The Poet Exiled and Restored:

A Reconsideration of Shelley's "Defence'

and Barfield's Poetic Diction

Lionel Adey

University of Victoria

Both Shelley's "Defence of Poetry" and Barfield's Poetic Diction were born out of controversies.1 If Shelley took too seriously Peacock's attack upon the Romantic poets in "Four Ages of Poetry," if Peacock had made fun of them rather than treating them as enemies, he did so from a position akin to that of Jane Austen in Sense of Sensibility, one which can be traced back beyond Johnson or Pope to Hobbes. Like Hobbes, Peacock finds primitive man ignoble, like the founders of the Royal Society eschews metaphor in favour of literal statement, like the Augustans sees the poet as plying his craft for aristocratic patrons, and like Austen prefers sense to sensibility. In Peacock's Iron Age the poet hymns the prevailing chieftain, in his Golden Age mythologises the king's ancestors and tribal heroes, in his Silver Age seeks to please an educated public and in his Age of Brass tries vainly to evoke the spirit and emulate the achievements of great predecessors in the craft. With each advance in knowledge, the poet yields more ground to the historian, the philosopher or in modern times the scientist. "A poet in our times," concludes Peacock, "is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community. He lives in the days that are past. His ideas, thoughts, feelings, associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs and exploded superstitions. The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward." 2

Peacock calls on contemporary poets to remain content with the canon of "good poetry" and turn to some "useful study." In his day--that of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron and Keats--men of intellect have abandoned poetry for such "better channels" as mathematics, science, philosophy, history, politics and economics. From their "upper air" they can "smile at the little ambition" and "circumscribed perceptions" of those "drivellers and mountebanks" who contend for the "poetical palm" or "critical chair" (p. 22-23). While Peacock is clearly having fun, some very similar judgments in Macaulay's essay on Milton3 and the marginal position of the poet in our contemporary culture should constrain us to consider whether the writing and appreciation of new poems can again become of central concern to the reading public. Before taking the question up in its concluding portion, this essay will set out Shelley's ground of defence and consider its bearing on Barfield's Poetic Diction.

Since Shelley completed only the first part of his projected "Defence," he never answered Peacock's attack upon contemporary poets. Instead, his essay is confined to a vindication of the permanent importance of Poetry for the human psyche and culture, and a claim for the poet as being endowed with imagination and sensibility beyond the average. The latter claim was vigorously attacked by C. S. Lewis, who in his controversy The Personal Heresy reasserted the Augustan view of the poet as a craftsman rather than a prophet or "genius," condemning the Romantics for directing attention to the author rather than the text. 4

In a controversy with Barfield consequent upon the submission of Poetic Diction as a thesis, Lewis argued at first that metre and versification, rather than metaphor, constituted the poet's working materials, but eventually accorded a higher place to metaphor and saw imagination, no longer merely an "image-making faculty," as uniting those forms of knowledge from which Peacock had seen poetry as successively excluded. 5

This essay will in turn consider the differences of Peacock, Shelley and Barfield, and to a lesser extent Lewis, concerning imagination and reason, poetry and prose, unconscious and conscious pleasure in poetry, poetry and criticism, primal language and the changing role of the poet.

I: Imagination and Reason

Shelley defines imagination as to poiein, "the principle of synthesis." As the maker of an object puts its

components together, so the poetic imagination fuses into one forms "common to universal nature and

existence itself." Shelley defines reason as to logizein, "the principle of analysis," by which things remain

separate and their relations are considered as in an algebraic formula or equation. Imagination, he adds,

"respects the similitudes" and reason "the differences" of things. (p. 277) He does not, therefore, dispute

Peacock's claim that rational analysis is fatal to poetic imagination.

The deconstructive criticism in vogue at present could hardly be more clearly described than as "to logizein"

(the act of splitting up) which "respects the differences of things." Whereas, in Shelley's memorable image

of poetic imagination in terms of an Aeolian lyre, "a principle within...produces not melody alone but

harmony" between the "external and internal impressions . . . driven over" (loc. cit.) the psyche, the object

of deconstruction is by intensive analysis of a text to demonstrate irreconcilable disharmony between its

elements, and also between what it purports to say and its various strands of meaning. The raison d'etre of

present day semiotics, moreover, is the treatment of words as quasi-algebraic signs related not to objects

in the external world but to each other. 7 Again Shelley's description of rational analysis as treating "the

relations of things...simply as relations," as though thoughts concerning things were "algebraical

representations," fits exactly. A further concern of Marxist literary theory is to show the whole notion of

an inner self capable of producing "internal" impressions to be chimerical. 8

Not surprisingly, in his preface to the second edition of Poetic Diction (1951), Barfield furiously attacked

logical positivism (now called linguistic analysis), the parent of deconstruction and semiotics. The purpose

of the linguistic philosophers was "to sweep away, as meaningless, all statements not related to physically

observable or verifiable events, to limit the sphere of man's knowledge to the increasingly tentative

findings of physical science, and to dismiss all other affirmations as meaningless." (pp. 16-17) For the same

reason, Barfield attacked, more moderately, I. A. Richards' distinction between "emotive" and "referential

language." (pp. 14-15) Linguistic analysis, deconstruction and semiotics represent the extreme of that

historical tendency that Peacock called "the progress of reason."

Within the book itself, Barfield took a more constructive line, arguing that both the "poetic" and "logical"

mind were necessary, the one for the production of poems, the other for their appreciation. Though

distinguishing between them in consciously similar vein to Shelley, he sets the distinction within a

philological and historical context, explaining how an originally portmanteau word such as the Greek penname

has over historical epochs split into the separate meanings "wind," "spirit" and breath," and how a poetic

metaphor (as in the hymn-line "Breathe on me, breath of God")9 can restore a forgotten unity between the

poetic mind and its natural or spiritual environment.

II: Poetry and Prose

Peacock treats prose as the language of "reason" and both he and Shelley treat poetry as the language of

imagination. This involves the difficulty that imagination may be as evident in the figurative language of,

say, the King James Bible as in that of Shakespeare. The difficulty was to increase with the advent of

Victorian imaginative prose writers such as Dickens or Hardy, or even Newman. Shelley escaped by calling

Plato and Bacon poets, the former on account of his imagery and "melody," the latter on account of his

"sweet and majestic rhythm" (p. 280). Thereby he ran the opposed risk of implicitly denying value to rhyme,

metre, stannic and sound-patterns. He tried to resolve his dilemma by combining the Wordsworthian

principle that poetic diction need not differ from that of good prose with an attempt to identify ordered

language with ordered thought:

Sounds as well as thought have relation both between each other and towards that which they represent, and

a perception of the order of those relations has always been found connected with a perception of the order

of those relations of thoughts. Hence the language of poets has ever affected a certain uniform and

harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less indispensable

to the communication of its influence than the words themselves, without reference to that peculiar order.

Hence the vanity of translation . . . (p. 280).

Even if more clearly explained, Shelley's solution would be no solution. Order and recurrence may be

as evident in the prose of, say, Hooker or Gibbon, whom one of us would consider poets, as in Plate or

Bacon or, one may add, the translated prose of the Bible or Book of Common Prayer.

Barfield gets round the difficulty by including imaginative prose within his "broad" conception of poetry,

and metrics, stanza-forms and sound-patterning within his more specific term "verse." He takes care also to

preserve Shelley's view of poetry (to poiein) as imaginative synthesis. Noting that with the exception of

Hegel critics have rarely supported the popular identification of poetry with metrical form, he adds:

As Verse is an excellent word for metrical writing of all kinds, whether poetic or unpoetic, and

Prose for un-metrical writing, in this book the formal literary distinction is drawn between verse

and prose; whereas that between. . . poetic on the one hand and prosaic on the other is a spiritual

one, not confined to literature. (p. 145)

This enables Barfield to his thesis that diction properly called "poetic" involves imaginative identification

with its object and that called "prosaic" a detachment for purposes of judgment or analysis. His distinction

enables him to find a place for criticism both in the completion of a literary work and in its reception or

subsequent appreciation. It still runs the risk that, being an either-or distinction rather than a sliding

scale, it might be differently applied in different periods. Readers influenced by Romanticism might consider

Pope's Rape of the Lock or, still more, his Essay on Man, to consist of "prosaic" thoughts in "verse" form

while those not so influenced might regard them as true poems. If detachment from the object be regarded

as the invariable characteristic of "prosaic" writing, neither Pope nor Johnson was a poet, for no lines could

be more "prosaic" in this sense than "Let Observation with extensive view/ Survey mankind from China to

Peru."

One way out of this difficulty might be to call the opening lines of "The Vanity of Human Wishes" prosaic

while applying the term "poetic" to more concrete portions, such as the account of the scholar as subject to

"Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail" (1.160) or the metaphor "Must helpless man, in ignorance

sedate/Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?" (11.345-46) In this case, a poet writes poetically when

extrapolating from his own experience or when employing a metaphor that clearly applies to himself among

others, but prosaically if postulating a detachment so complete as to be unimaginable. Another escape route

might be to restrict the term "poetic" to observations that include a correlative drawn from concrete

experience. Thus "From Marlborough's eyes the streams of dotage flow" would in every sense be poetic,

while "Swift expires a driveler and a show" (11.317-18) might be so only in the sense that Shelley finds

Bacon's writing poetic, i.e. rhythmic.

Neither the opening couplet nor that on Marlborough and Swift, however, seems to represent the

synthesizing quality of the poetic imagination as does the line on the scholar's lot. This quality may be more

evident in the recurring motifs of a novel such as William Faulkner's Light in August, where the figure of

the ever-twisting street, developed in the tenth chapter, depicts the meaningless succession of jobs and

locations in the main character's life, in contrast to that of the straight road used in the opening and

closing chapters to depict the meaningful life of Lena Grove who, after failing to marry the father of her

child, walks out of the novel with a truer man as her future husband. In the recurrent figure of the street,

the novelist usually remains detached, but sometimes imaginatively participates in the life not merely of his

psychopathic anti-hero Joe Christmas, but in that of any rootless or homeless wanderer in the urban

wastelands of the modern United States, in its endless sameness and futility.

The comparison between Johnson's poem and Faulkner's novel demonstrates the validity of Barfield's claim

that the distinction between poetic and prosaic language is "spiritual"--in this case a matter of imaginative

participation and dominant images--rather than simply one of rhythm or concrete diction.

III. Poetry and Critical Appreciation

Shortly after beginning to teach English at Oxford, Lewis came across and was soon belaboring Barfield

with Samuel Alexander's distinction between the "Enjoyed" and the "Contemplated." 10 As Lewis illustrates

it, "When you see a table you 'enjoy' the act of seeing and 'contemplate' the table....In bereavement you

contemplated the beloved and the beloved's death and, in Alexander's sense, 'enjoy' the loneliness and grief;

but a psychologist, if...considering you as a case of melancholia, would be contemplating grief and enjoying

psychology." 11 During the "Great War" with Barfield that ensued from the submission of Poetic Diction

as a thesis, Barfield protested vigorously against Lewis' "Box and Cox" alternation of enjoyment and

contemplation. Neither Lewis nor Alexander thought it possible to enjoy and contemplate in the same

moment. Just as contemplating a desirable feeling or state--pleasure in a natural scene or in love--could

mend one's enjoyment, so in Lewis' view it was possible to end or at least diminish an undesirable

state--grief or rage--by contemplating it. As its title indicates, his Grief Observed represented an attempt

to cope in this way with his feelings after his wife's death. In the "Great War" he argues that one should

try to view suffering with divine objectivity, as in "the tragedies of the poets." 12

Despite his objection Barfield, following Shelley, draws just such a distinction between making a poem and

taking conscious pleasure in it. In the "infancy of the world," says Shelley, "neither poets nor their

auditors are fully aware of the excellence of poetry, which acts in a "divine" way "beyond and above

consciousness." It is for "future generations to contemplate [my italics] and measure the mighty cause and

effect...." (p. 281). In context, Shelley is referring to the future judgment of poets by "the wise of many

generations" (p. 282). It is surely no coincidence, nevertheless, that after describing enjoyment ("divine and

unapprehended"), he should use the very word "contemplate" when referring to subsequent appreciation of

the poem. After quoting this passage, Barfield elaborates:

when I speak of the poetic I mean what many people would call the 'creative.' The poet is a man

speaking to men. In order that 'poetry,' strictly so called, should exist, an appreciating imagination,

in which aesthetic experience can light up, is...as necessary as the creative activity of the poet. And

so, although the poetic principle in language has waned since Homer's day, poetry as inner experience

has increased. The light of conscious poesy which can irradiate a modern imagination, as it comes into

contact with, say, the Homeric hexameters, is not to be compared with such fitful aesthetic gleams

as must indeed have flared up now and again amid the ...grosser pleasures preoccupying the dim

self-consciousness of his Homer's own (probably half-intoxicated) audience (p. 106).

Barfield's real originality rests not in his somewhat patronising speculation but in his subsequent parallel

between the aesthetic history of civilization and that of the individual. Citing Wordsworth on the way a

child's experiences can "acquire poetic value as remembered by the conscious, full-grown man" as being "the

true sense in which the child is father of the man," he points out that the man cannot recall very much of

his childhood or of man, ancestral experience, and so if wishing to increase this "limited store of wisdom"

must seek "some way of renewing the immediate activity of the poetic principle." Since this principle is

"dying out of language," the poet can find it only in himself:

The same creative activity, once operative in meaning without man's knowledge or control, and only

recognized long afterwards, when he awoke to contemplate, as it were, what he had written in his

sleep, this is now to be found with in his own consciousness. And it calls him to become the true

creator, the maker of meaning himself (p. 107).

Barfield immediately qualifies this by pointing out that the poet, "purely as creator, cannot even today be

regarded as a self-conscious individual, for such consciousness is impossible without rational analytic

thought." Insofar as he "can appreciate, and so correct, his own poetry" or choose his subject, "he is not

maker, but comparer, or judge; and he cannot be both simultaneously." (107-8).

This seems to exclude any notion of a poem as something that writes itself, as Barfield underlines by

pointing to the "delicacy and rapidity" with which creation and appreciation interact, and by stressing that

"the bare fact of verbal expression implies the operation of the rational principle," for apart from proper

names "every word in the language is a generalization" and any "poetic values" that were "given" in early

speech "but relies of still more living values which must have obtained in consciousness before the birth of

speech." Here he implicitly denies Shelley's claim that speech "created thought." He seems to envisage a

primal man aware of particular sights, sounds, smells, etc., but not yet in possession of words to categorize

and describe them. Presumably our ancestor was a poet or artist in seeking to recreate these by imitation.

Barfield traces an evolutionary progression by which shorter and shorter intervals have elapsed between

creation and appreciation. At first, the poet was "possessed" by a divinity that spoke though him at its

behest, next inspired by a muse he could invoke, and finally inspired in our usual sense of feeling the impulse

to write something not consciously willed or thought out. Formerly "inspiration," literally "breathing-in,"

came at random, but is now thought of as a "mood that may come and go in the course of a morning's work"

(p. 109). Throughout history, therefore, there has been a "gradual reduction of the inevitable interval"

between the two "nevertheless incompatible" moods until now this "huge change from poetic to appreciative,

from creative to contemplative . . . flickers with dazzling rapidity in the being of a single poet" which,

perhaps, he "deliberates an epithet." (p. 110).

A similar shortening of time between the reader's enjoyment and contemplation of a poem does not

necessarily follow. In practice, however, the interval between entrancement and critical appreciation is

often shortened by the requirements of educational courses or the meeting of minds in literary

conversation. Whether the benefit of introducing schoolchildren to great poems outweighs the harm done by

demanding their premature "contemplation" may never be decided, but the experience of New Criticism as

practiced by a few teachers and reviewers suggests that Lewis had good reason to mistrust evaluative

criticism. Barfield's objection, more to the New Criticism of I. A. Richards than to that of, F. R. Leavis or

Yvor Winters, was to the implicit dismissal of "non-referential" language in a poem, that is of words and

images with a metaphysical rather than a sensory referent, such as the positivist can verify in his "real

world." 13

IV: Primal Language

While only Barfield seriously defines the role and activity of the modern poet, all three critics envisage

primal language and thinking as poetic. None seems to allow sufficiently for the collectiveness of life in a

primitive community. Peacock, in particular, conceives of poetry in his Iron Age as the reciting of a

chieftain's deeds by a poet who is akin to a modern entrepreneur.

Shelley accepts the notion of a primitive Iron Age prior to the Golden by his very distinction between the

"youth of the world" in which men "dance and sing and imitate natural objects" in a set "rhythm or order"

and the more self-conscious state in which poets remark what has given them the most intense and pure

pleasure. In the latter stage, as individuals they "express the influence of society or nature upon their own

minds" in language "vitally metaphorical," inasmuch as it remarks "before unapprehended relations of things"

until words become "signs" rather than "pictures" of thoughts (p. 278). Shelley here seems to describe the

decline of figures into what Barfield calls "dead metaphors" that have become literal. Like Barfield, he

regards the modern poet's task as to supply fresh metaphors that will re-engage the reader's imagination.

Barfield raises the question Shelley has passed over concerning what language human beings might have used

before any considered themselves poets, in the fourth chapter of Poetic Diction, "Meaning and Myth." He

envisages an original unity of denotative words, evident in the holophrase, from which in time emerged

separate words for different shades of meaning, and distinct parts of speech. The change he sees as parallel

with man's growing sense of his distinctness from nature, and of the distinctness of other organisms from

each other. Innumerable words for to cut various trees divide into separate nouns and the verb "cut," each

of which requires a division between specific and general, concrete and abstract. Elsewhere Barfield has

exemplified the holophrase in Greek that translates into "nature-life-mortal-man-Socrates" 14. As parts of

speech developed such a holophrase would evolve into the simple sentences from which was fashioned the

model syllogism.

To explain the evolution of metaphor, Barfield has to dispose of a naive nineteenth-century assumption that

man first experienced sun, moon and earth as purely material entities, then later devised myths to account

for their origin. Instead, he contends, early man experienced nature as a living organism, the sun as a being

corresponding to Hellos, the corn as a primal Demeter rising from Earth at the sun-god's bidding. Myth,

therefore, is in his celebrated phrase "the ghost of concrete meaning" (p. 92). Myth, in other words, replaced

formerly wordless sensation, at once physical and spiritual. In Homer's time, "millions of spiritual beings

walked the earth." (p. 93). The difference between Steiner and Barfield, as Patrick Grant has pointed out, is

that Steiner would take Homer's mythology literally, whereas with Barfield one is not quite sure whether

he is not, after all, merely putting the matter from the poet's viewpoint.

Not much of the criticism of Barfield by Grant and by Anthony Nuttall for making unverifiable assumptions

concerning the primitive mind is germane to the present argument .15 We need only ask what kind of

evidence he could reasonably have been expected to adduce. Since only those committed to Anthroposophy (as

I am not) can take seriously "occult" discernment or "Akashic records," the only conceivable evidence must

come from the oldest literature available to us, that is, from Homer or the earliest books of the Bible. Two

incidents, Athene advising Telemachus to search for Odysseus when unable to control his mother's Suitors,

and the revelation of the Ten Commandments to Moses, might serve as paradigms. The idea of the quest for

his father that comes to Telemachus as advice from the goddess--where we might say the unconscious--takes

him on a journey that does not of itself resolve his predicament. Matured by his search, however, he returns

to help Odysseus dispose of the Suitors. Odysseus, moreover, owes his safe return to the guidance of

Athene and the prevalence of her pleas for him over the contrary wishes of Poseidon. The poet envisages

heaven and earth as prone to disputes that determine both the contrarieties of human fortune and their

resolution. There is no separation between the psyche and its environment. The same point might be made by

a mere allusion to Moses's reception of the divine law out of the burning bush.

V: The Poet

In Peacock's Iron Age poets were marginal figures, observing and praising their rulers. In Shelley's "youth

of the world," they taught their listeners law, religion and the arts. Shelley's claim goes back at least to

Sir Philip Sidney, who said that in the "infancy of society" every author was of necessity a poet. 16 We can

explain this belief in complementary ways. Like Shelley, we can suppose the first language, dance-movement

and drama mimetic, poetry being synchronous with dancing and music, as in Greek drama or biblical accounts

of dancing "before the Lord." We can also argue from biblical poetry that in ancient and purely oral cultures

declaimed speech that enshrined tribal customs and folklore was necessarily rhythmic or otherwise

patterned for ease of recall, as in the repetitive structure of a psalm-verse.

Even Peacock grants that in his Golden age poets such as Homer formulated the tribal history and

mythology. In "civilized" ages, in his view, poets have fewer and fewer functions, and in his

post-Enlightenment time none. In Shelley's view they have the function of awakening or refreshing the

consciousness of their readers, but retain their ancient function of teaching "the truth of things." This he

explains as the "creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature as existing in the

mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds." (p. 281). Leaving aside the ambiguity of

the uncapitalized word "creator" and the unproven assumption that human nature is "unchangeable," we must

assume the knowledge Shelley has in mind to be attentive acquaintance rather than learning, connaitre

rather than savoir. Though we already knew that a thankless child was a cause of pain, Shakespeare's King

Lear makes us vicariously experience it is as being "sharper than a serpent's tooth." ( I. iv. 312).

While taking a broadly similar view of poetry-as-knowing, Barfield goes further in two ways. Poetic diction

and imagery, first, expand the reader's consciousness, so that from the pidgin English description as

"Thlee-piece bamboo, two-piece puff-puff, walk-along inside, no-can-see" (p. 43), he knows what it feels like

to board a steamship. Similarly, from the "truth and beauty" of Shelley's "My soul is an enchanted boat," the

reader looks upon real boats, waves or swans through fresh eyes (p. 55). Secondly, almost any addition to

common speech occurs initially as a metaphor. Barfield illustrates this from the painting term "point of

view," probably first used in a psychological sense by Coleridge (p. 112).

Why "point if view," remains valuable as a critical term while the accounting metaphor "bottom line" has

already become a wearisome cliché can be inferred from Barfield's stipulation that the "strangeness of a

new term should be "interior," that it should "be felt as arising from a different plane or mode of

consciousness," not merely as "an eccentricity of expression." (p. 171). "Point of view" enables us to look at

stories in a new and valuable way, "bottom line" merely to say differently something we already knew or

thought.

In the "Great War" controversy Barfield compared the coining of a new metaphor to the formation of a new

hypothesis in science .17 Dante's Sun, he suggested, acquired our modern sense of one fixed star among

many when someone having in mind the images of the Copernican solar system and of a fixed star with its

own plants suddenly fused those images "by means of that faculty which Coleridge . . .dubbed "esemplastic

[Greek eis henplattein]" Introspection, in Barfield's view, will reveal this to be the origin of fresh meaning,

and what distinguishes a truth from a truism.

Barfield wrote before Sir Karl Popper propounded his "falsification criterion" of a verified proposition in

science as one that had withstood attempted disproof, but his view of a new hypothesis as involving such an

act of imagination is consistent with Popper's.18 The only conceivable test of a fresh metaphor, however, is

pragmatic, whether it provokes in the reader a new awareness of its object, in Barfield's definition a "felt

change of consciousness." This surely justifies Lewis in distinguishing between imagination as the "organ of

meaning" and reason as that of truth. By the same token, however, it surely justified Shelley and

Wordsworth in regarding the poet as having a keener than normal sensitivity to objects within his purview.

it also justifies Barfield in his separation of "poetic" diction--imaginative , concrete and

metaphorical--from "prosaic" diction--rational, tending toward abstraction, and marked at best by fluency

and planned sequence. It cannot escape the attentive reader of Newman or Gibbon that poetic language in

the sense of recurrent images or rhythms is of the essence of the finest prose.

What we can say to justify both Peacock and Barfield is that in what we commonly call prose the balance

between rational and imaginative writing varies according to the author's purpose. In the scientific,

philosophical or even historical treatise it may tilt toward the prose end of the scale, in some novels and

descriptive or polemical works tilt somewhat less noticeably toward the poetic end. The virtual

disappearance of the long poem in our century. however, implies the elimination of the "prose" element from

poetry: that is, of rational structure and sequence as in Paradise Lost or even Wordsworth's Prelude. The

same process of elimination is inherent in most varieties of "abstract" or "sound" poetry.

The two principal kinds of abstract poetry identified in a recent article by Stephen Scobie are "non-iconic"

poetry and poetry of "incomplete specification." In the former. the poet abandons language, so far as

possible, for pure sound. Being non-referential and geared to the sheer release of energy in oral

performance, this is not the same thing as the essentially mimetic primaeval poetry envisaged by Shelley and

Barfield. In the latter kind, the poet seeks to subvert the "inherently referential" character of words by

arranging them at random, duplicating voices on tape or otherwise setting up tensions between sense and

sound, language as content and language as dis-contented.

While some advocates of the sound poem see it as a return to primitive language, that is to "the origins of

our humanity," the common element in both the major kinds is the abandonment, as I earlier suggested, of

rational sequence and of reference to objects in the world we all share. In this sense, poetry is losing its

last traces of the "prosaic." At the same time, the poet as individual self or personality is, ideally,

eliminated in favour of "libidinal de-repression" or "direct emotional confrontation." In these senses, the

framework or pattern of the self is replaced by random utterance or emotion, thus fulfilling the darkest

forebodings of Lewis in his Abolition of Man. Even the defence by Scobie that sound poetry "can be used in

controlled, intelligent, witty and classical ways" to induce a "sense of the precariousness of language, of

the sheerly arbitrary nature of those configurations of sound on which the whole of our human intercourse

depends"19 implies firstly that sound poets live on the capital accumulated by earlier poets, and secondly

that they are abandoning that effort to make coherent sense of nature and human history that has been the

glory both of science and of the humanities. Had Peacock lived in the late twentieth century, instead of the

early nineteenth, he might more seriously have thought himself living in the Age of Brass, when poetry is

read, though not produced, by ever-shrinking coteries.

A further change, unforeseeable by Peacock, Shelley or even Barfield, has come about through the advent of

colour photography. Those whose ancestors were spellbound by the Faerie Queene now, in the original sense

of the word, "admire" a science-fiction film or dramatized novel, in which words supply continuity and

rational explanation but are subordinate to visual images which remain in the imagination when the words

have been forgotten. The imagination having shifted from words to images and often wordless sounds, as

foretold by Marshall McLuhan, the outlook for poetry as art-form central to our culture remains bleak

unless a new Shelley can defend not poetry as such, but the "prose" element within it that is necessary for

the production of poems that are substantial, coherent and eventually part of the reader's vital experience.