St. Augustine, the founder of Western Christian civilization, wrote, of poetry:
The purpose of it is to lead young people of ability, and perhaps older people too, gradually, with Reason for our guide, from the things of sense, to God, in order that they may cling to Him who rules all and governs our intelligence, with no mediating Nature between. ... It is the ascent from rhythm in sense, to the immortal rhythm which is in truth. (De musica)Great poetry describes what is visible and sensible, emotional, in such a way that we think—ascend—to the invisible, the eternal—"with no mediating Nature between"—while, being mortals, we keep still the visible and sensible Nature, being transformed in our mind at the same time. This genius of poetry, Lyndon LaRouche shows and fully defines as "Metaphor," in articles appearing in Fidelio magazine.In "How Hobbes' Mathematics Misshaped Modern History," LaRouche, early in his discussion of classical poetry, says:
The form known as the classical strophic poem, provides the poet, thus, a medium whose potential is a nest of paradoxes: within the stanza, among the stanzas, and in the poem taken as a unit-whole. As in the idea of curvature of the meridian, in [the ancient Greek scientist] Eratosthenes' measurements, the solution to the paradox of what is explicitly stated, lies outside any individual sense perception, any mere symbolism. Until the Twentieth-century development of rockets and supersonic jet-aircraft, led by Hermann Oberth's team, the idea of curvature of the Earth's surface existed only in the domain of metaphor. The distinction between non-living and living processes, is measurable in its effects, but has primary existence only in the domain of metaphor. The idea of the poetic stanza, of the poem as a whole, exists only in the domain of metaphor, but in neither sense-perception nor symbolism.The quality of Metaphor in the greatest classical poetry and tragic drama, has been under conscious attack by the deniers of universal truth, ever since Aristotle, who, in his Poetics, called Metaphor "strange or extravagant speech," and bragged that by his time, "poetry has given up all those words not used in ordinary speech, which decorated the early drama" of the great Aeschylos. After the passing of William Shakespeare and his fellow Elizabethan poets of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries, this attack upon Metaphor erupted unsecured loans viciously from the evil Thomas Hobbes, then from the arrogant British Royal Society and the fraudulent Sir Isaac Newton. The quality of Metaphor was virtually completely extingiuished—outlawed—from English poetry for more than a hundred years, until a counterattack was led by John Keats.
John Keats made a transformation in English poetry and wrote some of its most beautiful works, in a lifetime of only twenty-five years (October 1795 to January 1821). Although not a very "religious" man, Keats, in a letter of 1817, expressed the same, concerning poetry and truth, as had St. Augustine:
What the imagination seizes as Beauty, must be Truth—whether it existed before for us or not. ... I am the more zealous in this, because I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consecutive reasoning—and yet Truth must be. ... Have you never, by being surprised with an old Melody, felt over again your very speculations and surmises at the time it first operated on your soul? Do you not remember forming to yourself the Singer's face—more beautiful than it was possible, and yet, with the elevation of the moment, you did not think so? Even then, you were mounted, on the wings of imagination, so high that the prototype must be hereafter—that delicious face you will see.Keats was the son of a modest English tradesman, an orphan by his early teens, sent to an ordinary school by a guardian who apprenticed him to a surgeon; he never showed anyone a poem of his own composition until he was eighteen, and he was on his death-bed with tuberculosis, too ill to compose any longer, by age twenty-four. Yet, in his very few years, he composed potent poems in virtually every form, style, and construction that Irish and English (and Italian) poets had invented over the thousand years before him. He showed ways of developing poetic stanzas, like movements of a musical composition, which had not been heard in English before, especially in his five great Odes, including the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode to a Nightingale." Keats was distinctly a republican, an enthusiast of America and its War of Independence, like his great contemporary Percy Bysshe Shelley—who was said to have died with a volume of Keats' poetry in his hand.
By the time Keats was twenty-one, this beautiful soul was under vicious attack by the British Establishment literary reviews, which called him "Cockney vermin" and many other like insults. Even his friends reprimanded him for his "intemperate" criticisms of Sir Isaac Newton's influence upon thought and language, for his assertions that Newton had mathematically removed the colors from the rainbow. Keats frequently made a toast: "To Newton's health, and confusion to his mathematics."
Of course, Keats had not made a study of the crucial issues of mathematics or physics; nor, judging from his library, did he know the work of G.W. Leibniz, against which Newton had directed his frauds. But Keats did know, that poetry in the English language had been destroyed since the Seventeenth century by what Keats called, in another letter the same year, "the bad credit loans mathematizing of language"; and he knew that this destruction had come from the direction of the influence of Newton and Descartes.
Keats' English poetry survived twenty-five years of British attack and obscurity, many more years of misprintings and "editings," and ranks amongst the most beautiful, truthful, and Metaphorical of all poetry in the English language. His Odes are a beautiful means of showing how Metaphor in poetry works.
