4 - Becoming what one sees: the unity and identity of poetic self

Summary

This chapter is also about knowledge, the self-knowledge the poet acquires of the contemplating subject of love. Seeing and discovering, that is, creating a unity of sensuous form and spiritual idea in one's object of contemplation, not only permit a poet to merge the emotive meaning of love with its intellectual worth in intimate imaginings of harmony and beauty, but they also open up the even greater possibility for the poet-viewer to see and enjoy this same unity of mind and matter at work within the contemplating subject or self. An acquired unity and sense of order of exterior vision is what enables our love poet to acquire a sense of unity of interior vision. Scève, like Baudelaire and Valéry and other symbolist writers later on, felt that he could work upon the visions he experienced and communicate them in his poems, and even perhaps understand them in spite of the fact they might point to something contrary to, or above and beyond, logic. As Baudelaire would later put it, this paradisal perspective – be it outward vision of love object or inner vision of poetic self – is fundamentally a “call to order,” just as Valéry too would later view the process to be a “turning of disorder into order.”