Abstract
Of late a movement has sprung up which seeks to utilize the intuitions of Kierkegaard in erecting a system of poetics. One critic, for example, George Whalley in Poetic Process, explicitly acknowledges his indebtedness to the insights of Kierkegaard, and his style takes on a mystical ring as he sets out to explore the creative process and account for the miracle of expression that is the achieved poem. The function of the artist, he holds, is priest-like; “through the laying on of hands, by the ritual of ordonnance of the sensory material, a state of grace may be induced in the reader,”1 when he is in a responsive frame of mind. Thus a work of art, like a sacrament, makes possible a deeper and more illuminating approach to reality. In short, art is now interpreted as a vehicle of truths that are timeless and eternal. Between art and religion there is a vivid, underlying connection that is to be found in the integrity of the inner life of the poet.
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References
George Whalley, Poetic Process. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953, p. xxx.
See Charles I. Glicksberg, “Existentialist Criticism,” Southwest Review, XLII (Summer 1957), pp. 187–195.
Walter Pater, The Renaissance. London: Macmillan and Co., 1924, p. 252.
Sören Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Translated by David F. Swenson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941, p. 74.
The mystery of the Incarnation is now beginning to enter the field of literarv criticism as a constitutive, if highly ambiguous, element. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., in the “Epilogue” to Literary Criticism, advances the opinion “that the kind of literary theory which seems to us to emerge the most plausibly from the long history of the debates is far more difficult to orient within any of the Platonic or Gnostic ideal world views, or within the Manichaean full dualism and strife of principles, than precisely within the vision of suffering, the optimism, the mystery which are embraced in the religious dogma of the Incarnation.” (William K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Inc., 1957, p. 746.) For a dialectically subtle and sympathetic analysis of Wimsatt’s Christian aesthetic theory, see Murray Krieger, The Tragic Vision. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960, pp. 238-241.
George Brandes, Friedrich Nietzsche. Translated by A. G. Chater. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1915, p. 69.
Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche. New York: Meridian Books, 1956, p. 106.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Francis Golffing. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1956, p. 9.
Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism. Translated by Joseph W. Evans. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962, p. 36.
Heir of the Age of the Enlightenment, the modern poet often turns to the old mythologies, pagan or Christian, as providing a fruitful philosophical perspective, but the accent of faith is missing. The Devil of Doubt has driven the children of Adam out of the Garden of Eden, where they could cherish the old instinctive and universal consciousness of faith in the divine. In “Myth and Metaphysics,” Kimon Friar declares: “Since Goethe, the severance between the metaphysics and myth of Christianity has become so great that artists have been unable to use its myth alone as an ‘objective correlative’ with which to systematize the diversity of the modern world.” Kimon Friar (ed.), Modern Poetry. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951, pp. 424–425.
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© 1966 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Glicksberg, C.I. (1966). Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. In: Modern Literature and the Death of God. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-0770-7_4
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