 Chapter 15 of Visions and Revisions by John Cooper Poeus This Lubrivox recording is in the public domain. Dostoevsky The first discovery of Dostoevsky is for a spiritual adventurer such a shock as it's not likely to occur again. One is staggered, bewildered, insulted. It is like a hit in the face at the end of a dark passage. A hit in the face followed by the fumbling of strange hands at one's throat. Everything that has been forbidden by discretion, by caution, by self-respect, by atavistic inhibition, seems suddenly to leap up out of the darkness and sees upon one with fierce, indescribable caresses. All that one has felt, but is not due to think, all that one has thought, but is not due to say, all the terrible whispers from the unspeakable margins, all the horrible wreckage and silt from the unsounded debts, float in upon us and overpower us. There is so much that the other writers, even the realists among them, cannot will not say. There is so much that the normal self-preservative instincts in ourselves do not want said. But this Russian has no mercy. Such exposures humiliate and disgrace what matter? It is well that we should be so laid bare. Such revelations provoke and embarrass what matter? We require embarrassment. The quick silver of human consciousness must have no closed chinks, no blind alleys. It must be compelled to reform its microcosmic reflections, even down there, where it has to be driven by force. It is extraordinary how superficial even the great writers are, how lacking in the mole's claws and the woodpecker's beak. They seem laboring beneath some pathetic vow, exacted by the demons of our fate, under terrible threats, only to reveal what will serve their purpose. This applies as much to the realists, with their traditional animal chemistry, as to the idealists with their traditional ethical dynamics. It applies above all to the interpreters of sex, who in their conventional grossness, as well as in their conventional discretion, bury such ostrich heads in sand. The lucky unlucky individual whose path, this formidable writer crosses, quickly begins as he reads page by page to try out and startled wonder and terrified protest. This rending night-hawk reveals just what one hugged most closely of all, just what one did not confess. Such a person reading this desperately avoidant, finds himself laughing and chuckling under his breath and against his will, over the little things they had betrayed. It is not anymore a case of enjoying and aesthetic amusement, the general human spectacle. He himself is the one scratched and pricked. He himself is the one so abominably tickled. That is why women, who have so mad a craving for the personal and everything, are especially caught by Dostoyevsky. He knows them so fatally well. Those startling contradictory feelings that make their capricious bosoms rise and fall. Those feelings that they find so difficult themselves to understand, he drags them all into the light. The kind of delicate cruelty that in others becomes something worse, refines itself in his magnetic genius into a cruelty of insight that knows no scruple. Nor is the reluctance of these gentle beings so thrillingly betrayed. To yield their passionate secrets unaccompanied by pleasure, they suffer to feel themselves so exposed, but it is an exquisite suffering, it may indeed be said, that the strange throb of satisfaction with which we human beings feel ourselves at the bottom, where we cannot fall lower to be further unmasked, is never more frequent than when we read Dostoyevsky. And that is largely because he alone understands the depravity of the spirit, as well as of the flesh, and the amazing wantonness whereby the human will does not always seek its own realisation and well-being, but quite as often its own laceration and destruction. Dostoyevsky has indeed a demonic power of revelation in regards to that twilight of the human brain. We lurk the phantoms of unsatisfied desire and we are unspoken lusts stretch forth pitiable hands. There are certain human experiences which the conventional machinery of ordinary novel writing lacks all language to express. He expresses these, not in tedious analysis, but in the living cries and gasps and gestures and fumblings and silences of his characters themselves. Who like Dostoyevsky has shown the tragic association of passionate love with passionate hate, which is so frequent a human experience. This monstrous hate love caressing the bruises itself has made in shooting forth the forked fibre tongue of cruelty from between the lips that kiss. Has anything but he held it fast through all its protein changes? I suppose when one really thinks of it, at the bottom of every one of us lurk two primary emotions, vanity and fear. It is in their knowledge of the aberrations of theirs, of the mad contortions that these lead to, that the other writers seem so especially simple-minded over and over again in reading Dostoyevsky. One is positively seized by the throat with astonishment and man's insight into the labyrinthine retreats of our secret pride. And of our secret fear, his characters at certain moments seem actually to spit gall in wormwood as they tug at the quivering roots of one another's self-esteem. But this fermenting venom, this seething scum, is only the expression of what goes on below the surface every day in every country. Dostoyevsky's Russians are cruelly voluble, but their voluability taps the evil humour of the universal human disease. Their thoughts are our thoughts, their obsessions are our obsessions. Let no one think in his vain security that he has a right to say, I have no part in this morbidity. I am different from these poor madmen. The curious, nervous relief we experience as we read these books is alone a sufficient vindication. They relieve us as well as trouble us, because in these pages we all confess what we have never confessed to anyone. Our self-love is outraged, but outraged with that strange accompaniment of thrilling pleasure that means an expiation paid, a burden lightened. Use the word degenerate, if you will. But in this sense we are all degenerate, for thus and not otherwise is woven the stuff we are of men are made. Certainly the Russian song has its peculiarities, and these peculiarities we feel in Dostoyevsky is nowhere else. He not Tolstoy or Terganyev is the typical Slav writer. But the chief peculiarity of the Russian song is that it is not a shame to express what all mean feel. And this is why Dostoyevsky is not only a Russian writer but a universal writer. From the French point of view he may seem wanting and lucidity and irony. From the English point of view he may seem antinomian and non-moral, but he has one advantage over both. He approaches the ultimate mystery as no western writer except perhaps Shakespeare and Goethe have ever approached it. He writes with human nerves upon parchment made of human tissue and abysm evoker abysm from the darkness wherein he moves. Among other things Dostoyevsky's insight is proved by the profound separation he indicates between morality and religion. To many of us it comes with something of a shock to find harlots and murderers and robbers and drunkards and seducers and idiots expressing genuine and passionate religious faith and discussing with desperate interest religious questions. But it is our psychology that is shallow and inhuman, not his. And the presence of real religious feeling in a nature obsessed with the maddest lusts is a phenomena of universal experience. It may indeed be said what is most characteristically Russian in his point of view. He has told us so himself as the substitution of what might be called sanctity for what is usually termed morality as an ideal of life. The Christianity of which Dostoyevsky has the key is nothing if not an ecstatic invasion of regions where ordinary moral laws based upon prudence and self-preservation disappear and give place to something else. The secret of it, beyond repentance and remorse lies in the transforming power of love lies in fact in vision, purged by pity and terror but its precise nature is rather to be felt than described. It is in connection with this Christianity of his, a Christianity completely different from what we are accustomed to that we find the explanation of the extraordinary interest in the weak as opposed to the strong. The association between Christianity and a certain masterful moral self-assertive energy such as we feel the presence of in England and America might well tend to make it difficult for us to understand his meaning. It is precisely this sort of thing that makes it difficult for us to understand Russia and the Russian religion. It is impossible to escape suspicion that we Western nations have as yet only touched the fringe of what the Christian faith is capable of, whether considered as a cosmic secret or as an apient for human suffering. He saw with clairvoyant distinctness how larger part of the impetus of life's movement proceeds from the mad struggle always going on between the strong and the weak. There was his emphasis upon the struggle that helped Nietzsche to those withering exposures of the tyranny of the weak which cleared the path for his terrible transvaluations. It was Dostoevsky's demonic insight into the pathological subsoil of the religion of pity which helped Nietzsche to forge his flashing counter-blast. But though their vision of the general situation coincided, their conclusions were diametrically different. For Nietzsche the hope of humanity is found in the strong. For Dostoevsky it is found in the weak. Their only ground of agreement is that they both refute the insolent claims of mediocrity and normality. One of the most arresting truths that emerge, like silvery fish at the end of the line of this fisher and the abysses, is the truth that any kind of departure from the normal may become a means of mystic illumination. The same perversion or contortion of mind which may in one direction lead to crime may in another direction lead to extraordinary spiritual clairvoyance and this applies to all deviations from the normal type into all moods and inclinations and normal persons under unusual excitement or strain. The theory is, as a matter of fact, as old as the oldest races. In Egypt and India as well as Rome and Athens the gods were always regarded as in some special way manifesting their will and revealing their secrets to those thus stricken. The view that wisdom has attained along the path of normal health and rational sanity has always been a philosophical or a religious view. Dostoevsky's dominant idea has indeed many affinities with the Pauline one and is certainly quite a justifiable derivation from the evangelical doctrine. It is, however, nonetheless startling to our Western mind. In Dostoevsky's books Madman, Idiots, Drunkards, Consumptors to Generates, Visionaries, Reactionaries, Anarchists, Nympholettes, Criminals, and Saints jostle one another in a sort of dance macabre. But not one of them, but has his moment of ecstasy. The very worst of them, that little band of fanatic supermen of lust whose extravagant mania and excesses of remorse suggest attitudes and gestures that would need an Aubrey Bardsley for illustration, have at moments moods of divine sublimity. Nikolai Viseev-Oldovitch Stavrogan in The Possessed, Severida Galeev, Tvarnia's would-be seducer in Crime and Punishment, in Ivan, in the Brothers Karimatsov. Though all inspired by 10,000 demons cannot be called devoid of a certain mysterious spiritual greatness, perhaps the interesting thing about them is that their elaborate wickedness is itself a spiritualized rather than a sensual quality. Or to put it in another way, there are abysmal depths of spiritual subtlety in their most sensual obsession. The only entirely base criminal I can recall in Dostoyevsky, is Stavrogan's admirer, Peter Stepanovitch. And he is transformed and transfigured at times by the sheer intensity of his worship for his friend. It would be overpowering the reader with names themselves, like ritualized incantations, to enumerate all the perverts and abnormalists, whose various lapses and diseases become in these box mediums of spiritual insight. Though dealing continually with every form of tragedy and misery, Dostoyevsky cannot be called a pessimist. He is so profoundly affected by the spirit of the evangelical beautitudes, that for him, poverty and meekness and hungering, and thirsting and weeping and mourning, are always in the true sense blessed, that is to say, they are the path of initiation, the sorrowful gates to the unspeakable joy. The most beautiful characters he has drawn are perhaps Ilyoshikarimatsov and Prince Mishkin. Both of these being young men and both of them so Christlike that in reading about them, they are held to acknowledge that something in the temper of that figure, that there are two concealed from his followers, has been communicated to this Russian. The naive and yet ironical artlessness of their retorts to the aggressive Philistines who surround them remind one over and over again of those divine bon-mau, with which to use Oscar Wilde's illusion, the redeemer bewildered his assailants. Stefan Trivinovich is reading the miracle of the swine with his female cul-poture. Raskolnikov reading the miracle of the raising of Lazaroth with his prostitutes on you. Our scenes that might strike an English mind is mere melodramatic sentiment, but those who have entered into the Dostoevsky secret know how much more than that there is in them and how deep into the mystery of things and the irony of things they go. There is continually coming upon passages in Dostoevsky, the strange and ambiguous nature of which leads one's thought far enough from the evangelical simplicities, passages that are indeed at once so beautiful and so sinister that they make one think of certain demonic sayings of Goethe or Spinoza, and yet even these passages do no more than throw new and formidable light upon their old situations, the old crossroads. Dostoevsky is not content with indicating how weakness and disease and suffering can become organs of vision. He goes very far further than anyone in his recognition of the secret and perverted cruelty that drives certain persons on to less-rate themselves with all manner of spiritual flagellation. He understands better than anyone else how absurd the philosophical utilitarians are with their axiom that everyone pursues his own happiness. He exposes over and over again with nerve-rending subtlety how intoxicating to the human spirit is the mad lust of self-immolation, of self-destruction. It is really from him that Nietzsche learnt that wanton Dionysic talisman which opens the door to such singular spiritual orgies. Nothing is more characteristic of Dostoevsky's method than his perpetual insistence upon the mania which certain curious human types display for making fools of themselves. The more sacred aspect to this deliberate self-humiliation require no comment. It is obviously good for our spirit's salvation to be made fools in Christ. What one has to observe further under his guidance is the strange passion that certain derelicts in the human vortex have for being trampled upon and flouted. These queer people but there are more of them than one would suppose to arrive in almost sensual pleasure from being abominably treated. They positively lick the dust before their persecutors. They run to kiss the rod. It is this type of person who liked the hero in the story and lispries to terrain. Deliberately rushes into embarrassing situations into situations and among people where he will look a fool in order to avenge himself upon the spectators of his folly by going deeper and deeper into it. If Dostoevsky astounds us by his insight into the abnormalities of normal men he is still more startling when he deals with women. There are certain scenes the scene between Aglaya and Nastasya in The Idiot the scene between Sonja and her mother and sister of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment the scene in The Possessed where Lisa leaves Stevrogan in the morning after the fire and the scene where the woman loved by the mad Karamazov brothers tears her nerves in theirs to pieces and outrageous obliquity which brand themselves upon the mind as reaching the utmost limit of devastating vision and reviewing the final impression left upon one by the reading of Dostoevsky one must confess to many curious reactions he certainly has the power of making all other novelists seen dull in comparison dull or autistic and rhetorical perhaps the most marked effect he has is to leave one with the feeling of a universe with many doors with many doors and not a few terrifyingly dark passages but a universe the opposite of closed or explained though not a single one of his books ends happily the final impression is the reverse of hopeless his very many of a tragedy his dying is a embracing of it precludes any premature despair perhaps a profound deepening of one's senses of the mysterious perversity of all human fate is the thing that lingers a perversity which is itself a kind of redemption for it implies arbitrariness and waywardness and these things mean power and pleasure even in the midst of suffering he is the best possible antidote for the peculiar and paralyzing fatalism of our time a fatalism which makes so much of environment and so little of character in which tends to endow more worldly and material success with a sort of divine prerogative a generation that allows itself to be even interested in such types as the strong efficient craftsman of modern industry and finance is a generation that can well afford a few moral shocks at the hands of Dostoevsky's degenerates the world he reveals is after all in spite of the Russian names the world of ordinary human obliquity the thing for which we have to think is so rich and deep so full of featherless pits and unending vistas every great writer brings his own gift and if others satisfy our craving for destruction and beauty and yet others are longing for simplification and rational form the suggestions he brings of mystery and passion of secret despairs and cold ecstasies of strange renunciations and triumphs are such as must quicken our sense of the whole weird game looking back over these astonishing books it is curious to note the impression left of Dostoevsky's feeling for nature no writer one has met with has less of that tendency to describe scenery which is so tedious an aspect of most modern work and yet Russian scenery seems somehow without our being aware of it to have got installed in our brains Dostoevsky does it incidentally by innumerable little side touches in passing illusions but the general effect remains in one's mind with extraordinary intimacy the great Russian cities in summer and winter their bridges, rivers, squares and crowded tenements provincial towns and wayside villages the desolate outskirts of half deserted suburbs and beyond them all the feeling of the vast melancholy plains crossed by lonely roads such things associated in detail after detail with the passions or sorrows of the persons involved recur as inveterately to the memory as the scenes and weather of our personal adventures it is not the self-conscious art of a lotty or a denuncio it is that much more penetrating and imaginative suggestiveness which arrests us by its vague beauty and terror in Lea or Macbeth this subtle interpenetration between humanity and the familiar stage of its exits and entrances is only one portion of the fate of cosmic destiny one can use no other word which bears so heavily upon us as we read these books in other writers one feels that when one has gone full circle with the principal characters and has noted the descriptive setting all has been done here as in Achilles or Euripides as in Shakespeare and Goethe one is left with an intimation of the clash of forces beyond and below humanity beyond and below nature one stands at the brink of things unspoken and unspeakable one sees the children sport upon the shore and hears the mighty waters rolling ever more in ordinary life we are led and rightly led what else can we do this way and that by personal feeling and taste and experience we fight against religion we fight for morality or fight against morality we are traditionalists or rebels reactionaries or revolutionaries only sometimes in the fury of our faith and our unfaith they come blown across the world margins whispers and hints of undreamed of secrets and unformulated hopes then it is that the faces of the people know grow strange and distant or yield their place to faces we know not and things lighter than air then it is that the most real seems the most stream like and the most impossible the most true for the flowing of the waters of life have fallen into a new rhythm and even the children of Saturn may lift up their hearts it is too fatally easy in these days when machinery that star called Wormwood dominates the world to fall into a state of hard and flippant cynicism or into yet more hopeless and weary irony the unintelligent carefulness of the crowd so sickens one the disingenious sophistry of its hired preachers fills one with such blank depression that it seems sometimes as though the only mood worthy of normal intelligence of callous indifference and universal mockery all men are liars and the ultimate futility grins horribly from its mask well it is precisely at these hours at the hours when the little pincers of the gods especially nip and squeeze that is good to turn the pages of Fyodor Dostoyevsky he brings us his balm of Gilead between the hands of strange people but it is a true alabaster box of precious ointment and though the flowers that contains are snatched from the house of the dead one knows at whose feet it was once poured forth and for whose sake it was broken the books that are the most valuable in this world are not the books that pretend to solve life's mystery with a system they are the books which create a certain mood a certain temper the mood in fact which is prepared for incredible surprises the temper which no surprise can overpower these books of Dostoyevsky must always take their place in this first great role because though he arrives at no conclusion and utters no oracle the atmosphere he throws around us is the atmosphere in which life and death are equal the gestures his people make in their great darkness are the gestures of that which goes upon its way beyond good and beyond evil Dostoyevsky is more than an artist he is perhaps who can tell the founder of a new religion and yet the religion he founds is a religion that has been about us for more years than human history can count he more than anyone makes palpable and near to palpable of Christ the terror of it that shadowy monstrous weight of oppressive darkness through which we signal to each other from our separate hells its ways and waivers it gathers and regathers it thickens and deepens it lifts and sinks and we know all the while that it is a thing we ourselves have made and the intolerable whispers whereof it is full are the children of our own thoughts of our lusts of our fears of our terrible creative dreams Dostoyevsky's books seem as one handles them to flow mysteriously together into one book and this book is the book of the last judgement the great obscure land he leads us over so full of desolate marshes and forlorn spaces and hemlock roots brown tree trunks and Golgotha's broken shards and unutterable refuse as the land of those visions which are our inmost cells and for which we are answerable and none else across this land we wonder feeling for some fingers cold and dead as our own to share the terror with and it might be finding none for as we have groped forward feeling pitiless in the darkness and half-dead ourselves have trodden the dead down and the dead are those who cannot forgive for murdered love has no heart we're worth that should forgive will the Christ never come? End of Chapter 15 Chapter 16 of Visions and Revisions by John Cooper Pois This LibriVox recording is in the public domain Edgar Allen Poe One does not feel by any means that the last word has been uttered upon this great artist has attention been called for instance to the sardonic cynicism which underlies his most thrilling effects, Poe cynicism is itself a very fascinating pathological subject it is an elaborate thing compounded of many strange elements there is a certain dark willful melancholy in it that turns with loathing from all human comfort there is also contempt in it and savage derision there is also in it a quality of a mood that I prefer to call Saturnian the mood of those born under the planet Saturn there is cruelty in it too and voluptuous cruelty though cold reserved and evasive it is this cynicism of his which makes it possible for him to introduce into his poetry it is of his poetry that I wish to speak a certain colloquial salt pungent and acrid and with the smell of the tomb about it it is colloquialism but it is such colloquialism as ghosts or vampires would use Poe remains that has already been said has it not certainly cold while he produces his effects there is a frozen contempt indicated in every line he writes for the poor fessile artists who speak with tears yet the moods through which his anabelles and lasheas and a la looms lead us are moods he must surely himself have known yes he knew them but they were so to speak certainly the atmosphere he lived in that there was no need for him to be carried out of himself when he wrote of them no need for anything but icy pitalist transcription has it been noticed how inhumanly immoral this great poet is not because he drank wine or took drugs all that has been exaggerated in any way what does it matter now but in a much deeper and more deadly sense it is strange the world makes such odd blunders it seems possessed of the idea that absurd amorous scamps like Casanova reach the bottom of wickedness they do not even approach it intrinsically they are quite stupidly good then again Byron is supposed to have been a wicked man he himself aspired to be nothing less but he was everything less he was a great greedy selfish, swaggering, magnanimous infant Oscar Wilde is generally regarded as something short of the just man made perfect but his simple babyish passion for touching pretty things toying with pretty people wearing pretty clothes and drinking absinthe is far too naive a thing to be at bottom evil no really wicked person could have written the importance of being earnest with those delicious paradoxical children rallying one another and Aunt Augusta calling aloud for cucumber sandwiches Siloam itself that scarlet litany which brings to us as in a box of alabaster all the perfumes and odours of amorous lust is not really a wicked play not wicked that is to say unless all mad passion is wicked certainly the lust and Siloam smolders and glows with a sort of underfurness of concentration but after all it is the old universal obsession why is it more wicked to say suffer me to kiss thy mouth jokanan than to say her lips suck forth my soul see where it flies why is it more wicked to say thine eyes are like black holes burnt by torches and Turian tapestry than to cry out as Anthony cries out for the hot kisses of Egypt obviously the madness of physical desire is a thing that can hardly be tempered down to the quiet stanzas of Grey's allergy but it is not in itself a wicked thing or the world would never have consecrated it in the great love legends one may admit that the entrance of the Nubian executioner changes the situation but after all the frenzy of the girl's request the terror of that head upon the silver charger were implicit in her passion from the beginning and our God knows never very far from passion of that kind but all this has changed when we come to Edgar Allen Poe here we are no longer in Troy or Antioch or Canopus or Grimini here it is not anymore a question of ungovernable passion carried to the limit of madness here it is no more the human to human tradition of each man killing the thing he loves here we are in a world where the human element and passion has all together departed and left something else in its place something which is really in the true sense inhumanly immoral in the first place it is the thing devoid of any physical emotion it is sterile immaterial unearthly ice cold in the second place it is in a ghastly sense self-centered it feeds upon itself it subdues everything to itself finally let it be said it is the thing with a mania for corruption the channel house is its bridal couch and the midnight stars whisper to one another of its perversion there is no need for it to kill the thing it loves for it loves only what is already dead for that lingue there must be no profane misinterpretation of this subtle and delicate difference and analysing the evasive chemistry of a great poet's mood one moves wearily reverently among a thousand betrayals the mind of such a being is as the sandstone floor of a deep sea in this sea we pour divers for pearls and strange things must hold our breath long and long and we watch the great glittering fish go sailing by and touch the trailing rose coloured weeds and cross the buried coral it may be that no one will believe us when we return not what we have seen about those carcinets of rubies, ground, drowned throats and those opals that shimmered and gleaned in dead men's skulls at any rate the most superficial critic of Poe's poetry must admit that every single one of his great verses except the little one to Helen is preoccupied with death even in that Helen one perhaps the loveliest though and I do not think the most characteristic of all the Poe's desire is to make the girl he celebrates a sort of classic odd lisk round whose palpable contours and lines he may hang the solemn ornaments of the dead of the dead to whom his soul turns even while embracing the living far far off from where the real Helen waits so statue like a lamp in her hands wavers the face of that other Helen the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of William the longer Poe under the same title and apparently addressed to the same sorceress is more entirely in his mood those shadowy moonlit patirs, those living roses Bedsley has planted them since in another enchanted garden and those eyes that grow so luminously so impossibly large until it is almost pain to be saved by them these things are in Poe's true manner for it is not Helen that he is ever loved but her body her corpse, her ghost, her memory her sepulchre, her look of dead reproach and these things none can take from him the maniacal egoism of a love of this kind it's frozen in humanity can be seen even in those poems which stretch yearning hands towards heaven in Annabelle Lee for instance in that sea kingdom where the maiden lived who had no thought who must have no thought but to love and be loved by me what madness of implacable possession in that so all the night tide I lie down by the side of my darling my darling my life and my bride and her sepulchre by the sea and her tomb by the sounding sea the same remorseless laying on of hands upon what God himself cannot save from us may be discerned in that exquisite little poem which begins thou were stolen to me love for which my soul did pine a green isle in the sea love a fountain and a shrine all wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers and all the flowers were mine and how well in Poe's world do we know that dim gulf for which the spirit hangs mute motionless aghast for still in those days of hers which are trances and in those nightly dreams which are all he lives for he is with her with her still with her always in what ethereal dances by what eternal streams the essence of immorality does not lie in mad byronic passion or in terrible herodian lust it lies in a certain deliberate petrification of the human soul in us a certain glacial detachment from all interests save one a certain frigid insanity of preoccupation with our own emotion and this emotion the sake of which every earthly feeling turns to ice is our death hunger our eternal craving to make what is being be again and again forever the essence of immorality lies not in the hot flame of natural or even unnatural desire it lies in that inhuman and forbidden wish to arrest the process of life to lay a freezing hand a dead hand upon what we love so that it shall always be the same the really immoral thing is to isolate from among the affections and passions and attractions of this human world one particular lure and then having endowed this with the living body of eternal death to bend before it like the satyr before the dead nymph in all breath's drawing and mutter and shudder over it through the eternal recurrence of all things is it any longer concealed from us we're in the immorality of this lies it lies in the fact that what we worship what we will not through eternity let go is not a living person but the body of a person a person who is so far being drugged is not only to die for us but to remain dead for us through all the years in his own life with the lovely consumptive child bride dying by his side Edgar Allen Poe lived as morally as rigidly as any monk the popular talk about his being a drug fiend is ridiculous nonsense he was a laborious artist chiseling and refining his artificial poems day in and day out but his immorality lies as much deeper it is in the mind the mind master shallow for he is nothing if not an absolute cerebralist certainly Poe's verses are artificial they are the most artificial of all poems ever written and this is natural because they were the premeditated expression of a premeditated cult but to say they are artificial does not derogate from the genius would that there were more such artificial verses in the world one wonders if it is clearly understood how the unearthly element in Poe differs from the unearthly element in Shelley it differs from it precisely as death differs from life Shelley's ethereal spiritualism though God knows such gross animals are we it seems inhuman enough as a passionate white flame it is the thin wavering fire point of all our struggles after purity and eternity it is a centrifugal emotion not as was the others a centripetal one it is the noble platonic rising from the love of one's beautiful person to the love of many beautiful persons and from that onward through Transluna gradations the supreme beauty itself Shelley's spirituality is a living, growing, creative thing in its intrinsic nature it is not egoistic at all but profoundly altruistic it uses sex to leave sex behind in its higher level it is absolutely sexless it may transcend humanity but it springs from humanity it is in fact humanity's dream of its own transmutation for all its ethereality and remoteness it earns like a garden pain over the sorrows of the world with infinite planetary pity it would heal those sorrows Edgar Allen's spirituality has not the least flicker of a longing to leave sex behind it is bound to sex as the insatiable ghoul is bound to the corpse he devours the physical ecstasies of sex it has no interest in such human matters but the private of the fact of sex difference and it drifts away whimpering like a dead leaf in empty husk a wisp of chaff a skeleton gossamer the poor actual warm lips so sweetly foresworn may have had small interest for this spiritual lover but now that she is dead and buried into ghost they must remain a woman's lips forever nor have Edgar Allen's faithful ones the remotest interest in what goes on around them occupied with their dead their feeling towards common flesh and blood is the feeling of Caligula what have I done to thee that proud reserved face seems to say as it looks out on us from its dusty title page what have I done to thee that I should so Shelley's clear erotic passion is always a cosmic thing it is the rhythmic expression of the power that creates the world but there is nothing cosmic about the enclosed gardens of Edgar Allen Poe and the spirits that walk among those moon dials and dim pad tears are not of the kind who goes streaming up from land and ocean shouting with joy that Prometheus has conquered what a master he is what a master in the suggestiveness of names to mention only one thing can anyone touch him that word before a gene the name of the ruler of God knows what kingdom of the dead does it not linger about one and follow one like the smell of incense but the poem of all poems in which the very genius of Edgar Allen is embodied is of course Ula Loom like this there is nothing in literature nothing in the whole field of human art here he is from beginning to end a supreme artist dealing with the subject for which he was born that undertone a sadonic cynical humour for it can be called nothing else which grins at us in the background like the grin of a skull how extraordinary characteristic it is and the touches of infernal colloquialism so deliberately fitted in and making us remember many things is there anything in the world like them and now as the night was senescent and the star-dials hinted of mourn and the end of our path are liquecent and nebulous lustre was born out of which a miraculous crescent arose with a duplicate horn a statis bedimond crescent distinct with its duplicate horn and I said but let us pass to his companion the cruelty of this conversation with Psyche is a thing that may well make us shudder the implication is of course double Psyche is his own soul the soul in him which would live and grow and change and know the Vita Nova she is also the companion to which she has turned for consolation she is the second wife and the second wife of this conversation she is the second one the other one in whose living career is he would forget if it might be that which lies down there in the darkness then Psyche uplifting her finger said sadly the star I mistrust its pallor I strangely mistrust oh hasten oh let us not linger oh fly let us fly for we must then the companion thus the comrade and thus the Vita Nova now mark what follows then I pacified Psyche and kissed her and tempted her out of her gloom and conquered her scruples and gloom and we passed to the end of her vista but we are stopped by the door of a tomb by the door of a legended tomb and I said what has written sweet sister on the door of this legended tomb she replied the end of the poem is like the beginning and who can utter the feelings that excites that dark turn of oboe those gulging haunted woodlands of where can fame more thrillingly than a thousand words of description what we have actually felt long ago far off at that strange country of our forbidden dreams what a master he is and if you know what a master he is and if you ask about his philosophy of life let the conqueror Wyrm may answer low does a gala knight within the lonesome latter years is not that an arresting commencement the word gala knight has it not the very malice of the truth of things like Hain it gives this poet pleasure not only to love the dead but to love feeling himself dead that strange poem about Annie with its sickening sentimental conclusion where the poet lies prostrate drugged with all the drowsy syrups in the world and celebrates his euthanasia has a quality of its own it is the inverse of life's dance macabre it is the way we pour dances long to sleep for to sleep you must slumber in just such a bed the old madness is over now the old thirst quenched it was quenched in a water that does not flow so far underground and luxuriously peacefully we can rest at last with the odor of puritan pansies about us and somewhere not far off rosemary and rue Edgar Allan Poe's philosophy of life it may be summed up in the lines from that little poem where he leaves her side who has, for a moment turned his head from the tomb the reader will remember the way it begins take this kiss upon thy brow and the conclusion is the confusion of the whole matter all that we see or see is but a dream within a dream strangely in forlorn silence passes before us as we close his pages the procession of dead cold maids Ligier follows Ulalum Lenore follows Ligier and after them Ulalee and Annabelle and the moaning of the sea tides that wash their feet is the moaning of eternity I suppose it needs a certain kindred perversion in the reader to know the shudder of the loss more dear than life of such as theirs the more normal memory of man will continue repeating the liturgical syllables of a very different requiem our daughters of dreams and of stories that life is not worried of yet Faustian fragolet Dolores Felice, Yoland and Gillette yes life and the life lovers are enamoured still of these exquisite witches these fulcruberas these sirens but a few among us those who understand the poetry of Edgar Allen turn away from them to that rarer colder, more virginal figure to her who has been born and has died so many times to her who was Ligier and Ulalum and Helen and Lenore for are not all these one to her we have loved in vain and shall love in vain until the end to her who wears even in the triumph of her immortality the close clinging, heavily scented seriments of the dead the old bards shall cease in the memory that lingers of frail brides and faithless shall be shriveled as with fire for they loved us not nor knew us and our lips were dumb our fingers could wake not the secret of the liar ourselves so God the singer I had sung amid their ages the long tale of man and his deeds for good and dill but the old world knoweth tis the speech of all his ages man's wrong and ours he knoweth and is still End of chapter 16 Chapter 17 of visions and revisions by John Cooper Poeus this LibriVox recording is in the public domain Walt Whitman I want to approach this great soothsayer from the angle least of all profaned by popular verdicts I mean from the angle of his poetry we all know what a splendid heroic anarchist he was we all know with what rude zest he gave himself up to that cosmic emotion to which in these days the world does respectful of distant reverence we know his mania for the words en masse for the words ensemble democracy and libertad we know his defiant celebrations of sex of amorousness of maternity of that love of comrades which passeth the love of woman we know the world-shaking effort he made into have made it at all quite apart from its success marks him a unique genius to write poetry about every mortal thing that exists to bring the whole breathing palpable world into his gargantuan catalogs it is absurd to grumble at these inventories of the round earth they may not all move to Dorian flutes but they form a background like the list of kings in the bible and the list of ships in Homer against which as against the great blank spaces of life itself the writing upon the wall may make itself visible what seems much less universally realised is the extraordinary genius for sheer poetry which this prophet of optimism possessed I agree that Walt Whitman's optimism is the only kind of that sort of thing that one can submit to without a blush at least it is not in decent bourgeois and ill-bred like the fourth hand Protestantism that Browning dishes up for the delectation of ethical societies it is the optimism of a person who has seen the American Civil War it is the optimism of a man who knows the bowery and the road and has had queer friends and his mortal pilgrimage it is an interesting psychological point this difference between the marching breast forward of Mrs Browning's energetic husband and the taking to the open road of Whitman in some curious way the former gets upon one's nerves where the latter does not perhaps it is that the boisterous animal spirits which one appreciates in the open air become vulgar and irritating when they are practised within the walls of a house a satyr who stretches his hairy shanks in the open forest is a pleasant thing to see but a gentleman with under coloured gloves putting his feet on the chimney piece is not so appealing no doubt it is precisely for these domestic exercises that Mr Chesterton let us say would have us love Browning well, it is a matter of taste but it is not Whitman's optimism that I want to speak it is of his poetry to grasp the full importance of what the great man did that is fair one has only to read modern Libertaves after Walt Whitman Paul Fort for instance seems simply an eloquent prose writer and none of them can get the trick of it, none of them some were once I heard a voice that approached at a voice murmuring of those that sleep upon the wind and those that lie along in the rain cursing Egypt but that voice went its way and for the rest what banalities, what ineptitudes they make the mistake our modern free versifiers of thinking that art can be founded on the negation of form art can be founded on every other negation but not on that one never on that one certainly they have a right to experiment to invent if they can new forms but they must invent them they must not just arrange their lines to look like poetry and leave it at that Walt Whitman's new form of verse was, as all such things must be, as Mr Hardy's strange poetry for instance is, a deliberate and laborious struggle ending in what is a struggle no more to express his own personality in a unique and recognisable manner this is the secret of all style and poetry and it is the absence of this labor, of this premeditated concentration which leads to the curious result we see on all sides of us the fact namely that all young modern parts write alike they write alike and they are alike just as all men are like all other men and all women like all other women when, without the art of clothing or the art of flesh and blood they lie down side by side in the free symmetry the old poetic forms will always have their place they can never grow old fashioned any more than Piscinello or El Greco or Botticelli or Scopus or any ancient Chinese painter can grow old fashioned but when a modern artist or poet sets to work to create a new form let him remember what he is doing it is not the past time of an hour this it is not the casual gesture of a mad iconoclast breaking classic statues into mud out of which to make goblins it is the fierce tenacious patient constructive work of a lifetime based upon a tremendous and overpowering vision such a vision Walt Whitman had and to such constant inspired labour he gave his life notwithstanding his talk about loafing and inviting his soul the free poetry of Walt Whitman obeys inflexible occult laws the laws commanded unto it by his own creative instinct we need as Nietzsche says to learn the art of commands of this kind and the words of old values do not spend all their time sipping absinthe is it a secret then the magical unity of rhythm which Walt Whitman has conveyed to the words he uses those long plangent wailing lines broken by little gurgling gasps and sobs those sudden thrilling apostrophes and recognitions those far drawn flute notes those resounding sea trumpets all such effects have their place in the great orchestral symphony he conducts take that little poem quite spoiled before the end by a horrible bit of democratic vulgarity which begins come I will build a continent indissoluble I will make the most splendid race this I never shone upon is it possible to miss the hidden spherical law which governs such a challenge take the poem which begins in the growth by the margins of pond waters do you not divine delicate reader the peculiar subtlety of the reference to the rank range-wrenched anonymous weeds which every day we pass on our walks in land a botanical name would have driven the magic of it quite away Walt Whitman more than anyone can convey to us that sense of the unclassified palmel of weeds and stones and rubble and wreckage of vast desolate spaces the space is full of debris and litter which is most of all characteristic of your melancholy American landscape but which those who love England know we're defined even among our trim gardens no one like Walt Whitman can convey to us the magical ugliness of certain aspects of nature the bleak stunted godforsaken things the murky pools where the grey leaves fall the dead reds where the wind whistles no sweet fairy tunes the unspeakable margins of murderous floods the tangled sea drift scurfed with scum the black sea windrow of broken shells and dead fishes scales the roots of willow trees in moonlit places crying out for demon lovers the long moaning grass that grows outside the walls of prisons the leprous mosses that cover paupers graves the mountainous wastes and blighted marshlands which only unknowing wild birds ever touch with their flying wings and of which madmen dream these are the things the ugly terrible things that this great optimist turns into poetry yo honk cries the wild goose as it crosses the midnight sky others may miss that mad-tossed shadow that heartbreaking defiance but from amid the drift of leaves by the roadside this bearded faker of outcasts has caught its meaning and has heard and given it its answer ah gentle and tender reader thou whose heart it may be has never cried all night for what it must not name did you think Swinburne or Byron were the poets of love? perhaps you do not know that the only short story on the title page of which Guy de Maupassant found it in him to write that word as a story about the wild things that we go out to kill Walt Whitman too does not confine his notion of love to normal human coca trees the most devastating love cry ever uttered except that of King David over his son is the cry this American poet dares to put into the heart of a wild bird from Alabama that has lost its mate I wonder if critics have done justice to the incredible genius of this man who can find words for that aching of the soul we do not confess even to our dearest the sudden words he makes use of and certain connections or us hush us confound us take our breath as some of Shakespeare's do with their mysterious congruity has my reader ever read the little poem called tears? and what purity in the truest deeper sense lies behind his pity for such tragic craving his understanding of what love-stricken banished ones feel I do not speak now of his happily amorous verses they have their place I speak of those desperate lines that come here and there throughout his work where with his huge totanic back set against the world wall and his wild tossed beards streaming in the wind he seems to hold open by main gigantic force that door of hope which fate and God and man laws of nature are all endeavoring to close and he holds it open and it is open still it is for this reason let the profane hold their peace that I do not hesitate to understand very clearly why he addresses a certain poem to the Lord Christ whether it be true or not that the pure and heart see God it is certainly true that they have a power of saving us from God's law of cause and effect according to this law we all have our reward and reap what we have sown but sometimes like a deep sea murmur there rises from the poetry of Walt Whitman a protest that must be heard then it is that the tetrax of science forbidden vain that one should raise the dead for the dead are raised up and come forth even in the likeness wherein we love them if words my friends if the use of words and poetry can convey such intimations as these to such generations as ours can anyone deny that Walt Whitman is a great poet deny it who may or will there will always gather round him as he predicted out of city tenements and artist studios and factory shops and warehouses and bordello's eh and it may be out of the pearl use of palaces themselves a strange mad heart broken company of life defeated derelicts who come not for cosmic emotion or democracy or anarchy or amorousness or even comradeship but for that touch that whisper that word that handout stretched in the darkness which makes them know against reason and argument and all evidence that they may hope still for the impossible is true end of chapter 17 conclusion of visions and revisions by John Cooper Poe this LibriVox recording is in the public domain conclusion we have been together you who read this and to you whoever you are whether pleased or angry I make a comrade signal who knows we might be the very ones to understand each other if we met we have been together in the shadow of the presences that make life tolerable and now we must draw our conclusion and go our way our conclusion ah that is a hard matter the world we live in lends itself better to beginnings than conclusions or does anything in this terrible flowing tide even begin end or beginning we find ourselves floating upon it this great tide and we must do what we can to get a clear glimpse of the high stars before we sink I wonder if in the midst of the stammering and blurted incoherences the lapses and levities of this quaint book a sort of orientation as theologians say now has emerged at all I feel myself as though it had though it is hard enough to put it into words I seem to feel that a point of view not altogether irrelevant in our time has protected a certain light upon us as we advance together let me try to catch some few filmy threads of this before it vanishes even though like a dream in the waking its outlines waver and recede and fade until it is lost in space we gather then, I fancy from this kind of hurried passing through enchanted gardens a sort of curious unwillingness to let our fixed convictions deprive us of any more of the spiritual adventures to which we have a right we begin to understand the danger of such convictions of such opinions of such constructive consistency we grow prepared to give ourselves up to yield ourselves willingly to whatever new revelation of the evasive one chance may throw in our way it is in such yielding such surprises by the road such new vistas and perspectives that life loves to embody itself to refuse them as to turn away from life and dwell in the kingdom of the shadow why not the demon who has presided over our wanderings together seems to whisper why not for a little while try the experiment of having no fixed ideas no inflexible principles no concentrated dame why not simply react to one mysterious visitor after another as they approach us and caress or hurt us and go their way why not for an interlude be life's children instead of her slaves or her masters and let her lead us and great crafty mother whether she will there will be much less harm done by such an embracing of fate and such a cessation of foolish agitations than many might suppose and more than anything else this is what our generation requires we are overridden by theorists and preachers and ethical water carriers we need a little rest, a little yawning and stretching and being ourselves a little quiet sitting at the feet of the immortal gods we need to get to be troubled for a brief interval if the immortal gods speak in strange and variable tongues and offer us diverse shaped chalices let us drink dear friends let us drink as the most noble prophetess backbook used to say there are many vintages in the kingdom of beauty and yet others god knows even outside that let us drink and ask no troublesome questions the modern puritan seeks to change the nature of our natural longing he tells us that what we need is not less labour but more labour not less concentrated effort but more concentrated effort not heaven in fact but hell I do not know there is much effectation abroad in some hypocrisy puritans were ever addicted to hypocrisy but because of these virtuous prophets of action are we to give up our beautific vision why not be honest for once that what man born of woman craves for in his heart is a little joy a little happiness a little pleasure before he goes hence and is no more seen we know that we know nothing why then pretend that we know the importance of being up and doing there may be no such importance the common burden of life we have indeed all to bear and they are not very gracious or lovely souls who seek to put it off on others but for this additional burden this burden of being consistent and having a strong character does it seem very wise and so brief an interval to put the stress just there somehow I think a constant dwelling in the company of the great masters leads us to take with a certain pinch of salt the strenuous duties which the world's voices makes so clamorous it may be that our sense of their greatness and remoteness produces a certain humility in us and a certain mood of waiting on the spirit not altogether encouraging to what this age and its fussy worship of energy calls our creative work wow there is a place doubtless for these energetic people and their strenuous characters and their creative work but I think there is a place so for those who cannot rush about the marketplace or climb high alps or make engine spin or race with girded loins after truth I think there is a place still left for harmless spectators in this little theatre of the universe and such spectators will do well if they see to it that nothing of the fine or the rare or the exquisite escapes them somebody must have the discrimination in the detachment necessary to do justice to our creative minds the worst of it is everybody in these days rushes off to create and pauses not a moment to look round to see whether what is being created is worth creating we must return to the great masters we must return to the things in life that really matter and then we shall acquire perhaps in our little way the art of keeping the creators of ugliness at a distance let us at least be honest the world is a grim game and we need sometimes the very courage of Lucifer to hold our enemies back but in the chaos of it all and the madness and frenzy let us at least hold fast to that noble daughter of the gods men name imagination with that to aid us we can console ourselves for many losses for many defeats for the life of the imagination flows deep and swift and in it's flowing it can bear us to undreamed of coasts where the children of fantasy and the children of irony dance on heedless of theory and argument the world is deep as Arthustra says and deep as pain and deeper than pain is joy I do not think that they have reached the final clue the bulk of experience and struggle and the storming of the heights sometimes it is not from experience but from beyond experience that the rumor comes sometimes it is not from the struggle but from the rest after the struggle that the whisper is given sometimes the voice comes to us not from the heights but from the deeps the truth seems to be that if the clue is to be caught at all it will be caught where we least expect it and for the catching of it what we have to do is not to let our theories our principles, our convictions our opinions impede our vision but now and then to lay them aside but whether with them or without them to be prepared for the spirit bloweth where it listeth and we cannot tell whence it cometh or whether it goeth end of conclusion end of visions and revisions by John Cooper Paulus