Philosophy Today

DOI: 10.5840/philtoday2020811347

Poetry as Spiritual Exercise

JEAN WAHL
Translated by by Russell J. Duvernoy1

Translator’s Abstract: “La Poésie Comme Exercice Spirituel” first appeared in a 1942
issue of Revue Fontaine edited by Jacques and Raissa Maritain and was subsequently
republished in Wah’s 1948 text Poésie, Pensée, Perception, published by Calmann-Lévy.
The following is a translation of the Fontaine version. I have noted all of the variations
from the latter version in the notes. As I emphasize in my commentary, the piece is a
notable display of Wahl’s eclectic range of influences. Most importantly, it shows the
extent to which his interest in radical empiricism and process metaphysics informs his
creative approach to the intersection of poetics and metaphysics. These interests are
not explicitly named in the essay, and yet their influence is pervasive. The essay also
includes several moments of substantial resonance with the work of Gilles Deleuze,
as noted in the commentary.

Translator’s Key words: Jean Wahl, poetics, metaphysics, process philosophy

S
piritual exercise, first in the etymological sense of the word, [is] an
exercise of breath, of rhythm—and its rhythm will be passive and ac-
tive, a passivity that gives rise to an activity. Poetry is also a spiritual
exercise in a more profound sense. It is an exercise for becoming conscious of the
unconscious (sometimes in an infinitesimal consciousness). Even Valéry would
not deny it, who speaks of those first verses that are given to him, of the rhythms
that he catches at the origin of his poems and of the intermediate state between
the conscious and the unconscious; even Mallarmé, who sees ideas surge up from
the white page and a clarity that emerges from the night of Edom.2 And, inversely,
the surrealists must be well aware what role consciousness plays for them.
It is an exercise that also consists of manipulating time and space in a mys-
terious way. Condensing and elongating time, the poet makes a time that is no
longer that of the every day. He isolates a moment to which he gives its own

© Philosophy Today, Volume 64, Issue 3 (Summer 2020).

ISSN 0031-8256 793–796
794 Jean Wahl

duration, incommensurable with ordinary duration, at once longer and shorter;

longer through its infinite resonances, shorter through its character of ecstasis
and instantaneous rapture.3
Sometimes this manipulation manifests itself in remarkable parallels, as in
the poetry of a Nerval, an Appollinaire, an Eliot.4
This instant isolated by poets, is an instant that is no longer isolated, but in
which shines and is condensed a duality, a plurality, a multitude of instants. It is
an instant such that it no longer exists as only an instant.
The poet also creates a space. A space that is infinitely near, infinitely remote,
this living space that is the work of art, and which Rilke, inspired by the lessons of
sculpture, knew how to make us feel. It is a space that no longer exists as only space.
In that time and space, which are at once very close and very far from us,
everything becomes simultaneously near and far. The mystery is very close here;
and the very-near-to-here is mysterious. These two affirmations, where the one
is that of Coleridge and the other that of Wordsworth, come together; both knew
it well, and Novalis, perhaps better still, was aware of these two apparently con-
tradictory movements.
All work is an operation, an experience that creates itself.
Thus the question that a young poet posed to me recently: ‘is poetry an evasion
or is it a deepening?’ loses its sense. All great poetry is evasion only in appearance.
It is evasion because it is a deepening.
Poetry is a journal of the poet’s highest moments. In this sense, it is a measure,
not of moral worth or religious salvation, but of intensity.5
What is the poem about? The poem is a long unique name that names a state
of mind in its continuity. The poet names his state of mind; but in naming it, he
knows also that he is no longer himself, that he has passed beyond; he names
something or someone who no longer has a name.6
And so, the poet creates himself, he is the poet of himself, delivering himself
from his demons, pardoning himself (his Muse is his excuse), consecrating himself.7
A face crosses the mind, leaving a brilliant trace and a sigh. Through the gap
left by this trace, the words burst forth, beginning rhythmically. Poetry is born of
this call from a superior view to a superior speech, by an image that breaks ordi-
nary rhythm and leads towards a rhythm that tries to translate the image. It isn’t
a call from one to the other; it is a reciprocal call. It is an encounter, an encounter
that can be explained by a common origin.8
And finally comes the silence. Perhaps poetry is nothing but our way of color-
ing or vibrating the silence that succeeds it, or even that is contemporary with it.
Often, it is not the meaning of a verse that seizes us and arrests us, but some-
thing else, the [interior] accompaniment that it evokes in us.9
For whom does the poet write his verse? For an imaginary being who both
is and is not himself; he tells secrets to himself so that he has secrets for himself.
Poetry as Spiritual Exercise 795

When it comes to speaking of it to others, the poet hesitates; he doesn’t read his
own work well. Or rather he reads it as if it was by someone else. He reads it as not
understanding it. Thus Claudel when he dons his spectacles and reads one of his
great works as if it was an act of a notary. Deplorable, in fact, Claudel’s admirable
mode of reading. While another makes of his poems, through his hesitations, a
kind of shredded mess [charpie].10 Should we be suspicious of the poets who read
their work too well? No, I know some who know how to restore to their work the
atmosphere of which it was born.
Some poets have told us the method of their exercises: (Hölderlin, Shelley,
Poe, Rimbaud, Mallarmé).11
In fact, one ought not to speak of poetry as such as a spiritual exercise, but
rather of each mode of poetry as a particular spiritual exercise. What is more dis-
tinct from the strict arches under which a Dante has us pass than the open space
where Whitman, amid immense waves and immense winds, has us breathe? And
nevertheless, there is not less of infinity in the first as in the second.
Will this bring one to say that all poetry is the creation of a world? Both the
character of subjectivity and the character of creation in poetry are well noted in
this way. But, whether following certain realist tendencies that I sense in myself,
or following a certain incapacity, I would hesitate to define poetry through this
‘creation of the world.’ Is not the idea of a world the effect of a retrospective and
totalizing illusion? Poetry is rather creation of a language or a music, of a language
that is a music.
Perhaps it is necessary to add (after having envisaged poetry as spiritual ex-
ercise) that the poet ought not to have too much awareness of poetry as spiritual
exercise, and that poetry is not only exercise. “Exercise” places the accent on
activity. “Experience” (if one takes the word in the sense that James uses when he
speaks of religious experience) places the accent on passivity. Exercise, experience,
creation, poetry is also an adventure.
Revue Fontaine, 1942

Notes
1. The translator thanks Christopher Lura and Anna-Marie Hansen for help with the
translation.
2. Mallarmé refers to Edomite night in Don du Poëme (“Gift of the Poem”), the dedica-
tory preface to the Hérodiade cycle. Weinfield reports that Mallarmé is invoking a
mythical region though Edom also refers to a historical kingdom cited in the Hebrew
Bible, located in what is now Israel and Jordan. The mythical version is said to have
had sexless kings who gave birth to “monsters.” Weinfield reads this as a metaphor
796 Jean Wahl

for the poetic process and understands the child of the Edomite night to stand for
the poem. See Mallarmé, Collected Poems, 167.
3. As is frequently the case for Wahl, the use of ecstasis is influenced by Heidegger, for
whom ecstasis, or the standing outside of one’s self, is fundamentally linked to Dasein
and temporality. See Wahl, Human Existence and Transcendence, 8; Heidegger, Being
and Time, 377–79.
4. This sentence is omitted in the 1948 version.
5. This sentence is omitted in the 1948 version.
6. This paragraph is omitted in the 1948 version.
7. This is an appropriate place to mark the gendered nature of the original French. I
kept this in the translation though it should be emphasized that poetic experience
does not exclusively belong to any gender or sex.
8. This paragraph is omitted in the 1948 version. From this paragraph onward, the
Fontaine version denotes what follows in italics as an apparent commentary or ad-
dition on the previous. The 1948 version does not do this.
9. The 1948 version of this sentence includes the reference to “interior” that I have
placed in brackets. In this case, the addition clarifies Wahl’s intended sense.
10. Charpie is often translated literally as “lint.” The intended sense is difficult to ascer-
tain, but Wahl appears to suggest that the hesitations of the noncommitted reader
disintegrate the poetic event and render it diffuse or superfluous.
11. This sentence is slightly altered in the 1948 version.

References
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson.
New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1962. First published 1927.
Mallarmé, Stéphane. Collected Poems. Translated by Henry Weinfield. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1994.
Wahl, Jean. Human Existence and Transcendence. Translated by William C. Hackett.
Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016.
Wahl, Jean. “La Poésie Comme Exercice Spirituel.” Revue Fontaine 3(19–20) (1942): 26–28.
Wahl, Jean. Poésie, Pensée, Perception. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1948.
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