Editorial

Heraclitus is wrong. As we get older we walk into the same river twice, a third and fourth time, and we have the same illumination we had before. It’s the first time all over again.

Back in PN Review 42, Jorge Luis Borges wrote,

A.C. Bradley said that one of the effects of poetr y is that it gives us the impression not of discovering something new but of remembering something we have forgotten. When we read a good poem we imagine that we too could have written it; that the poem already existed within us. This brings us to the Platonic definition of poetr y: that winged, fickle, sacred thing. As a definition it is fallible, since that winged, fickle, sacred thing could also be music (except that poetr y is a form of music). Plato, defining poetr y, gives us an example of poetr y. And this brings us to the idea that poetr y is an aesthetic experience: something that would be a revolution in the teaching of poetr y.

This revolution keeps almost beginning, then being deferred or deflected by theories, contexts, or subordinated to biography. The enactments a great poem achieves are obscured by descriptive discourse and interpretation. Borges has a wonderful poem (quoted before more than once in these pages) about the first sonnet and sonneteer, ‘Un Poeta del Siglo XIII’ (‘A Poet of the Thirteenth Centur y’). This poet shuffles through the drafts of his poem. It is about to become the ver y first, not yet recognised, sonnet. He plays against the emerging form. Perhaps he has sensed, says the poem, radiating from the future, ‘a rumour of far-off nightingales’, things to come, even of impending clichés. The sonnet asks in the sestet:

Had he realised that he was not alone, that a cr yptic, an inscrutable Apollo had revealed to him an archetypal pattern, a greedy cr ystal that would detain, as night detains day and then lets it go: Dedalus, labyrinth, the riddle, Laius son. The future weighs on the present, much as the past can do: looking back, we see the past is aware of and returns our gaze. Prolepsis, analepsis, arrest the quill of the soon-to-be-sonneteer. A momentous little moment, a defining one. That first sonnet is recognised by its poet, not a discover y but a gift from ‘the inscrutable Apollo’. Classical myth, legend, literature, common memory provide content. The poet, suspended between a classical then and a modern now, mediates. The modern reader does the same. ‘Each later sonnet in whatever language participates in his work, and he in its. A poet who develops received forms is always in collaboration with the poems that came before and those that will come after. A sonnet never belongs exclusively to its author. Or even to its language. It is a given, a gift, in Italian, French (all the Frenches alive today), German, Englishes.’

Christopher Middleton turns to Bradley, too. ‘The poet speaks to us of one thing, but in this one thing there seems to lurk the secret of all… which, we feel, would satisfy not only the imagination, but the whole of us.’ It’s a brilliant obser vation, but categorical. The sense we experience of ‘the secret of all’ visits us infrequently, cannot be faked, and when it comes it is powerful, implausible, illuminating. In his essay ‘Notes on a Viking Prow’ (PN Review 10), to which I return so often, Middleton addressed the theme head on. He writes: