VISIONARY CINEMA
551
'J'he Fall of Hyperion
stations its scene and figures with a monumental '
sense of visual possibility that transoends what is ,ordinarily visible. A feel–
ing for the weight of things, and a deliberate pacing, too slow for the
impatience of the eye, combine to render Keats a maker poised before
things-in-their-greeting, even as Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley,
in
dif–
ferent ways, deal with things-in-their-farewell. Keats is nevertheless more '
than a naturalistic artist, however heroically we conceive his na,turalism;
like the other major Romantics, though to a lesser extent, he was, despite
his yearnings, a Miltonic poet, and the central principle that organizes his
art is not a particularly dramatic one.
If
To Autumn
is rightly accounted
his masterpiece, it presents us with a scenario of,' first, an enacted process
too slow for the eye to see; secondly, a sight so ambiguously blended.that ..
we cannot know for sure whether we love landscape or woman; thirdly,
a series of sounds, of autumnal music, that inevitably betoken death
by their gentle tentativeness. Blake would have had no ' quarrel with the
ode
To Autumn;
it gives firm outline, but spiritual as opposed to
corporeal form.
I propose to sketch the rough outlines of a visionary cinema in '
Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley, not in order to cast any illumination
upon the nature of any more pragmatic cinema we already know, and
not much in the hope that a study of poetry will ever make any par–
ticular cinematic artist any more gifted in his work.
The burden of Romantic poetry is absolute freedom, including free–
dom from the tyranny of the bodily eye, and this freedom appears to
have resulted in part from the specifically Protestant influence that
made modern poetry possible. When Wordsworth seeks the middle pas–
sage between the sensual, sleeping the sleep .of death in their vacancy and
vanity, and the ascetics, studying their nostalgias and insisting that all
earthly paradises have been lost, he is presumably not immediately con–
scious that he seeks what radical Protestantism so frequently sought, a
renewal of the Biblical program of hallowing the commonplace. It
takes a while to realize that this Wordsworthian hallowing is not enacted
through the eye. Wordsworth would rouse us from sleep by words,he says,
that speak of nothing more than what we
are,
rather than of nothing
more than what we
see.
Who could have thought, Stevens asks, 'in one
of his more explicitly humanist declarations - who could have thought
to make, out of what one sees and what one hears, so many separate ·
selves. Wordsworth was too aware that his freedom was precarious to
make so trusting a statement. In him the Christian Liberty of Milton had
become what it nearly became in Coleridge, the power of the mind ' over
a universe of death.
Christian Liberty, as a doctrine, led to Milton's conception of a
