Near the beginning of Jerome McGann’s “Poetry and the Privilege of Historical Backwardness,” an essay in his 2007 book Point Is to Change It: Poetry and Criticism in the Continuing Present, a quote from Shelley’s preface to Prometheus Unbound surfaces. McGann leaves out the first paragraph quoted below, and quotes the entirety of the second paragraph save its first and last sentences (an excision which does, I think, change the sense of the passage, however minutely):
As to imitation, poetry is a mimetic art. It creates, but it creates by combination and representation. Poetical abstractions are beautiful and new, not because the portions of which they are composed had no previous existence in the mind of man or in Nature, but because the whole produced by their combination has some intelligible and beautiful analogy with those sources of emotion and thought and with the contemporary condition of them. One great poet is a masterpiece of Nature which another not only ought to study but must study. He might as wisely and as easily determine that his mind should no longer be the mirror of all that is lovely in the visible universe as exclude from his contemplation the beautiful which exists in the writings of a great contemporary. The pretence of doing it would be a presumption in any but the greatest; the effect, even in him, would be strained, unnatural and ineffectual. A poet is the combined product of such internal powers as modify the nature of others, and of such external influences as excite and sustain these powers; he is not one, but both. Every man’s mind is, in this respect, modified by all the objects of Nature and art; by every word and every suggestion which he ever admitted to act upon his consciousness; it is the mirror upon which all forms are reflected and in which they compose one form. Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors and musicians, are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations, of their age. From this subjection the loftiest do not escape. There is a similarity between Homer and Hesiod, between Æschylus and Euripides, between Virgil and Horace, between Dante and Petrarch, between Shakespeare and Fletcher, between Dryden and Pope; each has a generic resemblance under which their specific distinctions are arranged. If this similarity be the result of imitation, I am willing to confess that I have imitated.
Let this opportunity be conceded to me of acknowledging that I have what a Scotch philosopher characteristically terms a ‘passion for reforming the world:’ what passion incited him to write and publish his book he omits to explain. For my part I had rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than go to Heaven with Paley and Malthus. But it is a mistake to suppose that I dedicate my poetical compositions solely to the direct enforcement of reform, or that I consider them in any degree as containing a reasoned system on the theory of human life. Didactic poetry is my abhorrence; nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse. My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarize the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware that, until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness. Should I live to accomplish what I purpose, that is, produce a systematical history of what appear to me to be the genuine elements of human society, let not the advocates of injustice and superstition flatter themselves that I should take Æschylus rather than Plato as my model.
Shelley’s first move is, broadly speaking, an Aristotelian one, the situation of poetry in a tradition of mimesis. In the first section of the Poetics (translated by S.H. Butcher), Aristotle says:
Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and Dithyrambic poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation. They differ, however, from one another in three respects—the medium, the objects, the manner or mode of imitation, being in each case distinct.
Of course, he goes on to say much more than this. But the general gist is clear. Imitation, as such, contains a pluralism; but all of its varieties are founded on the undertaking of re-producing an existent thing “somewhere else,” so to speak. What Shelley adds to this characterization of poetic activity as imitative, representation-oriented, mimetic, is a sense of the poet as a socially-determined presence, the product of—as he says—internal and external forces, both creators and created. Though Shelley contributes to an explanatory, perhaps psychological understanding of this tendency toward mimesis by making the claim about just what mechanism(s) give rise to it (what produces the re-production of mimesis, in other words), reference to the mechanism isn’t outright missing from Aristotle’s text. The claim is embedded in the Poetics in a discussion of the “two causes” from which poetry “in general seems to have sprung”—“each of them lying,” he says, “deep in our nature”:
First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. We have evidence of this in the facts of experience. Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. The cause of this again is, that to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in general; whose capacity, however, of learning is more limited. Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, ‘Ah, that is he.’ For if you happen not to have seen the original, the pleasure will be due not to the imitation as such, but to the execution, the coloring, or some such other cause.
The appeal here is an empirical one, and Aristotle doesn’t hesitate to zoom in on the most counterintuitive, even grotesque, examples. Aren’t statues, after all, just imitations of dead bodies? And whatever “the most ignoble animals” are or how they’re represented, it seems fair to say that we would generally derive pleasure from viewing representations of such animals—from the ability to appreciate their ignobility at a distance. But the point goes deeper. The imitation gives rise to something that approaches knowledge whenever it represents to us something that we have not perceived “in the wild,” something that has not been presented to us firsthand. Aristotle is drawing out an account of what it is that draws us, seemingly intuitively, to imitation, and this account appeals to imitation as something that gives both knowledge and pleasure—but it suggests more than this, though the suggestion is dropped as the passage proceeds. Just what is it that happens when we “happen not to have seen the original”? Then the pleasure of mimesis, Aristotle says, is not from the imitation seen as an imitation, but to the manner in which the imitation is created—something about craft, “or some such other cause.” I do not know what the latter phrase approximates from in the original Greek, but I am guessing the ambivalence is in the original; if not, what follows doesn’t so much hold of the Poetics as of its translator. Aristotle seems to be making room for a technical distinction here, one of minor importance: in many cases it should be granted, he thinks, that we derive pleasure from an object even when we have never ourselves seen that which it imitates. This seems straightforwardly correct, and the trailing-off of the sentence hints that Aristotle might even have thought it redundant.
I want to suggest, however, that the implications of this outwardly mundane turn are trickier than the passage recognizes them to be. For if a good amount, if not most, of the artworks we perceive—whether these be statues or sculptures or texts—are imitations of that which we have not directly perceived, it seems strange to designate these works “imitations” for us, at least in terms of how we experience them. For my reaction upon seeing, say, a statue of a unicorn isn’t to conclude that this animal must have existed somewhere from which it was copied, but that it conceivably exists, that it possibly exists. Aristotle’s account of what we derive pleasure from when we encounter such works of art seems incomplete: we also derive pleasure, I think, from the propositions of otherwise-ness, inchoate as they may be, that these works carry with them. We imitate, but, as Hume noted, we also combine in thought that which has been presented to us discretely through sense. And this is a part of the phenomenology of looking at something that one has “never seen before”: it is not that it is unintelligible, per se—one sees something, not nothing—but rather that it, whatever it is, does not strike one as an imitation of something existent.
Aristotle, in noting this, treats it as a case where it just so happens that we do not know that whatever is represented is, in fact, an imitation. But I contend that this misses something about the texture of experiencing a work for which we can identify no ontological precursors. We might, as Aristotle says, take pleasure from its craftsmanship, the skill with which it’s rendered. But is this the case, say, with literary fiction, with poetry? When I read The Waste Land or Howl—two poems whose critics have been helpless but to traipse through history, plucking every low-hanging and semi-interesting fruit from biography’s branches—I don’t think to myself, I’m recognizing the imitation of certain experiences in the life of an American poet. Certainly inasmuch as poetry deals with things sensible and thinkable by human beings, this is true, but also trivial; there’s still a difference between me perceiving something as something I have perceived before and perceiving something that I am not conscious of having perceived before. I have no access to Eliot’s or Ginsberg’s mind; their perceptions, in their rawest forms, are off-limits to me. I understand, then, that these works of poetry are imitations of someone’s experiences, but I have no idea just what, precisely, they are imitations of, and therefore no way to judge their fidelity to “the original.” Such fidelity is not the point, of course, but I think that it is just such an admission that brings out why calling these works “imitations”—even in a technical, philosophical sense—seems insufficient. Novels and poems present themselves to me as things that were, of which I have no knowledge, or as things that might be, of which I am just beginning to have knowledge. This knowledge is of the lightest, most skittish sort: the potential, the possible. But it is a sort of knowledge and not the mere admiration of craft that brackets the question of what the work of art could be referring to in “reality.”
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To return to Shelley: he says that he abhors didactic poetry, that it is wrong to think of his work as directed toward some sort of reform. Moreover, and more radically, he clarifies that he does not consider his “poetical compositions” as containing, “in any degree,” “a reasoned system on the theory of human life.” Does Shelley think such systems to be the purview solely of philosophy? He doesn’t come down one way or another here, but even if this were his position, he seems to think of poetry as a prelude—a prolegomena, to use Kant’s term—to philosophy. For in presenting his readers with “beautiful idealisms of moral excellence” he is preparing them to fully engage in philosophy, presumably moral philosophy. The “reasoned principles of moral conduct” that philosophy, rightly undertaken, produces can survive only after the mind learns to “love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure…” And this learning, it seems, is the work of poetry. Before a system on the theory of human life can be built, a full catalogue of its materials is called for. Poetry is this catalogue, the proposition of all possible worlds.
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The philosopher David Lewis begins his 1986 book On the Plurality of Worlds with the following statement:
This book defends modal realism: the thesis that the world we are part of is but one of a plurality of worlds, and that we who inhabit this world are only a few out of all the inhabitants of all the worlds.
Lewis laments that he chose, twelve years before writing the book, to call his thesis “modal realism”—but the name has stuck. But what does it mean to say that our world is “but one of a plurality of worlds,” the claim that sits at the heart of modal realism? Before we ask this question, another precedes it: what is “our world” after all?
There is nothing so far away from us as not to be part of our world. Anything at any distance at all is to be included. Likewise the world is inclusive in time. No long-gone ancient Romans, no long-gone pterodactyls, no long-gone primordial clouds of plasma are too far in the past, nor are the dead dark stars too far in the future, to be part of this same world. Maybe, as I myself think, the world is a big physical object; or maybe some parts of it are entelechies or spirits or auras or deities or other things unknown to physics. But nothing is so alien in kind as not to be part of our world, provided only that it does exist at some distance and direction from here, or at some time before or after or simultaneous with now.
Everything conceivable by us, then—and maybe even some things not conceivable by us—is part of our world. But if this is granted, does it even make sense to talk of “other worlds,” or parts of worlds, as entities that actually do exist, just in the way ours does, since if we can imagine them then they are, in some sense, part of our world?
There are so many other worlds, in fact, that absolutely every way that a world could possibly be is a way that some world is. And as with worlds, so it is with parts of worlds. There are ever so many ways that a part of a world could be; and so many and so varied are the other worlds that absolutely every way that a part of a world could possibly be is a way that some part of some world is.
I don’t wish to attempt to summarize or explore Lewis’s metaphysics here. Suffice it to say that his thesis is as radical as it sounds, if not more. Lewis thinks, in part, that postulating modal realism offers to metaphysics the kind of benefits that mathematicians have long (though not unproblematically) reaped since the development of set theory. And set theory brings with it a similar suite of issues—just what are sets, if not useful fictions?—but these issues do not seem to have derailed the utility and plausibility of sets and some conclusions derived from them. Lewis’s thesis is an opportunity to do with ontology, with existent entities, what has been done with numbers. And while it is fairly widely unpopular in philosophy, I think it offers an analogue for literary creation and criticism.
In his collection of essays, The Long Schoolroom, the poet and critic Allen Grossman recalls his search, when young, for an account of how “poetry came to be.” Standard histories of Anglophone verse began, he notes, with Caedmon, that peasant who was called upon in a dream to sing the story of creation—though in life he could not, and would not, sing. British and American poetry, Grossman infers, began with a narration of an “impossible” event—an event that, due to its very nature, could not be witnessed, and perhaps may not have happened. Anglo-American poetry roots itself in the recounting of revelations that have not been revealed to it, prophecies that have not been properly prophesized. Lewis, though in the realm of analytic philosophy, pushes us to think of things we haven’t seen—whole worlds we haven’t seen or even yet envisioned—as nonetheless real; this may sound strange, but the implicit dictates of a literary work are similar in form, even if what they suggest to the imagination seems more familiar upon encounter. The poem or novel asks us to fathom some other world, logically and affectively; in the cases where we can’t suppress our logic long enough to conceive of a world whose axioms are otherwise, affect kicks in to keep us there.
The language of criticism oscillates between the didacticism Shelley abhors (though this didacticism might be the only way to suggest something) and the more tentative articulation of a possibility or possibilities. I began this post hoping to make a case for the proliferation of conditional language in criticism—“seems to be” and “might be” instead of the resolute “is”—though I think now that maybe what’s needed, sometimes, is suggestion dressed up as assertion, for this may be the only way to preserve the force of the suggestion without vitiating it with qualifications. Either way, the imagination of poetry as a testing grounds for values of all sorts invites poets to see themselves as one half of a circuit: they create representations that critics then construct into even more worlds, representations that themselves get reinterpreted, etc. The cycle continues ad infinitum, but without regress: far from sliding beneath the frenetic buzz of the deconstructionist’s “free play,” every postulated possible world, I’d like to think, gets us closer not to some objective reality but to each other.