Reality as ‘Abyss’

Abstract

The consciousness which a poet brings to the making of his poetry will normally have two main strands in it. As a member of society he will have a share in the ordinary consciousness of his class or of society as a whole. As a poet, however, he is likely to have a more than ordinary awareness of the inability of the ordinary social consciousness to recognise and articulate its own reality, and of the need to penetrate that reality. I am thinking here, not of an ultimate transcendental reality, though this, whether or not unveiled by his religion, has been a perennial object of the poet’s attentions or at least a background presence in his work; but of a more immediate social and human reality — for example, the human reality of any accepted social custom, form or practice which obscures or violates the human; more complexly, all that is expressed and implied in Blake’s words, ‘blights with plagues the marriage hearse’; more comprehensively, the reality of a money-dominated society uncovered in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. Both the ordinary social or class consciousness and what I might term the reality consciousness have gone to the making of our literature. The proportions have varied, but in all authentic literature the presence of the reality consciousness is crucial. It is because of this presence in it that a work of literature primarily has the possibility of transcending the particular society or class or period from which it sprang, and becoming a permanent living human possession — though, of course, successful realisation by the writer of his theme in art terms is necessary if the possibility is to become actual.