Saturday 21 June 2014

Occultism and ‘the Movement’

In considering the relation between twentieth century British poetry and the occult tradition it is natural to think first of the occult leanings of the great modernists: the Frazer-inspired occultism of ‘the Waste land’; the ‘mythic method’ of Joyce’s Ulysses; Ezra Pound and the mystical psychology of the troubadours; the ‘strange gods’ of Yeats’ supernaturalism; not to mention Lawrence’s Paganism, or HD’s mythic Hellenism… the list goes on. All this seems at first sight to contrast sharply with ‘the Movement’, often thought of as responding to the excesses of Dylan Thomas and ‘the new apocalyptics’ with a sober and sceptical return to the ordinary.

But on closer inspection there are surprising survivals of occult tradition in the Movement. For one thing, there is Elizabeth Jennings, one of the poets included in the famous ‘New Lines’ anthology. Throughout her life Jennings was involved in a complex and passionate engagement with the more mystical stream of Catholicism, an engagement that resulted in a book-length investigation of the relation between poetry and mystical experience, Every Changing Shape (which perhaps significantly takes it’s title from Eliot’s early work ‘Portrait of a Lady’).

It would be easy to write off Jennings as an exception, were it not for a mystical strain reaching to the heart of the poetics of the Movement. Donald Davie’s essay ‘Purity of Diction in English Verse’ is often thought of as the closest thing the movement had to a ‘manifesto’. The term ‘purity of diction’ is ultimately defined by Davie in reference to the still under-rated work of Owen Barfield. Davie is discussing Barfield’s claim that figurative language is essential to true poetry, a claim that may seem antithetical to the Movement’s admiration for the ‘virtues of good prose’. Barfield writes:

If you take away from the stream of European poetry every passage of a metaphorical nature, you would reduce it to a very thin trickle indeed, pure though the remainder beverage might be to the taste. Perhaps our English poetry would suffer the heaviest damage of all.

Davie points out, however, that by Barfield’s own criteria, even poetry that takes the form of simple and literal statement can be profoundly figurative, due to the activation of dead metaphors in apparently literal language. Consequently, for Davie, the ‘purity’ mentioned by Barfield can be seen as a virtue. Far from damaging English poetry, purity of diction for Davie becomes a means of purifying the language by reviving its hidden powers.

Part of the reason for Barfield’s continuing neglect, of course, is his long and sincere association with Rudolf Steiner’s Anthoposophy, perhaps the most refined expression of modern occultism. Though Barfield underplays the connections in the work (Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning) discussed by Davie, the connections are there. The notion of reviving dead metaphor, for Barfield is closely connected to the Anthoposophical understanding of the history of the soul. As Barfield tells it, the development of human powers of rationality in modernity can be seen as having eroded our intuitive sense of the connection between, among other things, the natural and the spiritual world. Barfield gives a scholarly and logical argument for seeing the history of language as one in which single meanings - meanings embodying what from our current point of view appear as intuitive syntheses of key dichotomies: nature vs spirit, abstract vs concrete - tend to split up into a number of separate and often isolated concepts. The dead metaphors in our language, for Barfield, are thus often linguistic remnants of a primordial conceptual and perceptual holism. It is not much of a stretch, therefore, to see Davie’s program of purifying the language by reviving such earlier meanings as running in parallel with the occultist program of bridging the gap between nature and the world of spirit.

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