Dissociation of sensibility

In the December 2009 issue of Poetry , DH Tracy explores the difficulty that contemporary poets have in combining moral passion with aesthetic/sensual interest.  Quotations from poems by Frederick Seidel and Robert Hass lead to this observation: “sensuous experiences run up and down them both, and I think it is fair to say that the aesthetic is their dominant mode, by volume.  Both of them are in some doubt, though, as to whether pleasure is fundamentally meaningful, and so the moral intermittently surfaces, with desultory effects.  Seidel’s transition from architectural appreciation to Fascism is jumpy, because there is nothing else it can be; he has no continuous way of getting from A to B.  Hass too has problems turning one mode into the other . . . . With limited means of making the aesthetic relevant, it seems the only possible operating relationship between the two is ironical – a regretful and alienating irony in Hass, an aggressive and burlesque one in Seidel.  The poets are left making statements that large portions of their beings somehow cannot or do not bear on.”

By contrast, he finds in Alfred Corn’s 1940 elegy, Coventry , that “the moral and the aesthetic are related, overlapping, or even ultimately the same thing,” and he finds a similar unified sensibility in a description of Hans Castorp at the beginning of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain .  A description of the character’s appearance and habits leads smoothly into “a preliminary assessment of the hero’s character” because “having examined him we have some intuition of what level of unphysical detail to pay attention to.”

He speculates that the division and the current “ascendancy of the moral” may have something to do with poets’ protests at the shallow sensuality of the culture, but dismisses this explanation.  Instead, “the actuality is subscription to the fallacy of the aesthetic as anesthetic, and an asymmetry of sensibility which riddles the aesthetic response with skepticism while welcoming the moral one as ipso facto authentic.”

I suspect that the gap has something to do with a loss of the expectation that the universe is meaningful, a moral order in itself.  Aesthetic poetry attends to the surface of things, to what the senses can pick up; Tracy notes that, when it was first coined, aesthetic meant “pertaining to the senses.”  But if the surface is just a surface, and not a sacrament, then attention to aesthetics cannot reveal truth or goodness.  Truth has to intervene from somewhere else, and that intervention is likely to be a jolt.