“From the Music of the Cosmos to the Spleen of Modernity: What Was Poetry Like Before Wordsworth?” - Dr. Jason Baxter

Dr. Jason Baxter began our spring college retreat on May 26, 2026, with a lecture on conceptions of the poet. In contrast to contemporary emphasis on authenticity and self-expression, pre-modern thinkers conceived of poetry as an expression of reality and a restoration of harmony.

Transcript

In our age, we tend to think of the poet as an antisocial recluse who talks back to the modern world with irritability, in part because he knows, even before he begins speaking, that it won't listen to him anyway. In modernity, the poet lives in cramped garrets, on the periphery of society, outside of the glamorous financial districts, in seedy artist neighborhoods—Soho, Greenwich Village. But every now and then, like Jonah going into Nineveh, the poet lumbers back into the city to tell the modern city what it needs to hear.

Richard Wilbur, for instance, in his poem "Advice to a Prophet," gives the poet instructions on how to speak to the mad citizens of modernity who are intent upon their own ruin: "When you come, as soon you must, to the streets of our city," he says. Or John Betjeman, like an apocalyptic preacher, declared that it was time for Slough, a town about an hour outside of London by train, it was time for Slough to be destroyed by bombs: "Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough. It isn't fit for humans now. There isn't grass to graze a cow. Swarm over, death." "Come, bombs, and blow to smithereens those air-conditioned, bright canteens, tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans, tinned minds, tinned breath."

On the day that Nazi Germany invaded Poland, W. H. Auden wrote his poem "September 1, 1939," from his cafe in New York to rebuke world politics: "I sit in one of the dives on Fifty-second Street, uncertain and afraid, as the clever hopes expire of a low and dishonest decade." And similarly, Frost admitted that he was one "acquainted with the night," who had "outwalked the furthest city lights," and looked down the saddest city lanes, he writes in "Acquainted with the Night." Charles Baudelaire, the French poet, said that the poet is the magnificent albatross, exiled on earth amidst its hooting crowds. Coleridge likened the poet to the wizened, sun-baked, crazed mariner, interrupting the inane bustle of the banquet to reveal a vision of the depths. And T. S. Eliot was even less subtle in "The Waste Land." His preacher-poet comes back into the city, glances around at its corruption, and gives it a fire sermon.

At the beginning of "The Dry Salvages," Eliot condemns modernity like this: "I do not know much about gods, but I think that the river is a strong brown god, sullen, untamed, and intractable, patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier, useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce. Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges. The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten by the dwellers in cities."

And so the modern poet became an impractical dreamer, a hopeless wanderer, a visionary prophet, outcast, hermit, exile. Poets were haunted by images of worlds that used to be, that could be, or cannot be. The poet, in short, like Wilbur's prophet, is "mad-eyed from stating the obvious."

Although the poets of our age are depressed gripers, irritable critics, and disillusioned cranks, that was not the case for poetry in the premodern world. Rather than being on the periphery of society, a nostalgic, melancholic grumper, the poet in the pre-modern world was the guardian of inwardness, the one who could wake up deep things in himself and in the world.

In one of Horace's odes, for instance, the great Roman poet playfully describes how he was wandering in a wood—Integer vitae scelerisque purus—when he suddenly spotted a wolf. However, because the poet was singing an enchanting love song, the wolf ran away from him. Poetry provided him with a charm. In addition to Horace, we find the interlacing of magic and verse everywhere in ancient poetry. Think about Circe chanting her songs, or the songs of the sirens, or the dark rituals of Odysseus about to enter the underworld. In the ancient world, magic and poetry often resembled one another so closely that they are hard to distinguish.

And this association continued on into folk literature. In Grimm's "Little Brother, Little Sister," when the children approach the enchanted spring, it speaks to them in verse: "Drink not of me, drink not of me, or into a tiger changed you'll be." The great literary scholar Northrop Frye reminds us that the ancient Latin word for poetry, carmen, is related to charm—singsongy spells, sickeningly sweet, whose hypnotic effect comes from the overwhelming sense of sound, he says. You can "compel by the force of rhythm and sound alone, by getting the right words into the right order at the right speed, and so setting up a kind of movement that the thing being charmed will be forced to imitate."

And so we find a supercharged rhetoric, especially dense clusters of rhymes and assonance, every rhetorical trick in the manual. This is Northrop Frye again: "The rhetoric of charm is dissociative and incantatory. It sets up patterns so complex and repetitive that the ordinary processes of response are short-circuited. Refrain, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, pun, antithesis—every repetitive device known to rhetoric is called into play. Such repetitive formulas break down and confuse the conscious will, hypnotize and compel to a certain course of action, or they may simply put to sleep." Just think of a lullaby for babies: "Lulla, lulla, lullaby, lulla, lulla, lullaby. Never harm, nor spell, nor charm, come our lovely lady nigh. So good night, with lullaby."

Indeed, in Shakespeare, almost any time that a spell, an enchantment, or a charm is cast, Shakespeare's language—even if it had previously been in prose—turns into singsongy verse, even if it had been in prose a moment before. The witches in "Macbeth": "Round about the cauldron go; in the poisoned entrails throw. Toad, that under cold stone days and nights has thirty-one sweltered venom sleeping got, boil thou first i' the charmed pot."

In addition to creating the sickeningly sweet charmed sounds, you can weave into your web words of power—"powerful names which set up an energy capable of driving out everything opposed to them," from mythology, from scripture. For instance, Frye gives an example of the ancient poet Theocritus, in which a lovesick girl melts a waxen image to perform sympathetic magic: "May the heart of my beloved Daphnis melt for me." But then she says, in a negative formula, "As Theseus forsook Ariadne, so may Daphnis forsake the girl he's got now." Here we have an extension of the binding notion, says Frye. Something in a myth is used as an archetypal model to be followed by the present situation.

Renaissance scholars brought systematic methodology to this world of magical names and magical charms. For instance, the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino divided the universe up into three great levels: the super-celestial—for Ficino, not just the angels, but also the ideas of Plato; the heavens, made up of the planets and the stars; and then the terrestrial world. For Ficino, it was obvious that the sun exerted an influence on the earth. We watched plants grow; we watched spring sunshine make us happy. But for Ficino, there are some plants that have a special devotion to the sun—heliotropes, like the sunflower, that follow it across the sky. But it went farther for Ficino, who thought that you could discover that certain animals were heliotropes, and even certain minerals, like gold. The influence of the sun, for instance, causes gold to grow within the earth.

But it was also the case with the moon. Natural philosophers before the scientific revolution knew that the moon affected the tide. But they also thought it caused silver to grow in the veins of the earth, and that some plants and some animals had a particularly lunar inner quality. Just as you get sunstroke, you could also get moonstroke—what we call lunacy. In this way, all of the planets were thought to be exerting their own influences. And what is more, when in the ascendancy they sometimes exert even more influence. But the point is, their beams could implant within the earth and cause plants, animals, gems, and metals to grow. These inner qualities were called occult qualities, or hidden qualities.

And what is more, according to Kabbalah, when Adam named the things of the world, he was able to capture their secret essences with names. And so, if you know some of the very old names, you can gain a bit of the power in awakening these occult qualities.

And so the fundamental idea of magic is that you can use items lower down on the string of influences to wake up the powers at the top of the string. Waking up that power, you can get hold of it, capture it, and then reutilize it in the terrestrial world. For instance, Ficino writes instructions about how to do this. If, when a planet is in the ascendancy like Jupiter, you could get hold of a metal associated with the planet, and then inscribe the appropriate symbols of Jupiter at night, in Jupiter's metal, on the night in which Jupiter was the highest in the sky, you could create an amulet—which you could wear, and in which jovial powers would be captured and reusable.

The important thing, then, is that each of these columns were like invisible strings on a cosmic lute—strings that ran from the top of the world down to the lowest stratum of minerals. But it could get even a little weirder. For instance, if you knew the symbols of the planets, then you could engrave that symbol on a gem or metal especially associated with it, and thereby create amulets and talismans—say, to increase your charm by wearing an amulet of Venus, or increase your success by wearing solar talismans. Just a little hint for job interviews.

This is a little unnerving for us, but it's not as if it has disappeared. In our day, Northrop Frye says that if you want to find the last vestiges of such hypnotic magic, you have to turn to marketing and commercials. He puts it this way: "When the television commercial comes on and the ordinary viewer goes to the bathroom, the literary critic should stay where he is, listening to the alliteration, antithesis, epigram—that is, slogan writing—and similar rhetorical devices that invade the soundtrack as soon as the subject becomes really important. The products are presented as magical objects, and the hypnotic voice of the announcer compels us to go straight down to the store and demand that product, not forgetting the name. Here the tone of giving orders to a mesmerized subordinate is naturally disguised, but the mood is still imperative and the rhetoric repetitive."

The marketer and the salesman in our day borrow, then, the power of language from the poet to achieve the ends of the magician. The magician primarily wants to wake up sleeping powers, bottle them, and then redeploy them for the useful purposes of gaining control over nature and over other people. They want to use language to hypnotize potential clients.

But in addition to this survival of folk magic and poetry—this use of charms and counterspells—there was a learned Platonic tradition that also helped give pre-modern poetry a sense of purpose and self-identity. Take, for instance, the Platonic tradition which had its roots in the "Timaeus." The main character of the dialogue is Timaeus of Locri. In Plato's day, saying "this is my friend Timaeus from Locri" was immediately significant. Being from Locri meant that he was a practicing Pythagorean, a member of a semi-monastic religious community in southern Italy. It would be analogous for us to say, "this is my friend Ananda; he's from Tibet."

Timaeus, being a good Pythagorean, wants to show how the world of physics can be derived from a more fundamental world of numbers, of primitive mathematical relationships, like "like," "unlike," and "related." For Pythagoras and the "Timaeus," numbers and their relationships are the true background of reality, especially the four natural numbers: one, two, three, and four—which they call the tetractys. For the Pythagoreans, the first four natural numbers were sacred, precisely because out of them you could build the world. The number one wasn't technically a number; rather, it was called the monad, or unity, or oneness. And for the Pythagoreans, one almost had a personality. It was the serene symbol of wholeness. And because it was the source of all other numbers, it was considered the father of numbers. Two was called the dyad, and it was thought to be the principle of the feminine in creation.

By expanding from one point to two points, you could create a line. Then, by adding a minimum of a third point, you could derive a plane. By adding a minimum of a fourth point, you could construct the simplest possible three-dimensional figure and the simplest of all Platonic solids. Thus, with just four points, you had all the pegs you needed to begin to construct a primitive three-dimensional spatial reality. It's interesting how this kind of weird Platonic stuff has come back in the whole world of computer programming and constructing primitive realities from as few operators as possible.

The fact that one plus two plus three plus four added up to ten, which they called the decad, and the fact that the decad made a perfectly elegant shape—yet another of their beloved mysterious symbols—seemed confirmation that you really could get everything you needed by combining these primal numerical elements. Indeed, the relationship between four and ten got the Pythagoreans really excited. And so they started looking around to find sets of four. And they found, in fact, a decad of fours—a set of ten of fours. In other words, in imitation of the number itself, the world was made up of ten sets of four elements: four winds, four seasons, four elements, four cardinal directions, four temperaments in human beings, four ages of life, and so on. I know this sounds kind of bizarre, but if you have this in place and you read Milton or Shakespeare, you start to realize basically why these texts feel so foreign to us—let alone Dante, or something even older.

What is even more interesting is that you can derive a musical scale out of these whole numbers. If you have a single string, a monochord, and then pluck a string that's twice as long, you get a frequency of what we call the octave, which is twice as high. But what if you took the same and the different and connected them by means of mediation, says Plato? That is, what if you took the one and the two and found the arithmetic mean and the harmonic mean between them? The exact middle between one and two is 1.5, the ratio of 3 to 2. And this turns out to be the perfect fifth. In a similar manner, the ratio of three to four makes up the perfect fourth. Thus the famous story that Pythagoras was walking along and heard the octave, the fourth, and the fifth coming out of a blacksmith's shop. And he went in and stole all the blacksmith's hammers, and weighed them to discover that they were in these different proportional weights.

But here's the real point. From the one, the two, the three, and the four—the so-called tetractys—you could derive not only the basic geometrical points of physical reality, but also intervals of sound that inspired moral transformation. Numbers gave birth to the world, but they could also turn us back around, make us return and recenter us on unity. As Plato himself put it, no made creature can imitate the simultaneous fullness of eternal life. But we could make this world of time and history imitate wholeness by bringing healing to the bits and pieces of splintered and fragmented reality by means of harmonic intervals. The rhetorician does this with words, putting his thoughts in the right order. The musician does this by tuning his lyre to sound forth those primitive intervals on his eight-string lyre. And the sculptor does this by tuning the intervals of the body and then putting them into interesting arrangements.

Years after Plato, Cicero wrote a visionary account in which the Roman general Scipio had a mystical dream, in which his soul flew up through the spheres of the heavens to stand at the apex of the universe. Once there, Scipio turned round to look down and contemplate the universe stretched out beneath his feet. "What is this sound, so loud and yet so sweet, that fills my ears?" His guide answers: "This is the sound produced by the impetus and momentum of the spheres themselves. It is made up of intervals which, though unequal, are determined systematically by fixed proportions. The blend of high and low notes produces an even flow of various harmonies. By imitating this system with strings and voices, experts have succeeded in opening a way back to this place. Filled with this sound, people's ears have become deaf to it."

In other words, the music created by the spheres, to which we have become deaf, can be regained through study, or through music that imitates the same harmonic proportions which space out the heavenly bodies themselves. The universe is a piece of visual music whose proportions are evident, but only when viewed from above or recovered through study.

And so, in conclusion, rather than being on the periphery of society, the poet in the pre-modern world was at the center of the universe. Thus, as Thomas Traherne put it in his "Centuries," man is the comprehensor of the celestial environment. That is, to comprehend, in Traherne's usage, means not only to understand, but to contain. He says this: "God hath made your spirit a center in eternity, comprehending all, and filled all about it in an endless manner with infinite riches." God hath made your spirit a center in eternity.

Or, as George Herbert put it: "Of all the creatures both in sea and land, only to man thou hast made known thy ways, and put the pen alone in his hand, and made him secretary of thy praise. Beasts fain would sing; birds ditty to their notes; trees would be tuning on their native lute to thy renown; but all their hands and throats are brought to man, while they are lame and mute. Man is the world's high priest: he doth present the sacrifice for all, while they below unto the service mutter an assent, such as springs use that fall, and winds that blow."

In other words, the poet has the task of waking up his fellow citizens to what they have become deaf to: the music of the world. Their poems were almost like counterspells, in which the evil enchantment of worldliness was cast off.

These are strange ideas for us, who have grown up in the modernist, mechanistic paradigm. But they made up the very background picture of the Renaissance world. And it is for this reason that C. S. Lewis warns us to be very careful when we read Renaissance poetry, because we find their cosmos "tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonial, a festival, not a machine." "It is very important to grasp this at the outset," says Lewis. "If we do not, we shall constantly misread our poets by taking for highly conceited metaphor expressions which are still hardly metaphorical at all."

Sometimes pre-modern poems seem so artificial to us; we imagine a poet who's more concerned with these linguistic games than with expressing his emotions. But no one would call Vivaldi or Monteverdi stale or artificial, even if we find them cycling through all the musical tools available to them. The world was gushing with poetry, although we had become deaf to it. However, if you could hold up a mirror to the world—the mirror of poetry, in which your own words were saturated in music—then you could perhaps restore the ear to hear music in the original.

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