Poetic Consciousness
Meta-Poetics, or the Dialectical Evolutions of the Poetic Spirit
The Opening Frame
This essay continues and condenses the Ladder of Poetry lecture series, and is intended to be read by those who have watched the series, giving them a new way of thinking about these ideas, as well as by those who have not watched the series, giving them a clear through-line to follow. While I recommend watching the series for full understanding (or at least Part 16, which ties a few of the threads together), it can therefore be read as a standalone piece.
I have chosen to write the contents of this essay - rather than convey it in lecture format - because a certain precision better suited to writing seemed required.
I have titled this essay Poetic Consciousness, because that is the organising principle of the following ideas. It has steadily occurred to me in the course of thinking through these ideas that there is such a thing as Poetic Consciousness, that it has a teleology and ontology, and that we can break these into different phases, which flow on from and necessitate each other. In other words, if we understand one phase, we are able to undergo a process akin to archaeological reconstruction and assemble the rest, and can therefore say that Poetic Consciousness has an inner logic and necessity to it.
However, before we embark on clarifying what these phases are, and how they articulate with and flow on from one another, we first need to touch on why it is even important to do so.
The Problem and Solution
The field of poetry is fragmented. There are a wide variety of poetics (different schools of thought) and critical approaches to poetry. It is the ‘water’ we swim in, which is to say that we are so accustomed to this fragmentation that it has never occurred to us that there is something outside the water: namely, land. The problems of this fragmentation have been accepted unconsciously as inevitable and simply moved on from. What are these problems? We could all list out the various debates between what I have called the ‘Sentimental’ poets, who rebel against structure and tradition, and the ‘Scholar’ poets, who codify it. We could list out the misguided workshop/editor horror stories, where poets have applied the wrong metric to someone’s poems and forced them into inappropriate lines of development. Or point to the presumably wide swathe of more esoteric poets whose poetry has been made more ‘acceptable’ by the scholars who make up the publishing élite. We could point to a lot more; the pluralistic wave of contradictory poetic advice that drowns aspiring and successful poets alike; the general inability of the public to know how to read poetry and engage with Poetic Consciousness; the many poets who, facing this fragmentation and its consequences, give up, and thus leave the world that much poorer for it.
But all of this misses the overarching – underlying? – point; the main consequence of this fragmentation. That is, the consequence of a radical isolation. The consequence of believing oneself as isolated not only from other poets past, present and future, except in a haphazard circumstantial or thematic way (Christian poets, or grief poets, and the like), or from people in general, but also – more profoundly, even – from the logic of development inherent in Poetic Consciousness. Allow me to elaborate.
Poets currently proceed without any sense of the overarching picture; that they are developing their Poetic Consciousness; that there are thousands of other poets who have done, are currently doing, and who will do, the same thing as them; that they are radically connected to this community, extending what has been done, enriching and supporting what is being done, and laying the groundwork for what will be done. It is a golden chain, to paraphrase Dickens, of hands, inextricably clasped. Or, if you prefer a more poetic image, we can refer to it as a laurel, woven of many leaves.
It is perhaps easiest to clarify what is lost with the fragmentation we have been speaking of to expand on what this communal knowledge affords. Such knowledge of their intimate participation with this greater Poetic Consciousness (or Geist, if we want to use Hegel’s term) would afford an easing of that existential stress underlying every poet’s life and imbue it with a shared purpose and meaning. For they would be able to see that Poetic Consciousness has generated a host of poets, across time and culture, at every level of development precisely in order to reach as many people as possible and maximise its impact, every poet and artist being a ‘hook’ for a certain readership/audience.
For those who are open to the notion of reincarnation it would also clarify what it is that they are working towards, that grand vision and synthesis of human development which is inherent in Poetic Consciousness. Not just tomorrow, not just ten years from now, but ten lifetimes from now. The knowledge of what one is growing into is mysterious and profound in its impact; it gives the plant the knowledge of what it is to grow towards, so that it can participate in its flowering. But we needn’t bring this into the picture; it may be of interest to some of our readers as a point of reflection, but our argument doesn’t rest on it.
Having this ‘present’ in the poet’s being would furthermore, beyond the personal benefits, greatly enrich the poet’s practice, for the poets of the past, present and future would now speak in a legible language and something of a shared creative spirit, grammar or tongue could thus be taken up.
What we lack, and what we need, is some kind of centralised knowledge structure around Poetic Consciousness; in short, what I have been calling a ‘Bard’s College’, whose aim and function is to organise the various schools of thought into one overarching framework, and imbue each part with the knowledge of each other and how they fit within the whole.
The Dialectical Progression
Exoteric Poetry
Now we can get into the nature of the dialectical progression of the different stages of Poetic Consciousness. As an English teacher, I see the first stage frequently; other teachers, as well as scholars who note the growing wave of popular poetry, will doubtless find many examples to bring to mind of the kind of poet I am talking about. The first stage in the Ladder of Poetry we have called the Sentimental poet. What is important to note about this first stage is that they are preoccupied with one pole in the Self-Symbol axis: the Self. To explain what I mean here we need to first take a moment to explain this distinction.
The Self is the subjective space or plane of existence. It is interior and pre-symbolic; it is felt and unmediated, instinctive. The Symbolic Order is harder to explain: it is the field of symbolic mediation: not just language, but the structures, patterns, stories and tradition within language and which puts language to use. The Symbolic Order is the external nature of reality, as it comes to us to be used; objectivity, in a word. These are the two poles that make up the first two stages of Poetic Consciousness, which form one overall movement we can name Exoteric Poetic Consciousness, to be exact (Lecture 14 clarifies the Exoteric vs Esoteric distinction between the bottom two and top two stages, for those who want more on this). Applying this will clarify it further.
To return to the Sentimental poet, then, what we notice is that the Symbolic Order has not yet appeared to them as a distinctive reality. They are preoccupied with, and grant the status of reality only to, the Self; they trust its unmediated instincts and feelings, its subjectivity, more than the mediated field of symbols.
This is a rather precise way of saying simply that they speak in the sentimental generalities we expect of young, un-practiced poets - for they have not yet learned how to wield and master the Symbolic Order that would enable them to bring their Self truly to bear, into the field of expression.
It will become clear as we move through this dialectical progression what detailing this affords, but – to start with the Sentimental poet – having this knowledge enables us, as poetry mentors and guides, to properly support their development. As the ontology of Poetic Consciousness at this stage is dual, we must do so in a dual way: providing permission to explore their Self (and showing them that what they are producing is worth producing and exploring/expressing), and gently guiding them towards an awareness of the Symbolic Order they need to learn to master if they are going to be able to do justice to the Self (and beyond that, when we get to Esoteric Consciousness).
Which one we do depends on where the poet is at in the moment, of course – I am not proposing a rigid script of guidance, but a general balance to hold in mind. So long as we roughly engage in both poles, our students’ practice will take root and their poetry – and Poetic Consciousness – will flourish. We help them move, eventually, into the next stage of development. It will not be forced – any force is detrimental – but, in time, however long that is, if they have been supported as we have laid out here, they will naturally and inevitably find themselves called towards the second stage of development, which is a continuation of this first.
This second stage of development we have called the Scholarly stage. Scholarly poets are twofold; we can conceptualise it as a continuum. There are Iconoclastic Scholars, and Scholars qua Scholars, or the Scholar Proper. The Iconoclast strikes a midway point between the Symbolic Order and the Self; the Scholar Proper prioritises the Symbolic Order over and above the Self, whose role is that of the bystander. Before I explain these two types further, I will just make the comment that both share a similar preoccupation with mastering the Symbolic Order or Field. The Sentimental poet needs to be tutored into an awareness of the two poles; the Scholar takes it as reality, and proceeds accordingly, the two types in different ways.
The Iconoclast, more specifically, works to create symbols with their art of themselves as a symbol of a way of life. They create, to give it a phrase, symbols-of-a-symbol. Lord Byron created works of art that symbolised his Self as a symbol of an individualistic way of life. Walt Whitman symbolised his Self as a symbol of a loving way of life. I speak succinctly to make my point clear. I work and teach with a colleague who creates works of art that symbolise his accepting, flowing way of life. I have a friend who is a painter who creates works of art that symbolise his remembering way of life (remembering what is important in life, which connects to the Buddhist notion of ‘sati’). It is interesting to note that all of these artists (with the exception of my colleague) are bisexual. When I mentioned this to my friend, he noted simply that that made sense, given the nature of Iconoclasm: it rejects convention as arbitrary. The Iconoclast has a familiarity with the Symbolic Order, but disrupts it in unexpected ways, because they are wedding it to the instinctive and idiographic subjectivity of the Self. As I mention in Lecture 12 on this topic, this can make it look similar to the Sensing stage, because they can seem to have a field of reference that is both large and flowing, but the Self is present for the Iconoclast in a way that it is not in the Sensing poet (more on that when we come to it), and so they are therefore distinct.
It is my sense that the Iconoclast needs help making conscious the fact that they are working with two poles; they do not realise how much their Self is a part of the creative process for them. The poetic mentor therefore needs to help them realise this, so that they can participate consciously, in their daily life, with the Way of Life their creative drive is inextricably bound up with, so as to further clarify and amplify that transmission.
They too, it must be said, would benefit simply from being given permission to do their disruptive thing; they may bear an inferiority relative to the Scholar proper (as Sentimental poets tend to do also), who poetic society has deemed superior, and often create without the full support and understanding of the academy (which I am arguing thus needs to be replaced with something like a Bard’s College).
The Scholar Proper does not raise above the Self, for that comes later, but ignores it. This focus on objective symbolisation – which is a good phrase for tradition – is the pinnacle of modern poetry, using modern in both senses of the word, Modernistic and contemporary. Hence TS Eliot talks about the impersonality of the modern poet, not to mention the ‘objective correlate’. Geoffrey Hill, writing much later, comments on the need for modern poets to become objective of their subjectivity; he is indicating the essential nature of the work of the Scholar Proper. They are seeking to absorb and understand Objectivity. They do this through possessing the Symbolic Order of language and tradition.
This symbolisation reached its apotheosis in the little understood French Symbolist movement of the 19th century, which it is worth pausing here to comment on, as it is the main reason why the modern poetry establishment celebrates the kinds of poetry it does and helps us to see more clearly the nature of scholarly poetry. The French Symbolists strove to create aesthetic artefacts that were so objective, i.e., stripped of subjectivity and Self, that they assumed a life of their own. This ‘life’ was conceived of as a Platonic Idea, as this somewhat famous quote from Mallarmé shows:
“I assert, at my own aesthetic risk ... that Music and Letters are the alternate face here widened towards the obscure; scintillating there, with certainty of a phenomenon, the only one, I have named it Idea.”
This required being tuned – the letters of Paul Valery and Stephan Mallarmé are testament to this – to the highest pitch, so that nothing of the ephemeral fluctuations and base ‘impurities’ of the underlying Self (and the Selves of others) would be present in the aesthetic artefact or Symbol. It was Objectivity achieved.
Hence, Mallarmé could write:
“I am inventing a language … Paint, not the thing, but the effect it produces … the line of poetry … should be composed not of words, but of intentions, and all the words should fade away before the sensation.”
The idea being that, upon finishing a poem, the reader would conceive of the poem as distinctly itself and not a series of signs which a Self is behind. Pure poetry for the Symbolists was poetry that was divested of Selfhood. This fulfilled a religious function for Paul Valery and the other Symbolists; it was as close as they could come to something that was distinctly ‘other’ than the ephemera of Selfhood and the world. It was something lasting, real, objective, distinct.
We need to understand this if we are to understand the limitations of Exoteric Poetic Consciousness. For to Poetic Consciousness in the Scholarly phase, such objectivity is divinity – hence the glorification of tradition and symbolisation, of moving beyond the Self. But it is recognisable to those with eyes to see and a heart to sense through that this ‘Platonic’ divinity is a fundamentally limited and secularised conception. Such poetry – such poets – do not participate directly in the divine spirit that moves through form at will, for such a thing does not exist, and is but a phantom and fantasy of the Sentimental poet, who conceives of divinity as an easy, friendly and accessible guardian or parent. Such a diagnosis was reached and formalised by that Scholar Proper, Sigmund Freud, who parted from Carl Jung, his protégé who went further than this Scholarly critique and postulated the positive claim that there is, in fact, behind the veil of form, a higher and less accessible divinity.
Let me state this clearly: the beauty of the scholar is one of purgation. Through purgation of the ephemeral subjective, the beauty of the objective symbol is born.
Hence, again (one last quote) Arthur Rimbaud famously said:
“The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses.”
What Rimbaud is talking about here is the derangement and deregulation of the Self, with its tendency towards didactic self-expression. In Rimbaud’s mind – and in the minds of poets with this inclination – there is no higher integration of subjective and objective, no such thing as essence, and so the best that can be achieved and attained is a purgation/destruction of the subjective, for this is what leads to art that is “objective” and therefore, in this truncated way, religious. Later stages communicate a higher divinity through the form and thus function as icons; the reader and audience of the objective Symbol is meant to be lost in the form, making it something of an idol, in that it does not lead beyond itself.
It is the highest spirituality of what is a fundamentally materialistic outlook – as such, as poetry mentors we need to be able to see its limitations, so as to keep it from maintaining its stranglehold on the establishment, and also nurture and guide Scholarly poets (Iconclasts, as we have already said, are a little different) towards this outcome. We do this by helping them to understand the nature of what it is they are working towards – the speaking forth of the Symbolic/objective field, as it comes through to us unmediated by subjectivity.
What we have outlined thus far is the dialectical progression of Exoteric Poetry. Majority of poets will naturally be along these two lines because their practice does not require any substantive evolutions or accommodations at the level of ‘worldview’. It is universally acknowledged that there is a subjective Self and a body of tradition and order of symbols beyond the Self. This movement is therefore already culturally scaffolded and ‘digested’. Not so with Esoteric Poetic Consciousness, which is the next phase.
Esoteric Poetry
In Esoteric Poetic Consciousness a radical change is effected. As there is nothing for it but to jump in and do our best to articulate it, we will save the reader further preamble. At the Sensing stage of Poetic Consciousness the two poles, Self and Symbol, are at-oned, united. The objectivity of subjectivity that Geoffrey Hill spoke about is attained. It is curious to note both how this necessarily flows on from the dialectical logic set up in the previous two stages, and how the possibility of this development has not yet been conceived of by the Scholar. I have seen hints of this development in the writing of a few poets, but no systematic presentation of it – and as this unfoldment is inherently systematic, that makes me think there has not yet been any full understanding of Esoteric Poetic Consciousness extant in the literature; it would not surprise me if it had been seen by those poets who were clearly Esoteric in their development, but simply not put down on paper. In some respects, however, we needed the Modernist and particularly Symbolist movements to carry the Exoteric Conscioussnes to its culmination before we could properly trace out this dialectic.
But we have digressed: the Self and Symbol are at-oned. What this means in effect is that Poetic Consciousness no longer needs to flow between these two poles, for they have become one. There is no longer any sensed division between Self and Symbolic Order; the two are mediated. We can imagine it as tissue sewn together, which blood can now flow through and between. The Self can see itself in light of the Symbolic Order, and can see itself within the Symbolic Order; the two are one functioning field of intelligibility. This is experienced not as the great numinous release that a Scholar might expect after many lifetimes of focused endeavour, but simply as a ready-to-handness and a certain symbolic legibility or fluency. It is not so much perfect knowledge of each symbolic language so much as an adaptability to the different languages; a mastery of the process of mastery. And enough symbolic systems – cultural traditions – have been absorbed and understood that they can in turn be brought to bear on new symbols; we can conceive of a tipping point here in which this can all be leveraged to great and noticeable effect, whether the Sensing poet knows it fully or not. Often he does not, at the start, unless he has some kind of mentor; but eventually he will figure it out, because he will feel himself an alien in the world of modern poetry, and recognise that what he is doing is crucially distinct from the poetry of others; it will be something of a splinter in his mind, and he will work at it until it is released.
But if we were to stop here we would still be within – or only one step removed from - the materialistic and Exoteric Consciousness. Now we need to introduce the next step, which is inextricably tied up with this at-one-ment.
Now that the Self and Symbol are one – we can call this the Symbolic Self – ‘essence’ can come into the picture. To explain essence we need to bring Carl Jung back into the conversation. Jung famously popularised the notion of an archetype, a term which has been notoriously misunderstood even by (particularly by) Jungians. Quotes from Jung taken out of context won’t help matters much either, as he adapts the term to fit the context at hand – this and the scope and complexity of the idea explain its almost universal reduction.
An archetype - this is, for our purposes, the crucial thing to understand about it - is both subjective and objective. To conceive of how this could be the case we have to consider that there is some ‘psychoid factor’ that penetrates through and shapes both the subjective psyche and the collective realm of matter itself; that there is, behind both form and consciousness, a shared ground, out of which both grow like – to use Jung’s famous phrase – ‘rhizomes’ (roots).
This challenges, well, a lot of things about the materialistic outlook, but perhaps most centrally the idea that everything is separative. Instead, Jung says, an archetype is both form and spirit; it can be seen and sensed; scientifically analysed in the insect, and psychologically resonated with and sensed. Goethe said as much in his notion of the urpflanze – the archetypal plant, which he claimed to have discovered in his journey to Italy.
An archetype – a kind of in-forming spirit – if it manifests both in the objective and subjective, is evidently large enough that it needs both poles to manifest itself properly. It is just this polar availability that the Senser has achieved. The Senser has enough Symbolic Objectivity and Self-Subjectivity for the archetype to flow through, and be received by, the repertoire of his ‘Symbolic Self’.
Where the Sentimental poet gushes his subjective depths, and where the Scholar poet strives to attain the objective heights, the Symbolic Self of the Sensing poet flows with the incoming essence or archetype. Here’s another blow to the separative, materialistic way of looking things; we can look at it as the Symbolic Self flowing with, and ‘keeping up with’ the archetype, or we can look at it as the archetype using and wielding the Symbolic Self which has made itself receptive to its current. This is to be distinguished from Surrealist channelling which is glamourised in different ways by Exoteric Poets, usually by Sentimental poets who haven’t yet learned how to consciously mediate symbols, and sometimes by Scholarly poets (W.B Yeats and James Merrill) who look to it as a way of complicating their symbolic order, as a bridge into greater symbolic complexity.
There needs to be enough objectivity in the subjectivity of the poet for the archetype to have something to resonate and vibrate with; when there is this resonance, an essence is sensed, and the poem can flow. It is not the expression of an emotion, which is purely subjective, or the crafting of a symbolic object above the subjective pole. The subjective and the objective can flow with the essence; the poet’s being moves, as does his symbolising – though this makes it sound as though they are distinct; the whole point is that they are, at this point, indistinct, for this is what enables the process to occur in the first place. Or, to put this differently, the Scholar’s ‘Self’ is fixed, and so essence cannot flow through him as directly as it does through the Senser. (While the Scholar’s work may look, on the surface, as something more fluid and dynamic than the Sentimental poet’s, the consciousness is still constrained within this fixed pattern. This is what gives the Scholar poet’s work – T.S Eliot’s The Wasteland being an instructive example – its curious sheen of performativity, for the Self is still present as a fixed object, even if is ignored.)
We have called this process of flowing with essence a fidelous imagination (see Lecture 10, where I complete Coleridge’s materialistic and exoteric conception of secondary imagination), trying to capture the way in which the Sensing poet aims, in this process, to maintain fidelity with the essence coming through his Symbolic Self, without diverting either into Sentiment or the artifice of the Scholarly obsession with objective symbolisation, with the aesthetic flourish of tradition-for-tradition’s sake. His aim, putting it simply, is to do ‘justice’ to the essence that is coming through to him for expression.
This is Esoteric Poetic Consciousness, which is actually in touch with divinity as a positive force. The Scholar’s divinity is achieved by purgation and negation of all that is ephemeral and subjective; it is a materialistic and secular ‘Idea’. The Senser ‘senses’ divine essences as they precipitate and appear; he is attuned to the initial precipitation of the essence as something of a forcefield (to borrow a phrase from Geoffrey Hill’s lecture, ‘Fields of Force’), a ‘point from which much may come’ (to borrow Goethe’s phrase in his Conversations with Eckermann), and then helps it to undergo a second precipitation when he picks up his pen. Precipitation is, of course, an alchemical term – for those interested in exploring the alchemy of this process further, I discuss this more in Lecture 9, ‘The Alchemy of Poetic Development’.
This alone would be enough for an essay, more perhaps than some scholarly poets may have allowed for and are willing to entertain. Yet the dialectical logic flows on necessarily from the first two; if we accept that there is a Self and a Symbolic Order, and we do, universally – it is in the constitution of our phenomenology and our culture is saturated with this knowledge; if we accept that maturation is to first become aware of the objective, and then to master it – and we do, universally – this is the defining characteristic and drive, sometimes implicit, often explicit, of our academies and universities; then we must also accept that there comes a point when this mastery is embodied. Ultimately it is only those who attain this mastery who will really know what is being spoken of when we talk about essence, but if we accept that this kind of embodiment is possible, then we open ourselves to the conception of a divinity that is more realistic than the Sentimental conception and higher than the Scholarly one. In short, our worldview undergoes a radical shift and is irrevocably altered.
It is the perspective of this author that such a shift and accommodation at the level of worldview is needed for individual poets and for the culture at large, for many reasons. A kind of paternalistic deity (such as we see in Sentimental types) and aesthetic purity (such as we see in Scholarly types) can sustain us only for so long. The culture is undergoing what many have referred to as a meaning crisis, and the perpetuating of sentiment and aesthetic pleasure (short-lived for all except the most fanatical acolytes - Paul Valery as an example springs to mind) seems irresponsible; we need to resonate again, at a higher turn of the spiral, in a more rational and considered manner, with the divine spaces.
We have had a poetics, in Eliot, famously inspired by the Symbolists, of the crisis – that treated it thematically and exemplified it as a radical divorce from divinity; and now we need a poetics that leads us beyond it, which exemplifies the radical connection we have here been speaking of.
But we have also said that there is another stage beyond this, without which the dialectic logic would not be complete. This is the Scrying stage. The Scrier carries forward the Symbol-Self-Essence integration with an additional dimension: they are able to ‘scry’ the waters from whence the Essence Archetype came, and read in it a portent and a vision of those deep and timeless currents. Scriers, in folk literature, can read the future, and speak prophecies that capture timeless truths for the present moment. Blake did literally refer to his works as prophecies – and we are drawing on this as a way of pointing out the nature of this type. We have said, in the Ladder of Poetry series, that the Scrier thus resonates and works with ‘Eidos’, which we can define as the articulated structure of Being or of, in effect, the Godhead, or as close to it as we can come, while still in human form. It is understanding the why and the wherefore of the Essence Archetypes themselves; it is engaging in a kind of – here’s that phrase again – archaeological reconstruction – and from the Essence weaving out the living web of pure spirit which it was embedded within and from which it descended. It is, needless to say, a very high and rare achievement – this kind of Poetic Consciousness – the likes of which only a few poets have reached. Shakespeare, Blake, Goethe, Dante all count among this rank, and doubtless there are more in other traditions – Lao Tzu, Rumi, Hafez, and so on. We would have to make a broad survey of the spiritual literatures extant to be able to comment more definitively on the matter, but it is sufficient to say that there are only a handful of poets who have developed to such a point.
Poets working on this level do not need poetic mentorship, obviously – but Sensing poets moving into this stage can and might. Such poets would need not only to have the Symbol-Self-Essence integration explained to them, but also the living web which Essence comes from; we can call this, to use a clunky but accurate phrase, the Symbol-Self-Essence-Eidos alignment, resonance or integration.
For the reasons we have laid out, we can now – as a brief aside – make the clear statement that Exoteric poets are supported in a different manner to Esoteric poets. Exoteric poets need help moving in two directions: the Self, which needs to be encouraged, and Symbolisation, through the aesthetic praxis of craft. To apply feedback on the objective level of form and craft is appropriate to the Exoteric poet who is working towards mastering the Symbolic field, but it is not appropriate to the Esoteric poet, or at least not in the same way. For the Esoteric poet’s main concern is not whether he has made his work objective and aesthetic, but whether the symbols he has used best fit the essence coming through.
Presently, when we think of poetic mentorship, no matter the poet’s development or nature, it is often only on matters of craft, or else a liberal, unstructured patronage. But this does not name, and nowhere is this brought together into an explicit framework or mission statement, the manifold daily labour of poets everywhere providing each other (and we see this trend with minority poets in particular of late) with the kind of encouragement and acknowledgement of their right to speak creatively. It is done, but the nature of this work and support is not always understood – or is only partially understood. It is necessary because it says to the Poetic Consciousness in the poet that it is not trivial, that it has consequence, despite what the world and culture at large seems to think – which dismisses it not even with a positive statement of its irrelevance, but with indifference and a lack of recognition.
To sum it up before returning to our concluding discussion of Esoteric poetry: Exoteric poets need help with this double movement towards Self and Symbol; Esoteric poets need help with a single movement towards Essence and then towards Eidos. If this possibility can be named and the contact in this and other ways facilitated, then the mentor has done his job appropriately. We use the word mentor here, which seems too prosaic for a role that seems to be the very essence of poetry, a facilitator of relationships, a relationship that creates relationships – perhaps we can take a name from Celtic bards of old and refer to this role as an ‘Olave’. That seems to carry more of the wisdom quality inherent in this role and function. Olaves, it need not be said at this late point, are not Scholars, who study the objective symbolic order, but anyone who is able to hold this greater awareness of the whole, and the collective space they hold – the Bard’s College – is more a sangha or synod than an academy. Or, at least not as it has been conceived of by scholars, for as some may know, academy comes from Akadēmia, a sacred grove outside Athens, made sacred by those highly aware and genuinely religious few who recognised the Goddess of relationality in the grove, whose organised strings could vibrate with the essence and eidos of her depth; whose fine and cosmic attunement was misapprehended, reduced, desecrated and neglected by the scholars who saw in her only a great irrationality, in short – more of the subjective self, with its unproductive disruptions (obviously a paternalistic attitude inflicted upon women for much of history). In doing so they committed an inevitable error which persists to this day, in the curiously external and traditional way that Scholars relate to divinity and ‘God’, whether they are religious by their own admission or atheist. They have not yet the Symbolic mastery that would enable them to resonate with divine spaces, as we have already a few times said. They have not recognised that the Goddess, to use this mythic language, belongs to another order – not the subjective, not the objective, but the anima mundi that influences and is creative of both, as the fertile ground from which they spring.
The risk of putting these ideas into practice and getting this wrong, by entrusting power to people who are wolves in sheep clothing, is real and present, but it is a general risk our society has as a whole, lacking as it is in real spiritual discernment. The Bard’s College – or Akadēme, whatever we choose to call it, or whatever name it is given – will have to survive by virtue of the strength and clarity of its ideas, and the virtuosity and net positive of its effect.
Its danger will come mainly from:
the friction of overzealous mentors who lack understanding,
insecure mentors who aim to pigeonhole and keep poets within the box they’ve made for them,
insecure poets who wish to climb the ladder of poetry through performance (when only real, ontological development will suffice) and will resist their natural place, not recognising that they are loved there anyway
insecure scholars who reject the notion of anything higher and are quick to dismiss the deeper ontology of esoteric poetry and therefore of the whole project.
Wisdom, both in this abstract sense and in a pragmatic, tactful sense will be required if it is to become of any use to growing poets and humanity.
Conclusion
Now, by way of a conclusion, let us return to the theme of Esoteric Poetic Consciousness. It is a lonely practice and path, where the poet stakes not just his craft (for that is the objective realm of symbol) and not just his being (the subjective realm of self), but both, to resonate with a ‘material’ that is not even recognised as a material yet by the sensual masses and even by aspiring poets, working at the first stages of Poetic Consciousness.
What we are trying to make clear is that the poets we hold most dear – Shakespeare, Goethe, Dante – are essential (pun intended) to humanity, and live on and are still to this day celebrated, not for their Objective craft (the Scholar’s mistake), or for the glimmers we catch in them of our Subjective Selves (the Sentimental’s mistake), but for the real, living thread of divinity they are able, with varying degrees of clarity and understanding, to capture and impress. They haunt us with their spiritual matter, and that is why they live on, even through these radical misunderstandings and reductions. Man knows there is something deeper than Sentiment and Scholarly cleverness, or apt symbolisation; he does not know he knows this, but he recognises it, and decides to keep its sacred charge within the shared cultural space, as a token of his hidden face, his spiritual origin and eventual destination. He knows that he is not the Self; he knows that he is not the World of matter that surrounds him. He knows that what is behind these forms is incomparably more powerful; that it is reality, and everything beside it pales in comparison, is a lifeless play of shadows. This he knows, the destiny of Poetic Consciousness, because it is inherent in his own Poetic Consciousness, as the life within the seed, which must grow out inevitably and eventually as only this. The seed of Spirit is within him, and it quivers in recognition and anticipation when it reads the great poetry of man, even as the reader it is planted within turns to surface matters of sentimental affirmation and aesthetic appreciation, unable to place the deeper stirrings of his spirit.
The sentimental poet of the fourteen-year-old girl who has broken up with her boyfriend of two weeks shares a Poetic Consciousness with Shakespeare; the Spiritual flower of the latter is latent within the very workings and logic of her own. We spoke at the start of this essay of the community of poets across time and place as a laurel, woven of many leaves. But we can go further than this and say that Poetic Consciousness is that Consciousness in Man which drives him, through expression, towards a fruitful relationship with the infinite; in which the infinite can become finite, and the finite become infinite; in which Spirit and Matter marry, coalesce, and this world reflects, becomes indivisible with, the spirit-world above. In this place, all is one, and its intelligibility is as luminous as the sun; Dante apprehended its sphere well when he spoke of the concentric circles of ever-receding heaven. It has been frozen and trivialised by the Sentimentals, and frozen and dismissed by the Scholars, but the reality of it yet lives on and reaches the ready, patient, yet active and not as passive as it seems. For it fruits itself in love with the very world we walk upon and breathe (we have therefore called it a fruiting imagination, to tie up our extension of Coleridge’s unfinished schematic).
It is this knowledge, of man as Spiritual being, as Spirit sent out of itself and returning to itself (we find ourselves naturally falling into Hegel’s words), that is the great antidote and necessity of our time, riven as it is with struggle and crisis. Poetic Consciousness is one; the separation between poets is null; the separation betwixt earth and heaven is null, for the latter is active in and creative of the former; and, in time, as this fact becomes apparent to the masses, and embodied and carried into the culture with greater and stronger clarity of transmission, the separation between them and the poets, between Mass Consciousness and Poetic Consciousness will heal itself and break down as well. For they will recognise that the creative spark in them that resonates with, and is patterned within the polarity of Selfhood and Symbol, is Poetic Consciousness itself; and the last substantive barrier will disappear, evanesce, and Man will know himself in practice as one Consciousness.
We can say, therefore, that the poet, the Bard or Olave, prefigures what man will become: a creative agent and healing mediator between the lower and higher kingdoms. It is through him and his example – in poetry, in art, in philosophy, statecraft, psychology, teaching, science, mathematics – that man is helped to assume and inherit the role that he is destined for and seeking. The poet is a bridge which man crosses; he leaves breadcrumbs with his work and life (which is the same thing as his work) back to this place, at the meeting point between worlds.
Self and Symbol are two poles of matter or of the World; Essence and Eidos are facets of Spirit, pulling on man to evolve through the first polarity, so that they can be birthed and thereby change the world of matter into purer and purer spirit.
Poetic Consciousness is the iron in us that is pulled by this magnet.
It is the Unity that bridges all Division; the Truth that will convert all Lies; the will of cosmic Justice.