Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State

308 Pages·1992·10.203 MB·English

by  Tom Paulin

Convergences
Inventories of the Present
/
Edward W. Said. General Editor

MINOTAUR
POETRY AND THE NATION STATE
Tom Paulin
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
1992.
For Michael and Niall
Copyright © 1992 by Tom Paulin
All rights reserved
Printed in Great Britain
to 987654321
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Paulin, Tom,
Minotaur: poetry and the nation state / Thomas Paulin.
p. cm. — (Convergences)
ISBN 0-674—57637—3
i. English poetry—History and criticism. 2. American poetry—
History and criticism. 3. Russian poetry—History and criticism.
I. Title. II. Series: Convergences (Cambridge, Mass.)
PR503.938 1992
821.009—dc2o 91—34479
CIP
Contents
Author’s Note, vi
Introduction, i
Pure Primitive Divinity: The Republican Epic of John Milton, 19
Southey Landing, 32
John Clare in Babylon, 47
Citizen Clough, 56
Overthrowing the Fathers: Christina Rossetti, 77
Hopkins on the Rampage, 90
Writing beyond Writing: Emily Dickinson, 99
The Great Horn-Handled Jack-Knife: Great Expectations
as Epic Poem, 112
Yeats’s Hunger-Strike Poem, 133
Salid Oil and Alexindrines: Yeats’s Letters, 151
Hibiscus and Salvia Flowers: D. H. Lawrence, 159
Poetry and Power: Robert Frost, 171
Dwelling without Roots: Elizabeth Bishop, 190
Mr Cogito and the Nation: Zbigniew Herbert, 204
The Soldier and the Prince: Zbigniew Herbert, 211
Dimensions of the Present Moment: Miroslav Holub, 218
Hiding Itself in Itself: Tadeusz Rozewicz, 225
She Did Not Change: Philip Larkin, 233
Laureate of the Free Market? Ted Hughes, 252
A Visionary Nationalist: Geoffrey Hill, 276
Junk Britain: Peter Reading, 285
Acknowledgements, 295
Author’s Note
For their help and encouragement, I am indebted to Jillian Binns,
John Cronin, Anne Cutts, Tony Crowley, Seamus Deane, Marianne
Elliott, Kelvin Everest, Roy Foster, Seamus Heaney, John Kelly,
John and Tina McClelland, Jamie McKendrick, Andrew Motion,
David Murray, David Norbrook, Bernard O’Donoghue, Gerard
Quinn, Xon de Ros, Edward Said, Judith Still, Norman Vance. I am
also deeply grateful to my students at the University of Nottingham,
particularly to those gifted enthusiasts with whom I have studied
modern poetry.
Introduction
Hegel says, ‘It is the way of God with the world that the state exists.’
The state’s energizing principle is the power of reason ‘actualizing
itself as will’. However, the state is ‘no ideal work of art; it stands on
earth and so in the sphere of caprice, chance and error; and bad
behaviour may disfigure it in many respects’. Yet despite its
limitations, the state has an ‘affirmative factor’, which is Hegel’s
theme in The Philosophy of Right. The state is more than the sum
of its institutions; it exists through those institutions, but is also
above and beyond them. It is power, propaganda, a climate of
opinion, culture. It inhabits our minds, shaping our beliefs and
desires.
Nietzsche attacks Hegel’s idea of the state as ‘this new idol’ in
Thus Spake Zarathustra, asserting that state is the name of the
‘coldest of all cold monsters’. It was invented for ‘superfluous
people’ and is a ‘monster’ that devours them. Attacking social
contract theory in The Genealogy of Morals, he argues that the state
originated not in an act of agreement, but in an act of violence. It
therefore appeared as ‘a ghastly tyranny, a grinding ruthless piece of
machinery, which went on working, till this raw material of a semi­
animal populace was not only thoroughly kneaded and elastic, but
also moulded’. Nietzsche defines this monster in an angrily pro­
phetic manner that mixes hatred with admiration: ‘a herd of blonde
beasts of prey, a race of conquerors and masters which with all its
war-like organization and all its organizing power pounces with its
terrible claws on a population, in numbers possibly tremendously
superior, but as yet formless, as yet nomad’.
Nietzsche pitches his assertions against the Enlightenment’s
optimistic confidence in the nation state, a confidence that informs
these lines from The Prelude:
INTRODUCTION
How quickly mighty Nations have been formed,
From least beginnings; how, together locked
By new opinions, scattered tribes have made
One body, spreading wide as clouds in heaven.
Punning subconsciously on Locke as a pointer to Rousseau’s theory
of the social contract, Wordsworth identifies nature with spirit. He
sees the French people from the depth of ‘shameful imbecility
uprisen,/Fresh as the morning star’, and he celebrates their virtues of
self-sacrifice, ‘continence of mind, and sense of right’.
Wordsworth’s language and cadencing are distinctively puritan —
they are indebted both to Milton and Rousseau — but Nietzsche’s
modernist disillusion with the state is also rooted in Protestant
culture, specifically in a belief in the supremacy of the individual
conscience. This is one reason why his passionate anti-statism
appealed so strongly to Yeats and Lawrence. In ‘A General Introduc­
tion for my Work’, Yeats denied that he was a nationalist, ‘except in
Ireland for passing reasons’, and he dismissed ‘State and Nation’ as
merely ‘the work of the intellect. . . not worth the blade of grass God
gives for the nest of the linnet’. His rejection of the nation state is a
strategy which aims to identify poetry with an elemental simplicity:
I never bade you go
To Moscow or to Rome.
Renounce that drudgery,
Call the Muses home.
Seek those images
That constitute the wild,
The lion and the virgin,
The harlot and the child.
The primitive is offered as an alternative to political commitment in
‘Those Images’, but Yeats’s rejection of the ideology of Soviet
communism and Italian fascism is disingenuous: he was a dedicated
nation-builder, the shadow of the gunmen who founded the Irish
Free State. His writing is entangled with the ideology of romantic
nationalism, even though he wants to identify his poems with the
2
INTRODUCTION
prehistorical, with myth and transcendence. He therefore dismisses
the state by denying that it has any imaginative qualities: it is simply
mechanical. Thus Yeats rejects Hegel’s idea of the nation state as a
version of the Greek polis.
Yeats’s irrationalism is Nietzschean, but we can identify a great
theme, or a great and very difficult potential theme, in Nietzsche’s
contemptuous dismissal of the state as that ‘coldest of all cold
monsters’. By offering us a metaphor, Nietzsche has moved the state
out of a mechanically rational into an imaginative reality. This
identification of the state with monstrosity was made much earlier
by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein, a novel that mythologizes the idea
of the modern nation state which began with the French Revolution.
In 1818, Mary Shelley understood that the nineteenth century was
to be, in Bagehot’s phrase, the age of ‘nation-building’, and her
haunted, cruel, ugly but somehow sympathetic monster is superior
to all those notoriously inadequate definitions of the term ‘nation’.
As Chris Baldick shows in his exemplary critical study, In Franken­
stein’s Shadow, this imaginative monster is the offspring of
Hobbes’s image of the state as an ‘Artificial Man’.
In 1820, Percy Shelley wrote Oedipus Tyrannus or Swellfoot the
Tyrant in which Minotaur says:
I am the Ionian Minotaur, the mightiest
Of all Europa’s taurine progeny —
I am the old traditional Man-Bull;
And from my ancestors having been Ionian,
I am called Ion, which, by interpretation,
Is JOHN; in plain Theban, that is to say,
My name’s john bull; I am a famous hunter,
And can leap any gate in all Boeotia,
Even the palings of the royal park,
Or double ditch about the new enclosures;
And if your Majesty will deign to mount me,
At least till you have hunted down your game,
I will not throw you.
The modern identification of Minotaur with state repression begins
3