You’ve heard of blaming it all on television, especially when Elvis danced on the Ed Sullivan show. Or on Prohibition or the Reformation or the Edict of Constantine, or Milan (for its allying of Christianity with the ruling powers and thus allegedly weakening its prophetic function).
Well I have found one who blames it on the 18th-century philosopher Shaftesbury, a well-known apostle of sentimentalism — you feel and therefore you know — the state of mind that makes one unable to understand a news story without “human interest” thrown in.
Sentimentalism is only half the problem, however. The other half is association-of-ideas, a philosophical doctrine embraced by Hobbes and Locke: One idea leads to another? Pay attention: the two may be logically connected and you should take that very seriously, even as a guide in your pursuit of what’s true. Just go for it. It’s how we learn things.
The pin-pointer of these presumed seminal ailments is Yvor Winters (1900-68), a U.S. literary poet and critic who shook up his Stanford students from the ’30s on with his anti-Romanticism and would be strung up by students or other teachers if he tried it in today’s climate of gut-thinking.
Winters’ problem would have been the primacy he assigns to reason — in poetry but one suspects therefore in all of life — over emotion. For him emotion is a deep pit, “the brink of darkness,” as he called his only short story, published in 1932, the year his friend the poet Hart Crane jumped ship in the Gulf of Mexico without a life jacket.
Crane, a tortured soul by any measure, ordered (and apparently ate) a big breakfast before taking the final leap of despair, a victim of what Winters identified as rampant emotionalism.
What do you expect? Winters asked about Crane and any number of other mad poets, the 18th century’s William Blake among them, who bought the primacy of feeling and in his view scorned reason.
This notion was one “to break the minds of . . . men with sufficient talent to take the theory seriously,” Winters wrote. One is reminded of other performers, he said, tragic spirits who gave their all for chaos, saints “of the wrong religion,” as said of Hart Crane.
(to be continued)