Poetry After Mimesis

Earl R. Wasserman (Subtler Language) observes that “Until the end of the eighteenth century there was sufficient intellectual homogeneity for men to share certain assumptions. . . . In varying degrees . . . man accepted . . . the Christian interpretation of history, the sacramentalism of nature, the Great Chain of Being, the analogy of the various planes of creation, the conception of man as microcosm. . . . These were cosmic syntaxes in the public domain; and the poet could afford to think of his art as imitative of ‘nature’ since these patterns were what he meant by ‘nature.’”

That changed in the nineteenth century when “these word-pictures had passed from consciousness. . . . The change from a mimetic to a creative conception of poetry is not merely a critical philosophical phenomenon. . . . Now . . . an additional formulative act was required of the poet. . . . Within itself the modern poem must both formulate its own cosmic syntax and shape the autonomous poetic reality that the cosmic syntax permits; ‘nature,’ which was one prior to the poem and available for imitation, now shares with the poem a common origin in the poet’s creativity.”

Charles Taylor, who quotes this passage (Malaise of Modernity, 84-85) notes that this is more than “a question of fragmentation.” It’s not as if the older vision could be restored if we could accept, for instance, the cosmic syntax of Blake or Rilke. He argues that “what could never be recovered is the public understanding that angels are part of a human-independent ontic order, having their angelic natures quite independently of human articulation, and hence accessible through languages of description . . . that are not at all those of articulated sensibility.” When Rilke speaks of angels, he means something “human-related” or “language-related” and “the very idea that one such order should be embraced to the exclusion of all the others . . . ceases to have any force” (86-7).

It’s not at all clear that the “never could be recovered” follows. Taylor doesn’t think we are locked in an iron cage; he thinks rational persuasion is possible. And if so, why not conversion?