Love is the colossal mystery at the heart of the universe—a mystery that haunts every corner of our lives as we ponder what we see around us. It is the light illuminating the nothingness within the atom and the chorus singing through the darkness between the stars. We often have a utilitarian view of nature, with horses for riding, trees for building and burning, and cows for milking and eating. These uses are surely good and beneficial, but through this utilitarian view we render the world mysteriously incomprehensible to ourselves.
All of these creatures in nature have an existence that precedes our uses for them. We ask why God created the world and ponder that chain of questions until it vanishes into the unsearchable mystery of the Divine Will. In doing that, we overlook the way in which all that exists is a monument to God’s ineffable love, in which He created all things and in which all things hold together. Good poetry and art can push past the utilitarian cloud of ignorance and bring us closer to that reality of Divine Love, a reality with which we are, all too often, out of tune.
I have experienced a mysterious power in good poetry that awakens love in my heart in ways that I had not seen before. Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” gave me a new appreciation for these birds that I had never felt before, though the nightingale’s song has been heard since ancient times. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick deepened my love for whales, and his art immortalized the majesty of whales for future generations who have no practical need for these monsters of the sea. Amazingly, these poetic works produced this love and fascination in my heart even though I have never seen a whale or a nightingale before.
One may wonder at the mystery of why Keats and Melville chose nightingales and whales out of all the marvelous and noble things in the earth to honor with their art, and one may even question the ultimate value of their projects. There is a latent wonder in these creatures that we scarcely probe. In the laboratory and in our minds, the world’s wonders move us not and we murder to dissect. There is always a reason and purpose for the things that we do, a reason which is not even an end in itself, but will ultimately serve another, later utilitarian purpose. However, we must see that the nightingale and the whale are knit together by God’s love for all that He has made, and the poet, in turn, taps into the Divine Love which saturates these and all creatures of the cosmos. Whenever a poet, moved by love, expresses the hidden awe in one of God’s creatures and brings us to love it, we behold how it is fearfully and wonderfully made and experience the fundamental love behind its existence–a love which precedes any utility. Love sees a thing as an end. From thence, a means is only a gift.
This is why art resists definition. It taps into the world that is too much with us, a world that itself resists definition. Armies of scientists working for centuries have not banished mystery from the cosmos. They may work for millennia, but the foundational question will always remain. For how can science and reason alone discover the love of God? If love is reduced to reason alone, what remains of it? If art is reduced to propaganda–a means to a different end–is not something lost? Propaganda loses its life and power when the end for which it is a means is discovered or fulfilled. It becomes a discarded and irrelevant shell as time moves onward. Poetry founded on love is true creation, an end in itself. Art based on love maintains its pregnant mystery and can speak through the ages, because it is created on the same principle that sanctifies the ceaseless song of the universe, a principle that will be forever opaque to the utilitarian. This principle of love, like art itself, resists rational definition, though aesthetic philosophies and breathtaking artworks wheel around it like the stars. The principle is swaddled in the holy depths of the heart of God, who alone enlightens our darkness.
I believe that our world still needs art and poetry that is driven by love, but this is a dangerous culture for those wishing to pursue that path. On one hand, the utilitarian world is captivated by propaganda and the creations of artificial intelligence, calling into question the value of the love the young poet pours into his work. It is all too easy to question poetry’s value if it serves no external cause. It is all too easy to question the need for the writings of human poets when machines can produce writing and poetry so easily.
Furthermore, the young poet is tempted to devalue his work with excessive rational criticism and perfectionism, despairing of creating perfect art and thereby stifling the creative energies that could otherwise produce something truly good. I firmly believe that there is no reason why the next Shakespeare cannot be walking among us. However, an aspiring poet will never find the joy of artistic creation unless he or she dares to create, shaping the form of poetic details into beauty before presuming to assign an overall value judgment to his or her work. A poetic thought, in its infancy, needs the poet’s continual nurturing in order to grow into a great artwork. The infant poem will scarcely survive if it is immediately cast into an aesthetic courtroom intent on speedily declaring it to be “good” or “bad.” If the aesthetic quality of the poem is thus predestined, there is no need to nurture it and change it, and the poet’s creative spirit becomes ossified. But truly loving creation suspends this ultimate aesthetic judgment, refusing to predict the “good” and “bad” before it has worked in all sincerity with that which is. And that is the loving work from which good art will flow.
Ultimately, I believe that a baseline attitude of love and charity beautifully promotes creative flourishing in poetic communities. There is certainly room for critique in this philosophy, for critique can certainly improve a poetic project, but critique must flow from this joyful foundation. If one focuses on flaws and weaknesses in every poetic project and strives to find fault with it, his or her poetic world may well begin to look like a dungeon with sparks of torchlight occasionally illuminating its depths as, in the mind of this critic, fewer and fewer poems attain a level of aesthetic perfection sufficient to justify their existence. But if a poetic critic proceeds with his or her duty in light of love, determined to see–at the very least–the love of the author as lending value to every creation, then this critic’s poetic world is a much brighter place, a place where every poem lends some brightness to a poetic heavenly host, and, in turn, where the greatest of poems blaze forth all the more brightly–daystars in the sapphire sky of a joyfully vibrant aesthetic imagination.
The poetic endeavor undertaken in a spirit of love is both an invitation to create and an invitation to see. When a poet writes in the hope and trust that his or her work will ultimately be a window of love into the world, a conduit for the heartfelt attitude by which utility-transcending value emerges, then this is a powerful encouragement to create. In turn, when poets joyfully share the love that they see in the world, their creations open vistas of experience and vision that may have otherwise remained locked away from the world. Good poetic works, in showing love, may open a window into the heaven of God’s Divine Love, love in which the world was created and in which all eternity rests.
Jonathan Schulz is a senior History major who loves music, poetry, swimming in frozen lakes, and distracting people from their studies. Please contact him at jeschulz@outlook.com to learn about his project to increase appreciation for the work of unknown contemporary poets.
Hillsdale Forum 