Plotinus among the critics 1

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 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 mention, although it has gotten
a lot of 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 inferred from 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,

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