"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by Daniel Morgan

The trend of modernity, especially after World War I and blatantly after World War II, has been to accommodate the marginal and disparate elements of society, intelligent and ignorant, the neurotic and normal, by ironing out whatever high towers exist between them. What comes to my mind is primarily the stratification of the arts, how closely they are related to us (if at all) and how they are popularly created and judged by any objective standard (we can only hope). The case as I see it is that somehow, having been brought closer to us, the arts seem to have only been removed much farther than before.

The modern education experiment has been tried and failed, and covered-up, and received more funds, and tried a few more times, and failed some more. But then Progressives are always rather slow on the learning curve. Consequently, our post-modern priorities in education have disinherited the concept of the "Renaissance Man" or men of letters. This was the fellow who grew up learning his Latin and Greek and French and German through the primary grades as well as the trivium and quadrivium (who has even heard of those these days?) and soon became a scholar in various fields by his thirties. And there were almost legions of this species of man. Today homo traditionalus is all but extinct. Universities now seek to specialize and pigeon hole, in short, to marginalize the arts even further from the common man. Instead of knowing a good measure of everything as our antiquated Renaissance Men would, our graduates know a little bit of nothing or, in the case of the more fortunate, a whole lot of one thing.

Where the intelligentsia of today has gone wrong is in supposing that the hurdle between the common man and the lettered man is an artificial, aristocratically-placed barrier that can simply be erased without any consequences. In reality, it is like a great wall of crystal, quite formidable to get past, but not at all hard to peer into. That is to say, for a common man to become a poet is not an afternoon's effort. Learning the craft requires years of apprenticeship, studying the masters that came before such as Virgil, Dante, Donne, and Yeats. Once the fellow finds out where he lies on the continuum from antiquity, he has defined his context and perspective and can go on to rework his skill until he is old. However, no matter how straight and narrow a path that seems, the effort needed for the common man to simply see into and appreciate the great works of the past like the odes of Keats is minimal. Again, a few may take up the piano with years of dedicated and assiduous practice, but it only takes an earful of the classics for a child to enjoy the concertos of Grieg.

At the cusp of the nineteenth century, Wordsworth reflected on those poets who were caught up with the decorum of inverted syntax and unnatural personifications and mythological referentials. They only abetted a specialized and convoluted poetic jargon rather than poetic diction. There is the anecdote of Browning who confessed to the London Poetry Society of one of his early poems: "When I wrote that, God and I knew what it meant, but now God alone knows."

In Lyrical Ballads (a title immediately expressive of tavern- or travel-song), Wordsworth not only wrote about the common man, he wrote for the common man in "the real language of men." In other words, "keep it simple, stupid." So it was in the countryside that he believed the common man spoke a "plainer and more emphatic language." His experiments with Coleridge in restoring the rustic (and thus transcendent) in poetry meant that it should read like written prose. Of course, no writer could intelligibly put to paper the everyday jumble of conversational speech or render out the "ers" and "ums" of spoken prose, since people normally talk in redundant fragments and run-ons. Instead, he believed there was no "essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition."

Wordsworth was something of a progressive conservative. Even though he supported the French Revolution, he wanted to advance the tradition of old. He also believed that each of his poems had a worthy purpose, to cause the reader to be "in some degree enlightened, and his affections ameliorated." Poetry for him was not the obsession of the bohemian recluse or the activist ravings of the coffee-house guru. Poetry speaks as much of the truth as science does. The only difference is "the poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion." This does not mean Wordsworth could dismiss the evil in the world with a casual quip about more education and opportunity for all á la the NEA. A crusader against the Zeitgeist of emerging globalism in his own time, he was not proposing we simply hold hands around the world and wish suffering away. He might very well have taken to the desert with the Essenes had he witnessed the "savage torpor" and "degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation" evidenced by reality TV shows today.

But even a written prose in English, simple though it is, has suffered greatly since Wordsworth's time. William Morris, at the other end of the century from Wordsworth, argued that the English language has lost its height and grandeur. Morris, a man after my own heart, sought to restore the poetic beauty of prose in his fabulous romantic fantasies long before J.R.R. Tolkien was born. Half a millennia before Wordsworth and Morris, however, Dante was working on the same problem. In his De Vulgari Eloquentia (On Common Speech), he posited that Italian, the language that flowed as naturally into a child as milk from a mother's breast, trumped the precision of Latin. Consequently, his Commedia was monumental among the masses. He was the Wordsworth of his day and built the eloquence of his language as he moves up in worlds toward a vision of God Himself. He could vary from the truly vulgar and scatological though vocabulary to the divine as his protagonist advanced out of the filth of hell and into the rarefied air of paradise.

But most adults today have not visited the worlds of Dante, Wordsworth, or Morris. Especially in America, poetry has the reputation for being sophist, esoteric, and high-falutin'. Even among the intelligentsia, poetry has become a marginal diversion. But that is a far different climate than pre-1960s America. John McWhorter in Doing Your Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care says that even in our speeches we talk in a sort of verbal drive-by. We have lost the notion of rhetoric and orators - alas, another species now nearly extinct. As a genre, poetry has been beat up and bruised like some effigy of King George. The notion that not everyone can be a poet grinds against American's inborn frontier sensibility. For them, the poet as craftsman is just plain undemocratic.

Now firstly I must say that I side with Plato when it comes to the values of a democracy and, secondly, this mentality affects far more than this one genre. Egalitarianism, the radical demolishing of any differences between the refined and the prosaic, the sacred and the secular, has seeped into music, drama, and the other arts. Even classical music gets the same bad rap for being "elitist." And all efforts to "fit in" today amounts to supporting the most tawdry of entertainment. Using incorrect grammar has become a sort of protest against the Establishment, whoever that is anymore. I'm not sure even the last days of Rome witnessed such decrepitude such that to speak in a polished and articulate manner was taboo.

What is at stake here in defending a high view of poetry (and thus tacitly the other arts) is the very legitimacy of the creative mind. I will not attempt any exhaustive treatment as Longinus, Sidney, Shelley, and others have answered the age-old objections to poetry long ago. I merely wish to address the discipline of formal poetry and the Christian.

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We must first be reminded that words reflect reality. Anthropologists tell us that language shapes culture more than any thing else. When language is imprecise and primitive, culture returns to the swampland of savage torpor. The classics of world literature illustrate this in history. When Chaucer decided to pen his Canterbury Tales in a Midlands dialect of Middle English, the sheer popularity of the work unified the tongue of the people. Dante's vernacular of the Commedia forged modern day Italian along Tuscan lines. Cervantes did the same for Castilian Spanish in Don Quijote and the Authorized Version of the Scriptures helped mainstream modern English. It is a frightening thought to be sure: what then if the great literature of today is written on the lowest common denominator? When the Left Behinds and Harry Potters fossilize our language on a fourth grade level, we fool ourselves in expecting our children to grow intellectually (and morally) stalwart on such paltry table-scraps. Regardless of the brilliance or banality of their subject matter, books that employ a low diction, bare skeletons of syntax, and elementary vocabulary make for a threadbare diet.

Every novel one reads need not have the high diction of Malory and Shakespeare, however. Indeed, the Greek New Testament was written in the common koine dialect, but with such mastery of language that even the unbeliever may feel some numinous inspiration from its words. The amount of poetic language in Scripture is only paralleled by the volume of history included. If that seems strange, it was not so for the Puritans who worshipped the God who revealed Himself though history. Knowing that we reach the divine in words, history can accurately evoke deeds of the past. Therefore, we have a "testament" of who God is and what He has done for His chosen people in salvation history. Many of those worshipping Puritans even became historians in their local townships and not a few achieved some enduring poetry. Even when words cannot ascend to describe God Himself but only His acts, they can, in fact, talk about Him indirectly, in an apophatic or anthropomorphic manner.

Also, words surpass and transform reality. There is a fluidity of connotative meaning to words, giving them their transcendent quality. Logos (Logos) can mean not only "word", but "order", "reason", "account", "value", "charge", "thing", or "book." It is a one-word poem. Connotations provide an inexhaustible matrix of complementary meanings. In fact, most words have their own wondrous intricate web of meaning if we cared to look closely enough for the dewy threads. As Emerson said, "Every word was once a poem." As far as The Logos, Christ Jesus is the ultimate Word. I have always enjoyed the times when Jesus was going over points of the law with the Pharisees and kept pointing back to Himself. He is the self-interpreting word. It's as if a book somehow came alive and told you how to read it!

As Tolkien describes in On Fairy Stories (which even touches on the Gospel in stories), simply putting together the words "green" and "Sun" forms an entirely new object not available in nature, but "sub-created" by our imagination. Words also transform and shape reality by the spiritual principle of speaking truth into our lives. This is not pop psychology, the feel-good power of positive thinking. Rather, one can give an edifying word that changes a friend's attitude and outlook that gives him the strength to carry on. One does not have to know that the word "encourage" etymologically means to put the heart back into a person for it to make a difference in one's life. The meanings in these conglomerations of sounds affect the hearer in dramatic ways. On the down side, verbal abuse can reduce a child to a shell of his potential self just as if the word was a blow to the gut.

If those are the powers of poetry, why do we not revel in their richness? I propose the reason is two-fold. First, modern Christians in reaction to relativism are uncomfortable with ambiguity in language. But ambiguity should not equal confusion. If a poem needs glosses and footnotes galore in order to be understood, it is simply bad poetry (you know who you are, T.S. Eliot!). The Wasteland is a wonder of a poem after one has loved the Western literary canon first. By itself and its referential notes, however, the poem is too centripetal to enjoyably understand, almost like some Deconstructionist ploy of deferred meaning. Eliot and the reader, and this goes for all poetry, must meet each other halfway.

But we should certainly not mistake ambiguity for ambivalence. The poet knows what he wants to say and may mince words together and remold language through the forges of irony and paradox to do so, but he is not wishy-washy over his message. When Jesus said the first will be last and the leader must learn to be a servant, He was not confused. The use of paradox, one remembers, is not that of a contradiction in logic or truth values, but an apparent contradiction due to the way a statement is worded. A true contradiction would be an antilogy. Indeed, He still upholds the hierarchy when He says a disciple is not above his teacher, nor a slave his master; it is enough for the disciple to become like his teacher.

The other reason for Christians snubbing verse is less excusable. If we are honest with ourselves before our Father who is in secret, we know that Christians across the board have lost an appreciation for the arts. They have somehow fallen into the old Puritan stereotype (a villainously false one at that, considering their previous commendation) of keeping our eyes so heavenward that we neglect and despise all that is wondrous in the world. In the academic world, this results in intellectual torpidity and disobeys the command to love the Lord with all of our mind. The mind cannot be cut off and compartmentalized any more than the heart or soul can be unstrung. Our bodies are instruments bound in three-tone harmony.

How then should our poetry look? We should read and compose with the knowledge that effulgence and a surfeit of feeling is not the same thing as pretense. Neither does directness necessarily equal crude, pedestrian, or didactic talk. The poet does not have to employ street-talk to speak clearly. He will not fear using elaborate and flowery language though it may be mistaken by the philistines for pious posturing. Often newcomers to poetry cannot understand the reason for describing a flower in a dozen long-stemmed stanzas. One might as well ask why the Psalmist repeats the same themes over and over or why the Apostle feels the need to stack superlatives upon superlatives in describing the love or power or wisdom of God. The coverage a poet gives to his subject may linger in "silence and slow time", but that is no vain repetition of the Gentile. It is the sort of abandoned adoration that fills attics up with love letters.

Since Protestants have yielded little fare in fiction writing, one might turn to music or art to see the sacred and profane played out. Bach, Handel, and Brahms did not use their religion as a license to produce shoddy hymns. Neither did Grunewald, Durer, or Rembrandt. But those master-craftsmen well deserve an article of their own to commentate. Let it suffice to say that Christian music today is riddled with the studied equivalent of Beatnik; I can recall a dreadful Chris Rice song that rhymes "radio" with itself a half dozen times. Compare that to the music of Caedmon's Call, a band whose lyrics seize upon Donne, Milton, Coleridge, Augustine, C.S. Lewis, ancient hymns, and the greatest paradoxes of the doctrines of grace.

But what of using the harsher side of realism of our fallen world in Christian fiction like curse words and sex scenes? I admit, 'tis a temptation I often face, and occasionally lose. While fiction is a different duck than the self-contained poem, no one, except the most gung-ho of the modern cult of the ugly, enjoys banality or scatological matter in literature. The Bible's most explicit sexual scenes are cloaked in euphemism and a divine language that stops far short of arousing the reader. But God did use a supple and gorgeous language in Hebrew verse to picture that rapturous mystery.

Of all people, Christians have the least excuse in leveling the field between apprentice and master-craftsman since they know the journey is steep, and that the robes of glory are only woven out of suffering. Oh the works of art had been done before you, Athens! If San Francisco or Seattle had seen them, they would have repented long ago in dust and ashes.

So it is not enough for there to be Christian artists. Their craft must be as meticulous if not more so than their neighboring secular artists. The temptation is always high to become smug in holding the right content and refrain from mastering the form as well. The smug among us are those who excuse themselves with Paul's words that it does not matter if one preaches out of selfish ambition, envy, or strife, but so long as in "every way, whether in pretence or in truth, Christ is preached" (Phil 1:15-18). But Paul was not saying "It's just the thought that counts." In rejoicing in the Message, he was still troubled by the contention of the fleshly teachers. He made allowances for the sake of the Message, but not excuses for the motives. It is not enough to say or make something true. It must also be beautiful, or "good" as God phrased it in the Genesis account.

Irreverent Words

There are then three mistakes Christian writers and especially poets make in regards to content and form, the first being the most common. We focus on our content without regard to form, rather like a person walking around naked, ignorant of their aesthetic lapse. While the nudist may aspire to some measure of beauty in this raw and natural state, he or she may hardly call the unattired and unaffected body "art." In the same way, when Christians mindlessly reword expressions of faith, right doctrine, and worship of God, and figure that makes up for their lack of artistic discipline, they are in grave error. This mixture of pride and sloth is akin to the story "The Emperor's New Clothes" (coincidentally written by Hans Christian Anderson, a consummate believer and craftsman).

The next mistake is the reverse. Writers so caught up in getting the form down right (the numbers of meter and proper conventions and decorum of their genre) that they forget to narrate a tight plot with believable characters. Form without content is like clothes without a person. This is the fatal flaw, even worse than the newly clothed emperor. When the reader stares blankly at a work, wondering aloud, "What the deuce is being said here?", there is no substance, no personality to the poem. One might as well worship the shroud of Turin rather than the risen Christ. The Christian poet John Donne expressed it thus: "But he who loveliness within / Hath found, all outward loathes, / For he who color loves, and skin, / Love but their oldest clothes."

The last error is where the clothes do not match the person. They may hang loosely off the subject like a scarecrow's garb or simply clash with the particular mood. Bright colors in a blouse do not belong at a funeral and trochaic trimeter in verse does not correspond to an ode to melancholia. The book to read, by the way, is Poetic Meter and Poetic Form by Paul Fussell.

I assume, of course, that there is such a thing as poetry and that we are able to effectively judge it by the objective "doctrine of absolute criteria." In The Well-Wrought Urn, Cleanth Brooks contends "the Humanities are in their present plight largely because their teachers have more and more ceased to raise normative questions, have refrained from evaluation." "Relativism will have forced us to give up not only literature, but history as well. We shall have to content ourselves with literary chronicles, masses of uninterpreted facts, mere bibliographies."

The Idea of the Tree and the Secret Story

It should be remembered that I am not saying anything novel here. By form, I do not merely refer to meter and perhaps rhyme schemes, but what Brooks calls the consummate harmony of the poem in its imagery, word choice, and internal logic. "The essence of poetry is metaphor," Brooks continues, "and metaphor is finally analogical rather than logical." In logic, we ask if a conclusion necessarily follows from its premises. Here, we ask whether a poem follows itself. As the Commedia grows upon itself in correspondences of allegory, poetry does so by resolving dramatic tension with irony and paradox. We judge a poem on its own grounds and merit, but we judge it nonetheless. It is not a perfect science and that is the whole point. Both the crafting and the judging is an imperfect, organic art. A tree is beautiful not for its perfection, but for its striving through perfection. In the same way, John Ruskin points out that, unlike other cultures, medieval Christianity confessed man's imperfections and thus achieved the only individual, creative, unique, and noble architecture in the great Gothic cathedrals. The Greeks and Egyptians merely had their slaves carbon-copy pieces of bland perfection like hermetically- precise pyramids and symmetrical temples. Form is far more than the categories we can check off on some Egyptian slave driver's list.

For a quick look at how Christians have embodied the idea of the tree (divine striving through imperfection), I'm reminded of Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday and Lewis' The Magician's Nephew. The former poses, "I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the trees" as the latter describes the dawn of a "world where everything, even a lamp-post, comes to life and grows" - "just as the trees had grown."

Therefore, the question is not what Athens has to do with Jerusalem, as Christians since the second century have supposed. For Jerusalem has much of Athens within it, the Temple of Solomon, the masterful ephods of Aaron, the gate called Beautiful and sundry springs. Rather, what has Jerusalem to do with Rome?

Athens represents an intellectual paradigm, perhaps even a philosopher's hang-up on reason, which can be down-sized, trimmed-up, and incorporated to fit into the Christian life. Rome, however, embodies the Aristotelian method of epistemology, searching for truth from within rather than above. It is imperial in its tastes, and all too prone to waste away in avaricious incontinence. We could say that Augustine and Luther have more in common with Trismegistus and Plato than Caesar and Pope Boniface. Plato might have been the odd kid at the end of the block with the funny-looking forehead, but Boniface would have been the schoolyard bully whose behavior was excused because of his rich parents and athletic prowess.

Since all art is imitation (mimesis as in mimics), we as followers of Christ are also to make our lives into pleasing works, knowing all along that it is God who crafts (poietes as in poetizing) us into the likeness of His Son, as vessels of honor. There is nothing artificial or profane about that sort of art.

Discovering prosody (what was often called the "numbers" of meter and sometimes rhyme scheme) is like reading the Bible in its original languages; only one can learn prosody in a day, rather than spend years in Greek lexicons. Some of us have the potential to become Bible scholars, but all of us can admire prosody and enjoy a good turn of phrase. Once we put the "numbers" back into words, we can sneak a peek at the infrastructure of Dante's world and the arcane architecture of apocalyptic literature, both of which are edified by numbers. Who knows? As heirs of Christ, we might just be able to sub-create "good" worlds in writing again as homage to the Word made flesh. After all, one could certainly do worse than plucking parables and shouting from the rooftops His masterpiece, the Secret Story of the Sent Son.