THE SHAPING SPIRIT: NINETEENTH CENTURY QUESTS FOR ORDER

THE SHAPING SPIRIT: NINETEENTH CENTURY QUESTS FOR ORDERAuthor(s): Lawrence WynnSource: Interpretations, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1976), pp. 1-9Published by: Scriptorium PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23240413 .

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THE SHAPING SPIRIT: NINETEENTH CENTURY QUESTS FOR ORDER*

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, The maker's rage to order words of the sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.1

These lines from Wallace Stevens' "The Idea of Order at Key West"

stand on frontispieces of two books with strikingly counter titles:

Austin Warren's Rage for Order: Essays in Criticism2 and Morse

Peckham's Man's Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior, and the Arts?

Obviously the significance of Stevens' words is distinctive for each.

Professor Peckham believes that the "almost universal assumption" of

the "identification of art and order" is "entirely in error."4 He argues that "the ancient effort to find order in a situation [art] which offers us

the opportunity to experience disorder" is quite wrongheaded.5 Mr.

Peckham denies that poetry discovers ". . order amid chaos, meaning in the middle of confusion, and affirmation at the heart of despair.'

"6

He does agree that man "desires above all a predictable and ordered

world, a world to which he is oriented . . . ."7 Art, then, becomes a

necessary burden in that it requires him to remain aware of his capacity to innovate, to develop orientations.8

In his Preface, Professor Warren declares the two contraries

"intensity and calm; initial violence, sought and achieved discipline" to

be necessary to poetry. Art "succeeds when there is an equilibrium which is also a tension, when there is a rage waiting to be ordered and a

rage to find, or to make, that ordering."9 Poetry, he says, requires a

technical discipline in the "deformation and reorganization of the

language," a spiritual discipline "of confronting disorder in one's self

and in the world; of facing . . . the responsibility of vision and choice"; and a third discipline "to unite the spiritual revolution and

reconstitution to the linguistic or literary."10 According to Warren, "The poet's passionate desire to perceive order for himself . . . makes

his final creation a kind of world or cosmos; a concretely languaged,

synoptically felt world; an ikon or image of the 'real world.' "n

The assumption that the drive to create art is to create or at least

imitate order is of long standing. Art has been valued for its various

capacities to reveal an order which lies at the heart of what is outwardly chaotic, its ability to penetrate to the essences of things or to unfold

meaning otherwise wrapped in confusion. Traditionally the artist has

been seen as a maker, a moulder, an orderer, a shaper. Contemporary voices, Ernst Cassirer, Clive Bell, Kenneth Burke, W.K. Wimsatt, speak of art as an "organizer of flux," as "significant form," "symbolic form," or "instances of symbolic action." Historically, the "order" of the artist

has been variously explained as being imitated, discovered, recovered,

transferred, reciprocated, or created. With the beginning of the

*Read as a paper at a symposium entitled "Aesthetics and Survival: A

Humanities Colloquium," April 18, 1974, Memphis State University.

1



nineteenth century, there is a marked shift in emphasis upon the

responsibility of the artist to provide or to share in the provision of this

order himself, emphasis upon the necessity of transferring, at least in

part, order from the artist's mind. In his The Mirror and the Lamp,

Meyer Abrams has supplied the most thorough account of this

increasing stress upon the creative role of the artist in metaphorical

oppositions of mirror (passive "reflector") and lamp ("radiant

projector").12 Though no nineteenth century artist, so far as I know,

argues that he creates in a complete vacuum, that he wholly invents, estimates of the significance of the poet in developing the order

envisioned in his work range from the suggestion that he merely intensifies what he finds ready-made in the world to Oscar Wilde's

paradoxical declaration that life imitates or derives its order or design from art or the artist.13 For many, order and form result from a

reciprocal action of subject and object, of nature and mind. Wordsworth,

Coleridge, and Shelley all speak of their plastic power. The imagination colors and modifies. Though Hazlitt calls art "mimetic," he sees the

poet as reflecting a world already imbued with an emotional light he

projects.14 The collaborative role of mind and nature is distinguished in

Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" lines referring to "all the mighty world/Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,/And what

perceive . . . ,"15 In Book II of the Prelude, the poet notes an "auxiliar

light" that "Came from my mind, which on the setting sun/Bestowed new splendour . . . ,"16 Striving to overcome the loneliness of his new

life at Cambridge, he found himself as sensitive to "whate'er of Terror or of Love/Or Beauty, Nature's daily face put on" as "waters are to the

sky's influence," yet he asserted:

I had a world about me—'twas my own; I made it, for it only lived to me, And to the God who sees into the heart.17

In his tribute to Wordsworth on hearing the Prelude entire, Coleridge also represents this principle of reciprocalness—mind gaining insight from nature and nature as mirror for the transformed image of self:

... of moments awful, Now in thy inner life, and now abroad, When power streamed from thee, and thy soul received The light reflected, as a light bestowed . . . ,18

Ward Pafford has demonstrated how important "the shaping creativity of mind" is for Byron in the final cantos of Childe Harold.19 In Stanza VI of Canto III, Byron justifies resuming the poem:

Tis to create, and in creating live

A being more intense, that we endow

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With form our fancy, gaining as we give The life we image, even as I do now.20

Both Coleridge and Wordsworth often refer to "the one Life within us and abroad . . . ,"21 The view lies at the heart of the conversation

poems of Coleridge, is a central element in the "Tintern Abbey" lines on the presence that disturbs "with the joy/Of elevated thoughts" and has its dwelling in "the light of setting suns" and "in the mind of man,"22 and is thematic in the "Ancient Mariner." But it is the "Dejection: An

Ode" and Wordsworth's "Intimations Ode" which present most vividly the significant role of the passion and life of the poet in transforming the loveless crowd's "inanimate cold world"23—in converting "matter

of-fact into matter-of-poetry," as Mr. Abrams puts it.24 Peter Bell's

yellow primrose, he suggests, thus becomes "something more" indeed. In his 1962 English Institute paper, "The Drunken Boat," Northrop

Frye reminds us of these modern attitudes which assume that "The basis

of civilization is now the creative power of man; its model . . . the

human vision revealed in the arts . . ,"25—the model in the mind

reflected in the external world. As Frye suggests, Coleridge's notebook

entry: "I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking for, a symbolical

language for something within me that already and forever exists, than

observing anything new," may be linked with Wordsworth's view of his

natural world which represents to him the "still, sad music of humanity" or with Keats' heavens on which he reads "Huge cloudy symbols." The nature to be imitated, then, seems to be inside the artist as well as out.26

For the nineteenth century artist, the creative faculty is an

Imagination—"esemplastic," "coadunating," "magical," "synthetic"— to use a few of Coleridge's terms. This is the "shaping spirit." It is

Coleridge, of course, to whom we owe the most thorough effort to define and to demonstrate the character of the poet's powers. The

primary imagination is the "living Power and prime Agent of all human

Perception," he says. It is a "repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am."27 Coleridge is concerned here with "the great ordering principle,"—the agency, according to David

Daiches, "which enables us both to discriminate and to order, to

separate and to synthesize, and thus makes perception possible . . . ." If

creation is considered "destroying chaos by making its parts intelligible by the assertion of the identity of the designer, as it were, then the

primary imagination is essentially creative," and the secondary

imagination becomes "the conscious human use of this power."28 In

Notebook 25, Coleridge speaks of the imagination as "the power by which one image or feeling is made to modify many others and by a sort

of fusion to force many into one . . . ,"29 The result in poetry is a

"multeity in unity," Coleridge's definition for Beauty as well.30

Other early nineteenth century writers point up the Imagination's "making" or unifying capacities. In his 1815 Preface, Wordsworth

considers it as "conferring," "abstracting," "modifying," and "en

dowing," shaping and creating.31 Lamb calls it "that power which draws

all things to one . . . ,"32 Coleridge's poet "described in ideal perfection"

3



sets in motion this "synthetic and magical power,"35 which "dissolves,

diffuses, dissipates in order to recreate" or if this is not possible strives "to idealize and to unify."34 In "The Statesman's Manual," Coleridge calls the imagination a "reconciling and mediatory power, which

incorporating the Reason in Images of the Sense, and organizing (as it

were) the flux of the Senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the Reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths, of which they are the conductors."35

For Coleridge, most important in its mediative role is the fact that the

imagination is "essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are

essentially fixed and dead."36 It gives life even as it manifests life in

organic form or unity, which shapes as it develops itself from within.

(But that is a subject for another time and place.) The imagination, according to Coleridge, manifests itself through

"the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of

sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; ... a more than usual state of emotion, with more than

usual order . . . ,"37 Nineteenth century artists value the fusion of

dissimilarities, the combination of counters, the harmonizing of the

irrelevant and the discordant. R.H. Fogle describes the works of the

great Romantics as "a series of oppositions" stemming from their

"vitalist idealism."38 One readily recalls Blake's contraries and Hopkins'

"pied beauties," and his "How all's to one thing wrought," as well as

Keats' "disagreeables" evaporating when brought into close

relationship with the intensities of Beauty and Truth.39 A major reconciliation for which the nineteenth century poet hopes

from the imagination is the uniting of subject and object, of man and

nature. Writing to William Sotheby in 1802, Coleridge declares that "A

Poet's Heart & Intellect should be combined, intimately combined &

unified, with the great appearances in Nature . . . ."40 Art, he says in

"On Poesy or Art," "might be defined as of a middle quality between a

thought and a thing, or . . . the union and reconciliation of that which is

nature with that which is exclusively human."41 As Mr. Abrams ably demonstrates, in Coleridge's "Dejection," "nature is made thought and

thought nature, both by their sustained interaction and by their

seamless metaphoric continuity."42 Byron, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth—all speak of states of consciousness which lead to or

allow such interfusion.

In his Well-Wrought Urn, Professor Cleanth Brooks has

demonstrated that "paradox" can be the "language appropriate and

inevitable to poetry," presenting his views in part through examination

of works of the Romantics.43 Wordsworth's and Coleridge's assertions

of their various intents in the poems of the Lyrical Ballads clearly support the notion: to make the commonplace extraordinary; to

provide the charm of novelty to the everyday; to provide the semblance of truth to shadows of the imagination. Some nineteenth century

conceptions of the functions of metre stress the harmonizing of

oppositions—a joining of spontaneous impulse and voluntary purpose,

4



according to Coleridge.44 Hopkins later referred to his use of

"counterpoint" as designed to fuse the expected and the unanticipated 45

For Coleridge the greatest poetry reflects "the greatest multeity in the

greatest unity." It is, as Mr. Abrams explains, the result of spontaneous feeling in a "productive tension" with "impulse for order" which sets the assimilative imagination to work, balanced by opposing purpose and judgment, and supplemented by emotion.46 Yeats, too, cites the

complexity of the artistic process in his "Poetry and Tradition," when

he describes the activity and effect of the artist's "Shaping joy":

This joy, because it must be always making and mastering, remains in the hand and in the tongue of the artist, but with his

eyes he enters upon a submissive, sorrowful contemplation of the

great irremediable things ....

the nobleness of the Arts is in the mingling of contraries, the

extremity of sorrow, the extremity of joy . . . 47

This "Shaping joy" has a special pertinence for the Romantic orderer, for "Joy," as the Romantics conceive it, is indeed the necessary condition for the exercising of these poets' powers, for the untrammeled

operation of the "shaping spirit of the imagination." For Coleridge, this

"joy" may be defined as "a consciousness of entire and therefore well

being, when the emotional and intellectual faculties are in equipoise."48 Keats may join his nightingale on viewless wings of poesy when he is

"too happy in thine happiness";49 Shelley asks that the lark teach him

"half the gladness/That thy brain must know" so that men will listen as

he listens.50 If Coleridge could recall the song of the Abyssinian maid, it would "To such a deep delight" win him that he would (or could) build

Kubla Khan's pleasure dome in air.51 And Wordsworth, too, celebrates the "deep power of joy" in "Tintern Abbey."52

Ironically when some nineteenth century poets lament in song the

absence of joy, this "beautiful and beauty-making power,"55 a loss which

leaves them unable to create, the quality of their poetry virtually contradicts their theses. In "Dejection," unable to respond to the world about him, Coleridge most regrets that his afflictions, without and

within, suspend "what nature gave me at my birth,/My shaping spirit of

Imagination." Joy, "this strong music in the soul," he asserts must come

from within. Coleridge's ode closes with the wish for his lady, that

Joy lift her spirit, joy attune her voice; To her may all things live, from pole to pole, Their life the eddying of her living soul!54

As Coleridge sings his loss, he demonstrates with great power the

shaping spirit he misses. Wordsworth's "Intimations Ode" presents in

part a similar loss or failure of Joy, deals with it in a somewhat different

5



manner but concludes with similar stress upon the interaction and

mutual influence of mind and matter. Hopkins, too, portrays that

damping effect of "joylessness" upon his "shaping vision" when he

addresses Bridges from his barren mood—though the power of his

execution belies his plaint for the loss of "The fine delight that fathers

thought":

Sweet fire the sire of muse, my soul needs this; I want the one rapture of an inspiration. O then if in my lagging lines you miss

The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation,

My winter world, that scarcely breathes that bliss

Now, yields you, with some sighs, our explanation.55

The shaping spirit and the form it engenders matter to the artist and

to his audience if, as Mr. Brooks suggests, "the artistic form, the

dramatic structure of the poem, defines, fortifies, and validates what the

poet has to say . . . ,"56 They matter if the form and order the artist

creates become in turn means by which he and his readers may deal

understandingly with experience. Let me return for a moment to Professor Peckham, to a 1961

statement, one of a series in his evolution of a theory of Romanticism:

For the past 165 years the Romantic has been the tough-minded man, determined to create value and project order to make

feasible the pure assertion of identity, determined to assert

identity in order to engage with reality simply because it is there and because there is nothing else, and knowing eventually that

his orientations are adaptive instruments and that no orientation

is or can be final. The Romantic artist does not escape from

reality; he escapes into it.57

And let me conclude with a return to Mr. Stevens, further lines from the

Key West poem and its singer by the sea:

She was the single artificer of the world

In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self

That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we, As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there never was a world for her

Except the one she sang and, singing, made.58

Lawrence Wynn Professor of English

6



NOTES

Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 1964), p. 130.

2Austin Warren, Rage for Order: Essays in Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), [ii].

3Morse Peckham, Man's Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior, and the Arts (Philadelphia and New York: Chilton Books, 1965), p. 1.

Hbid., p. 27.

5Ibid., p. 40.

Hbid., p. 31. Peckham quotes Elizabeth Jennings from a review of her Recoveries, the London Times Literary Supplement, June 11, 1964, p. 512.

7Ibid., p. 313.

Hbid., pp. 313-315.

9Warren, Rage for Order, p. [v].

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid., pp. [v-vi].

12Meyer H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953).

I3Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying," The Artist as Critic, Critical Writings of Oscar

Wilde, edited by Richard Ellman (New York: Random House, 1969), pp. 290-320.

^William Hazlitt, "On Poetry in General," Lectures on the English Poets, The

Complete Works of William Hazlitt, edited by P.P. Howe (London and Toronto: J.M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1930), V, 3-4.

15William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, edited by Thomas

Hutchinson, revised by Ernest de Selincourt (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), pp. 164-165, 11. 105 ff.

16Ibid., p. 507, 11. 368 ff.

17Ibid., p. 509, 11. 127 ff.

l8Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "To William Wordsworth," The Complete Poetical Works

of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by E.H. Coleridge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), I, 404-405.

19Ward Pafford, "Byron and the Mind of Man: Childe Harold III-IV and Manfred Studies in Romanticism, I (Winter, 1962), 105-127.

20George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Poetical Works of Lord Byron (London and New

7



York: Oxford University Press, 1945), p. 210.

21Coleridge, "The Eolian Harp," Poetical Works, I, 101.

"Wordsworth, Poetical Works, p. 164.

23Coleridge, Poetical Works, I, 365.

24Abrams, 1'he Mirror and the Lamp, p. 68.

25Northrop Frye, "The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism," Romanticism Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, edited by Northrop Frye (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963),,p. 10.

26Lbid., pp. 10-11, 13.

"Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, edited by J. Shawcross (London: Oxford University Press, [1907] 1939), I, 202.

28David Daiches, Critical Approaches to Literature (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1956), p. 107.

29Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, edited by T.M. Raysor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930), I, 212-213 (a fragment, probably part of the 1808 lectures).

'"Coleridge, "On the Principles of Genial Criticism," Biographia Literaria, II, 232. Cf. Ibid., II, 16.

"Wordsworth, Poetical Works, p. 754.

"Charles Lamb, "On the Genius and Character of Hogarth; With Some Remarks on a

Passage in the Writings of the Late Mr. Barry," Miscellaneous Prose, The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, edited by E.V. Lucas (London: Methuen and Co., 1903), I, 73.

"Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, II, 12.

"Ibid., I, 202.

''Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Statesman's Manual," Lay Sermons, edited by R.J. White, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), VI, 28-29.

36Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, I, 202.

"Ibid., II, 12.

"Richard Harter Fogle, "A Note on Romantic Oppositions and Reconciliations," The

Major English Romantic Poets: A Symposium in Reappraisal, edited by Clarence D.

Thorpe, Carlos Baker, and Bennett Weaver (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957), p. 18.

"John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, edited by Hyder E. Rollins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, [1958] 1972), I, 192 (21 December 1817).

8



40Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected, Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), II, 864.

41Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, II, 254-255.

42Meyer H. Abrams, "Stnlcture and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric," From

Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle (London: Oxford

University Press, [1965] 1970), p. 551.

4iCleanth Brooks, The Well- Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1947), p. 3.

44Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, II, Chapter XVIII.

45Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and

Richard Watson Dixon, edited by Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), pp. 14-15 (October 10, 1878) and 36-42 (December 22, 1880-January 14, 1881).

46Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, pp. 122-123.

47William Butler Yeats, "Poetry and Tradition," The Cutting of An Agate (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1919), pp. 48-50.

48E.H. Coleridge, The Lake Poets in Somerset, Transactions of the Royal Society of

Literature, vol. XX, quoted by I.A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination (London:

Routeledge and Kegan Paul, 1950), p. 150, n. 2.

«John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale," The Poems of John Keats, edited by Miriam

Allott (London: Longman; New York: W.W. Norton, 1970), p. 525, 1. 6.

50Percy Bysshe Shelley, "To a Skylark," The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe

Shelley, edited by Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, [ 1907] I960),

p. 603, 11. 101-102.

"Coleridge, "Kubla Khan," Poetical Works, I, 298, 11. 37-46.

52Wordsworth, Poetical Works, p. 164, 1. 48.

"Coleridge, "Dejection: An Ode," Poetical Works, I, 365.

"Ibid., pp. 365-368.

"Gerard Manley Hopkins, "To R.B.," The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by W.H. Gardner and N.H. McKenzie, Fourth Edition (London: Oxford University Press,

1967), p. 108.

56Cleanth Brooks, A Shaping Joy: Studies in the Writer's Craft (New York: Harcourt

Brace Jovanovich, Inc., [1972]), p. xix.

"Morse Peckham, "Toward a Theory of Romanticism: 11. Reconsiderations," Studies in

Romanticism, I (Autumn, 1961), 8.

''Stevens, Collected Poems, pp. 129-130.

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THE SHAPING SPIRIT: NINETEENTH CENTURY QUESTS FOR ORDER