OCTAVIOPAZ
599
Propertius shed light on the dark corners of love and discovered the in–
sidious power of that fatal passion, jealousy. Without Catallus and Prop–
ertius, Shakespeare might not have been able to conceive Othello, or
Proust to discover Swann's torment. From the feudal era to that of the
bourgeoisie, poetry continued to inspire warriors and lovers: Parsifal and
Roland, courtly love and Petrarchism, libertines and Romantics. One of
the roots of contemporary feminism may be found in the "courts of
love" of the twelfth century. As in antiquity and in the East, poetry also
nurtured philosophers. There is scarcely one of our great thinkers, from
Saint Thomas to Machiavelli, from Bacon to Schopenhauer, from
Montaigne to Karl Marx, who has not written poems, or whose writ–
ings are not embellished with verses and maxims taken from poets. Seen
from this perspective, the numerical question disappears. We do not
know how many Romans read Ovid, how many Italians Petrarch, or
how many French Ronsard, but we know
who
read them. And these
readers, whether few or many, were the head and heart of society, its
thinking and acting nucleus. Although they belonged to the ruling
classes, many were dissidents, critics of the status quo. Some were recluses,
intellectual hermits.
The change began in the last years of the nineteenth century. After
the great pitched battles of Romanticism, poetry retreated underground:
clandestine war, conspiracy in the catacombs. But as we have seen, this
retreat was a victory: yesterday's poets, cursed and bound for Hell, are
today's patron saints. The displacement of the humanities, which are no
longer the center of our educational systems, has had even graver conse–
quences. A sign of the times: Baudelaire wrote a poem in Latin, Rim–
baud won first prize in Latin composition in his lycee, and Lautreamont
studied literary precepts in a treatise by Jose Gomez Hermosilla, a severe
classicist and a remarkable translator of the
Iliad
-
but Whitman, the first
great modern poet, never went through a university or took a course in
the humanities. Loss or gain? I would say that the gain compensates for
the loss. And Whitman carries on a different tradition, one no less vener–
able than the Greco-Latin: the tradition based on the Bible.
Today the sciences occupy the place of Latin and Greek. The
change has been natural and justified. But the preeminence of
sdentism,
a
modern superstition, has been less natural and is totally unjustified. Each
science may speak with authority with regard to its particular domain:
there is no such thing as Science; there are only sciences. But scientism
would translate the discourse of physics, chemistry, or biology into hu–
man domains: history, society, the individual, the passions. One could ask:
Is
the practice of the various sciences possible without the common store
of wisdom that is represented by the humanities? Perhaps, but the cost is
immense. Neither Freud nor Einstein forgot the classics.
