404
PARTISAN REVIEW
effects on man. Immortality? "A demand of the nerves." Baude·
laire made other discoveries: "Prayer is a storehouse of energy."
"Of augmenting all the faculties. A cult (Magianism, evocatory
sorcery)." "Infinity," says Poe, "like 'God,' 'spirit,' and some
other expressions of which the equivalents exist in all languages,
is by no means the expression of an idea, but of an effort at one....
A word, in fine, was demanded, by means of which one human
being might put himself in relation at once with another human
being and with a certain
tendency
of the human intellect." (His
italics.)
At the very moment, then, when the historical sciences and
psychology are beginning to penetrate the old mysteries through
systematic research, poetry lays them open through imitation,
extracting from them the living powers of mankind covered with
myth and abstraction. Believing in nothing, it subjects itself to
all deities. Assuming postures of prayer, it notes the results in
terms of sensation and vital rhythms.
It
mimics the trances of the
jungle, kneels before painted fetishes, decks itself out as Satan,
tattoos itself with the pentagram or Evil Eye-all the time keeping
a record more and more exact of its f aintings and recurrent floods
of strength. These open acts of warfare on religion extend the
humanistic struggle against the Church into the farthest provinces
of the spirit and on a more radical and deadly level than ever
before. While the gross materialism of the nineteenth century
simply denies the reality of spirit, thus leaving it intact to reac·
tion, the dialectics of poetry undertakes to deliver its changing
gestures into the common vocabulary. "
'We should have to be
God ourselves!'
"
Poe reflects. "With a phrase so startling as this
yet ringing in my ears, I nevertheless venture to demand if this
our present ignorance of the Deity is an ignorance to which the
soul is
everlastingly
condemned." (His italics.)
This revision of the profession of poetry through the scientific
conversion of the ambiguous divine Being into a definable state of
consciousness was achieved only through enormous technical labors
not accounted for by Maritain's "spiritual reflexivity" with its
mystical abandonment of "th
~
line of the work." No modern poet
has been able to take existing methods for granted. This lack of
"tradition" is another factor that separates modern poetry from
artisanship and its norms. With his medieval standards, Maritain
hastens to form a "syllogism": no artisanship, therefore no poetic
