What Is the Purpose of Poetry?

Caitlin Smith Gilson is professor of philosophy at University of Holy Cross in New Orleans and visiting professor of philosophy at Pontificia Università della Santa Croce in Rome. She is the author of eight books of Catholic theology, Christian philosophy, and religious poetry. Herein we discuss her latest volume of verse, Rhapsody and Redolence: The Crystal Decade, a cycle of religious poetry and art, co-written with Carol Scott, an award-winning artist and professor emeritus of art at University of Holy Cross.

NOR: In today’s educational milieu, it seems that poetry, particularly religious poetry, is either made a cadaver onto which cultural theorists impose an ideology or seen as mere ornamentation with no value in a world socially determined by economic utility and bottom lines. Poetry was once understood to be an anthropological episteme, a way of knowing, if only through a glass darkly. It was seen, even in the blind but percipient eyes of Homer, as a mimetic art representing the truth of our nature in relation to supernature.

Caitlin Smith Gilson: Such an understanding of poetry, and of philosophy, too, as a way of knowing ourselves sub specie aeternitatis (from the perspective of the eternal), has been, for some time now, in decline. For this reason, there are few thinkers these days in academia, and even fewer poets.

The word philosophy (love of wisdom) is used with ubiquity, but its contradictory pole, philodoxa (love of opinion), is not. Isn’t that a reason to pause? What we call thought, philosophy, and poetry, having lost the demands of Being, having lost Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, have always necessitated more than instantiations of ego, more than the emotivist sentiment, and are the many shades of the unspoken philodoxa. In the land of the ontologically impercipient, we would be fortunate if the one-eyed man is king, for the blind are leading the blind in “higher” education.

NOR: The notion of leading through literature, however, is a vital cultural function. It is as old as Aesop, whose fables are nothing if not maps for the moral imagination. I once opined at a faculty discussion of educational aims that poetry is to science what a mother is to a child. A child is naturally curious but dangerously reckless if his course is not gently directed — or redirected.

Smith Gilson: Like literature, poetry is not centrally a manual to improve ourselves or society. When it becomes a blueprint or a manifesto, it paradoxically prevents its chance to entice, delight, and instruct — without coercion. The free choice to enact the Good, proceeding from an enticement of one’s being into the saturated phenomena of great art, is the essential, almost hieratic, mystical step that summons the will to become a greater participant in the natural law.

NOR: That evokes the criticism of Allen Tate, who said it would be more desirable to dispense with poetry altogether than to use it wrongly. Totalitarian governments do both: They suppress poetry while supporting verse that advances their political agendas.

Smith Gilson: Tate knew his business. When literature is written as an ideological playbook of any color, shape, or form, the experience of high and living culture is truncated, malformed, and withered at the root. If an author’s characters must conform to a quota of diversity, equity, and inclusion, if poetry must be the mouthpiece of the therapeutic or the pragmatic, then literature does harm when it should not do any.

NOR: Tate maintained that the purpose of poetry is neither to proselytize nor to advance political causes, despite the poet’s capacity to make us more aware of the complexity of our human predicament, and poetry’s potential to affect our behavior, political or otherwise. Tate conceded that there is, to be sure, “a reciprocal relation between life and art, at that point at which life imitates art,” but he wisely added that we should not conclude, therefore, that “poetry is merely politics, or a kind of addlepated politics, and thus not good for anything.”

Smith Gilson: Poetry is good for everything in the human sphere. It is a preparation for life but ever free — a liberal art, so to speak. Its freedom to convey the ineluctable — the unrepeatable experience in its shivering nudity, its resplendent grace, its sheerly given beauty and terror — is poetry’s raison d’être as the necessary propaedeutic to, and passageway of, culture.

NOR: I gather that you defy the New Historicist imperative to view works of the moral imagination as mere products of their time, an imperative literary theorists and literature professors alike have abided dogmatically ever since Marxist ideologue Fredric Jameson gave the command, “Always historicize!”

Smith Gilson: I defy it and have been the target of its enforcers. Years ago, one of the first critiques of one of my early books complained of its lack of gender-neutral language. The critique suggested amending the historical citations I used. As I am a woman, the reviewer implicitly expected better from me.

Throughout my career, I have had comparably lamentable experiences, and I am more saddened for the enforcers than for myself. How intellectually limiting it is to read all ideas and experiences through the myopic lens of historicism. Such a lens precludes real thinking, sequesters the courtship with ideas, and stymies the audacious discovering of reality. The absolutist as historicist, or historicist as absolutist, forfeits the capacity for virginal wonder and sordidly surrenders every idea to the academy’s politburo, which has replaced fidelity and meaningful discourse.

NOR: Tell me about your development as a writer in resistance to the politburos and apparatchiks of academia and their intellectual provincialism. What types of writers — literary, philosophical, otherwise — have most influenced your poetry?

Smith Gilson: I find myself remaining with, and returning to, the figures who navigate the carnal and the spiritual, who are timeless because they avoid the faddish demands of a reduced, often foolish — even churlish — sense experience. The body politic encarnalized in good writing extends from the family to the highest theological meaning, and its representations in art demand an intensive hierarchical affectivity reflecting, with Aquinas, the intellect’s longior via (longer way).

NOR: Would you say, then, that in your poetry the experience of feeling is not separated from intellectual thought, as it is in so much versification of our time? What authors have modeled for you this reconciliation of sense and sensibility in writing?

Smith Gilson: Literary figures such as François Mauriac, J.K. Huysmans, Fyodor Dostoevsky, T.S. Eliot, Rainier Maria Rilke, Flannery O’Connor, W.H. Auden, and Ezra Pound have indelibly permeated my reflections and writings.

NOR: Intellectually, you and O’Connor seem especially akin. Like yours, her understanding of reason in relation to art is foreign to modern conceptions of either, for it is based firmly, as yours clearly is, on St. Thomas’s definition of art as “reason in making.” Is there a particularly Catholic work of modernity that has shaped what might be called your Thomistic imagination?

Smith Gilson: Two works come to mind immediately: Jacques Debout’s little-known My Sins of Omission and Charles Péguy’s Mystery of the Holy Innocents. Debout, along with the other authors I referenced, is an estuary of intelligence that consistently frames Thomistic thought, liberating Aquinas from any kind of dull, lifeless manualism. A third work is Péguy’s The Portal of the Mystery of Hope. The carnal creature envisaged in this work continues to be a linchpin for all my writings: “a body kneaded from the clay of the earth, the carnal earth.”

NOR: Am I correct to infer from your evocation of Péguy’s incarnational imagery that you believe that recognition and acceptance of our carnality are essential to the poet’s work? No doubt you concur with Auden that exalting the mind over the body is another form of Manichaeism, a morally destructive one because loving our neighbor — the ethic Auden deemed the sine qua non of Christianity — requires a body. “Our bodies cannot love,” he acknowledged in one of his last poems, “But, without one, / What works of Love could we do?”

Smith Gilson: Your inference is correct. The human person is in but not of the world. This should never mean a bypassing of the world. Instead, because the human person is not of the world, he experiences its immanence in ways that shape his soul and permit the recovery of truth and participation in the mystery of Being. The recovery of transcendental Beauty comes from experiencing the delicate balance of body and soul — or, as Auden’s words remind us, immanence and transcendence — that mark the human person. Beauty that saves necessitates culture, education, art, tradition, and divine meaning, all realized on Aquinas’s horizon, or confinium, between time and eternity, body and soul.

NOR: Prosodic beauty is a quality of your poetry. Does your verse shape itself into any recognizable or traditional forms?

Smith Gilson: Not exactly. But I confess that I have wanted to play with disciplining my poetry into a set form, such as the sonnet or even the haiku. The regulating power of a prescribed format bestows an exquisite limit, direction, and precision to poetry. The poet cannot become overindulgent, and every word must be incarnating and progenitive.

NOR: I couldn’t agree more. Commenting on the contemporary poet’s overindulging limitless form, Robert Frost quipped that writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net. When you write a poem, do the effects of words or sounds concern you?

Smith Gilson: They do indeed. My poetry heeds rhythm, the sounding felt-word enchanting the image and submerging the listener/reader into the non-mediated transient experience, which, because universal in its intimacy, is also enduring.

NOR: A reader’s response, then, if I may put a fine point on what you are saying, is vital to a poem. Without it, a poem does not exist inasmuch as its existence requires a response or experience of it. Its evocative power is actualized or realized in a listener who hears it. Would you agree?

Smith Gilson: I would and do. To listen is to obey. The word obedience comes from the Latin ob-audire, which means “to listen with great attentiveness.” For this reason, the conjuring of and courtship with evocative patterns of sound organize my poetry. In much verse there is an explicit call-and-response structure, a speaking with the veiled Divinity who responds in kind; this structure is, in fact, implicit in all my poems.

NOR: Essential to meaningful poems are images. Toward what kind of imagery does your verse tend?

Smith Gilson: My poetry never strays far from polyphonic theological imagery. It adheres to the mythic language of creation, enters the entanglement of virtue and vice, and meditates on the incarnational animal, who is in the image and likeness of God beyond all image.

NOR: Tell me about your latest volume of verse.

Smith Gilson: Rhapsody and Redolence: The Crystal Decade is co-authored with the exceptional New Orleans artist Carol Scott, who supplied 25 images for the book, as well as the cover, and co-wrote a selection of the poems for each of the ten cycles of poetry.

NOR: Adumbrate the ten cycles in the book.

Smith Gilson: The ten cycles — God, Sex, Surrender, Death, Time, Art, Prayer, Love, Rosary, and Suffering — intend a new kind of philosophical and theological thinking. The contrasting tensions of lostness, disease, ugliness, obscurity, and disintegration dominate and appear to oppose the Transcendentals, but they are the necessary purgative force, the entrance into the human-and-divine eros through stretched ecstatic suffering.

This purgative, all-enclosing, encompassing demand evokes the essential homelessness where agapeic abnegation seeks, relentlessly to its death, the lover and beloved union. It will seek nothing lesser; it cannot seek anything more. It seeks love, but be warned, it is no plaything; it is love that demands, cautions, invites, tosses ships, and takes souls apart as if they were bodies. In fact, in this new kind of philosophizing, love is the architect of the game.

NOR: It would seem that the poems in this volume aspire, as does your poetry generally, to something like divine utterance.

Smith Gilson: Poetry returns thought to the lifelong elegy of the senses, to the precarity of the flesh, and to how we act out our immortality through the clay of the earth. Its very architecture inclines the body to yearn, unite, and extend in and toward otherness in a way that places us, for Aquinas, relatively higher than the angels. Though the image of God is far more perfect in the angel than in the human person due to their intellectual powers, we have a dignity, a likening power, within the entirety of our flesh that can raise us above angels. “The whole human soul is in the whole body, as God from God,” Aquinas says.

In our lowly senses dwell the most ardent hope for the Resurrection. This gift is dramatically realized in Christ’s Incarnation. Our immateriality is not meant to be abstract or disembodied but to have shape, breadth, length, texture, sound, and smell. Rhapsody and Redolence seeks to avoid the anemic spiritualism that forsakes the senses as something shed along the way to enlightenment, or their reduction to a biological soft determinism whose varying degrees of physiological difference could never account for the phenomenological difference as difference between men and animals.

Rhapsody and Redolence is a collection of poems at the coal mouth of divine utterance: It engages the place where paths begin, before the path is trod, at the first step of being trod, where word is fleshed with wisdom. To accomplish this new kind of thinking — a resolutely freed-from-fad, radical originary philosophy — the poet had to begin as all beginnings do: within the face of the other, honest, and stripped of guile and pretense.

NOR: In what, or in whom, did you, the poet, find “the other”?

Smith Gilson: This poet found her other in the remarkable artist Carol Scott, who plays with reflection and light, particularly with how the gaze of one is remade in the face of the other.

NOR: Tell me more about Carol’s legacy as a creator.

Smith Gilson: Carol’s artistic legacy is her intensive and mystic devotion to the naked naturalness of first appearances. She explores how things first come together in light and sight, what recedes and remains underneath as compared to what presents itself, what is demarcated into shadow, and what bares itself in light, and more, how to accentuate our perception of that light in simple objects. Carol’s art evokes the first and immediate touching, sighting, tasting, and hearing, the perfume of divine presence within the unrepeatability of the person.

NOR: What does Carol contribute to Rhapsody and Redolence?

Smith Gilson: Carol invests the book with the visual living mood.

NOR: Would it be correct to say that the book consists in a poetical correspondence of spoken word and observable image, in a verbal translation of the visual?

Smith Gilson: Yes, it certainly would be. As poet, I grounded the present “now” in a mirrored reflection on Carol’s art; the writings were anchored in the statured image, in the brilliance of unfettered images captivating the senses, arresting thought, so the poetic heart remained for a moment in agonic stillness, in the in-between of all things. The poetry was a deliberate engagement with another medium of non-mediated expression, one that hits more faithfully than poetry at the unsaid, at that uncommunicated aegis shielding Being itself. Word plunged into the flesh and pigment of the paint, revisiting it repeatedly throughout the writing. The gaze of the art prevented the poetic act from becoming a self-enclosed expression tacitly to an out-there abstracted other. It was the carnality of spirit married to the kind of spirit that leavens flesh.

NOR: Describe the creative process back of this collaboration between poetical painter and painterly poet.

Smith Gilson: A handful of Carol’s works were in progress, and I witnessed and wrote alongside their inception and completion, from start to finish. My poetry re-creating her art, completing the other in the unfolded faces of Being. We are creating and being brought into creation by the other, conjuring a creative fidelity, entering together the luminosity of first wisdom, becoming full participants in that wisdom and light, allowing for a heightening and a magnification of experience. Our works placed themselves into the other, placed on the horizon between time and eternity, securing a foretaste of the senses in the resurrected state.

This process involved an overflowing of her rhapsodic and immortalizing imagery into writing. The final section of each decade of the book includes shared poetry to reflect this intellectual and spiritual kinship.

NOR: This process implies a compellingly radical philosophy of aesthetics.

Smith Gilson: It does indeed. It is a philosophy in which art and poetry are not picked up and put down; they are not even an extension of one’s being. Instead, they are a foretaste of union in Heaven, where senses may cross the divide, where touch of the other communicates sight, and the taste of tears speaks of the miles of unspoken history. It is a grafting together of ultimate Being as final and ultimate Person, hitting at the interior dynamite of the God-man Himself, of Being becoming flesh and blood.

NOR: This is a novel and radical philosophizing.

Smith Gilson: It is, to be sure, but it entails the magnification of medieval epistemology, too. It is intentionality lived out in an unabashedly cruciform reality. I must reveal the other, the artist, whom I have taken in and become in the act of knowledge. What I have become is the other — that creator or the artist’s self she presents to me in this interplay of appearance and reality, the seen and unseen.

What the artist takes in when knowing the self is the unity of the illumination of my own self. This is my poesis, which reveals both the artist’s self in progress, and the artist’s self I have become, when knowledge is, in a way, all things.

More still, when I first reveal to the intentional artist her own self, I do so only because my soul knows itself only in the face of otherness, because the artist has revealed my own self, my poesis as illuminating her self in me. The only origin of this infinitizing mutual dependency would be that each acts from eternity when acting in time. The power and surrender of this infinity are dramatically revealed when God becomes man.

Rhapsody and Redolence seeks to capture an inkling of the experience of God as the Divine Artist, whose creative dialogue is in the marrow of all memory, all thought, all action, and all being.

SUNDAY’S CATACOMB By Caitlin Smith Gilson

I plan to reacquaint myself with your bones
With the marrow of your bones
With the substance sponged on Christ’s lips
In His Passion

At the center of the Earth
I will find your bones
Bore into the marrow of the earth
With broken nails
Separated from my flesh
Tearing my fingers indifferently
My blood instinctually searching
Crying out
Gnashing the teeth of my bones
Wailing and smashed hands
Dug into graveled wall
Dripping towards your dried-up bones

I will snatch you
Smuggle your bones out of caverned loss
Held under my dirtied shirt
Stuck to my chest in sweat and dried blood
Wet again, soaked in fevered longing
Shoulders beaten in stone
I will hold you
Nearest my beating weeping heart
Wild and savage
In my passion
Untrained squadrons of relentless rage
Untaught
Unable to learn
Clutching your bones to mine

Explorers we ought to be
Inside and out
Pick me apart
Do what you will
Scavenger whom I love
Untamed in longing

Make me your wreckage
Claim my bones for ash
Do what you will
Take haunted form
Rock me in the cradle
In feather down
Bones as brittle as birds

Today is Sunday
All the Churches bathed in blood
Blood of the Spring lamb
Bones torn inside out
Architectural bones
Breaking the centuries
Pulled together in Passion
Stone altar
Violent donative altar
Lay down your head
Loving altar of God’s bone and flesh
Your flesh and bones and mine
For all time
Held to my chest
Passion

REQUIEM By Caitlin Smith Gilson & Carol Scott

If you dip your finger
Into the blood of my paint
And further your reach
Behind my heart
Then you would know with inborn light
The slower requiem
The Platonic Form
Hothouse strawberries
Overworking the vine

Dip your finger into the wine
Into the wilderness of God’s leaving
Departing leaves from winter’s tree

If you would dip my finger
Within the paint of your heart
Beyond all Philosophy
Then I would know every sense
Sight overworking the vine
Un-gelded artifices of beauty
Effortless roiling time

Artisan of unspent surrender
Places change beauty
Hemlocked lips
Death will know everyone

No more philosophical meanderings
Into the dark
As light of God
Door opening
Door closing
Run wild
Passions shot
Death will know everyone

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