For over a decade, I have asked my children for only one Christmas gift: to read aloud a poem at our Christmas Eve dinner. As small children cheerfully, as middle schoolers begrudgingly, as older teenagers dutifully, they have each recited their assigned poem every year. To me, it is marvelous.
This year, I requested John Keats’ “When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be” and William Blake’s “The Tyger.” Perhaps influenced by all the buzz about AI and how it is influencing and reshaping the world my children are inheriting, I chose these two poems because they pertain to writing and the spirit of both human and divine creativity. From the past, these poets’ voices have something to tell us.
Art, Beauty, and Human Aspiration
To delve into my experience of hearing my children read these two poems, I return to our Praxis Circle contributor Sir Roger Scruton. Scruton as a philosopher focused much of his thinking and writing on aesthetics, and therefore offers us a thorough means of how to examine our experience of beauty through art.
Furthermore, in his book Beauty, Scruton makes the point that all art is about imagination and human aspiration. Consider for a second, his reductio ad absurdum argument: what would a world opposed to human aspiration, where art celebrates selfishness and other grotesque human behaviors (page 100), look like? Degenerate fantasies where people laugh at one another’s misfortunes (page 105), a society no rational person would want.
Thankfully, as human beings formed by God, we long for the good and our lives aim towards it. All our creative endeavors do the same. To comprehend this goodness, as Sir Roger wrote, “One aim of art: to present imaginary worlds, towards which we can adopt, as part of an integral aesthetic attitude, a posture of impartial concern” (page 107). By adopting this posture, we can judge, and through judgement we can understand matters of taste. Therefore, what strikes us as aesthetically beautiful in these imaginary worlds taps into this sense of human hopes.
So, I return to the experience at our Christmas dinner when the words of Keats and Blake emerged like tiny, angelic butterflies from the cocoons of my children’s mouths. In Keats, his earthly time running out, he tries to soak up the world’s beauty, capture it, and show it in his words, knowing he will most likely succumb to his own mortality and thereby fail to complete his artistic task. In Blake, the poet inquires about the mystery of divine creation, but regardless of the limitations of human understanding, he continues to search for creation’s purpose and meaning and origins.
What do these texts say, but also what do they reveal about life? What are our aspirations? For Scruton, this is the aesthetic attitude, that these words scratched in ink by human hand upon the page (now appearing on our digital screens) still have this power to unveil and ask us to consider these mysteries rooted in Truth and the Divine. We peer into poetry to find something in ourselves worthy of cultivating, worth giving our energy and devotion.
The Pursuit of What is New and True
Which leads me to Sir Roger’s point about coming to aesthetic conclusions via “reasoned consensus.”
Through study over time, we learn to appreciate the beautiful. We may disagree, of course, on good and bad, but to pursue beauty sincerely is to offer it more than our perfunctory, immediate reactions. When we give to Beauty the dedication it deserves through inquiry, reflection, and discussion, we live a more fulfilling life, one of possibility and wonder.
To hear my children read these poems was transcendent. Sure, their voices, which I have heard since their very first utterances, added an elevated level of emotional heft, but at the same time, these imagined scenes contained in the poetry are sublime, regardless of who is rendering them aloud. To prove this point, as I examined these poems for the purposes of writing this post, I am seeing new images, creating new understandings, and participating more fully in the marvel of humanity’s creative accomplishments.
In two previous posts, I wrote about how investigating beauty is interpreting the relationship between the object and viewer through the “mechanics of human judgment” and also how even the purest form of Nature has its own language for which we can exercise a rational understanding. Likewise, when I focus my powers of reason on the poetry of Keats and Blake, in both the context of our holiday celebration and in my subsequent reading, I am attempting not just to grasp the ephemeral. I am trying to discover something new… and true.
To conclude, I offer words far more refined and lofty than I could write, those of John Keats himself, from a poem different than the one I handed my daughter on Christmas Eve, Ode on a Grecian Urn:
“When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
