POETRY AND M. MARITAIN
401
something more than a flight into the desert. "I think," says Mari–
tain, "that what has happened for poetry since Baudelaire has an
historical importance equal in the domain of art to that of the
greatest epochs of revolution and renewal in physics and astronomy
in the domain of science." We agree with Maritain on the revolu–
tionary character of modern poetry. But we cannot attribute this
epoch-making importance to a St. Jerome-like escape from litera–
ture into meditation. We find its significance rather in the specific
professional experiences of those writers who, according to Mari–
tain, "turned away from the poetic work." These experiences, in
which the shape of the historical crisis ·is embedded, group them–
selves about the following conscious attempts: (1) to master the
objective problem of inspiration freed from dependence on reli–
gion; (2) to conform the. methods of poetry to those of scientific
experiment; (3) to rediscover the creative energies of the com–
munity. None of these attempts was ever seriously made before
our epoch; they are direct responses to it and to it alone; and taken
together they are identifying signs of modern poetry.
Poetry and criticism from Poe to the Surrealists is filled with
observations and outcries on the profession-to Maritain this is
proof of the Narcissism of modern poetry, and all his quotations
are taken from such statements. In interpreting them, however,
he ignores their intended practical meanings, so stripping them of
everything that gives them relevance to life and the color of the
real world. Naturally, they then reflect nothing but a black abyss
of "spirit" and can be manipulated as evidence of metaphysical
concentration upon self. It is as if we took all that has been written
oq medicine during the past 100 years to prove that the profession
has been inhumanly concerned with nothing but the spirit of medi–
cine. Once again, as in his attacks on Descartes, Luther, and Rous–
seau, Maritain's method is to confront modern thought with the
sin of "angelism" (see Maritain's
Trois Reformateurs)
in order to
create about it the sense of a void. That this void exists only in
by the "wise" action of the Church; in the future, according to the
Kenyon
article, by
poetry's own act of teaching itseH to sit still. The historical movement of the past
century, that is, modern poetry
as a reality,
is seen as the complete triumph of the
antithesis of art, "Agir." From the historical point of view, however, an exactly
reversed logic operates: the modern movement
begins
as a synthesis at the very moment
when inspiration and making reach, for the first time, an intolerable contradiction.
No better indication is needed of the totally idealistic character of the New-Catholic
esthetic than its treatment of the actual movement of poetry as inferior to its own
logical synthesis.
