After God Departs
Poets of Reality. By J. Hillis Miller. (Harvard/ O.U.P., 48s.)
DYLAN THOMAS has been described as a child with a beer bottle stuck in his mouth, an apocalyptic seer, a heretic Welsh preacher drunk with words, and a necrophiliac. To find him called a 'poet of reality,' in J. Hillis Miller's new book, comes as a shock. One wonders what Mr Miller means by reality, particularly when Thomas is said to share this quality with Conrad, Yeats, Eliot, Stevens and William Carlos Williams. By detailed criticism of these writers, Miller tries to prove that a revolution in sensi- bility has just taken place. Gradually, after the pessimism of the late nineteenth century, poets have been making new adjustments to 'reality,' learning how to live at home in the universe, to celebrate their own existence. Unfortunately, Miller writes in a turgid, graceless style which makes his argument difficult to follow, but it's worth the effort. We are now sufficiently distant from the modern experimental art of the 1920s and 1930s to begin to assess its historical sig- nificance. Miller offers an exciting, if contro- versial, new interpretation.
In his last book, The Disappearance of God, Miller showed how for mid-nineteenth-century writers, such as Tennyson and Arnold, God seems to have withdrawn from the physical world. They try desperately to call him back, to find intimations of God in nature, society and the soul. But Nietzsche's pronouncement that God is dead is the necessary conclusion of their uncertainties. Poets of Reality carries the argu- ment forward into the present century, for the departure of God is the starting-point for many twentieth-century writers. The self is isolated, locked in a prison hearing 'the key turn in the door once and turn once only.' Man knows only his own consciousness: 'the development of fiction from Jane Austen to Conrad and James is a gradual exploration of the fact that for modern man nothing exists except as it is seen by someone 'viewing the world from his own perspective.' In Conrad the nihilism implicit in these attitudes is brought to the surface and shown for what it is. For him civilisation is an illusion, an arbitrary set of rules and judgments, a house of cards built over an abyss. 'A man that is born,' says Stein in Lord Jim, 'falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea.'
According to Miller, his chosen poets begin with an experience of nihilism—the beast slouches towards Bethlehem to be born, the hollow men whisper together, the boys of summer are ruined :--but each in his own way enters a new 'reality': Yeats by his affirmation of the infinite richness of the finite moment; Eliot by his discovery that the Incarnation is here and now; Thomas by
acceptance of death which makes the poet an ark rescuing all things; Stevens by his identification of imagination and reality in the poetry of being.'
Mr Miller is a critic of much perception, but I wonder if his poets have developed as far to- wards a new adjustment as he suggests. The chapter on Yeats ignores his well-known rage at the inadequacy of his own symbols. For Miller, Yeats's 'long battle against the nineteenth- century experience of the death of God has been won.' The Circus Animals' Desertion' is not mentioned. Eliot's faith in the Incarnation is at the centre of Four Quartets, but he remains contemplative, aloof, unable to embody in words the fullness of Christian love expressed in the story of the Good Samaritan. In Four Quartets his belief in Incarnation struggles against that revulsion from the body so charac- teristic of his work. Thomas asserts the impos- sible—that 'death shall have no dominion'—but his rhetoric often moves close to hysteria. Karl Shapiro finds in Thomas evidence of a split mind, mixing sexual revulsion and sexual ecstasy, the pathological and the joyous, and this seems a more accurate reflection of his warring pas- sions.
Particularly in America, it's become fashion- able to praise the objectivism of Williams, but he's just not a great enough poet to justify the claims made for him. For Miller, his five poets are on a 'journey of homecoming toward reality.' Perhaps only Eliot, by accepting tradi- tional Christianity, reached any kind of home. Certainly for Yeats and Thomas the journey remained a struggle and a mystery, and in the end they knew only the turbulence of their own hearts. Randall Jarrell wrote: 'Pain comes from the darkness And we call it wisdom. It is pain.'
C. B. COX
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