|
Joseph S. Salemi _________________
A PLEA FOR AESTHETICISM ___________________________________
Why am I bringing this subject up? Well, it irks me when people read a poem and are not satisfied until they have wrenched out of it what they consider must be its proper ideological, moral, or religious meaning. Do the following five things not occur to them? a) The poem may have been written by a poet who does not share their ideological, moral, or religious presuppositions. b) The poet may be speaking ironically or sarcastically through his fictive voice, presenting ideas or thoughts that are NOT his own, but which are being held up for ridicule. c) The poem may be a pure joke, a piece of entertainment, a sarcastic slam, a jeu d’esprit, or something else that has no connection with high seriousness. d) The poet may have deliberately designed the poem to be offensive to a certain segment of the reading population. e) No poem has the obligation to teach or preach or proselytize or promote a certain viewpoint or ideology or moral system of belief. To put it bluntly, a poem is not a vehicle for something else. Some people get upset with me when I speak this way. They say “Doesn’t a poem have any meaning for you? Are we forbidden to draw anything out of it as a lesson or an idea or a judgment?” Here’s my answer: Yes, a poem definitely has some meaning in it, if it is written in clear and correct standard English using proper grammar and spelling. But the poem is not about its meaning! The poem is about its own intrinsic perfection as a verbal artifact! That is the core of aestheticism. It’s so easy to prove this, if people would simply pay attention. A poem can express perfectly clear meaning, and it can support the best and most pious ideas, but it can still be a disaster as a poem! Is that not obvious? Haven’t we all read scores of godawful, rotten poems by well-meaning schmucks, expressing the most moral and proper and virtuous and upright thoughts? Do we not clearly see that these are failures as poems, and not worth the paper they are written on? How many poems do we get that are perfectly “moral” and “wholesome” and filled with “edification,” but which are also sickeningly saccharine, conventionally pietistic, embarrassingly simple-minded, and tediously clichéd? How many editors are benumbed by the endless floods of Hallmark-Card niceties that come into their slush piles? This proves that poems are not about their meaning or moral or “message” or hortatory aims. They are about something else that is much more important. What is that thing? It is their aesthetic perfection as expertly sculpted language. As long as a poem can show that it is in such a class, its meaning or message or moral doesn’t bloody matter. Let’s start by examining the subjects of really good poems. Anything is possible in the hands of a competent poet, but there are some immediately obvious things to notice. Is a poem hysterically funny? Great—as long as you’re laughing, what else matters? Is a poem exciting and scary? Good—we all love a bit of nerve-tingling titillation. Is a poem erotically arousing? Fine—who doesn’t go for that sort of thing? Is a poem intriguing and interesting? Wonderful—we all can use an escape from boredom. Is a poem savagely satirical? OK—a knock-down-drag-out pummeling always has a willing audience. In short, a poem has to be intellectually and emotionally appealing, in the ways that comedy, excitement, sex, curiosity, and violence are appealing to the human mind. Are there other possible subjects? Of course—but the poet had better be damned sure that he makes them just as compelling as the ones mentioned above. A major objection to aestheticism is the one that goes like this: “But I want my poems to edify people! I want them to be uplifted by what I write! I want my poetry to be a testament to the truth, and a guide to proper behavior and a morally acceptable mindset!” When I hear that sort of argument, I generally try to extricate myself from the conversation, because I realize that the person I’m speaking with is not really interested in poetry at all, or even in literature. He simply views poetry as a convenient tool of exposition, useful as a way to present arguments or celebrate an ideology or belief system. If a poem brings across the proper “message,” that’s all he’s concerned with. He’s not a poet. He’s a missionary. If I argue at all with such a person, I simply ask him why he bothers going through the complicated trouble of putting his message into verse, when he could just write his message in plain prose and have it printed up as a pamphlet for distribution. Wouldn’t that be a lot easier and more direct? The answer I usually get is this: “Poetry is a good way to put the message across in a pleasant manner, and makes the message easier to swallow.” That was one of the arguments put forward by Sir Philip Sidney in the sixteenth century, and it is as silly now as it was then. Is a poem a piece of bait on a fisherman’s hook? It is just there to catch converts? For a lot of earnest, upright, God-fearing people, the answer to that last question is Yes. Their interest is not in poetry, but in structures of belief, and how to dragoon readers into living a certain kind of life. An attitude like that is the death of poetry, whether it is held by a preacher or a political ideologist. And it is why aestheticism has been profoundly distrusted and disliked by professional religionists, political activists, and even some philosophers like Plato. Such persons are driven by a sense of duty and obligation, rather than by a pure love of what is aesthetically and emotionally appealing. Americans are particularly prone to this tendency, since we are a nation of pragmatists and utilitarians and businessmen and hard-driving salesmen who want to get things done quickly and cleanly. We pride ourselves on having clear goals, and going after them as expeditiously as possible. If we are professional religionists (as many Americans are) we are seriously concerned with the salvation of not just out own souls, but the souls of other people. If we are political activists, we are ferociously exercised with getting people to vote the right way, and to think the right thoughts. All of this energetic partisanship is anathema to genuine poetry, which isn’t about convincing anyone of anything, or converting them to our faith. Poetry is about language and its intrinsic beauty. Do poems also have “meanings,” and “messages,” and “morals”? Can they promote an ideology or a religion? Sure—but those things happen secondarily, after the poet has achieved his primary task of producing a top-notch piece of verbal craftsmanship, because that primary task is what we will judge him on, not his subject matter or his opinions. I’ll end with a short historical note. The English poet, novelist, and literary critic Edmund Gosse (1849-1928) was born into a family of very strict religionists, who were members of a nonconformist sect called The Plymouth Brethren. In their home, his parents disallowed the presence of any literary work, whether poems or novels or dramas or stories, or even nursery rhymes. Not a single piece of fictive mimesis or creative verbal construction was to be found in the house. There was only the Bible, and some dreary tracts. The Plymouth Brethren were the most extreme of Low-Church Protestant Dissenters, who despised on principle any beauty, décor, ornamentation, and flourish of design, preferring the barren Calvinism of drab plainness and unadorned scripture. Gosse eventually rebelled against this mindset, and became a prolific writer of literary works, journalism, and criticism. His autobiographical memoir Father and Son is an amazing picture of his growing up in an atmosphere totally hostile to any kind of verbal creativity. Gosse’s career also shows that the impulse to aestheticism is innate in the human spirit, and cannot be crushed even by the most constraining anti-aesthetic upbringing, and the most fanatical religious-truth fixations. Humans want the beauty of language—its color, its detail, its imbrications, its flourishes, its twists and turns, its sheer delight in its own well-ordered complexity. What
aestheticism did was to turn the primary focus of literature in that
direction, rather than leave literature as an enslaved handmaiden to
moral tub-thumping. That is why I am making a plea for it. Language can
carry meaning—in fact it always does. But it also can be the special
product of poetic skill and craftsmanship that turn words into something
transcendent, inherently pleasurable, and valuable apart from meaning.
That is the daring claim that aestheticism makes for language, and one
that has ruffled the feathers of many meaning-mongers, from Plato and
preachers to the Plymouth Brethren.
(Bocca Baciata: Portrait by Dante Gabriel Rosetti
Joseph S. Salemi has published poems, translations, and scholarly articles in over one hundred journals throughout the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. His four collections of poetry are Formal Complaints and Nonsense Couplets, issued by Somers Rocks Press, Masquerade from Pivot Press, and The Lilacs on Good Friday from The New Formalist Press. He has translated poems from a wide range of Greek and Roman authors, including Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Horace, Propertius, Ausonius, Theognis, and Philodemus. In addition, he has published extensive translations, with scholarly commentary and annotations, from Renaissance texts such as the Faunus poems of Pietro Bembo, The Facetiae of Poggio Bracciolini, and the Latin verse of Castiglione. He is a recipient of a Herbert Musurillo Scholarship, a Lane Cooper Fellowship, an N.E.H. Fellowship, and the 1993 Classical and Modern Literature Award. He is also a four-time finalist for the Howard Nemerov Prize. His upcoming books, Gallery of Ethopaths, and a collection of critical essays, are forthcoming. |
I
have long been an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or aestheticism.
This particular formulation goes back to the French philosopher Victor
Cousin in the early nineteenth century, but it is widely known as the
hallmark of those later writers called the aesthetes or the decadents,
who flourished towards the end of that same century. The English
catchphrase “Art for art’s sake,” and the Latin Ars gratia artis,
also express the same belief. Théophile Gautier’s poetic collection
Émaux et Camées
is often given as a prime example of literary aestheticism. 