The Instruments of Oracular Expression

Extract

Romanticism fabricated a poet of vast oracular powers largely from superstitious notions and suspicious philosophies which the Renaissance had gathered up somewhat by chance with the rational part of the Graeco-Roman legacy. The model was surely an imposture and, historically considered, a scandal. Seer, sage, prophet, mage—the pretensions varied, but all were titles to transcendent disclosure in times increasingly committed, at least officially, to a unified scientific view. That the poet could be confirmed to any degree in this anachronistic role was probably owing to the circumstance that the general cultural reflex following the Enlightenment reawakened widespread interest in those dark and excluded passages of the human spirit which mystics and seers were thought to frequent. Poets who pretended to voyance benefited from the muffled but persistent rumor of profound mysteries accessible to the high priests of Kabbala and the Corpus Hermeticum, to Illuminists, Rosicrucians, and Neopythagoreans. Western Europe had never ceased to acknowledge, even in such unlikely periods as the later Middle Ages, the aboriginal priestly and prophetic functions of the poet; but romanticism contrived—out of occultism and neoplatonism, antirationalism and anticlassicism—such a warrant for unabashed oracular saying as Antiquity had scarcely imagined. While perhaps none of the romantic was actually prepared to grant the poet his ancient powers in full measure, few seemed inclined to diminish the stature of the heroic abstraction, who symbolically contested the claims of naturalism and positivism.