The Paradigm

Imagination is the irrepressible revolutionist.
- Wallace Stevens

Toward the end of the last century, the mind of the West (if you can call it that) showed forth the lineaments of a void of nothingness, an abomination of desolation.

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First philosophy did away with God; then it was Man's turn.  Goodbye to humanism, goodbye to the human...

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Fatalists all : Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, Barthes, De Man, Derrida...  Mankind is the toy of unconscious linguistic rules and structures of control.  The idea of freedom is meaningless.

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Of course, without freedom, there is no struggle whatsoever, no point.  Pointlessless was the great moral alibi.

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I suppose one could concede that these theorizers were struggling at least to convey a truth : but it's the truth of the fixed idea, the reigning mantra, the "control" itself.

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Since the imagination was either the autotelic master of its own domain (modernism) or the abject scapegoat of parodic cancellations (postmodernism), ambitious poets could choose from a wide range of phony genres, methodologies, attitudes, etc.  It was an expanding market at the time.

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Beckett, Pynchon, D.F. Wallace... after Kierkegaard & Sartre, a plangent pessimism about the human condition became ingrained in culture.  Then appeared the neo-Nietzschean option : structuralist anti-humanism (see above).

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Language Poetry, Flarf, Conceptualism... the poets strummed variations on seductive discourses emanating from the shambles of Western thought.

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Meanwhile the hawkers continued hawking their wares.  Poetry is a special case.

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The new paradigm will somehow rebuild what was destroyed, without going back...

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I imagine the imagination will be recovered, on behalf of both mankind and God.

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It might be a new kind of geometry.  The imagination will emerge from human freedom again, just as Kant envisioned; yet mankind will not displace God.  Perhaps there will be a new Trinitarian concept.

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God will allow humanity the freedom to imagine Her.  But imagination is one thing, an actual encounter is another. (God, after all, is HOLY : while Woe is me, I am a man of unclean lips.)

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The source of poetry's strength is its freedom.  Not license or egotism, but moral freedom.

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Moral freedom is a limb of conscience.  The poet's freedom appears under the aegis of truth.  We trust the poem because we recognize its authenticity - we hear it ring, so to speak (as in Mandelstam's "gold coins of humanism").

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This freedom branches from something like Sartre's notion of the phenomenology of the image.  The image is purposeful - the creation of a phantom form.  Not for illusion's sake, but to say something to us.  The freedom of the beautiful image engenders a kind of absolute joy.

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The spontaneity of the image is allied to the underlying dramatic essence of reality.  All the world's indeed a stage : poetry grasps this, and offers, not discourse, but an event.  And this is, moreover, where poetry & history coincide.

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Angst of postmodernity : hegemony of the pervasive, manipulative, vacuous, dehumanized, amoral, inauthentic image.  But poetry is conscience, presence, authenticity.  The poet utters (somehow!) an authentic image.

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Kant's transcendent imagination may be universal and a priori : but in order to create, the little light bulb over your head must still switch on.

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Sartre, by way of his disenchanted, pessimistic phenomenology, explained just how frail, ephemeral, abject, solipsistic, unreal - yet motivated, conscious - are the mental "images" we construct (every moment of our waking/dreaming lives).

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Yet (absurdly enough) the poet, Plato's ethereal, winged creature, foolishly shares those most vulnerable, abject phenomena - those useless dream-images - so that we understand them, a little... recognize ourselves in them (enthusiastically, reservedly, begrudgingly).  This is what the poet does (all day & night).

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"And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us... full of grace and truth."  (The Word we imagine... conceptualize... perceive.)

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Like a dream, the muse, a moment of blessed grace, Proust's involuntary memory... from the deep.  (I think Kant said so himself : imagination is rooted in the unknown depths of the soul.)

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I have a hunch that Wallace Stevens pondered, confronted and resolved in advance almost all of the cruxes of the postmodern impasse.  (Imagination and reality, artifice & truth...)  Almost all of them.

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...& David Jones solved the rest.

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Poetry signals consciousness & presence : personal, human, divine, and in relation (to its interlocutors, its crossroad, its time & place).  That relation, essentially, is Love.

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Whence comes the special freedom & authenticity of poetry?  The short answer (pace, Military-Industrial Writer Complex) : poetry is not for sale.

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Not for sale.

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An escapee from the kingdom of Mammon.

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Mammon, planetary heir-apparent : controlling both authoritarian & democratic systems (China, Russia, USA).  Mammon, burning up the earth : the idol of human greed.

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This is the short answer.  But there is a more precise answer.  Poetry's freedom, to repeat, proceeds from conscience, per se.  In other words, its substance is an innate, ethical response : compassion.