Reading Simon Haines’s description of what Redemption in Poetry and Philosophy is about in the light of his conclusion that life may be “fundamentally religious” and that “we are not God” sheds considerable light on the more pressing question of what Haines is about in this book. He says the book is about Wordsworth and Kant (one standing in for poetry, the other for philosophy), chosen because they are “two of the earliest and greatest writers” to sense the need for an “analogue” of redemption in the aftermath of “the long process of dismantling the Christian faith, which began with the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment” (xiv). But it is “in a sense” also “about the first consequences of Rousseau,” tracing the precedent established by “the earliest redemptive writers of Rousseauan modernity,” who pointed the way for subsequent writers whose experience of “sin” drew on Christian sources in a post-Christian context.
As Wordsworth and Kant stand in for poetry and philosophy, Rousseau stands in for the dismantling of the Christian faith. Choosing Rousseau for this role means the pivot about which this book turns is not Germany or England, but France. Haines reads the Enlightenment project as a dismantling of Christian faith and the French Revolution as the culmination of that project. His reading assumes that the project leaves the “sense of sin” intact (at least in part because, while we are not gods, we are tempted by the possibility). So the question for Haines is how poetry and philosophy, as exemplified in Wordsworth and Kant, address the sense of sin. Dismantling Christian faith without dismantling the sense of sin creates the need for something to replace Christian redemption, and Haines reads Wordsworth and Kant as embodiments of two ways (both under the influence of Rousseau, both flawed) to do so. It is also important that he reads both as anticipating much of the argument Nietzsche makes. Part of his rationale for reading them as he does, it seems, is to get to what lies behind Nietzsche’s project (described by Camus as “to kill God and to build a church… the constant and contradictory purpose of rebellion”).
All of this tells us more about Haines than about Wordsworth or Kant — as it should. If we want to read Wordsworth or Kant, we are best advised to read them rather than reading about them. How reading Haines can contribute to our reading of Wordsworth and Kant (and not just be a reading about them) hinges on how he puts them to work. The answer, I think, is that he engages them in a task best understood as dogmatic theology with an ecclesiological core. Haines has something to say about God — which means, as is most evident in the last sentence of the book, that he has something to say about us. And what he says about “us” is an instance of what Michael Harrington called the politics at God’s funeral — Camus’ church after the death of God.
As Haines describes redemption in a post-Christian context, it is a necessity grounded in our lingering sense of sin and the desire it precipitates to feel better about ourselves. That puts feeling front and center (appropriate in a book that devotes most of its space to a Romantic poet), and it gives desire precedence (making Freud a structuring absence in this book, as Haines acknowledges in a note on Wordsworth’s “spots of time”). On the face of it, redemption is a hypothetical made necessary by our desire to feel better — and dependent on a “self” with enough continuity over time both to feel better and to feel better about. Dependence on a “self” explains the autobiographical turn in Rousseau and Wordsworth. But it also (as Haines acknowledges in passing) calls Augustine and the confessional tradition in Christianity to mind.
When Haines comes down at the end with a temptation to think “the nightmare of modernity” has been “the awful thought that each of us, indeed humanity en masse, faces the eternal silence alone — rather than the alternative that we all live noisily together, piping and playing, and that each of us, after all, lives, and lives now, rather than then, and is survived by others who also live,” he binds a succinct account of his church with a temptation to think. I can’t help wondering why he sees this as a temptation. It looks more like an assertion to me, followed by a confession: modernity is a nightmare in which each of us is alone, face to face with eternal silence; but the reality is that each of us always lives in the context of a we that was there when each of us arrived and will survive when each of us is gone (though it may be then what we call “they” now). The confession is a statement of what is really real, and Haines expands it with three statements (the first qualified with “surely,” the second qualified with “may be,” and the third unqualified): “surely… life in itself is not fundamentally elegiac”; life “may… be fundamentally religious”; and “we are not God.”
Haines defines “religion” here as “such acceptance and celebration of the limits of life that enable life itself to be lived most richly” (219). But I think it is critical to connect this with the earlier image of living noisily together, which is a rejoinder to Wordsworth and Kant (but also to the French Revolution) as Haines reads them. The “we” that defines religion — that leads to celebration of limits — is a noisy, playful, joyful, living crowd.
This understanding of religion, I think, helps to explain why Haines reads Wordsworth’s poetry as a whole (and poem by poem) as a failure marked by moments of greatness (a reading that is surprisingly consistent with Wordsworth’s “spots of time”). He sees the “Ode on Intimations of Immortality” as a withdrawal from political life (which failed at redemption) into the solitude of childhood (which succeeds at redemption only by making living elegiac): life is always what is past, living always mourning what is gone. Redemption lies in memory, always then never now, and memory is always autobiographical, always dependent on making a self.
So much depends on what is real, what is illusion, what we mean by we, and what sort of self that makes possible.
Haines describes poetry and philosophy as the two ways (the only two ways) human beings think with language. Poetry, he says, is metaphorical, while philosophy is conceptual. This is a fascinating claim that Haines seems to think goes without saying — so he says very little about it beyond the simple assertion. I find the sharp distinction problematic, and I am confident Wordsworth would share this response (though I am less confident about Kant). I might as well say I find it unthinkable, because I am convinced that human conceptualization is (as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest) itself fundamentally metaphorical. Lakoff and Johnson allow for nonmetaphorical concepts that emerge directly from experience (and in this, they are close to Kant in identifying concepts without which the activity of thought would not be possible). But the activity of thought — conceptualization — which brings these concepts into contact with other concepts, proceeds by making metaphor. That is what we do when we think, and philosophy is nothing if not thinking. The sharp separation, it seems to me, is itself a withdrawal from the messiness of living. The moment one thinks, one is knee deep in metaphor — and philosophy forgets this at its peril. By the same token, poetry is inconceivable without nonmetaphorical concepts. To abandon them would be to abandon thought and language. While there may be good reason to say that the abandonment of thought and language is precisely what poetry seeks (poem is where mind goes), as long as mind is going, nonmetaphorical concepts will be colliding to make metaphor. That snippet of Wordsworth’s that is so often quoted as a “definition” of poetry — “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” — is not a definition at all without what follows: poems with any value need poets who have also “thought long and deeply.” That poetry and philosophy are two ways of thinking with language seems most helpful in reading Kant and Wordsworth. As long as we are thinking in language, minds going, we are engaged in both.
And this, it seems to me, would be the place to criticize Wordsworth for placing redemption in memory if memory is simply past. Haines rightly notes that we live here and now, not there and then. If Wordsworth does indeed abandon the Augustinian insight into time so familiar from Book XI of the Confessions, there is reason to criticize. But I think he sets out to embody it in poems like the immortality ode and the poem to Coleridge we know as the “Prelude.” Memory is an activity in the present. Where else could it be? And it is an embodied act (what else could it be?), a taking place.
Reading Kant and Wordsworth in Rousseau’s light (or his shadow, as the case may be) is interesting. But I think it is a mistake to ignore the Augustinian (and specifically Lutheran) context in which Kant wrote. Haines makes passing reference to this, but I think a closer look would help him make more sense of Kant’s spontaneity. Wordsworth’s Anglican context is equally Augustinian (and Lutheran in its own way). This is most evident in Coleridge’s theological reflections and the impact they had on F.D. Maurice and Christian socialism — but that leads to another book, another time. For now, I think it is worth noting that any concept of redemption either Kant or Wordsworth is likely to employ will be radically incarnational. To put it simply, it has precious little to do with how we feel: it is a matter of who we are. And who we are is entirely dependent on what God is. (Whether we have a sense of sin or not, Kierkegaard would say, we are always in the wrong vis-à-vis God — perhaps especially when we have no sense.) When Haines says “we are not God,” he invites an apophatic corollary that may be of use here: God is not us. That is certainly something a Romantic poet could play with (it is very close to Emerson’s definition of Nature) — especially in a radically incarnational world that confesses God incarnate in human form. God who is not us is us now. Now what?
Haines is dismissive of Wordsworth’s embrace of his “office” as poet (and, less expansively, of Coleridge’s embrace of Anglicanism), which he understands almost entirely in terms of duty. This suggests that it is a renunciation of the freedom Wordsworth experienced during his time of political activity in France. But I think it would be more useful to work through “office” in terms of vocation, which binds it with freedom along lines Luther articulated in “The Freedom of the Christian.” Starting with the ubiquity of God and a radical reading of the incarnation, our vocation is to become who we are — which is what it means to be free. Who we are, in Luther’s language, is Christs to one another; and that transforms what we do. To put this another way, our vocation is word made flesh. It is certainly possible to say (or write) that Wordsworth’s poetry, as word, is an escape from the action that immersed him in the terror of the present moment in France. This, too, is, of course, only words. But, agree or disagree, I think it makes sense to take Wordsworth at his word and consider the possibility of poetry as action in the world. It is interesting politically to consider the possibility (to borrow an image from Wallace Stevens) that it’s a world of words to the end of it — and this is not a failure.
That may even be a good way to approach Haines’s “may be” — that life is fundamentally religious. And it may, as others have suggested, make Marx and Burke more alike than Marx and Rousseau in their embrace of politics as an organic process. The most important political question (and the question of Wordsworth’s poetry) is how embodied beings grow. For human beings, addressing this question has often taken the form of making lives by asking what we mean by “we” (as the Hebrew prophets did repeatedly — and as Romantic nationalism has, for better and for worse, so often done) and, within that context, coming to know and articulate an I. Haines says poets are masters of life writing — and in that sense every one of us practices poetry every time we say I. And every time we say I, we engage in the political act of making a city — even when we think we say it on the way out (as hermits from Laozi through Merton have known).
Haines says life is not fundamentally elegiac, but I find myself reading his reading of Wordsworth with John Lee Hooker and Van Morrison in mind. We’ll never get out of these blues alive. And Billie Holiday — You don’t know what love is / Until you’ve learned the meaning of the blues. Elegiac is not the opposite of joyful, and being a hermit does not mean fleeing the terror of the present moment. More likely, it means addressing the terror — more often than not, in a piping, playing, messy mélange of poetry and philosophy in over its head in metaphor.
reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
Simon Haines. Redemption in Poetry and Philosophy: Wordsworth, Kant, and the Making of the Post-Christian Imagination. Baylor University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-1-60258-779-3.