"Poetry as Revelation"
by
Dr. Peter J. Stanlis

Address at University of Detroit, November 13, 1962 on the occasion of the conferring of an honorary degree of doctors of humane letters upon Robert Frost. Dr. Stanlis writes, "Mr. Frost remarked that it was like his own view of poetry, as it should be since I learned it from him."

The cells of the brain, I understand, are about equal in number with the stars in the universe. This analogy of gray matter and star matter suggests to me the nature of poetry as a form of human revelation.This effort of the mind of man to approximate the farthest extent of the universe, this seeking by the terrestrial to reach the celestial, is at the heart of all revelation.

All forms of revelation help to personalize the universe for us. In the modern world it is easier for many people to understand revelation in religion, history, or science, than in poetry.

As members of the Judaic-Christian tradition, whether Old or New Testament style, or both, whether churched or unchurched, we are familiar with religious revelation and prophesy. All Americans are more or less covented; they acknowledge and obey the law of Moses, or the law of Christ. Despite the tribulations suffered by religion in the past two thousand years or more, and despite the abuses by men of revelation in Scripture, the core of revealed normative moral principles remains unimpaired. These principles are the revelations of God to man in Western civilization, which all men of faith and right reason acknowledge. Religion contains the greatest and most inclusive of all revelations, because it involves the ultimate origins, nature and destiny of man.

History as the temporal course of human events also has its power and value as a source of revelation. History reveals the known march of the ordinary providence of God. Since we cannot arrive at our moral principles by studying men's actions, but rather use our body of revealed laws to judge the actions of men in history, as revelation history is not a source of principles, but at best it is a preceptor of moral and intellectual prudence, teaching men temperance.

Science is Nature's revelation to man, supplementing God's revelations through religion, and the record of man's own revelations in the temporal events of history. The revelations of Nature through science include the whole of physical creation, from the vast universe to the minutest records of fossils in the sedimentary deposits of geological ages. Inert physical Nature comes to man ready made. But the endless curiosity of man, which is his greatest intellectual virtue, probes the secrets of physical nature generation after generation. The greatest truths of nature have been revealed to us by our own efforts, through experiments in search of pure or theoretical knowledge. Very little has come to man from science automatically, by default. To many people, astronomically speaking, man may appear infinitesimal in our vast universe. But astronomically speaking, man is still the astronomer. In the modern world of science as revelation and prophesy, and practical or domestic application, science is so ascendant that it often threatens to usurp the just prerogatives of religion, history, and poetry. A Faustian presumption has often accompanied the attempt of science to lift us above bondage to physical nature. But the achievements of science are still limited mainly to material things.

Poetry in the modern world, as always in the past, is largely concerned with revealing God, man and nature to the human race. A finished poem is capable of revealing the deepest insights into the meaning and value of the universe and ourselves. As revelation, a finished poem is so rooted in objective reality that it becomes a new thing, capable of appealing to our senses, our minds, our emotions and imaginations, in short, to our total nature. The revelation is not merely of knowledge, but of love; it involves not recognition only, but communication and response, which is correspondence; it begins in ecstatic pleasure, and ends in calm wisdom. Between a good poem and a responsive reader there is instant rapport, pure sympatico. That is what makes poetry at once undefinable yet unmistakable. The value of poetry is like the value of a state of grace - an end in itself. Poetry for its own sake implies that our love of it should be audacious and intrinsic, unmixed by motives or interests of practical utility, or the dilettantish knowledge of the culture vulture.

Poetry as revelation achieves its ends in as great a variety of ways as religion, history, or science. If God writes straight with crooked lines, the poet by indirections finds directions out. One basic way to all poetry is through metaphors, which include the whole of reality, in which a part suggests the whole. The opening quatrain of William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence" contains one of the best statements of how this basic method of poetry works:

Until we understand that the revelations of poetry are at least as significant as those of science and history, and quite of an order with the revelations of religion, we shall not do justice to the role or importance of poetry in the modern world.

Sir Philip Sidney, in his Defense of Poesy (1595), understood its nature and importance, and distinguishes poetry sharply from philosophy and history. Philosophy, wrote Sidney, is strong in principle but weak in illustrative examples; history is strong in the concrete examples of human behavior, but contains in itself no principles for judging men. But poetry, at its best, is strong both in principles and in examples, and it has the further great advantage of being cast in a permanent and unforgettable form.

It would be easy to refine upon Sidney's argument as it applies to science. Whereas science knows truth, poetry embodies it. Science is like a prism of light cast on many particular points of nature, all alike, unleashing men's imaginations upon the whole creation. That is why it is a mistake to read poetry merely for knowledge, apart from living it.

Like religion and science, poetry depends on faith and belief in its revelations. We must indeed make "a willing suspension of disbelief" if we are to understand the truth in the illusions of reality created by the poet. As in religion, we must believe in poetry in order to understand it, and not make our rational understanding the measure of our belief. Once we as readers make this act of faith, we shall see that the true poet has created in his poem a great clarification of life. Poetry, like science and religion, is a way for men to conquer time and space, to draw out the future by believing it into existence, by stretching the lengthened shadow of a man from the beginning of time into eternity.

The ordered beauty of the universe and man, and all that is disordered and tragic, is part of the province of poetry. Man is the chief recipient of Divine creation, and man alone gives meaning to created things. As man existed originally as an idea conceived by God, so the universe and everything in it also exists in a meaningful form only to the extent that men grasp its truths through the revelations of religion and science and history, and perceive its forms through the revelations of poetry, and transmit them into posterity. In science, the richest accumulation of ages is the laws of physical nature man has discovered and preserved. In poetry, our inherited wealth is in the figures of speech, aphorisms and metaphors, contained in our literary works and traditions.

All honor belongs to those who perfect our forms of revelation - whether theologians, historians, philosophers, prophets, scientists or poets. The processes of revelation have been with man from the beginning, and seem destined to continue till time has stopped. Yet certain mysteries always remain. But it is the glory of human nature that the great mystery of the unknown is constantly being penetrated by life in its most advanced forms. And the further we go into the still unknown the less we can claim for ourselves as individuals. Whatever men contribute belongs to the human race. No individual can claim a personal ownership in the revelations of religion, science, or poetry. Yet it is because each of us benefits personally through our common humanity from all that our inheritance has given us, from each past probe and revelation into the universe and the heart of man, that we pay homage to poetry, and honor our poets.

Copyright. Permission to reprint this historic speech given by Dr. Peter J. Stanlis