POETRY AND M. MARITAIN
405
work; therefore nothing but spirit and the absolute. But the cease–
less discovery of new techniques is the chief characteristic of
modern work,
which has also left artisanship behind. Thus in
modem poetry, as in scientific production, making and the pene–
tration of the unknown do not oppose but dynamically advance
each other.
In all this, the rediscovery of the community as the source
of poetic energy has played a major part. The first
scientific
glance
at inspiration disclosed its connection with a community
con–
science;
the second, that in modern times the poetic community
has become mankind itself. No longer identified with the com–
munity through religion and myth, poetry has striven in various
ways to establish new relations with it. From Poe's deliberate
effort to irritate a special area of sensibility in his audience, and
his exploration of dreams, to the fathoming of a collective uncon–
scious by the Surrealists, the line of modern poetic thought is not
clear without this search for a
collective subject,
identifying indi–
vidual inspiration with a wider surging. "I kept steadily in view,"
says Poe, "the design of rendering the work
[The Raven
J
univer–
sally appreciable."
(His italics.) And it is not to be supposed, he
warns, that the states with which he is experimenting "are confmed
to my individual self-are not, in a word, comrpon to all man–
kind." "Immense depths of thought," observes Baudelaire, "in
popular phrases, hollowed out by generations of ants."
Rimbaud carried to new heights the analysis of how poetry
had to work. Deliberate inspiration, scientific conformity of means
to end, popular culture--he concentrated these themes into a single
novel practice which completely revolutionized the profession.
Everything modern becomes, however, in Maritain's hands an
appetite for infinity. "The experience of Rimbaud," he says, "is
decisive." Of objectivity? method? synthesis? Not at all. Rim–
baud is to stand for mysticism opposing art, for "poetic knowl–
edge" or "enthusiasm" in that "pure state" where "the poetry
necessarily enters into conflict with the art," and where "it no
longer seeks to create but to know." Did not Rimbaud
describ~
the inspired ego in the formula, "I is another?" Let us forget that
this was also the notion of the Greeks (see Oesterreich's phrase–
ology above) and the prophets. To Maritain it is a modern heresy.
