THE TRUTH OF IMAGINATION Also by Andrew J. Welbum and published by St. Martin's POWER AND SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE POETRY OF SHELLEY The disparity between 'objective reality' and human imaginative response. The natural landscape below is dwarfed by the humanized Sun and the imaginings he evokes. William Blake, The Sun at His Eastern Gate, from the illustrations to Milton's t:Allegro. Watercolour (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York). The Truth of Illlagination An Introduction to Visionary Poetry Andrew J. Welbum British Academy Fellow in Romantic Studies, New College, Oxford Foreword by Owen Barfield Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-20446-5 ISBN 978-1-349-20444-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20444-1 ©Andrew J. Welbum 1989 Foreword © Owen Barfield 1989 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1989 978-0-333-46071-9 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1989 ISBN 978-0-312-03632-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Welbum, Andrew J. The truth of imagination : an introduction to visionary poetry I Andrew J. Welbum : foreword by Owen Barfield. p. em. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-312-03632-4 1. English poetry-History and criticism. 2. Imagination in literature. 3. Visions in literature. 4. Vision in literature. 5. Self in literature. I. Title. PR508.145W45 1989 821.009-dc20 89-10345 CIP For Julia Contents List of Plates and Figures viii Foreword by Owen Barfield ix Acknowledgements xiii Introduction The Truth of Imagination 1 1 The Poetry of Vision 16 Part I Neglected Visionary S1 2 Milton's Inner Journey S3 3 Milton's Christianity and the Birth of the Ego 79 Part II Devil's Companions - Romantic Mythologies 97 4 Blake, Initiation and The Book ofThel 99 5 The Devil for a Companion: Goethe and Shelley 123 6 From Prometheus Unbound to The Portal of Initiation 149 7 The Two Lives ofW. B. Yeats 165 Epilogue The Tower 202 Appendix 1 Ranters and Poets 217 Appendix 2 The Gnostic Lyric: Blake and Baudelaire 221 Appendix 3 Yeats, the Gyres and a Learned Jesuit 226 Bibliography 231 Index 235 List of Plates and Figures PLATES Frontispiece The disparity between 'objective reality' and human imaginative response. The natural landscape below is dwarfed by the humanized Sun and the imaginings he evokes. William Blake, The Sun at His Eastern Gate, from the illustrations to Milton's L'Allegro. Water­ colour (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York). 1 William Blake, Satan, Sin and Death, from the illustra­ tion to Milton's Paradise Lost. Watercolour (Hunting­ ton Library, San Marino, California). 2 Samuel Palmer, The Lonely Tower. Etching (1868: The Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut) . 3 William Blake, title-page to The Book of Thel (Copy 0). Relief etching (The Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC). 4 Rudolf Steiner - Arild Rosenkrantz, painting in the small cupola of the First Goetheanum (detail). FIGURES 1 Imaginative Consciousness. The Shelleyan Mythic Polarities. 2 The Structure of Imagination in Paradise Lost. 3 The Eleven Scenes of Die Pforte der Einweihung as a Sonata-Movement. 4 Imaginative Polarities. Phases of the Moon. S Rudolf Steiner, Planetary Seals. A sequence illus­ trating the evolution and simplification of forms (Goethean metamorphosis). 6 Athanasius Kircher, The Gyres of the Moon. Engraving by Pierre Miotte from Ars Magna Lucius et Umbrae (1646). Foreword The question has been raised before now whether there really is such a category as Literature. Libraries have to decide somehow whether, for instance, Carlyle's The French Revolution is literature or history. And is Thus Spake Zarathustra literature or philosophy? There is nevertheless a class of reader, less numerous perhaps now than it was fifty and more years ago, whose taste is for literature as such, who like books, and books about books, and are inclined to say to such intrusive irrelevancies as history, philosophy, psycho­ logy, sociology etc., 'A plague on all your houses!' Any member of that fraternity who picks up this book, sees at once that there is very much in it besides literary criticism, and puts it down again murmuring 'not for me', will be making a great mistake. For he will be missing a body of critical commentary, on Milton, Shelley and W. B. Yeats in particular, and less extensively on Wordsworth, Blake and Goethe, which, if there were nothing else in the book, would represent a notable contribution to English literary criticism. Its author has in abundance just what we look for in that class of writing: an original angle of vision, well-supported by quotation and tempered by extensive acquaintance with the views of other critics, and above all that warmth - enabling depth - of penetration, which is only to be had when the final result has been 'begotten in the ventricle of memory and nourished in the womb of pia mater' not just analytically, but also con amore. The fact remains that his personal relish for 'visionary poetry' has been used to enhance rather than obscure his awareness of poetry's wider function, the one that Matthew Arnold had in mind when he called it 'criticism of life'. That way of putting it has come to mean a good deal more than it did in Arnold's day, except perhaps to the late F. R. Leavis and his epigones. It is a pity that the term philology has become not much more than a synonym for linguistics or etymology. It used to mean so much more: at its widest, learning in general and then more specifically the kind of literature and literary criticism that concentrates especially on the nature and mystery of language. It is this kind that has noticeably expanded during the last thirty of forty years. The amount of attention that has been bestowed on what I will call the concept of language as revelation is to my mind very striking, and I should x The Truth of Imagination not like the job of compiling a bibliography of books and articles, both literary and philosophical, that have appeared on such topics as myth, allegory, metaphor, symbol and symbolism, imagination. Obviously they cover a wide variety of opinion and speculation, but if I were asked to lay my finger on a single predominant trend, I should have to point to an increasing realization that these phenomena cannot be satisfactorily apprehended without taking account of a substantial change of consciousness that has been taking place in the West over a long period; further, that a crucial point in that change occurred at about the time of the Renaissance, culminating in the scientific revolution and its sequelae. Perhaps it is some such awareness that underlies a still more recent trend in the general climate of opinion, noticeable in circles well outside the realms of philology in either its earlier or its later sense, which Theodore Roszak has called the Human Potentials Movement. It certainly involves an enhanced estimate of the potentialities inherent in the individual human being. Having embarked on The Truth of Imagination, one's first impress­ ion is of surprise to find Milton, and not only Milton but especially Paradise Lost, in such unlikely company; to be told that a stronger bond joins him 'with the sceptical Shelley and the ambivalent Goethe than binds him to the forms of religious tradition'; to be told moreover that 'In Paradise Lost he turned from outer to inner struggles, and depicted with unsurpassed imaginative energy an inner journey, a descent into one's own soul and a vision of paradise.' Others have agreed that (contrary of course to the poet's intention) Satan is the real hero of the poem. Dr Welburn does not share that view; what he does maintain is, that in the figure of Satan Milton's myth-making power responds to the challenge of self-exploration with one of its profoundest achievements ... a journey to the threshold of unconscious depths. He shows that long before Freud, a poet could handle themes of repression, and the making conscious of the unconscious, with imaginative assurance and truth. The second reaction, if my own is anything to go by, is acquies­ cence. Full treatment of the subject, well supported by quotation and including a finely tuned appreciation of Milton's mastery of language, has justified the new perspective. Foreword xi I fear all this may have given the impression that the book is mainly about Milton. No so. It is not even mainly about poetry, though it is presented largely in terms thereof. Essentially it is about the predicament of the human mind at its present stage of evolution; and it leads off with Milton because he was the first great English poet to appear after a crucial moment in the substantial change to which I have referred, and because true imagination, both in and out of poetry, is the first step on that inner journey. The moment can be located, the author points out, between Spenser's time and Milton's, and much can accordingly be learned by, for instance, studying the difference between their respective uses of allegory (Sin and Death in Paradise Lost are allegorical personifications). The other poets dealt with are all Romantics or post-Romantics, and it was in Romanticism that the new direction first began to be aware of itself. But something more needs to be said about the change of consciousness and the direction its evolution is, or should be, taking. Even more recently than the last thirty or forty years signs have been appearing, especially perhaps in the realm of literary criticism, of agreement on a historical perspective.