POETRY AND M. MARITAJN
393
Prizing creative efficiency, social equality, and the dignity of
labor, Maritain's values have a strong appeal to the modern mind.
And were his artistic City of God left floating on high as an image
of our ideals (executed as a Thomistic
collage),
who could object'?
Alas, Utopias are never conceived for themselves, but always
as a weapon against something that exists. In the case of Maritain,
a weapon against modern art.
For, having attracted us with his workshop standards, his
social dream, and his familiarity with vanguard art; having settleJ,
too, with the spiritualism of cults other than his own; Maritain
turns his apparatus upon the actual development of poetry in
order to envelop it in a cloud of his own, from which the odor of
sulphur is by no means lacking. As a theory of the history of
poetry, his philosophy loses all trace of the realism contained in
its static values and reveals itself to be nothing more than a system
of polemical abstractions subtly promoting the interests of his
Church in the contemporary war of authoritarian trends. This
becomes clear when we contrast Maritain's interpretation with
some of the positive features of poetry in our times.
With mixed feelings, Maritain finds* that since Poe and
Baudelaire, poetry has represented a tremendous spiritual heresy
and a nullity as art. Baudelaire "marks the discontinuity"; he
drew the forbidden curtain dividing the workshop of poetry from
its sacred chamber. At once the machinery of poetic production
was thrown into disorder, and the most awesome convulsions have
since been felt throughout the whole body of this ancient art. Its
very identity has undergone alteration-instead of signifying th e
making of poems (a human activity), the word "poetry" now refers
to the poems themselves (things), which contain all the mysteries
of being. Modern poetry, fascinated by itself, has plunged into
the mirror of self-consciousness, has become entirely a wrestle of
spirit. The result has been a
"prise de conscience"
which, like the
knowledge sucked from the apple of Eden, has inaugurated
a
course of change and suffering, disturbed by inner "crises of
growth" whose end is not yet in sight.
*"Poetry's Dark Night"
(Kenyon R eview,
Spring, 1942). The lecture published in
Kenyon
develops opinions and examples given by Maritain in
Art et Scolastique
(1920) and elsewhere.
