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The Instruments of Oracular Expression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Arthur K. Moore
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Extract

Romanticism fabricated a poet of vast oracular powers largely from superstitious notions and suspicious philosophies which the Renaissance had gathered up somewhat by chance with the rational part of the Graeco-Roman legacy. The model was surely an imposture and, historically considered, a scandal. Seer, sage, prophet, mage—the pretensions varied, but all were titles to transcendent disclosure in times increasingly committed, at least officially, to a unified scientific view. That the poet could be confirmed to any degree in this anachronistic role was probably owing to the circumstance that the general cultural reflex following the Enlightenment reawakened widespread interest in those dark and excluded passages of the human spirit which mystics and seers were thought to frequent. Poets who pretended to voyance benefited from the muffled but persistent rumor of profound mysteries accessible to the high priests of Kabbala and the Corpus Hermeticum, to Illuminists, Rosicrucians, and Neopythagoreans. Western Europe had never ceased to acknowledge, even in such unlikely periods as the later Middle Ages, the aboriginal priestly and prophetic functions of the poet; but romanticism contrived—out of occultism and neoplatonism, antirationalism and anticlassicism—such a warrant for unabashed oracular saying as Antiquity had scarcely imagined. While perhaps none of the romantic was actually prepared to grant the poet his ancient powers in full measure, few seemed inclined to diminish the stature of the heroic abstraction, who symbolically contested the claims of naturalism and positivism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 21 , Issue 82 , June 1973 , pp. 1 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © 1973 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1 In the Moralia (397B-D, 404B), Plutarch recorded a not altogether serious discussion of the relation of inspiration to expression, in which it was con cluded that deity provided the inspiration for, but not the language of, oracular utterance.

2 See Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed, London and New York, 1958, pp. 13 f.; Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, New York, 1952, p. 78.

3 Cf. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, London, 1935, pp. 208 f.

4 Cf. Ion (533D-534E) and Laws (719); Longinus, On the Sublime, VIII 4.

5 E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1951, pp. 70, 82; E. N. Tigerstedt, "Furor Poeticus: Poetic Inspiration in Greek Literature before Democritus and Plato," JHI, XXXI (1970), 163-78.

6 Trans. Philip Wheelwright, Heraclitus, Princeton, 1959, p. 69.

7 Gwendolyn Bays, The Orphic Vision: Seer Poets from Novalis to Rimbaud, Lincoln, Nebr., 1964, p. 3.

8 C. G. Osgood, Boccaccio on Poetry, Princeton, 1930, pp. xl f.

9 Cf. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, I. 4, 8; T. L. Peacock, "The Four Ages of Poetry"; R. W. Emerson, "Divinity School Address" (1838).

10 Oeuvres complètes, ed. Yves Florenne, Paris, 1966, III, 573.

11 The Philosophy of Rhetoric, III, 1.

12 Poetic Imagery, New York, 1924, p. 2.

13 "Questions de Poésie," NRF, XLIV (Jan.-March, 1935), 64.

14 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, IX.i.4-5; De rhetorica ad Herennium, IV.xxxi.

15 Rhetoric, III.ii.9.

16 The Arte of English Poesie, III.vii.

17 On Style, II.100-101.

18 Inst. orat., VIII.vi.75.

19 The Philosphy of Rhetoric, III.i.2. Baudelaire, III, 600, placed high value on hyperbole and apostrophe "puisque ces formes dérivent naturellement d'un état exagéré de la vitalité."

20 Op. cit., p. 227. Cf. Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language, New York, 1947, pp. 288 f.

21 Inst. orat., IX.i.16.

22 Cf. Cicero, De inventione, I.i.

23 See Elizabeth Sewell, The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History, London, 1960, pp. 30-33.

24 In the Biographia Literaria, chap. 1, Coleridge may be supposed to have affirmed the inseparability of thought and expression, though in truth his remarks are indecisive.

25 See A. P. Bertocci, From Symbolism to Baudelaire, Carbondale, Ill., 1964, p. 68.

26 Op. cit., III, 556.

27 The Spirit of Language in Civilization, trans. Oscar Oeser, New York, 1932, pp. 4 f.

28 See Georg Mehlis, "Formen der Mystik," Logos, II (1911-12), 250 F.

29 See Frank Kermode, Romantic Image, London, 1957, p. 131.

30 See E. M. W. Tillyard, Poetry Direct and Oblique, rev. ed., London, 1948, pp. 39-49.

31 M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, 4th ed., Paris, 1945, pp. 213 f.

32 See William Righter, Logic and Criticism, London, 1963, p. 22.

33 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jakobson and B. G. Schoepf, New York and London, 1963, p. 21.

34 See my article, "Formalist Criticism and Literary Form," JAAC, XXIX (1970-71), 21-31.

35 Joseph, pp. 35-07, lists fourteen figures of repetition.

36 Joseph, p. 398.

37 Symbol and Metaphor in Human Experience, Princeton, 1949, p. 56.

38 See Hugo Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik von Baudelaire bis zur Gegenwart, Hamburg, 1956, p. 38.

39 The Art of Poetry, trans. Denise Folliot. Bollingen Series, XLV. 7, New York, 1958, p. 183.

40 The Psycho-Analysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing, 2d ed., New York, 1965, p. 22.

41 Op. cit., p. 35.

42 "Three Meanings of Symbolism," YFS, No. 9 (1912), 14.

43 Bertocci, p. 18; John Senior, The Way Down and Out: The Occult in Symbolist Literature, Ithaca, N. Y., 1959, p. xxiii.

44 Essays and Introductions, New York, 1961, p. 49. Cf. Herman Pongs, Das Bild in der Dichtung, Marburg, 1927-39, II, 3 f.; Jean Danielou, "The Problem of Symbolism," Thought, XXV (1950), 427-30.

45 See the valuable discussion of Herman Güntert, Von der Sprache der Götter und Geister, Halle, 1921, pp. 3-50.

46 Coleridge is supposed to have created the preference for symbolism and the prejudice against allegory in the Statesman's Manual, though earlier Goethe had expressed much the same opinions, according to René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Criticism, 3d ed., New York, 1956, p. 300. Yeats repeatedly denigrated allegory, as opposed to symbolism—Essays and Introductions, pp. 116, 146-48, 160-61.

47 Cf. A. G. Lehmann, The Symbolist Aesthetic in France 1885-1896, Oxford, 1950, pp. 282-86.

48 See Edgar de Bruyne, Etudes d'esthétique médiévale, Bruges, 1946, II, 368-70.

49 "Préface à un Commentaire," NRF, XXXIV (Jan.-June, 1930), 218.

50 Quoted from Guy Michaud, La doctrine symboliste, (Documents), Paris, 1947, p. 25.

51 Oeuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry, Paris, 1945, p. 387.

52 Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, Bollingen Series, XXXV.1, New York, 1953, p. 259.

53 Anna Balakian, The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal, New York, 1967, p. 164.

54 Selected Essays 1917-1932, New York, 1932, pp. 204 f.

55 See Georges Cattaui, Orphisme et prophétie chez les poètes français 1850- 1950, Paris, 1965, p. 111.

56 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, London, 1933, p. 152.

57 See J. C. Carothers, "Culture, Psychiatry, and the Written Word," Psychiatry, XXII (1959), 311.

58 N. K. Chadwick, Poetry & Prophecy, Cambridge 1952, pp. 20, 61.

59 See R. W. Hepburn, "Literary and Logical Analysis," PhQ, VIII (1958), 342-56.