Loafing heroism - Village Magazine

70 December-January 2014

EW of us can recite a poem in its entirety. Perhaps

this no longer matters as even an infant can now

ﬁnd whatever it was on YouTube. Yet many of the

outstanding technological advances humanity has made

only seem to increase stress levels, generate inequality

and cause environmental degradation.

What is the antidote? Is it possible that close engage-

ment with Romantic poetry can bring us from the

brink of meltdown? Edward Clarke, the author of ‘The

Vagabond Spirit of Poetry’, believes so.

In recent times many in the West have been drawn to

the non-dogmatic spiritual traditions of the East from

Buddhism to yoga as they search for tranquillity and

deep meaning. But Clarke suggests that we “we have

our own traditions and mysteries, our own ways of tak-

ing hold of breath” that can be found in our inherited

poetry.

He argues that “by reciting poems and remembering

them, we ﬁnd that we have been provided with narra-

tive exercises suﬃcient to apprehend that we are greater

than we know”.

Clarke writes of how he continues to draw inspiration

from a passage from Milan Kundera’s novel ‘Slowness’.

Kundera enquires in one powerful passage:

‘Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah

where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where

have they gone, those loaﬁng heroes of folk song, those

vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed

down under the stars? Have they vanished along with

footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature?

There is a Czech proverb that describes their easy indo-

lence in a metaphor: ‘They are gazing at God’s windows’.

A person gazing at God’s windows is not bored; he is

happy. In our world, indolence has turned into having

nothing to do, which is a completely diﬀerent thing: a

person with nothing to do is frustrated, bored, is con-

stantly searching for the activity he lacks”.

Clarke makes bold claims on behalf of his poetic ideal:

“Swearing by capitalism, democracy, reason and sci-

ence, we are all the while cheerfully ignorant about

supernatural powers that hide themselves in great

poetry”. Essentially Clarke holds a neo-Platonic, pre-

Loafing heroism

Mystical poetry to enrich the workaday.

Review by Frank Armstrong

ENVIRONMENT

BOOK REVIEW

The Vagabond Spirit

of Poetry

Edward Clarke

John Hunt Publishing

£12.99

December-January 2014 71

Enlightenment worldview, much like that of most of

the poets he adulates including Shakespeare, Milton,

Wordsworth and Yeats.

Unlike most critics Clarke is unabashed at the sug-

gestion that great poetry engages with supernatural

forces: “I contend that the greatest poetry can make

us apprehend that God, the centre of religious celebra-

tion, whatever we call that nothingness or darkness,

incomprehensible and vast in its own being, is a force

within man”.

Clarke’s deep engagement has brought him to an

explicit belief in the supernatural. He poses the question:

“If a work makes us believe in fairies, even temporar-

ily, do they thus come into existence within that work

whenever it is read with the most believing mind, how-

ever strange that seems?”

The author is unrepentant in response to an accusa-

tion from one critic of “spiritual literalism” in his ﬁrst

book. He says: “I will persist in what many critical con-

temporaries see as a folly because the older poetry calls

for it (such is my piety)”. Surely Clarke cannot be faulted

for giving poetry a neo-Platonic reading considering the

poets he parses would have approved of it rather than the

sociological or deconstructive approach now favoured

in academic institutions?

Clarke is wary of a melancholic trend in modern

poetry. He argues that the worst kind of poetry is con-

fessional. He identiﬁes Sylvia Plath among a raft of

poets who he says “are depressingly limited and dan-

gerously egotistical poets”. Clarke insists that poetry

should seek to answer eternal questions and eschew

self-indulgence.

William Wordsworth’s poetry encapsulates this ten-

sion between a Romantic poetry searching for a ‘great

beyond’ and the self-referential poetry he holds in con-

tempt: “Wordsworth worries me because he becomes

so consumed by the story of his life, ‘The Prelude’, so

obsessed with what comes before, that he neglects to

develop his capacity to look after, his ‘capacity of thee’,

or that which comes to us from the future”.

Clarke identiﬁes historical episodes when pre-mod-

ern ideas encounter industrial civilisation as propitious

for poetic invention and the other-worldly forms that

inhabit such verse. He claims: “Supernatural forms have

a habit of entering a country’s literature when its oral

culture is dying out and the population becomes more

urban and sceptical. In England, genii have ﬂocked to

our literature from the sixteenth century onwards.

When Yeats was recording the last vestiges of ancient

tradition in Ireland during the nineteenth century, the

fairies began to ﬁnd a new home in his verse”.

Clarke endorses the revolutionary ideas of William

Blake who favoured a sacramental poetry, and a uni-

versal form of religion: “The Religions of all Nations are

derived from each Nation’s diﬀerent reception of the

Poetic Genius, which is everywhere call’d the Spirit of

Prophecy… As all men are alike, tho’ inﬁnitely various;

so all Religions: and as all similars have one source the

True Man is the source, he being the Poetic Genius”.

There is a clear divergence between Clarke’s approach

and that of one of the leading Modernist poets and critics

of the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot. As a devout Christian

Eliot rejected what he regarded as the paganism of

Romantic poetry. Clarke claims that: “Eliot’s major prob-

lem with this book would have been due to his critical

position as a Christian”. But Eliot’s devotion led him ulti-

mately to admit that: “The poetry does not matter”.

Clarke is convinced that: “Poetry does matter because

it opens paths to self-knowledge by acknowledging indi-

rectly and formally that which I had better call ‘The

bright eternal Self that is everywhere’; ‘that is immor-

tality, that is Spirit, that is all”.

This divergence between Christianity and older form

of religiosity is identiﬁed by the anthropologist Barbara

Ehrenreich in her book Dancing in the Streets: A History

of Collective Joy (2006). She argues that “today’s ‘faiths’

are often pallid aﬀairs – only by virtue of the very fact

that they are ‘faiths’, dependent on, and requiring, belief

as opposed to direct knowledge. The prehistoric ritual

dancer, the maenad or practitioner of Vodou, did not

believe in her god or gods: she knew them, because, at

the height of group ecstasy, they ﬁlled her with their

presence”.

The poetry that Clarke esteems evinces this older form

of spiritual engagement that a rationalist Christianity,

especially that which emerged after the Reformation

and Counter-Reformation, superseded. Seen in this

way, poetry may be one among other forms of expres-

sion including dance and music that allows the human

spirit to thrive.

Clarke might be faulted for an elitism that creeps

into his evaluation of the poetic imagination. Should

we restrict ourselves to the worship at the shrine of a few

canonical poets? Or are there many more ‘loaﬁng heroes

of folk song’ in our midst as Kundera suggests there once

were? Also, the poets Clarke esteems so highly are all

male. Is the poetic priesthood a male preserve or should

the female imagination be given more emphasis?

Furthermore, it seems unsatisfactory to dismiss the

scientiﬁc ﬁeld peremptorily. Undoubtedly there are

some scientists that bring ‘scientism’ to an unhelpful

extreme such as the tendentious Richard Dawkins. But

Clarke may share more of a platform than he realises

with others especially Iain McGilchrist. McGilchrist

actually taught literature before training as a psychi-

atrist. His book ‘The Master and his Emissary’ (2009)

explores what he views as a pathological imbalance of

the brain hemispheres apparent in the Western imagi-

nation since the Industrial Revolution, with far too great

an emphasis on the problem-solving left, at the expense

of the creative right.

Clarke’s book is a powerful polemic that is unapolo-

getic in its spiritual conviction. His Romantic reading

of Romantic poetry diverges from most academic dis-

course and merits fresh appraisal. He traces a line of

poetic authority, from Shakespeare to Yeats, which to

his great regret was in the end largely broken by indus-

trial civilisation.

As the world confronts the many challenges of a

rampant globalism and a dislocated and uninterested

population perhaps, as Clarke envisions, a revived poetic

mystical poetry, along with other art, can indeed help

us comprehend the great beyond, as well as help us cope

with the here and now. •

Swearing by capitalism,

democracy, reason and

science, we are all the

while cheerfully

ignorant about

supernatural powers

that hide themselves

in great poetry

“