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Plotinus among the Critics

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 Plotinus Among the Critics
By Dana Wilde, Ph.D.

If sense-perception is a movement through the body which ends in the soul, how will the soul not
perceive? – Plotinus, Enneads 1.1.6

I assume, in my cranky, conservative mention, although it has gotten a lot of

way, that poetry always speaks of the
outer, physical world in order to evoke a
sense of the inner world, whatever the
inner world may be – soul, mind, spirit,
psyche, ego, astral body, whatever. Put
another way, I assume that poetry is
metaphorical – that the concrete imagery
in a poem, and the sound and rhythm of a
poem, somehow stand for or represent
inner qualities. There are a lot of
qualifications to these assumptions, not
the least of which is the sense that William
Carlos Williams brought to poetry earlier
in this century: that metaphor does not
work the way western culture always
believed it to, that a poem is an entity
itself, a concrete item in its own right
which does not mean but is.
Still I cannot get away from the sort of
Plotinian idea that words are the
fragmented expression of the activity of
thought or mind, the activity of thought or
mind being not words at all but activity
itself, the being of the inner human being.
Poems, being radically focused on some
element of the inner being – or
contemplating that element – represent the
inner being. In this sense even Williams'
poems are metaphorical, despite the
current book on them. The poem “This Is
Just To Say,” for example, is the
representation in words of that sweet guilt
engendered by eating someone else's fresh
plums. This sensibility is evoked by the
poem; it is not the guilt itself, of course –
that fact seems too obvious to even
attention in the past thirty years – it is the
sensibility of the poem, of the
arrangement of words, the sound of them
and the images they depict, all in keeping
with Williams' insistence that poetry is not
mimetic but somehow autonomous. But
the sensibility evoked by the poem is like
the sense of plum-guilt which occurs in
the inner being. Plum-guilt is an activity
of the inner being. The poem represents it.
In addition to arrangements of words
like Williams' that are definitively
concrete, there are also highly ambiguous,
abstract arrangements of words like this:
he who gathers has little
he who scatters has much
These ancient Chinese lines have no
definite sense image, the way Williams'
poem has a definite image of the sight and
taste of a bowl of plums. Yet certainly
there is an implied image, so to speak, of
one person gathering something –
vegetables or rice, let's say just for the sake
of supplying a picture – and of another
person scattering something – seeds or
grain. Qualifying the gathering and
scattering are the abstract notions that the
gatherer has little, and the scatterer has
much. What they have little or much of,
we don't know.
If my assumption about poetry has any
validity, then this poem is speaking of
some quality of the inner being. And so I
read the poem like this: a person who
gathers has little, “little” referring to some
inner quality. The idea of “gathering,” for
example, may be associated with greed; he
who perpetually gathers money, cars,
swimming pools and electric things has
lost control of his desires, and become
greedy. (The word “perpetual” is implied
in the present indicative verbs – “gathers,”
“scatters.”) Greed being the lack of
another quality like temperance, for
example, or at least being a small thing to
have, the gathered has little. He who
gathers has little.
A person who scatters, on the other
hand, has some significant inner quality.
He has much, “much” referring, for
example, to those inner qualities we might
traditionally call “the virtues” – justice,
temperance, courage, even the capacity to
contemplate. In contrast to the gatherer,
who is perhaps greedy, the scatterer is,
perhaps, generous. He has much
generosity. He who scatters has much.
In the end it clearly does not matter what
pictures a reader supplies for what is being
gathered or scattered because, no matter
what is supplied, it becomes a metaphor
for inner qualities – the gatherer might be
overfilling a basket of potatoes or
squirreling away his paycheck; the
scatterer might be tossing seeds on the
ground or flinging away his last pennies. It
doesn't matter (although the seeds may
imply a slightly different, because more
precise, reading). The poem's abstract
economy gives it a wide range of possible
implications, and makes it the most
forceful for that kind of ambiguity. Its
metaphorical implications might even
serve to lift the reader out of an inner
squalor.
Again, this reading assumes that poetry
speaks of (and perhaps affects) the inner
being, and that there are certain moral –
perhaps even higher – virtues to be
identified in human beings. But there is
another way of reading this poem, and it
will take over your consciousness if you let
it.
Years ago I gave this poem to a freshman
class, naively believing that the moral-
spiritual implications were crystal clear. I
asked the students to write about the
poem, then collected the writings and
asked the students what they had said.
There was little reaction, as usual, until one
young woman, Leslie, raised her hand and
explained, in terms much simpler and
more straightforwardly logical than those I
used above, that the poem simply means a
person gathers because he needs things,
that is, because he has little, and a person
scatters because he doesn't need things,
that is, because he has much. Poor people
have little and gather. Rich people have a
lot and scatter. And that's that. Simple,
precise, perhaps even true.
According to the basic tenets of reader-
response criticism, this literal reading is
perfectly valid. And in terms of the text
itself, this reading is impeccable. It seeks no
more than what is actually in the words.
For years I have carried this incident
around in my head, and sometimes when I
think about it, the simplicity of Leslie's
interpretation buries my original
interpretation, and I have to fight my way
back through her idea to my own. When I
finally grasp my own idea again, it is
sometimes merely a recollection of the
interpretation's conclusion,
unaccompanied by its logic, and I have to
take my reading on faith until I work out
my logic again too.
The issue becomes extraordinarily
complex at the question: Why does Leslie's
interpretation bury mine so thoroughly?
The complexity arises from at least two
places: from my assumption about poetry,
and from the emphases of our culture in
general. This is going to hurt, probably, but
please bear with me and try to reach back
into what is useful in the traditions of
western philosophy, religion and literature.
My assumption and our cultural
emphases are intertwined and at odds. My
assumption about poetry springs from a
general prior assumption that there is such
a thing as a “spirit,” or at any rate that
human beings are still composed of body
and soul. (I will spare this discussion
Plotinus' distinctions between Soul, Mind
and “the One.”) I also hold the general
prior assumptions that God exists, and that
there is some kind of intelligent activity in
process which is not human, or only
tangentially human. This is a lot to
swallow, however, because current
academic postures require a disbelief in or
disregard for God and the spirit world,
largely on the grounds that neither Kant
nor Descartes could prove God's existence
and that Nietzsche found an
extraordinarily clever and disturbing way
of saying God is dead.
The culture, I am saying, is stuck in the
somewhat muddy idea that the physical
world is all there is. The currency of
Williams' insistence on the autonomic
identity of “a poem” reflects the same idea
in poetics. For example: “It isn't what [the
poet] says that counts as a work of art, it's
what he makes, with such intensity of
perception that it lives with an intrinsic
movement of its own to verify its
authenticity ... To me all sonnets say the
same thing of no importance. What does it
matter what the line 'says'?”l The poem's
the thing, not its figurative meaning.
This is a way of saying that the culture,
including Williams, emphasizes the
material world. Now there are a number of
ways to understand the emphasis. One
way is to understand that there are no
ideas but in things, which suggests that
some strange thing (an “idea”) is inherent
in physical reality, although the strange
thing may not have the capacity to exist
without physical reality (God remains
safely entombed). Another way is to
understand that the only thing that exists is
physical reality, and some results of this
understanding are cars, swimming pools,
electric things, a general cultural
propensity to acquire as much money as
possible, and the decimation of forests for
profit. “Mammon” briefly sums up the
sensibility.
In the past the latter understanding was
generally held to be suspect or evil, even if
you were caught up in it yourself. In the
present the idea that a way of life can be
suspect is, in many circles, itself suspect
because in a world where there is only
physical reality, morality is perceived to be
quite arbitrary, and the spirit, since it does
not exist, is of no significance whatsoever.
People are encouraged to do as they see fit
and, in America, if I may add a tangential
editorial comment, everyone is encouraged
to see fit to earn and spend as much money
as possible. The only morality is that of free
enterprise.
Similarly for poetry and our readings of
it. In a culture which emphasizes material
reality, a poem will inevitably be read in its
most material terms. The free play in one
or two words can become the subjects of
great critical enterprise, much to the
dismemberment of the poem, which is
merely a material arrangement of words;
make your critical capital there, if possible.
And further, although I think Williams is
widely misread (there is, after all, that
insistent phrase – “no ideas but in things”
– which strongly implies that much more
happens than simply dead reality), his
sense that a poem is an agent of its own
force and elements devolves in the critical
world to the notion that traditional ideas
about metaphor are mistaken; poetry does
not figure spiritual concerns because there
are no spiritual concerns. There are only
things. There are only words arranged by
some unknown human voice. The morality
of free enterprise becomes a method of
reading poetry. He who gathers does so
 because he needs the money; he who
scatters does so because he has more
money than he needs. It trickles down.
Noblesse oblige. “A thousand points of light.”
Now what was my original reading of
the Chinese poem? Something about there
being inner qualities to human beings.
Something about generosity and greed.
Something about poetry's function being
inherent in its capacity to drive the human
spirit toward things more permanent and
beautiful, perhaps, or at least more real,
than even the physical world. Metaphor, I
am thinking, is still the essence of poetry:
he who scatters has much because he has
generosity, and he who gathers has little
because he has greed.
I am with William Faulkner on this
point of literature: “[Man] is immortal, not
because he alone among creatures has an
inexhaustible voice, but because he has a
soul, a spirit capable of compassion and
endurance and sacrifice. The poet's, the
writer's duty is to write about these things.
It is his privilege to help man endure by
lifting his heart, by reminding him of the
courage and honor and hope and pride
and compassion and pity and sacrifice
which have been the glory of his past.”2
Concrete reality, in other words, whether it
is the concrete reality of the world or the
concrete reality of poetry, has meaning for
the inner human being. To paraphrase
Plotinus: the world is filled with meaning.
There is metaphorical value to all
existence.
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But the idea of the metaphorical value of
concrete reality, and therefore of poetry,
becomes, like my interpretation of the
Chinese poem, buried eventually under
the culture's insistence on the final reality
of matter. It is much simpler, much easier
and more logical to take words at face
value, and we do, insistently. In this way,
we can deny that anything underlies a text
at all. We can deny any words in a poem
that do not suit our preferred reading. We
can deny any words in a politician's
speech that do not suit our hopes. We can
deny the existence of meaningful moral
structures. We can deny metaphor. With
these denials life becomes much simpler.
The problem with this simplicity,
however, is twofold: a poem becomes a
swamp of details signifying nothing, and
we come to actually believe that wealth is
routinely scattered.
Notes
William Carlos Williams, “Introduction to The
Wedge,” in The Poetics of the New American Poetry,
Donald Allen and Warren Tallman, eds., (New
York: Grove Press, 1973), p. 139.
William Faulkner, “Nobel Prize Address,” in
The Faulkner Reader, (New York: Random House,
1954), p. 4.
© 2015 Dana Wilde dana.wilde@maine.edu
This article originally appeared in The Antigonish
Review No. 89 Spring 1992 and was reprinted in
Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism, Lawrence
J. Trudeau, ed., Vol. 163 pp. 309-12, 2014.