On Poetic Knowledge (III)

Extract

The experience of Rimbaud was too drastic to serve as an object-lesson. In spite of him and Une Saison en Enfer the same error went on—an error of aim or direction, a false deflection of energy; and this despite the fiercest and most vaunted efforts to see more deeply into poetic consciousness. But now there was to be no fullstop; now the journey, it was presumed, was to go on and on to the world’s end and beyond ; down a track that led nowhere, in a train that could not move. And this, in a way, can be done : in a sort of dream, thanks to a sort of magic.

Because it tries to make use of poetry to fulfil man’s desires and his search for knowledge and his hunger for the absolute, surrealism, has for us a special historical importance.

Remember the remark of Marcel Raymond—to which I have already referred—’ to declare the game not yet over, that all might still be saved from the wreck, was the essential message of surrealism.’ But in fact the surrealists too fell victims to poetic knowledge. At first they were above all concerned to rediscover what Raissa Maritain, in the first of the essays in this book, calls ‘That river in the mind underlying all our ordinary activities, that deep, authentic indefinable reality, perceived by the soul from time to time when she opens herself to the unknown and is revivified thereby.’ And I doubt not they did enjoy some moments of high ecstasy (in the natural order) when the soul ‘bathes once more in the spring of her being, is refreshed and strengthened,’ by the poetic experience. No need to refuse them this much good fortune.