Diagnosing Christopher's case: Smart's readers and the authority of Pentecost

LET us begin with a critical truism about Christian poetry, nicely expressed by David Daiches: "Often there is a tension between what religion tells [the poet] and what experience tells him [or her]. Both messages are true, but they are far from identical" (88). This "tension between taught religious truth and personally encountered truth," he goes on, makes much fine poetry possible. In speaking approvingly of such "tension," Daiches situates himself in a New Critical tradition that locates the power of many poems-Donne's "Batter my heart," Herbert's "The Collar," and Hopkins' "Thou art indeed just, Lord" are classic examples-in their ability to balance or juggle the claims of these two kinds of truth, the doctrinal and the experiential.

But not all Christian traditions (in theology proper or in aesthetics) have been confident that such a tension is necessarily productive and enabling. It is easy enough to say that the "two kinds of truth" are different and yet compatible, but to do so is to beg several important questions. And when religious poetry is at issue, the chief questions begged involve the possibilities and limitations of human language; and the key Biblical sources on this subject are powerful, but apparently contradictory, myths which even the most devoted advocate of illuminating paradox would be hard-pressed to reconcile-Babel and Pentecost. Ultimately, any poet who seeks to be faithful both to Christian doctrine and to personal experience must (consciously or unconsciously) situate his discourse along an axis between Babel and Pentecost. And inevitably, among those who recognize this axis there are extremists who cling to either terminus.

George Steiner writes, "Babel was a second Fall, in some regards as desolate as the first" (59). Especially notable among the Christian adherents of this position, and utterly convinced of Babel's irremediable consequences, are Samuel Johnson-so dubious about the whole prospect of religious poetry-and the later W. H. Auden. For them, the so-called "tension" between doctrinal truth and experience is an inescapable antinomy that results from the fallenness of humanity and its language. Johnson makes his argument most eloquently in his "Life of Waller":

Let no pious ear be offended if I advance, in opposition to many authorities, that poetical devotion cannot much please.... Contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical. Man admitted to implore the implore thee mercy of his Creator, and plead the merits of his Redeemer, is already in a higher state than poetry can confer.... All that pious verse can do is to help the memory, and delight the ear, and for these purposes it may be very useful; but it supplies nothing to the mind. The ideas of Christian theology are too simple for eloquence, too sacred for fiction, and too majestic for ornament; to recommend them by tropes and figures, is to magnify by a concave mirror the sidereal hemisphere. (I 291)

Auden's argument has a similar force:

Poems, like many of Donne's and Hopkins', which express a poet's personal feelings of religious devotion and penitence, make me uneasy. It is quite in order that a poet should write a sonnet expressing his devotion to Miss Smith because the poet, Miss Smith, and all his readers know perfectly well that, had he chanced to fall in love with Miss Jones instead, his feelings would be exactly the same. But if he writes a sonnet expressing his devotion to Christ, the important point, surely, is that his devotion is felt for Christ and not for, say, Buddha or Mahomet, and this point cannot be made in poetry; the Proper Name proves nothing. (458)

Auden and Johnson share, above all, a distrust of the power of finite human language to communicate matters of eternal importance and perfect truth. It is significant that neither of them wrote devotional verse; Auden's references to Christianity in his poems are relatively indirect (see, for example, "The Shield of Achilles"), while Johnson confined his devotional writings to his private diaries and journals.

At the other end, among devotees of Pentecostal power, we find a poet much less well known. Christopher Smart claims for himself and his poems an apostolic or prophetic authority: he is in his view God's fully empowered poet, whom no force or condition can tame. Smart is no more interested in a productive tension between doctrine and experience than are Johnson and Auden: but rather than accepting a wall between the fallen language of experience and the perfect Word of God, Smart insists that all differences are consumed in the Pentecostal fire.

The chief purpose of this essay is not to examine in any great detail Smart's claim, but rather to investigate its consequences as they are manifested in some of his readers. For Smart is chiefly concerned to establish his poetic authority; and authority, because it is granted by readers and has no discernible essence, is a social event, not a personal attribute. John Guillory has written a book called Poetic Authority, and that book has a chapter called "Miltonic Authority." But the adjectives in those titles refer not to the actual historical status of Milton as a poet or a theologian or a seer, but rather to the means through which Milton sought to establish his authority.' In my view, then, Guillory does not write about authority itself; instead he investigates authorial self-definition and selfjustification. For it is obvious that, while there is no poet in the English tradition more authoritative than Milton, that authority has rarely since the advent of Romanticism derived from the premises which Milton himself articulated and endorsed.