,
without coaxing or crafting. While Eliot laid the groundwork for his masterpiece by
taking notes and preparing (and suffering through writer’s block and the misery of
his rotten marriage), he wrote his grand finale in a kind of convulsion of poetic
creation.
F. R. Leavis’ grand statement about the nature of The Waste Land further
illustrates this idea: “The unity the poem aims at is that of an inclusive
consciousness: the organization it achieves as a work of art is one that may, by
analogy be called musical. It exhibits no progression…the thunder brings no rain to
revive the Waste Land, and the poem ends where it began.”
165
Can we find traces of
this within the poem itself? “What the Thunder Said” does hang together more
cohesively than earlier sections; its images of dryness and decay are even more
consistent than in earlier sections of the poem. It contains a good deal of repetition,
which may account for its seeming coherence: “Here is no water but only rock”
166

and later, “And no rock / If there were rock / And also water.”
167
The images of
drought recur in a myriad of ways—“cracked earth,” “empty cisterns and exhausted
wells,” and limp leaves waiting for rain. It is curious that Eliot’s most sustained
moment of poetic activity should focus so closely on an exploration of dryness, but,

165
Leavis, F.R. English Literature. 103.

166
TWL, 331.

167
Ibid, 345-347.
90
of course, the dryness is not a metaphor for poetry. Rather, the dryness is meant to
further illustrate the themes of the rest of the poem: despair, sterility, apathy,
unfulfillment. It is a hellish vision of the world—bats that look like babies, torchlight
on sweaty faces, a decayed hole in the mountains. Everything in this section of the
poem points to the inescapable and overwhelming wrongness of the world, as though
hell had reappeared on earth itself. Everywhere there are terrible images of pain and
desolation: maternal lamentations, falling towers, a “dead mountain mouth of carious
teeth.”
168

And what is the consolation for this? There is briefly, a figure who may be
Jesus on the journey to Emmaus: “Who is the third who walks always beside you? /
When I count there are only you and I together / But when I look ahead up the white
road / There is always another walking beside you.”
169
Alternatively, this figure may
just as well be death. All in all, it seems, the best reading for the final section of the
poem is to understand it as the utterances of someone recently dead. “[U]nder seals
broken by the lean solicitor,” Eliot writes, and “Shall I at least set my lands in
order?”
170
The overwhelming message of “What the Thunder Said” seems to be that
death is the only possible result of the terrible condition of the world. As Grover
Smith writes, “The overwhelming implication of the final lines of The Waste Land,

168
Ibid, 339.

169
Ibid, 359-362.

170
Ibid, 408, 424.
91
in so far as they bear on the issue of salvation, is that none is to be had.”
171
But
Smith goes on to point out that the act of making a work of art is ultimately life-
affirming. It might somewhat tautological, but it is clear that while the content of the
poem itself is about a hellish life after death, or put an only slightly better spin on it,
a purgatorial life after death (“Poi s’accose nel foco che gli affina /Quando fiam ceu
chelidon”), the act of making the poem is affirmative. More than that, it represents
the apex of Eliot’s achievement. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,”
he writes, almost as if in looking back from beyond the grave. And, in fact, these
fragments have been shored against his ruins—when all else about Eliot has been
forgotten, the fragments of The Waste Land will be remembered.
172

171
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. London: George Allen, 1983.

172
TWL, 430.
92
Chapter Four: Hybrids of Thought and Feeling: Jorie Graham
It is difficult to know which poet to examine following explorations of Eliot
and Coleridge; it does not seem to be an overstatement to say that we have no
contemporaries who occupy even roughly the same galaxies. Randall Jarrell wrote
acute criticism in inimitable style, but he did not engage in the same sort of
philosophical investigations of the imagination. Other contemporary names which
spring to mind are similarly hamstrung—Rich’s criticism is more politically and
socially oriented than metaphysical; Brodsky, like Hass, Justice, and Hall, as well as
numerous other 20
th
and 21
st
-century poet-critics, tends to the more literal aspects of
craft. One could make an argument that the critical writings of the Language (or
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, as they put it) school do investigate the nature of the current
imagination. Without a doubt, the Language poets—particularly in the manner in
which they reinterpreted and reimagined the various inheritances of Stein, Williams,
and the Black Mountain School poets—represent the most dedicated effort at a new
poetry, much in the same mode that Pound, Hulme, H.D., et alia, set about remaking
it in the early part of the 20
th
century. The practitioners of this poetry do have a
critical position, somewhat shaped by the critical theory that emerged, chiefly from
France, in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Motivated by a desire to democratize poetry—freeing
poetry from the notion that it issues from a single, elite source, “the poet,”—writers
in the Language school write poems that avoid narrativity, linearity, and
connectivity, seeking a poetics of disjunction and surprise. In an interview with
93
Serbian poet Dubrava Djuric, Lyn Hejinian explained the influence of French
structuralism and post structuralism on her work:
My encounter with them freed me from sloppy (though rigidly held) models
current in interpretations of poetry in the U.S. What was generally considered
in the U.S. to be the “poetic” factor in poetry was embedded in self-
expressivity—in the replication of epiphanous moments in the which details
of the world matched or coincided with poet’s expectation or desire for
meaning. This view is still prevalent. The world is found to be meaningful,
but not for and to itself; it is meaningful because perceiving makes the poet
special; the poet plunders the world for its perceptual, spiritual treasure and
becomes worthy (and worth more) on that basis. I simply don’t have the kind
of self-regard that can espouse such an undertaking.
173

Instead, Hejinian goes on to explain, she is propelled by language, and the “turn to
language.” Thus, poetry is less a product of the individual experience of the poet
than of a kind of social exchange between people who understand words. “Anything
made of words,” explains Hejinian, “including a literary work—is socially
constructed and socially constructing. Aesthetic discovery is also social
discovery.”
174
The emphasis on community rather than on the self would seem to
negate an exploration of the imagination as such; furthermore, Language poetry is
much more interested in the medium itself (by which I mean, of course, words)
rather than the artist, the one who produces the words. In her book, Feeling in
Theory, Rei Terada further expands this notion; in her examination of the Cartesian
issue of mind/body (which she says poststructuralists see as “auditory hallucination
and oblique self-approach”), she avers that Derrida’s writings on Descartes

173
Hejinian, Language of Inquiry, 169-170.

174
Ibid, 170.
94
“emphasize a fundamental affinity between phenomenality and textuality.”
175
Again:
the written, and not the writer. Thus, while there is a large and expansive critical
apparatus that accompanies the genre we know as Language writing, and even post-
Language writing, it feels unhelpful to a survey of the notion of felt thought. Felt
thought necessarily implies the existence of an individual from whom the poem
issues; the notion of an associated sensibility is less reliant on the social contract
between readers and writers than it is on an assumption that there is a subject who is
experiencing thoughts and feelings.
Finally, and perhaps as a question of personal taste, I find the work produced
by the Language poets, and their inheritors, to be often lacking in feeling. I recognize
that this is a rather sweeping generalization, and it certainly does not apply to all
practitioners of the method (Rae Armantrout is an obvious exception, as is much of
Hejinian’s work). Consider the following from the poem “Test of Poetry” by Charles
Bernstein:
Does freight refer to cargo of lading carried
for pay by water, land or air? Or does it mean
payment for such transportation? Or a freight
train? When you say a commoded journey,
do you mean a comfortable journey or a good train
with well-equipped commodoties?

As is evident in this snippet, punning, syntactical experimentation, humor—play
with language, in other words—is considered to be much more important than any
expression of the emotional life of the poet. For my project, it is necessary to have as

175
Terada, 22.
95
a given that emotion is a strong aspect of the work examined; without it, one-half of
the construct known as felt thought falls away. Given all these factors, I have found
the poets of the Language school to be incompatible with my area of interest.
Discounting the Language poets, one is hard-pressed to find a poet who can
compete with Eliot or Coleridge in their attempts to explain the creative imagination;
furthermore, it is difficult to find a poet who has struggled to marry the philosophic
and the poetic both in critical and creative writing as both Eliot and Coleridge did.
One might propose James Merrill, and it is certainly true that The Changing Light at
Sandover is a kind of grand epic that proposes an entire Weltanschauung, as well as
numerous speculations about the afterlife, questions about the environment, and the
proposal of an alternate theology. But in that very work, Merrill himself did not
claim to have a great understanding of philosophy; his was, perhaps, a more
experiential than philosophical endeavor. Other contemporary poets who might be
considered include John Ashbery and Brenda Hillman, but again, one does not see
the overt, heavily emphasized engagement with philosophy that seems necessary for
this study. Which brings me to Jorie Graham. Graham does not have the same sort
of critical resume as do my two earlier subjects, but she mirrors them in one
important aspect: Much of her poetry seeks to marry the philosophic to the poetic, or
more specifically to understand that crucial philosophical question, the nature of the
connection between the mind and the body. Helen Vendler helpfully writes in The
Given and the Made, Jorie Graham “is what used to be called a philosophical poet.”
Vendler points out that Graham was trained through her French secondary education
96
to think in terms of the determinedly intangible: “That second thought that we call
philosophical wonder was reinforced in Graham by her schooling at the Rome Lycee
Francais, where in philosophy class, students were regularly assigned essays on such
intimidating abstractions as ‘Justice’ or ‘Being.’”
176
Such terms could easily serve as
titles for Graham’s poems.
This quality has been increasingly obvious since her overtly philosophical
poems in The End of Beauty; I would argue that she, more than any other poet
writing today, attempts to infuse her poetry with philosophy’s sweeping questions. In
James Longenbach’s essay, Jorie Graham’s Big Hunger, he asserts a similar point,
arguing that she constantly deploys major philosophical issues in her work, and that
her work is marked by an overt ambition to approach the “big subjects.”
177
In fact,
what Graham does most frequently is to unite these inquiries with descriptions and
interrogations of her mind at work. To the extent that one feels she succeeds,
Graham’s poetry might be looked as an exemplar of both the secondary imagination
and the acting out of an associated sensibility. The stream-of-consciousness mode of
her poetry (after her first two books, which are much more crafted and closely
formed than her later work), as well as her attempt to make transparent her mode of
creation, by her infinitesimal details of perception and constant repetitions, reveals
the process of poetic fusion at work. She wants more than anything else to fuse the

176
Vendler, Helen. The Given and the Made. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
1995, 97.

177
Gardner, Thomas, ed. Jorie Graham: Essays on the Poetry. Madison, Wisconsin: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2005.
97
disparate faculties of thought and feeling together, even as she simultaneously
portrays the fragmentation of the physical and psychological worlds. Vendler
expands upon this notion, writing that, for Graham, “the true, for an artist, must
involve the accurate transmutation of feeling into knowledge…”
178
. Graham is
consumed with the representation, nay, the reenactment of that transmutation. The
connotations of the word “transmutation” recall to us the chemical nature of
Coleridge’s diction in his definition of the secondary imagination; furthermore, we
recall that this is precisely the word that Eliot uses in his analogy of the poet’s mind
to the filament of platinum. Like Coleridge, like Eliot, Graham is concerned with the
changes that take place when that which has been separate is forced together by the
esemplastic power of poetry.
This aspect of her work is explored in Joanna Klink’s essay review “To Feel
an Idea,” wherein Klink asserts that Graham seeks “in the company of other High
Moderns such as Eliot and Stevens, to construct a relationship” between sensory
experience and mental impression.
179
Klink argues that this is the dream of the
unified field—the title of Graham’s collection of selected poems. Even as Graham
knowingly, purposefully participates in the imitation of the fragmentation of
perceptible experience, she does so with the goal of unifying the disunified. She
wants to bring all the severed pieces of our very late world back together, if only for
a moment and only in the mind. Longenbach makes a similar claim, declaring that

178
Vendler, 103.

179
Klink, Joanna.”To Feel an Idea: Review of .Swarm” Jorie Graham: Essays on the Poetry. Thomas
Gardner, Ed. Madison, Wisconsin: The Univerity of Wisconsin Press, 2005, 162.
98
while Graham’s work appears defiantly open-ended, what the poet actually seeks is
closure. Jorie Graham is “preeminently a poet of closure,” Longenbach writes,
quoting Graham’s own declaration that “We tend to define our poets by that aspect
of sensibility they actually most lack and strive towards.”
180
If it seems
counterintuitive to designate Graham as a poet in search of closure, it is no more so
than it is counterintuitive to regard T.S. Eliot as a poet profoundly motivated by
emotion.
Although Graham’s work takes a direct turn into the more overtly
philosophical after her third book, The End of Beauty (1987), an impulse toward the
epistemological is apparent in her earliest work, even in poems that Longenbach
refers to as “small, controllable.”
181
She has always been concerned with the action
of the mind; like Wallace Stevens, she is preoccupied with the consciousness of the
mind in the act of making the poem. In her first book, Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts
(1980), the poem “Mind” amply illustrates this tendency. The poem is comprised of
a series of images that act as metaphors for the action of the mind: “the slow overture
of rain,” “the hummingbirds imagining their wings / to be their heart,” and “the
poplars / advancing or retreating”
182
all represent the fractured, fractionalized
movement of the mind. She depicts the action of thought as the concerted gesture of

180
Longenbach, James. “Jorie Graham’s Big Hunger.” Jorie Graham: Essays on the Poetry. Thomas
Gardener, ed. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005, 86.

181
Ibid, 85.

182
Graham, Jorie.”Mind.” Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980,
6, 8, 14-15.

99
a million separate parts—the feathers of the birds, the drops of rain, the distinct
leaves of the trees. The mind is “parts / of a puzzle unsolvable.”
183
The poem
concludes with the mind “entering the ground / more easily in pieces / and all the
richer for it.”
184

Like her first book, the poems in Erosion (1983) comprise short lines and a
curt, rather tensile relationship to language; Graham’s now-characteristic
Whitmanesque long line is nowhere in evidence here. But the suggestion that
Graham is on a metaphysical quest as well as a poetic one is clearly indicated in
Erosion: Her poem “In What Manner The Body Is United with the Soule”
foreshadows what will prove to be her singular preoccupation in Materialism (1993).
The poem, which is in three parts, opens with the speaker suspended by
transcendence after hearing “into music.” She qualifies: “Not that I heard / very deep
/ but heard there was a depth, // a space through which / you could fall.”
185
Here, the
speaker begins to understand the world as having a concealed world within it,
beneath the “surface tension, / which is pleasure,” and it is in that invisible world that
the true self resides.
186
“In a piano concerto,” she reports hearing “the distance
between the single instrument / and the whole republic / heard the argument each

183
Ibid, 32.

184
Ibid, 37.

185
Graham, Jorie. “In What Manner the Body Is United with the Soule.” Erosion. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993, 10-14.

186
Ibid, 4-5.

100
made / for fate, // free will.”
187
Here, she suggests, the human mind, opened by the
transmutation of art, is able to comprehend the single paradox of what it means to be
human. The second section of the book depicts the discovery of medieval objects in
the muddy banks of the Arno: illuminated manuscripts, picture frames, candlesticks.
She writes of the manuscripts: “Sometimes the gold letters loosened / into the mud /
into our hands.”
188
Here again is the intersection of the material of the human with
the abstract beauty of art—the gold of the letters tattooing the skin of the hands. All
the obstacles of time and history are erased here, through the meeting of the
contemporary body with the relics of the past. Not only the meeting, but the act of
preserving—they are in act of redeeming and saving these ancient objects from the
mire. Graham then compares this to the self, which she defines as
an act of
rescue
where the flesh has risen /
the spirit
loosened ….
189

Having compared human consciousness to miracle of a water strider, the insect that
walks on water, in the first section, she returns to that natural image in the third and
final section. But in the final stanzas of the poem we are not in the light of the

187
Ibid, 19-27.

188
Ibid, 40-42.

189
Ibid, 68-72

101
opened human consciousness; rather, she minutely describes the unconsciousness of
the water strider, how easily it can be satisfied. The water strider will only lay its
eggs on birds’ feathers, and that bird, when “it wakens and / flies off,” takes to the
air in “a freedom // it knows nothing of.” In this poem, Graham seeks to define the
human by showing what is not human: the inability of the animal to comprehend
abstractions. Thus she deepens and expands her initial metaphor of the human to the
water strider; the human mind is, at the surface like the insect so light it can walk on
water. But to go deeper into thought is the definition of what it means to be human,
to pierce the surface and enter into a contemplation of the meaning of freedom is a
uniquely human quality.
Her poem “The Age of Reason” is similarly occupied; here she describes the
process of “anting,” in which a bird will spread its wings over an anthill, and let the
tiny creatures take up residence in his feathers. Like the water strider, like the bird at
the end of the poem previously discussed, this bird does not know and cannot know
what it does what it does. In Erosion, Graham understands what it means to be a
person, rather than an animal, in terms of the ability to think. But even here, in these
more comprehensible, less complicated poems, she is already foreshadowing what
will prove to be a governing obsession in later books: the way the mind moves, the
way perception occurs, the way we temporally receive and understand the external,
material world. It is the fact of sequence and the way that it functions as a form of
thought that so consumes the later work. In addition, Graham will also concern
herself with multiplicity, with the eye that sees many multitudes of visible objects
102
and is able to process and comprehend what it being seen. In this regard, she recalls
us to Williams’ remarks about the imagination in Kora in Hell: “The imagination
goes from one thing to another. Given many things of nearly totally divergent
natures but possessing one-thousandth part of a quality in common, provided that be
new, distinguished, these things belong in an imaginative category and not in a gross
natural array.”
190
Graham nearly precisely echoes Williams here, when she declares
that she does not want a “simultaneous, cut clean / of sequence.” She perceives and
comprehends that infinite complexity that is the material world, and then, of course,
the infinite complexity of the act of thinking about that material world.
Her preoccupation with the act of thought begins to be more fully expressed
in The End of Beauty. In her third book, she bids farewell to the neatly constructed,
more easily read, more coherent, more cohesive poems of her two earlier books. The
End of Beauty, which Thomas Gardner refers to as her “breakthrough book,” is
obsessed with a theoretical idea, specifically, the failure of beauty, its impossibility
in our modern world, its impracticality. No longer satisfied with enumerating the
ways that humans differ from animals, Graham moved into more complicated
terrain, seeking to examine what was then one of our chief postmodern obsessions,
passed on to us by the modernists, who found themselves dissatisfied with art that
seemed to them intended only to be beautiful. In these poems, she is consciously
attempting something like an associated sensibility; she is trying to convert a
theoretical paradigm into the language of poetry. Unlike her previous remarks about

190
Williams, William Carlos. Imaginations. New York: New Directions, 1969, 14.
103
the nature of mind, here she is moving towards what will become her trademark
method: the representation of the act of the mind moving. In Graham’s poem “Self
Portrait as Gesture Between Them [Adam and Eve],” she speaks to the new role of
art, or what she desires art’s new role to be; moreover, she describes the act of the
mind considering that desire. The poem is fragmented, arranged in numbered
sections that seem to arbitrarily and abruptly interrupt the form of the poem. For
example, from the poem’s conclusion:
29
of being perhaps altogether wrong a piece from another set
30
stripped of position stripped of true function
31
and loving that error, loving that filial form, that break from perfection
32
where the complex mechanism fails, where the stranger appears in the
clearing,
33
out of nowhere and uncalled for, out of nowhere to share the day.
191

191
Graham, Jorie. “Self-Portrait as Gesture Between Them.” The End of Beauty. Hopewell, New
Jersey: The Ecco Press, 1987, 69-74.

104
Although the poem is ostensibly about Adam and Eve’s fall from grace, it is clearly
also a poem about creation, a poem about poetry, in other words. The postlapsarian
landscape we now occupy is the world after beauty. “The thing inside, the critique of
the given,” she writes, describing Eve’s burgeoning knowledge after eating the
forbidden fruit.
192
But the real knowledge is the knowledge that the gods of old, the
gods of the old poets, will no longer serve us. Beauty isn’t enough, and it is hardly
all ye need to know. Instead, as the quotation above demonstrates, we need a poem
that is “stripped of true function”—less formed, less formal.
193
We need a poetry that
breaks from perfection, a poetry that occurs when “the complex mechanism fails.”
We want error, and we want to be in love with error. In other words, sonnets will no
longer suffice.
But even as she articulates the absolute dividedness that defines our
postmodern existence, the poems in The End of Beauty insistently indicate a longing
for the possibility of union, or reunion, of mind with body, of internal with external,
of self with others. Vendler accurately remarks on the titles of many of the poems in
The End of Beauty— “Self-Portrait as Both Parties,” “Self-Portrait as Hurry and
Delay,” “Self-Portrait as Apollo and Daphne”—that they are consumed with the
desire to fuse two disparate, even antithetical, entities into a single work of art.
“[T]here is a way to be ‘both parties’ at the same time,” writes Vendler, and that way

192
Ibid, 27.

193
Ibid, 68.
105
is through the esemplastic act of writing a poem that describes the self.
194
It is hardly
tangential that these are self-portraits; the real connection that is being formed here
is between different aspects of the self. This is a fairly radical suggestion:
Contemporary modes of theoretical thought seem to generally propose that the
subject is fragmented and dissociated, from ourselves, from each other, from the
world. We are as fallen as it is possible to be. Yet, here, in this poem, Graham
suggests that there may be a way reunite the fallen self with the preserved self, that
all hope is not lost.
In the service of looking for the possibility of reunification of the mind with
the body, she has become obsessed with the phenomenological experience of what it
feels like to be Jorie Graham. Longenbach compares her poems to Husserl’s
“thickened present,” by which he suggests that by “tracing the contours of a single
action in the present, we feel the weighty convergence of the personal and cultural
traces that cling to it.”
195
The comparison to Husserl is no accident. Graham’s poetry
is nothing if not sensorially and temporally rendered; she is obsessed with the minute
depiction of the psychological and physical state of the poet at the moment of writing
the poem. If we are to think of her as having an associated sensibility, it is important
to consider that she is first of all a sensuous thinker; she thinks through her senses.
For Graham, the word “sensibility” is best applied in terms not of emotion, but of the
five physical senses. She is compelled to sensorially experience the world around

194
Vendler, 105.

195
Longenbach, 83.
106
her. She reminds us of Bishop’s sandpiper, looking endlessly through the grains of
sand: “Poor bird, he is obsessed.” Her poems inscribe writing inside of writing, or
living inside the act of writing. They recall vividly Valery’s description in his essay
“Poetry and Abstract Thought” the precise way that the world is altered when the
poet looks upon it from the perspective of being in the moment of inspiration. In
“Notes on the Reality of the Self,” Graham describes the experience of watching a
river, yet she describes it in such particularity that we begin to feel we are looking at
a pointillist painting. She moves not just breath by breath, but between breaths; she
shears instants from instants as though she were putting them on slides and
examining them under a microscope. The following quotation recalls us to the barren
landscape of The Waste Land, but here rather than extending the experience of the
insufficiency of the material world into a mythic realm, she anchors it in the
subjective experience of the speaker. Whereas Eliot’s “I” feels utterly, intentionally
impersonal, Graham’s sounds like the voice on the phone, or even closer, the voice
inside our heads.
I let the dog loose in this stretch. Crocus
appear in the gassy dank leaves. Many
earth gasses, rot gasses.
I take them in, breath at a time, I put my
breath back out
onto the scented immaterial.
196

She often uses, or even overuses, the present participle, in order to hammer home the
immediacy of the experience. “[N]ailing each point and then each next right point,

196
Graham, Jorie. “Notes on the Reality of the Self.” Materialism. Hopewell, New Jersey: The Ecco
Press, 2000, 17-22.

107
inter -/ locking, correct, correct again, each rightness snapping loose…and
henceforth, loosening—”
197
The present tense is insistent; although it creates a kind
of lulling, rolling rhythm—all those repetitive “ing” sounds—it serves to repeatedly
remind us that we are in a body that is feeling. Klink describes this as “the mind
frantically outrunning the body, or the body reaching out across a great, ocean-like
distance, through confusion and grim pain, with all its senses brightened, to meet the
mind.”
198
The poems are pervaded by the desire to unite the intellectual with the
physical.
“Steering Wheel” attempts to reproduce the sensation of sensation. I do not
mean to sound unnecessarily tautological—there is, in fact, something implicitly
circular about the poems, insomuch as they are self-consciously self-conscious. They
are meta-meta-poems. They are obsessed with the depiction of perception; her goal
in the poems is to imitate herself in the moment of perception. “In the rear-view
mirror I saw the veil of leaves / suctioned up by a change in current / and how they
stayed up…in the absolute fidelity to the force behind.”
199
A few lines later she
writes, “Oh but I haven’t gotten it right.”
200
She sets herself to the same task again,
the task of describing the leaves in the driveway being blown by the wind. “[M]e
now slowly backing up / the dusty driveway into the law / composed of updraft,

197
Ibid, 26.

198
Klink, 164.

199
“Steering Wheel.” Materialism. 1-4.

200
Ibid, 15.

108
downdraft, weight of these dried midwinter leaves.”
201
Graham’s atomistic
attendance to the immanence of perception is all in the service of reproducing the
experience of the mind. She wants her poems to be the mind in the act of making the
poem, not simply to describe the mind. This is taking Stevens’ description of the
“mind finding what will suffice” to the outer edge of possibility.
I do not want to be overly reductive, particularly in my assertion that
Graham’s work comprises poems of association and union between the subject and
the object, between the self and the non-self. She simultaneously—like Eliot—
demonstrates how divorced we are from our bodies, from the external world, even
when she is in the act of stringing together, uniting disparate objects, feelings,
perceptions, descriptions, and narration. In some ways, this is the consequence of the
paradox that is at the center of her work: She wants to reunite the mind with the
body, even as she compulsively describes the absolute nature of our Cartesian split.
This is made most manifest in her book Materialism (2000) (the above passages are
drawn from the same book)—hardly surprising, with such a title. She opens the
collection with several passages that pertain and explain the thematic fixation that
occupies these poems. First, a passage from Sir Francis Bacon, one that would have
made even Pound happy. “[T]he human understanding is by its own nature prone to
abstraction. It supposes that which is fluctuating to be fixed. But it is better, much
better to dissect than abstract…”
202
This passage readily defines Graham’s project in

201
Ibid, 31-33.

202
Ibid, p. 3.
109
Materialism: She seeks to minutely detail—to dissect—the world around her as she
perceives it. At the same time, she grapples with the problematic division between
the self and other, between thought and thing, between material and immaterial. Here
I would argue that we are in the terrain of The Waste Land; utter differentiation in
the service of a greater whole. In other words, Eliot’s response to Francis Herbert
Bradley, or perhaps, this is Graham responding to Eliot, responding to Bradley. If
this seems like a leap, perhaps it is—I am merely suggesting that when Graham is
articulating the minutiae of distinction, she is doing it within the larger whole of a
poem. She is weaving a tapestry of the unreal while unweaving the tapestry of the
real.
What is crucial to consider are the dualities that obsess Graham throughout
this book and much of her work: mind and body, thought and felt, material and
immaterial. Graham goes on to quote a passage from Plato: “Well, then added
Socrates, let us suppose that there are two sorts of existence—one seen, the other
unseen.” The dialogue continues: “The soul is more like to the see, and the body to
the seen? Yes.”
203
Emerson follows, then Whitman, and finally Plato again, reporting
Socrates’ last words to Crito: “We owe a cock to Asclepios. Pay my debt. Do not
forget.” This quotation perfectly conflates the real of material and immaterial; even
as Socrates nears death, the most abstract state possible, he is fixated on the material:
the cock, the debt, Asclepios. It is almost as if Graham is attempting to demonstrate

203
Ibid, 4.
110
how relentlessly humans cling to the material, even as our souls are thoroughly
dirempt from the physical plain.
It seems almost unnecessary to point out that Materialism is Graham’s most
philosophical book; recent books, such as Sea Change (2007) and Overlord (2005),
have been much more overtly lyrical—as well as more overtly political. Sea Change
is absorbed with environmental catastrophe and the need to address climate change;
Overlord is built around Graham’s experience of living in Normandy, quite close to
where Operation Overlord took place. By contrast, Materialism is much less
material: Here, the poet is interested in tracing and retracing that fretful, Stevensian
terrain. How do humans understand the physical world? How do we reconcile the
abstract nature of thought with the firm reality of our embodiment? How, in other
words, do we overcome the dualism of mind and body? “[T]hough there are, there
really are, / things in this world, you must believe me,” concludes “Steering Wheel,”
as if the act of thinking about something nullifies its material existence.
204

The idea, in fact, that language cannot coexist with matter becomes a primary
concern of the book. “I pray thee Lord / to make these words / have / materiality….”
she writes in “Concerning the Right to Life.” Significantly, she is not praying for her
words to matter; she wants them to have an actual, physical, tangible presence. What
this indicates is both her anxiety about the frailty of language as a mode of social
activism and her desire to make the abstract into something concrete. Over and over
in Materialism, we find the terror that the speaker is not real, that nothing is real,

204
“Steering Wheel,” 38-39.
111
because everything must be perceived through that unreliable machine, the
immaterial mind, and even worse, can only be described through those unreliable
vehicles of meaning, words. Thus her title, “Concerning the Right to Life,” is a
pun—although the poem is ostensibly about an abortion clinic, in fact its deeper
meaning has to do with the right to physical life. Graham wants to be real, but she
can’t be sure she is.
In this manner, her quest (Longenbach’s word) is distinct from Stevens.
Stevens had a kind of certainty that forms the backbone of his poems; he seems
absolutely positive that God is dead, that there is nothing beyond this material plain,
and everything we are is understood as a mere side effect of evolution and biology.
For Stevens, however, the imagination is a consolation. But Graham lacks even this
conviction; in the poem “Belief System” in Sea Change she writes, “Thinking was
the habitation of a /trembling colony, a fairy tale—of waiting, love—of / the capacity
for / postponement.”
205
Thinking as a fairy tale does not make a very strong case for
thinking. Furthermore, Graham’s physical self is a much more fluid, indeterminate
one; she feels that she is in danger of being absorbed into the environment around
her. In “The Dream of the Unified Field,” her most operatic poem in Materialism,
the speaker melts into a snowstorm. “Once I was…once, once.”
206
(emphasis mine)
This speaker is terrified of not being, and she wants language to form a bridge
between the immaterial self and the material self. Language becomes a form of

205
“Graham, Jorie. “Belief System.” Sea Change. New York: Harper Collins, 2008, 6-9.

206
“Dream of the Unified Field,” 132.

112
redemption in Materialism, a book which would have been more aptly titled
Dualism. For Graham does not believe, as the materialists do, that there is nothing
beyond. She is gripped by the contradictory notions that that there is something
beyond this plane and that there is nothing on this plane at all. In other words,
Graham may be a Platonist at heart: she believes in the existence of Platonic forms
and she distrusts the physical world in which she lives. Her method of coping with
this disparity is to examine, as closely as possible, the objects, feelings, thoughts,
historical events—everything, in other words—that comprise her life. Graham is a
capacious poet, consumed with the desire to represent as much of her world as she
can. In that representation, she seeks reconciliation—even the consolation of the
divine. Or perhaps it might be as well to return here to Williams, in Kora in Hell:
But the thing that stands in the way of really good writing is always one: the
virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under
the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets
a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity.
207

207
Williams, 14.
113
Chapter Five: Conclusion
In my chapter on Coleridge, I quote one critic who ponders his status in our
contemporary times, asking if he has become a “desiccated relic” rather than a
“seminal thinker.” It is not an unfair question. Just because something is old does not
make it true; in fact, it makes it more likely to be untrue. Furthermore, it is in the
nature of theoretical or critical scholarship for the children to devour their parents;
one theory gains the day, effectively snuffing out what it was that went before. The
New Criticism was replaced by semiotics, which developed into structuralism, which
was then expanded by deconstruction, which has been complicated by post
colonialism, et cetera. Our current critical climate would seem to negate the
possibility of felt thought. Over the course of this dissertation, it has seemed difficult
enough to make a case for the mere empirical existence of associated sensibility in
the poetry of the past. Without taking it for granted that the subject exists, it seems
the case for felt thought has already been lost.
Certainly many critics would tell us that this is the case. In Fredric Jameson’s
Poststructuralism, he asserts that there has been a “waning of affect” in
contemporary times. He explains further:
The end of the bourgeois ego, or monad, no doubt brings with it the end of
the psychopathologies of that ego—what I have been calling the waning of
affect. But it means the end of much more—the end, for example, of style, in
the sense of the unique and personal…As for expression and feelings or
emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of
the centered subject may also mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but a
114
liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a
self present to do the feeling.
208

Despite this declaration, despite the confidence of this declaration, and even in spite
of the popularity of this conviction, it is my strongest impulse, as a writer, as a poet,
to react defensively against this sort of argument. Perhaps it is wrong to use the word
defensively; as a writer, one may feel actually offended by the idea that “there is no
longer a self to do the feeling.” One feels, narcissistically that one has a subject, a
self, an ego. One even has one’s psychopathologies; one has suffered to acquire
them. To someone like Jameson, my reaction would be regarded as overly simplistic,
even childish, and my ideas about the imaginative subject would seem anachronistic.
My only response to this is that, ultimately, theories are written about poetry,
rather than the reverse. Although poetry is very often informed by critical theory and
philosophy—as I have attempted to demonstrate in the cases of these three poets—
poetry also exists independently, beyond and outside of the academy. Poets have and
will continue to write, and having considered various methods of understanding the
imagination, I believe that, yes, there is a subject capable of having an imagination,
and that despite the confusion and vague wording of Coleridge’s assertions, his
definition of the secondary imagination does in fact stand us in good stead.
Furthermore, if we understand poetry to be a product of a combined faculty, a
thoughtful feeling, or a felt thought, we will understand it best. We can find
examples of this belief in the writings of many poets. For instance, H.D., who saw it

208
Jameson, 15.
115
as an intersection of body, mind, and soul, called it the “over-mind,” complaining
that the shift from “normal consciousness to abnormal consciousness is accompanied
by the grinding discomfort of mental agony.”
209
For H.D., the state of being within
the imagination was acutely physical: “If I could visualise or describe that over-mind
in my own case, I should say this: it seems to me that a cap is over my head, a cap of
consciousness over my head, my forehead, affecting a little my eyes.”
210
Emerson
called it the “oversoul.” Yeats, who felt that being in the heat of the imagination was
nothing less that being “overwhelmed by a miracle,” even suggests such periods
helped him hold “in a single thought reality and justice.”
211
Or let us return to the
philosopher of the backyard: Coleridge held that poetry is a rationalized dream,
“perhaps never consciously attached to our Personal Selves.”
212

Finally, I turn to Wallace Stevens, who many might consider to be the
supreme philosopher poet. In The Necessary Angel, he examines the difference
between poetry and philosophy, and finds, it seems, that while poetry fulfills the
same functions as philosophy, it may be the more happy-making activity:
It seems to be elementary from this point of view that the poet, in order to
fulfill himself, must accomplish a poetry that satisfies both the reason and the
imagination. It does not follow that in the long run the poet will find himself
in the position in which the philosopher now finds himself. On the contrary,
if the end of the philosopher is despair, the end of the poet is fulfillment,
since the poet finds a sanction for life in poetry that fulfills the imagination.

209
H.D. Notes on Thought and Vision. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1982.

210
Ibid, 18.

211
Ibid.

212
BL, 343.
116
Thus poetry, which we have been thinking of as at least the equal of
philosophy may be its superior. Yet the area of definitions is almost an area
of apologetics. The look of it may change a little if we consider not that the
definition has not yet been found, but that there is none.
213

This is a bittersweet note on which to end, and yet as Eliot would say, in our end is
our beginning. I asserted in the introduction to this dissertation that any investigation
into the nature of the imagination would ultimately be unsatisfying. While I think we
have seen that the idea of associated sensibility is worth merit, we have not gone
much farther in our attempts to feel our way out of the dark cave in which we started.
The imagination remains as elusive as a wisp of summer fog, and as fleeting as the
wind that carries the fog away.

213
Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel. New York: Vintage Books, 1942, 43.
117
Chapter Six: Coda: What to Do When You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling:
On the Abandonment of the Genuine in American Poetry
Over the past ten years, there has been a noticeable decline in the amount of
emotion present in American poetry. This is a sweeping statement, admittedly; one
will wonder how such a statement might be proven or even explored. It is, in fact, the
sort of statement that T.S. Eliot might have made, although, he, it is likely, would
have made some statement in the opposite direction, insomuch as he deplored
emotion and all its messy ramifications.
One need not look further than the chief journals and large first book prize
winners to find evidence for this point; emotion has been vanishing faster from
American verse than the snow leopard and the polar bear from their respective
climes. Take, for example, Richard Siken’s Crush, which won the Yale Prize in
2004. (It is perhaps the sole Yale book of this decade to receive general notice.) I
quote here from his poem “You are Jeff”:
Let's say God in his High Heaven is hungry and has decided to make
himself some tuna fish sandwiches. He's already finished making two
of them, on sourdough, before he realizes that the fish is bad. What is
he going to do with these sandwiches? They're already made, but he
doesn't want to eat them.

Let's say the Devil is played by two men. We'll call them Jeff. Dark
hair, green eyes, white teeth, pink tongues—they're twins. The one on
the left has gone bad in the middle, and the other one on the left is about
to. As they wrestle, you can tell that they have forgotten about God, and
they are very hungry.

This is funny; one might even say there is wit. Certainly, it is surreal. But of feeling,
there is not so much. Looking at other Yale Prize winners from this decade, one finds
118
this to be a trend. Looking more generally at the field of young poets, one considers
the acclaim and/or popularity of such figures as Joshua Clover, Joshua Corey, D.A
Powell, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Juliana Spahr, Christian Bok, and Christine Hume, one
feels that there is a movement afoot.
I fear that soon all feeling will be extinct from poetry, eradicated like some
hostile plague, Well. I would argue that sentiment (rather, of course, than
sentimentality) has been assaulted on many fronts. It has been attacked from both the
right and the left as the weakling on the playground, the soldier unfit for duty, the
part that cannot pass muster, to heartily mix some metaphors. The left was the first,
and possibly the more pernicious, of the aggressors. You will, of course, expect me
to begin to throw around names like Barthes and Derrida here, and one cannot escape
the reality that when the death of subjectivity was declared, the mourning bells were
also rung for the free expression of feeling in poetry. If one is made to believe that
one’s person, one’s self, is no more than a collection of atoms freely colliding in a
meaningless universe, one is not likely to think that one’s feelings matter very much.
Or if one thinks that one is no more than the sum of one’s signifiers, then it is the
language, not the emotions behind the language, that suddenly becomes paramount. I
am reminded of an anecdote: a friend began seeing a Lacanian therapist in Paris; he
was often made to wait for thirty, forty, even fifty minutes in the waiting room. Then
he would be ushered into the office, he would utter one word, and the therapist
would stop him. That is all, the therapist would say, I see and understand
completely. When the holistic complexity of one’s subjectivity can be replaced by a
119
single utterance, a single parole, then, bien sur, one’s faith in the merit of feeling is
shattered.
And by whom is poetry made these days? For the most part, it is written by
young poets trained by those who suckled deconstruction and French literary
criticism as mother’s milk. Most poets attend graduate programs, where they are
schooled to believe what a host of literary critics and scholars from the past forty
years would have us believe. Postmodernism is a very rigid faith, for all its
questioning of religion and selfhood and capitalism and racism and sexism and
identity politics. It allows for no spirit of mystery, of grace, beauty; it does not grant
that a person has individual feelings sustained through unique events at particular
moments of time. It is a blunt instrument; it has the subtlety of a Stalinist
apparatchik, and demands similar loyalty. It is no surprise that such a methodology
has produced a hollow poetry. Some have laid, drawing with broad brush, the blame
for “bad contemporary poetry” at the feet of the ever-growing number of graduate
programs, or at the general fact that graduate students read so much critical theory
and are thusly influenced by it. I say instead that it is the type and style of critical
theory that they read. If graduate students read the essays of Pound and Eliot and
Coleridge, if they read Plotinus, Longinus, and Plato; if they read Freud, Marx and
Darwin, in addition to all the poetry that was necessary for practical poetic
education, then perhaps, in the dusty halls of academe, all would be well.
I am sounding now very neo-conservative. Oh yes, one might say, pound
away on theory, try picking a broader beam to aim at. But my point is not to steer
120
poets and readers to the right, either poetically or politically. In fact, what we might
consider the “right wing” of poetry, which would be formalism, has little to offer us
in the way of genuine sentiment. Empty regularity, meter and rhyme for nothing but
their own purpose, were shown to us nearly a century ago to be without merit. Those
who carry on in its spirit, such as the torch bearers of the New Criterion, are not
doing so in the service of expressing the genuine. They are doing so because they
seem to feel obliged to do so, as ladies once felt obliged to cross their legs at the
ankle and men once felt obliged to walk at the outside when escorting a women
down the street. It is manners, and not much more. That is not to say that it is not
possible to write a poem in rhyme and meter without “real toads in it” as Moore
might say, but as it so unnatural to our ear in this year of 2009, it is extraordinarily
much more difficult. To insist that a poem is not a poem unless it rhymes at this very
late date is so silly as to be self-parodying. And the reviews produced by formalist
critics, such as the particularly venomous ones produced by William Logan, for
example, are also utterly unhelpful.
So we are aided by neither the right nor the left. The middle is not much help
either. Poetry magazine, which has become essentially a corporate venture, publishes
benign, inoffensive, sometimes sentimental verse, imbued with individual
statements, but rarely with actual expression; rather, they are what a friend of mine
likes to call “supermarket epiphanies.” Consider the following from a poem titled
“God Knows” by R.S. Gwynn.:
121
Her e-mail inbox always overflows.
Her outbox doesn’t get much use at all.
She puts on hold the umpteen-billionth call
As music oozes forth to placate those
Who wait, then disconnect. Outside, wind blows,
Scything pale leaves. She sees a sparrow fall
Fluttering to a claw-catch on a wall.
Will He be in today? God only knows.

When one considers the great history of Poetry, this is all the more galling. One also
cannot help but think of Mary Oliver’s cautions in A Poetry Handbook about the use
of “technological language” which may not be appropriate for poetry—do the words
“e-mail,” “inbox,” and “umpteen-billionth” really have the ring of that which has
been chosen to delight and instruct? Or even to merely delight? There is assonance in
the phrase “music oozes,” but that does not make up for the very inaccuracy of the
image. How can music ooze? It is, in point of fact, a displeasing combination of
words.
This is the sort of criticism that Eliot would have made. (One recalls his
impatience with Shelley’s arrows and silver spheres in “Ode to a Skylark.) But Eliot
brings us back to the main point of this article. Before Poetry began publishing this
sort of bland treacle, it was the vanguard magazine of the Modernist movement. It
gave voice to an entire generation of poets who changed poetry forever. What may
be most important to consider is that we are still wrestling with the ghosts of the
past; we have not yet lain to rest the “rules” lain down for us by Eliot and Pound, by
T. E. Hulme. We think we are not supposed to show any feelings, because we think
that Eliot told us not to. But Yeats implored us to use a “more passionate syntax.”
122
And The Waste Land is a deeply expressive poem, even if the feelings that are being
expressed are ones of discontent, despair, aridity, hopelessness, and emptiness. To
say nothing of The Pisan Cantos, where Pound writes of how a human could never
again lock up an animal, after one has lived in a cage. Both Eliot and Pound paid
dearly for these poems; Pound was imprisoned as a traitor; Eliot suffered a mental
breakdown. I am not suggesting that poets must fling themselves wildly at the rock
cliffs of fate, endangering themselves and those around them simply in order to gain
experience about which to write.
What I am suggesting is that perhaps part of the reason that poetry is ever and
ever more removed from the lives of “ordinary” Americans is that there is so little in
it that anyone could reach out and hold. It is an old, and very humanistic, idea, this
suggestion of universal connection through language. But without it we are lost, I
think. Not only are we not writing for a larger public, we are not even writing for
each other. We are barely even writing for ourselves. The need for the genuine in
poetry is so great as to be inexpressible. Why, you might ask. Our politics is
mundane, the speeches, like our poetry, trite and intended much more for effect than
for substance. Our entertainment—our movies and television—are similarly devoid
of the genuine. We have gone so long without being moved perhaps we do not know
what it is to be moved anymore. Perhaps we are afraid. But it is that fear that is so
terrifying, for if one believes that poetry and politics are connected, then there is a
connection between the eight-year long administration of a president who could not
123
speak English, a failed war, and a vacuous poetry. More than ever, we need poetry
that matters. We do not die for love. We die for lack of it.
124
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129
Appendix: The Sleep Hotel

The Sleep Hotel

Poems
130
Acknowledgments
Grateful thanks to the editors of the following journals, in which these poems
originally appeared, sometimes in different versions:

American Poetry Review: “Covet,” “Home Front,” “One Night Lions Came into My
Yard,” “Watching the Sunset on Peconic Bay, Long Island”

Colorado Review: “Via Negativa”

Eclipse: “After Reading Lao Tzu”

Field: “Homesick” and “Right”

La Petite Zine: “The Clown and the Frog See Everything” and “Bride Saddle with
Stirrups”

LIT: “Hollow”

Lyric: “Interstate 5,” “The One Who Doesn’t Love You Doesn’t Matter,” “This Far
and No Farther”

Pleiades: “Poems are Remote and Cunning as Fire”

Ploughshares: “Waterlights”

POOL: “Brightness Falls,” “Ignis Fatuous,” “The World is Transformed by Rain”

Seneca Review: “Q & A”

VOLT: “How Wide. How Red. How Canopy”
131
Table of Contents
Part One
One Night Lions Came into my Yard
Rich in Flint
This Far & No Farther
Storytelling
Homesick
When I Used to Go Everywhere with You
Home Front
Pacific
After Reading Lao Tzu
Q & A
The Clown & the Frog See Everything
Redeemer Apple
Sonic
Caution
Longing
Ignis Fatuous
Right
Night with Echoes
Hollow
Waterlights
The One Who Doesn’t Love You Doesn’t Matter
Broken Open by Pills
Part Two
Poems Are Remote & Cunning as Fire
The World is Transformed by Rain
Watching the Sunset on Peconic Bay, Long Island
The Bone Room
How Wide. How Red. How Canopy
Covet
First
Turning Thirty
Interstate Five
Tight, Slack, Tight
Jumble
Messengers of Error
Bride Saddle with Stirrups
The Sleep Hotel
132
Even People I Loved
Via Negativa
A Sense of Proportion
Brightness Falls
Think: Fire
Prophecy
The Wake

Notes
133
Part One

Out in the world, no one sleeps—

Federico Garcia Lorca
134
One Night Lions Came into My Yard

Two females, outlined in black marker
two cubs

I was lying in my white gown
sweat under my breasts
hand between my legs

one male with his lazy mouth

the lions circled the lawn, their huge heads
wheat-colored, even in moonlight:

the grasses of my education—staves—
bent so easily

under their feet
135
Rich in Flint

Julia and I drove north
all day to look at leaves

The trees were red with fall’s flame-change
The trees were orange

In Vermont a doe’s body hung in a tree
draining

A guy in camouflage hosed down his truck
Julia said you can tell it’s real live free or die up here

Inside me—
hot/cold translation of fever

The slain doe leaked from the tree
while the sane face of the sun

retreated behind red-orange leaves
136
This Far & No Farther

From the plane I saw how the forest was burning
disorganized orange hem

low tide on the mountain

lady next to me I hate to fly don’t you

Later we flew over clouds
which look like snow if you don’t squint

I drank my red drink with limes & no ice
I got drunk

The plane flew east
the sun backed away like an animal

Chalky faces of the other passengers
numb no-self of being with strangers…

in the past the hills keep burning
137
Storytelling

Paper people in a paper land,
a paper house, crazily slanted,
a house like a child would draw:

a square, a triangle, a circle
for the sun.

Stick people stand outside the house
grinning in crayon. No hair, no hands.

Fire people.
But how will you hold the people
when they’re burning up in your hand?
138
Homesick

1.
Her mother misusing the word elegiac;
her father calling himself stupid—
She runs a tongue over her teeth, thinking
anchorite, cenobite, bite down—

The dog on the lawn, humping his pillow.
The back yard: eugenias and junipers,
browning fescue. Avocados,
azaleas dying in-to-out,
eight star sky.

Flower arranging—a large spiky blue flower
no one knew the name of, looked like a peacock,
The house, the house, the house.

2.
John the Baptist ate bugs, she says
to no one in particular.
Locusts, I think.

She was one of, and her sister beside,
giggling in and out. Breathing.

Someone slips on the mossy bricks. Someone laughs.
Someone blows out the candles, turns on the Jacuzzi,
models the new clothes. Someone covers her mouth.

Way back then, when we used to fight, she thinks, at least then we…

Dessert. Desert. Be certain.
139
When I Used to Go Everywhere with You
the sheep were matted with shit, their wool yellow
they ran when we approached

the goat had an infected eye
clotted with green mucous

I leaned over the chest-high stall to pet the pygmy horses
they huddled close as children

it was hot & the zoo smelled bad

one rooster & a clutch of pissy hens in a wire coop
a three-legged dog slept by the door

you said someone should really take care of all this

overhead clouds thickened like yeast
140
Home Front

The half-life of houses begins:

USA USA USA !!!

spray painted
on the cracked macadam.

A dry branch blows past
empty paper bag some newspaper

I thought of us a
man a woman a man

On the next block two Mexican guys
their sweatshirts covered with grime
feed wood into a machine
comes out dust

My hands are numb

Well I did have friends & I

loved them
141
Pacific

the water is so impersonal,
a stranger to everyone

a child-wind spends itself in the palm
the moon makes endless promises

tonight she’s wearing her sailor face,
preparing to cast off
142
After Reading Lao Tzu

The one who speaks does not know.
The one who knows does not speak,

wrote the old master, which perhaps describes
the situation. Meaning we were all sad.

Meaning that when you were seized by desire,
it was nothing more than flesh, bared above the collarbone

she poured the long night of herself
into empty coffee cans and cornfields

and brushed by air. Meaning: It’s chemical. So
that when the moon rears its parched head,

her eyes a mask on her face, the livestock snorting and pacing,
her absent husband…she died at 32

when you feel a finger grazing your neck,
it’s only wind created by the movement of

her daughter crying and lighting
fires under the bed

your own body. Downdraft. Live
stock. Because sadness is multiplied

don’t worry, she told me,
you can’t inherit this

by sadness. A cradle of no compare.
Loose conspiracy of mind and body,

dough swelling over the edge of the bowl,
the yeasty smell of it, a disease that is

a blanket over the window
a pillow over the face
143
known and not spoken and
also the other one,

who speaks and does not know
what to say.
144
Q & A

What is the nature of the disease?
Crabgrass and carpenter ants. A funnel.

What is the funnel?
Grape cluster. Echo. Voicebox.

Who hears the echo?
Foxes in the yard. Chickens in the coop.

What do the foxes want?
Banditry and hocus pocus.

What’s hocus pocus?
Heaven for amateurs.

Where is heaven?
In my mouth. Mouth. A paper spill.

What spills?
Tree blight.

What is blighted?
Politics and the bristly lung case?

What makes you bristle?
Hole-in-corner reasoning. Carnal subtraction.

What was subtracted?
Mayflies. Mysteries. Mathematics.

What is inside mathematics?
Fish eyes & soda balm. Some honest injuns.

What is honesty?
The nature of the disease.
145
The Clown & the Frog See Everything

striped hat

was that an object from your life?

your life which felt dirempt from objects

the juggler, the fire-eater
the sword-swallower

the trapeze artist befriending the air

you’ve seen them
moving like insects in the circle of light, performers

hard work in the mouth of the

your granular existence, your circus tent

your new hat
146
Redeemer Apple

Satellite up, satellite down,
catastrophe circle. The air revolves, cool and dry,
in the dark of the will.

Skin catalyst. Eye
rotates inside the eye of the flower,
inside the eye of the star,
which explodes like a star.

After stars cross—a bright bouquet—
they quit breathing. Stop.

Who sang star? Who sang satellite?

A purple plum, ringed with apples.
I was alone. Cold air foxed inside my chest.

Where were you, redeemer? I waited for you,
filled my own balloon.
147
Sonic

where houses used to be

now /
flight vapor

*

trying to see with the mind
or through the mind:

a lot of sex with S—no radiation

(if I didn’t love him
he couldn’t hurt me)

the streets became empty fields but still have names like Buena Vista

doesn’t air speak
the same fluent language as water?

*

behind the fields just the ocean
trammeled blue canvas, furled god liquid

water a process like being cured,
like watching birds learn to fly

I thought if I could just keep pushing
then something
would lift over

the empty fields where my mother’s house used to be

*

the thing about sex is that it’s rectilinear

(maybe the house floats in the air like an ark)

148
I parked behind a couple who were kissing

when the planes go over
it feels like drowning

S said I’ve never been on a plane what does it feel like to fly

I said kind of metaphorical

*

at first I was prepared to love him, to love over him

a change in air pressure

his cock everywhere inside, a theory of love

*

sand-bird, ash-bird

the doves were the color of ash
& there were two of them
in the yoked limbs of the sycamore

my ashen cunt
bare after he shaved it

picture of myself at 3 & S said you still look just like that, exactly the same

—preserved in ash & sand

*

but if the truth was I liked being alone

sex with myself so much better—

like sleepwalking

*

watched the birds fuck in the tree it seemed violent as opera
149

but I knew better
or thought that I knew better

it looked like battle
wing over tussled wing & a sound like newspaper being torn

people kept asking me —aren’t you married yet?

*

sweet disinclination

house after house torn down for flight

error in logic:

I didn’t love him

but the air was hard to breathe

*

the same birds sing over & over from the tree
in daylight I watch them

the male with pepper spots over his feathers

but it used to be so much easier

the female, smaller, no markings, on the branch below

they make a sound like

see-ew—see-ew

*

almost asleep but the birds are peevish

the birds don’t sleep
even under the drape of darkness

150
birdsong, not like bells but bell-shaped

I just wanted to see around it,
around the possibility of flight

chain link fence
diamond-shaped empty

O sound

hidden in the sea
151
Caution

Little boys release a fleet of balls at the top of a hill.

The balls, which are red or blue or striped,
run together or apart,
a little population, in the usual flight of populations,
skidding, then bumping down the street.

The balls run down the hill & vanish.
Some are found by dogs. Others are not.
152
Longing—

It’s beautiful

colored lanterns strung on a line

Settled perfectly inside me—
the not space

where you used to be,
talking to me, extending your hand

Sailboats asleep in their slips

A mechanical sun rises as if pulled by string
153
Ignis Fatuous

Small flames light up the marsh
I want to eat them

Falseness flames inside me

I love you the way the ground loves the flame

The stars in their distant abstraction
tiny lanterns of desperation

Every night issues new orders, new rules

Small fires mount on the horizon
Their heat is not real, except in the mind

which burns, which is why love ends

The world we could not wait to eat
begins to consume us
154
Right

I

My friend hisses:

“No one thing can be all things to one person,”
and then looks over at me,
sideways.

I say, “Well, I never thought it would be all—”

II

That you wanted to be left alone,
that you wanted to feel part of something—

How weak you are, limp leaf on a clematis vine,
caught always with your sour face and sore wrist.
A writer.

III

The girl reclines. She leans, lee of the stone, la la la,
lean-to shack built up against the lie of the house.
Tar paper and cut-bits of cardboard: Ketchup. Green Beans. Toilet paper.

She thinks she is better than everyone else. She may be right.

IV

The frog leaps out of water; the water falls back on itself.
155
Night with Echoes

tonight the moon calls
but I only see you,

the blade of your body

like light caught in a paper spill

my courage: water gone to the sea

but your courage is explicit
dark pattern on a red handkerchief

your hair tied up against the rain

2

when I touch you
(I want to touch you)

little pools of water collect at low tide

anemones like asters
the needled bodies of sea urchins

now, later—high tide—

I reach for you

atonal waves hasten me to the shore

3

in the bar I watched you

you watched others

the eyes of the fox
above the field of wheat
156
I wish that you would look at me

little fox

4

longing shames me

the tulip carves a groove in the air
the linear green stem, like the geometer’s drawing

your body & my body
tulips in a jar, or loosely tied with cord

tulips flattered by air

together, but indifferent

they lean their prayerful heads

aspects of meaning

5

night comes for me
even when I can’t sleep

I open the window to let you in

listen to the owl
she hunts the darkness

as I hunt for you

I call to you
but you do not answer

your eyes—tulips—opened for rain
157
Hollow

Thicket of:
knew I shouldn’t,
but wanted him anyway…

~

Why are the moth wings brown?
Because the accelerated desire is made or stolen.

Why do the crows call at night?
A case can be made for no other recourse.

Why does the tree grow upward?
Root silence unforgives.

(because there are twin lines of deception)

~

Traveling separately
and together, two orbits
that won’t intersect. A problem for geometry
and men with beards, a problem that

doesn’t like solutions

~

slowing down the body’s progress through air,
remote thick paper \ unmarked, unpencilled

when will change come
so that the light

~

O little campfire self
158
Waterlights

Paper boat on dark water—

Candle inside the boat
which stands for woman

Let the water stand for man.

Downstream the willow unbraids her green tresses.

The water sings as it moves
The banks are sodden, the reeds clogged with mud

The candle makes a chapel of light.
The water sings words no one understands.

Let the willow stand for the self—

I think of the willow
when I think of you.

I try to be the willow

Her pious hair

Throat of green whispers
159
The One Who Doesn’t Love You Doesn’t Matter

Struggling to get out
from under the hood of the world,

I drove through the night cathedral
listening to the murmur of the fog:

not you not you not you

The cars ahead burned into smoke.
Lights were embers.

I crouched inside the white companion

when something tugged me up out of my body,

& held me over
scattershot
the road
160
Broken Open by Pills

I think about you so much

that night we made love, awake in the frank
darkness of four a.m.

You saying over and over it feels so good
as if you did not believe it

Telescope of missing you

Resorting to a night of intellect
& high ceremony,

tapping my ashes into an empty bottle of beer
161
Part Two
162
Poems Are Remote & Cunning as Fire

Poems rise the dark out of the dark.
Think don’t feel my friend A likes to say.
White bones hiss like leaves inside the tree.

What conveys the ochre light like sand & oil?
A’s hair fans out in rags of fire while
roots collapse sideways inside the soil.

Like this, like this, like this: a twist of rope
a half-stitched hem. We talk the way birds
talk, from different trees, blindly spite &

blindly love. Explain or don’t complain, A’s
words will peel or strip the bark from the tree.
Can the words consume the light like fire?

I hate A. Sometimes the light creeps crippled
from the shaft; sometimes it glows like leaves.
163
The World is Transformed by Rain
after Neruda

Green everywhere! Raucous green
I give myself up to you but

do you want me? I think you may be like my lover,
you only come when you aren’t wanted,

you only come when I refuse you.
Now the lawns glow in green fire, and I

read them in translation, brown rewritten in green.
Possibly all love is translation.

I never understand what you say
when you’re speaking. You change me,

and I let you, so that the barren hills
ripen with grass and the yellow impertinence

of wildflowers. Has the rain stopped?
The sun is so easy to understand, so constant,

it’s easy to think like Augustine: I understood
and then I believed. I want the opposite,

the irrational rain, wrath of the angered
gods, rain that drives you

to me, because you love me
the way the rain loves the earth—

erratically, with great fury. I don’t love you back,
but I flower under your hand, green as limes.
164
Watching the Sunset on Peconic Bay, Long Island

Standing behind glass, Paula & I watched
the light checker the bay. It was the armistice
between day & night, when the visible surrenders the tangible.

We stood close, but did not touch
as the sun guided its round boat downward.
The sky was scarved in pink and red and blue.

It was all as usual, the trees consumed
by an apparition of fire: first flame, then dark.
For once, the world’s beauty didn’t bother me.
165
The Bone Room

beetles & butterflies mounted behind glass

stuffed birds
a crane with a snake in its mouth

a human skeleton hung on a rod

(the day after a month of bleeding
not feeling empty exactly, more passed over)

concentration loose inside the vise

lizards, spiders, a python propped on a forked stake
little printed cards with names in Latin

wouldn’t it be easier to say you’re never going to get what you want

passing through the cycle of stains
red-brown thoroughfare

ruined stillness

perfection
166
How Wide. How Red. How Canopy

yesterday G said
perfection is your subject

*

oh smoke oh plumage oh holy

under the wide red canopy of your parents dissolving
under the opening mouth of your first sexual parting

the tomatoes knotted to their wooden stakes
the scent pungent on your hands rub it off it won’t come off won’t

practical living: couldn’t write so you went back to the garden

(the garden! be serious….

the bees are serious)

no sound & couldn’t write so you went back to the garden
scene of your first

*

remember the garden where you let him
make love to you or no it was your
idea the grass itchy under your thighs &
a whole sky absolution pressing you down
did you imagine it or did someone look out & see you?

apology in yr. mouth like feathers in the cat’s mouth

primitive mouth & the second mouth

*

couldn’t withdraw your critic: the heart of the matter
167
a man on horseback. no. a child in a carriage. no. a man on a bicycle. no. a woman
washing clothes in a bucket. no. a dog on a line. no. a child hiding under the stairs.
no. a woman with snake-hair folding her hands in her hands. yes probably. snake-
woman with tepid eyes color of grease.

the critic was clean & inflexible, like a new handbag with a golden clasp
you were so reachable & the critic was not

girl self stretched out, long dark shelf…

*

ugly succulent in the garden, no one remembers its name, approximately 40 yrs. old
& belonged to Aunt Ola, who drank beer when she couldn’t sleep & since you do the
same thing everything is inherited including the past which your mother says blooms

oh golden night. oh heritage dust. oh rootskin & seedling.

the earth underneath the earth—not your department

girl voice saying heaven devil let me out

an inquiry into containment saying do you really think
the marguerite daisy wants to live like that in a pot.
root bound so obviously not.

imprint of the day imprint of the receding hour imprint of the garden father

the critic stood on the roof over the garden, radical judge of all that she surveyed.
her hair was fire!

look at that woman with cobwebs for eyes how can she see that way?

as a child you used to walk around with a book on your head to improve
your posture
impostor

*

the woman was really a witch of course,

she stood in the garden exchanging air for air & her terrapin skin which did not come
off.
168
What foul conjuring is this someone might say but you didn’t.
you were trying to understand why,
if you planted the tomatoes so far apart, they grew together anyway?

I’m different, you told her, I’m different because I’m smart.

that witch was archetypal—she had bells around her neck & wrists & pointed nails
like thorns. in the background someone was keening. not really music but more like
music than anything else

not that different (her voice filled with sand) not that different & not that smart

*

scrap: you sent for her & she came. your pony-hour redemption.

*

how wide. how red. how canopy.
how moth. how might. how tangent & curving spire.
how tower. how path. how make. how wolf.
how candy-tongue & religion
nowhere.

sexual book under the bed—you found it & you read it

your parents’ book

*

the witch slept on bus benches. the witch wore leaves in her hair & a cape made out
of garbage bags. her body like a broken doll. her unhappiness garland of ropes &
stains.

the witch was punctuated & the witch was the critic & the witch was you—

even when you were seven you felt it:
you were on the swings & the sun was out after a long
rain & you said to yourself now I see it’s a
box with a golden latch
169
Covet

birds fly when my neighbor tells them to
whenever she waves her hands

or that’s how it seems to me

when I think about her, in my lock box of gravel & sand

my clawed face, my scar
Sycorax cleaving the sprite into the tree

it’s a jeweled abandon , isn’t it being mean

so happy for you so happy so so

envy consumes itself

first the face then the hands the feet
170
First

driving home, we spoke as usual
as if nothing had happened

delicate cookery
impractical experiment
of flesh entering flesh

outside
tough swollen oleanders
ruffled in the wind
as if in conversation

silent illogical exchange
one poisonous flower
to another
171
Turning Thirty

it’s May

campus ferments in jasmine
petunias breathe out their dry medicine

I wander around

on the street corner men drink malt liquor
make signs with their hands

girls huddle outside buildings, pull up their straps
boys laugh

I think about the picture of the hunter
his body borne by the animals

hares, birds & foxes
the dark missions of trees behind

is that the meaning of fealty?
or of feast?

at the corner an old guy fills his shopping cart with cans
172
Interstate 5

the hills dusted with purple, dusted with orange

swallows dart in and out of mud hives,
their underpass cities

Saturday night a new lover,
the guided eye of sex flashing open

hypnotic, the red familiar
the red phenomenon

like dark water poured from a jug

now: the long drive home
dust, the usual tumbleweeds, the dry grasses

black cloth flutters on the cattle fence

firemen stand in a stubble field, fully suited, practicing,

starting fires putting them out
173
Tight, Slack, Tight

today
clarity at the ridgeline

twin selves joined in the no-haze
as clouds pursue each other over the mountains

the brown gift__the grit of clear-headedness
the double-faced bird

tight white clouds impose their delicacy

the freeway curves left, implacable cement barrier
trash strewn in the spillway

cloud-ready

surrendered to the claim—not the salute—of reason

from the car window, can you see the snow? I can
174
Jumble

Someone had turned the air into water

so you went out driving—

Coming around the curve at Zuma, you
felt like pollen carried out into the wind

there you feel free

Harum scarum

A red car cut you off—license plate: ONLYART

a woman at the gas station begged for cigarettes,
her pink sweater mottled the color of old blood,

her cardboard sign instructed:

until the full moon do nothing
175
Messengers of Error

guy at the market buys
Pampers and beer at 8 a.m.

woman in a ripped T-shirt
waters her lawn through a chain link fence

Mexican kids play soccer
on a traffic median,
a yellow strip of grass

on the radio
oh oh oh oh oh oh oh I still love you so

ducks cross the freeway onramp
cars line up to let them pass

homeless guy by the tracks,
pants down, wiping himself

brown hills brown haze—like recompense—

in hot glassine light
176
Bride Saddle with Stirrups

Galloping into the
noose wind, under the hole-gathered sky

I hold nothing but the mane

At bird-light we travel, my horse & I
cropping grass, drinking from streams

Sometimes I run beside her
one hand on her smooth flank

Her eyes: brown globes on no axis

I was reared on mare’s milk

Thick fermented cloud
that boiled my stomach

My taut skin, mare’s skin

Roaming heart & ashes
177
The Sleep Hotel

lights went back & forth in the near distance

Mars was supposed to be close
but I couldn’t find it

while my father slept
I sat, open-eyed, in a green vinyl chair—

watching tubes, monitors, joking nurses
who made the same jokes over and over,
wearing their brisk obedient clothes

when he woke I fed him
ice chips from a plastic spoon
178
Even People I Loved

Winter break alone in St. Louis

Flat on my bed all day
eating peanuts from a jar

watching images flicker

My car got stuck

Outside the blizzard quickened

Narcosis of snow

Gelid New Year’s Eve,
past all nuance
179
Via Negativa

The light is bankrupt
mid-January pearl

Even at noon only partial sun

Your face dissents,
appears repeatedly in dreams

Last night a bed of arrows, a bed of knives
the slant edge of you—

Orion triangulated overhead
in the yellow-purple sky

Anxious wind, helpmeet to the branches
The leaves lifted and tossed by the neutral breeze

I drank ecstasy, cup of you

woke depraved
180
A Sense of Proportion
Once you stumble... human nature is on you.
--Virginia Woolf

*

Pain dull red of old blood

The carousel plays the familiar tune
under the cracked parti-colored roof

Buy a ticket &
you can ride—

*

dirty water spill-filling old gutter water / leaves soda cans plastic bags trash floating
mental / canned memory / cigarette butts / veil of smoke / hard to breathe

human nature is on you

sounds in the night gather,
are spent

*

said Dr. A please, if you can, quantify the amount of time you feel bad in a
percentage like 30% bad and 70% good & so forth

monk notes with a green fountain pen

you’re in a funk he said agreeably

on the floor the rug swirled indecent colors
rainbow in an oil slick

he was always very neatly pressed & dressed wearing his tie Windsor-knotted

through the window some light,
hard to say what %

181
*

mind shaken from the body
like water shaken from the hands

the pills were blue or orange or yellow

I took them the way other people take God

something green & white—a capsule—and I remember moving my arms in the air
like I was moving them through something very soft & dense, like animal hair

but, break, my heart for I must hold my tongue

written—
written into

the dumb show enters

*

felt vestigial

Roman coins on my eyes

no resistance—no repetition

not the way the water won’t commit to the sand
how it always pulls away and comes back

not like love

*

Hear my prayer O Lord, and let my cry come unto thee
Hide not thy face from me in the day when I am in trouble

white god-night
puppet body, limbs on string

For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as an hearth
182
cheat grass grew everywhere
crowding out the world, dry brown fuel
crowding out the rest of the world

My days are like a shadow that declineth; I wither like grass

*

Herons part the stillness
their bodies blue as math

they seem to know how still they are / they seem to know

how to fish in a dry sea

there’s rue for you and here’s some for me

so long, Septimus. Septimus, so long—
183
Brightness Falls

Then the world ignited.
Bad news everywhere,

everywhere plague. We locked
the doors and hid our faces,

we breathed attar of roses
from vials suspended on thread.

As if beauty could keep us safe.
As if beauty could keep us sane.

Nothing could. Too early
for jacaranda but too late for rain

the moon drove herself up
through the boughs of the pine

like a grinning skull. The phone
rang, but no one answered.

Illuminated windows, brilliant night,
moonlight bright enough to read by

if you could hold a thought long enough
to read. This was grief. Someone said once

just think of the word “God” or “love”
& you’ll be fine. But even a single word

was too much when the dust
that hid us blew away. Only sleep,

a childhood sleep filled with dreams
of dangerous objects & the men

who carry them.
184
Think: Fire

Man is that what he thinks; if he thinks fire, he is fire; if he thinks war, then he will
cause war. It all depends merely on that the whole of his imagination becomes an
entire sun; i.e. that he wholly imagines what he wills.--Paracelsus

*

The question is—where does it get me?

or anyone—

*

Not religion but solemnity:

Floating in my grandmother’s pool
under the bitter eucalyptus
watching planes fly overhead

Lately the news is bad—worse actually than bad—
& all I can think about are my dead relatives

I really loved my grandmother Muriel & she really loved me

Oh, stupid

*

[I am embarrassed by this poem it’s a fact]

Gardenias turn brown at the tips when you touch them it’s a fact

Today S is digging trenches we’re not in love it’s a fact

the higher a man climbs the less easy it is

it’s a fact

*
185
At her memorial service I was 12
I didn’t cry b/c that seemed both dramatic & brave

The planes pass over her house they pass over

I think I would like to sleep peacefully in a burlap sack filled with leaves

*

Yesterday my friend said did you hear about the terrible things in Sudan
yes I said

Then we talked about S & how it would be better for me not
to see him anymore & yes I said

*

That man in the Purgatorio who just sleeps & sleeps—he’s too tired & he doesn’t
get to go forward until his penance is up

Resistance, like trailing your hand in water as Charon’s rowboat moves forward
under the purple-dark & starless sky

*

The little patio where Muriel grew things & with bare feet would walk out to water

her feet long and beautiful wings

*

In the news—blood, beyond

a loose feeling in my bowels & yes my chest & yes my head

Sense of horror can be conveyed through a tone in the voice or by saying very
dramatically it was too much for me I can’t talk about it

Barrel-empty—

or the split barrel, with the curved spines sticking out like a porcupine

186
*

When I was ten, she took my book (Jane Eyre) and threw it in the bathroom trash

She was tired of being around people who read all the time

In my family this is considered a funny story & is sometimes told at holiday
gatherings

I often tell it myself

My favorite part of Jane E. is actually when she is at the Lowood school & they
make her stand on a stool to teach her not to lie & she loves Helen who dies

I like it because it is very clear who is bad & who is good

They had to break the ice in the basins
to wash their little white faces
in the white cold dawn

*

turning off the news, S said isn’t it enough sometimes just to feel

corollary action: sunlight burns like fire among the leaves

*

Guilt of the personal
like purposely holding your hand to the iron

says Jung Equally we have a share in gods & devils, saviours and criminals but it
would be absurd to attribute these potentialities of the unconscious to ourselves
personally…

I would like to believe this but I think that it is not true

says Jung at the present time too we are once more experiencing this uprising of the
destructive forces of the collective psyche. The result has been mass-murder on an
unparalleled scale

If my grief for my granny after 28 years is not so very much abated what else

187
Lotus-blossom—take & eat of the lotus & sleep the lovely forgetting

Tender as the stalk bent at the root

*

Grief-bouquet harbored long in my heart

constructed with cardboard & cellotape & little
red drops of candle wax dripped red and greasy over the top of the box

She was so unhappy & I loved her so much

(yes once they put her in the hospital & yes did apply shocks to her brain)

*

What does it feel like to be in the rain of fire

Pull the veil of leaves over your face & sleep inside the burlap sack

Tea with my friends on Friday afternoon looking at the ocean
we talked about death & war & Republicans
we spoke about the compassion problem

Mostly we looked at the sea & everything bad seemed very far away from me

*

My other friend said so what are you going to do / move to Palestine?

*

We used to go to the nursery together

I loved the greenhouse

the smell of damp soil & the air so wet you were almost breathing water

I would go into that light closed warm space
to look at the green ribs of the leaves

*
188

Prostitutes in Delhi, ten or twenty men a day
a little area made out of colored sheets hung on wire

the mind has been here before or
has the mind ever been here before?

*

And I saw issuing from on high, descend
Two angels, each with flaming sword in hand
Broken short off and blunted at the end.
Green as the just-born leaves ere they expand,
Their raiment was, which they behind them trailed,
By the green wings ever disturbed and fanned.

*

Cheatgrass spread everywhere over the rough hills of the peninsula

My heart wasn’t in it, but I drove on further

to watch planes pass over the jeweled veins of the sea
189
Prophecy

Light over water
turned it brown,
particulate with sand

gulls fished in the light-rectangle
bobbing heads, down and then back up

I had been thinking about Cassandra

her dream-sorrow

done with feeding
the gulls slept/rocked on the water

distaff of the waves—

or what made us distaff—
190
The Wake

I could not bring you with me, old self,
carry you in my arms like a stillborn colt,
rickety body slick with membrane.

I wanted to breathe;
you wanted to succeed, or at least go
forward, a tall horse jumping over a wall.

Instead: the morning light that moves
over the wall like the surface of the ocean,
small shadows fingering bricks like anemones.

No one chased me.
Still, I ran like Daphne,

turning and turning into the heart of the tree.
191
Notes

“The Bone Room” is a taxidermy shop in Albany, CA.

“The Clown and the Frog See Everything” is the title of a child’s dream drawing
exhibited at the University Village shopping center in downtown Los Angeles.

The title of “A Sense of Proportion” comes from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. In
addition to quotations from Woolf’s book, the poem also contains lines from Hamlet
and from the 102
nd
Psalm.

The title of “Bride Saddle with Stirrups” refers to a decorative saddle used by
nomadic tribes in 10
th
century Eurasia.

The phrase “brightness falls” is drawn from “A Litany in Time of Plague” by
Thomas Nashe. The poem also contains a line from The Cloud of Unknowing.

The penultimate stanza of “Think Fire” is drawn from Dante’s Purgatorio. The
quotations from Jung can be found in Two Essays on Analytic Psychology.

“Poems are Remote and Cunning as Fire” is dedicated to Carol Muske-Dukes.
“Watching the Sunset on Peconic Bay, Long Island” is for Paula Mauro. “Think
Fire” is dedicated to Muriel Newlove, in memoriam.

Abstract (if available)

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Asset Metadata

Creator Schroeder, Amy (author)

Core Title Typewriters and cooking smells: associated sensibilites in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, T.S. Eliot, and Jorie Graham

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 07/18/2009

Defense Date 05/06/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag creativity,Jorie Graham,OAI-PMH Harvest,poetics,Samuel Taylor Coleridge,T.S. Eliot,theories of imagination

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor McCabe, Susan (committee chair), Muske-Dukes, Carol (committee chair), Becker, Marjorie (committee member), St. John, David (committee member)

Creator Email ASchro1432@aol.com,scroeder@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2376

Unique identifier UC1196998

Identifier etd-Schroeder-3116 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-565970 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2376 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Schroeder-3116.pdf

Dmrecord 565970

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Schroeder, Amy

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu