448 - The Poetics of Belief: Studies in Coleridge, Arnold, Pater, Santayana, Stevens, and Heidegger

The Poetics of Belief: Studies in Coleridge, Arnold, Pater, Santayana, Stevens, and Heidegger
By Nathan A. Scott, Jr.
Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1985. 198 pp. $24.00.

In an essay on Walter Pater in the present volume, Nathan Scott, Professor of English and Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, points out that Pater was moved by some remarks in a review to alter the original title of his collection of essays from Studies in the History of the Renaissance to Studies in the Renaissance as acknowledgment that the gathering was not quite so sharply focused as the original title suggested. A not dissimilar charge could be brought against The Poetics of Belief, which is actually better described by its subtitle. For, although it advances a general argument or, perhaps better said, a general attitude about its subjects, like Pater's Renaissance this is a collection of "Studies in..." rather than a thesis book. But, also like Pater's work, one does not necessarily wish it otherwise.

The Poetics of Belief contains six essays on the figures named in the subtitle. Three of the essays (those on Arnold, Pater, and Santayana) have been previously published; one (the epilogue on Heidegger) uses some previously published material from earlier books by Scott; and two (on Coleridge and Stevens) are presumably new for this volume. All are preceded by a fourteen-page introduction that goes some distance toward giving the succeeding essays a common theme, even if the individual essays themselves are not always as clearly tailored to the pattern as the introduction implies and even if they occasionally repeat themselves in ways that suggest oversight rather than intention.

The guiding theme of this collection, as of much of Scott's earlier and justly praised work on religion and literature, is the concept of the "poetic imagination." Here the emphasis is on a group of writers and thinkers that Scott sees as having embraced, each in his own way, such a concept only to have been misunderstood or ignored by their later readers and interpreters and thus to have been disregarded or held to be irrelevant in the present academic climate, dominated as it is by the nihilistic storm-clouds from France and New Haven.

450 - The Poetics of Belief: Studies in Coleridge, Arnold, Pater, Santayana, Stevens, and Heidegger

By using a term like "poetic imagination," Scott instantly calls to mind that figure in the Anglo-American literary tradition who made the concept of the imagination, poetic and otherwise, most completely his own-Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge indeed constitutes the first end of a kind of polarity (Coleridge's term, not used by Scott) at the opposite end of which stands Martin Heidegger. Thus the Coleridge essay is the initial one (after the introduction) and the Heidegger essay the terminal one. In between come Arnold, Pater, Santayana, and Stevens. The misunderstandings and/or the neglect of these middle figures in terms of their poetic and religious beliefs are what Scott seeks to arrest and redress, and Scott's enterprise will be of interest to students of religion and literature both.

On Coleridge, Scott argues convincingly, if less originally than he supposes, that Coleridge's concept of the imagination is as much a religious as a purely literary one. Crudely put, the imagination is an agency of thinking and through it we can come at religious knowledge, whether or not old religious formulations are outworn. Scott is certainly right in so arguing, and he would have gained support here from consulting Barfield's What Coleridge Thought, which is not cited in this study. But the notion is important, apart from who has expounded it most fully, and it has profound implications not only for Coleridge but for those who came after him and who in some degree participated in a Coleridgean tradition or shared Coleridgean concepts. Of the many of these in the nineteenth century, Scott singles out Arnold and Pater, not necessarily because they were the most complete Coleridgeans (he is not concerned with tracing influences or conscious groupings in any case) but because both had, in Scott's view, ideas of a "poetic imagination," of "dwelling poetically on this earth" (this latter phrase being adapted from Hdlderlin). As with Coleridge, such ideas guided their religious thinking as well as their literary thinking. In Scott's view also, both have suffered from general misunderstanding of what their religious ideas and beliefs were.

In treating Arnold and Pater, Scott is concerned to absolve the former of the charge of having sought to reduce religion to poetry and the latter of the charge of having reduced even poetry to mere aestheticism. This involves Scott in reexamining and rethinking the later Arnold's extensive writings on religion and in rethinking some early Pater essays, Pater's Renaissance, and above all his Marius the Epicurean. Scott argues vigorously and often persuasively that Arnold was not trying to throw out the belief with the superstition but rather seeking to reestablish real belief on the grounds of experience. Pater, he claims, was not seeking mere sensationalism, as he was accused even in his own day of doing, but rather an openness to the spiritual that led him in the person of his hero Marius to a condition that the churchmen would have called "baptism of desire."

Both arguments have a certain rightness about them, especially as they are argued out of the total thrust of the respective authors' works

451 - The Poetics of Belief: Studies in Coleridge, Arnold, Pater, Santayana, Stevens, and Heidegger

and not out of single statements taken out of context and elevated into immutable judgments. (Here one thinks, as Scott does, of the way in which Pater's ill-fated "Conclusion" to the Renaissance haunted, first Pater himself, and later the whole assessment of Pater's work by scholars and critics.) Inevitably, however, Scott seems to overstate his case and to disregard for purposes of his argument highly ambiguous elements in both Arnold and Pater, just as previous critics have disregarded those elements that Scott or his opponents would like. Nevertheless, Scott, along with Ruth Ap Roberts in her recent Arnold and God (not cited by Scott), enjoys the distinction of taking Arnold on religion seriously and deserves our gratitude for so doing.

With Santayana, Scott is less concerned to correct misunderstandings-though he finds enough of these along the way-than simply to bring that once formidable philosopher back into the arena of academic discussion. The essay also gives Scott an opportunity to thrust and parry with the deconstructionists, and it is an opportunity well used. With Wallace Stevens, Scott's aim is more to refocus attention on aspects of Stevens that remove him from the category of atheist in which many modern critics confidently place him. And with the epilogue on Heidegger, Scott aims to establish the modern philosophic end of the polarity that begins with Coleridge. For, as Scott rightly observes, citing T. S. Eliot (on whom Scott is otherwise rather too severe, especially in regard to Eliot's reservations about Arnold and Pater), the community of literature is a living one, in which the present can speak to and even modify the past, as the past can speak to and modify the present and the future. That is, if we listen aright. Scott's "Studies in..." can help us to do so.

G. B. Tennyson

University of California
Los Angeles, California