Poetry and Metaphysics

Jean Wahl's "Poetry and Metaphysics" first appeared in what, under the editorship of Jean Lescure, would soon become one of the leading literary journals of the French Resistance, Messages.(1) After a premier issue on William Blake (to which Wahl contributed advice and several poems of his own),(2) the journal's second issue, in 1939, was devoted to the topic "Metaphysics and Poetry," and included, alongside Wahl's lead article, an important essay on the poetic instant by Gaston Bachelard, original poems by Paul Eluard, and photographs of Hans Bellmer's La Poupee.(3) Wahl played a major role in shaping this issue. Not only did he suggest possible contributors; he also served, in Lescure's words, as "the most diligent go between imaginable."(4)

In this foundational article, which would be reprinted during the war in Wahl's Existence humaine et transcendance (1944)(5) and again in 1998 in Lescure's Poesie et liberte: Histoire de "Messages," 1939-1946,(6) Wahl ventures nothing less than "perhaps to reach the idea, the essence, of poetry." Poetry, Wahl suggests, is located both at the foundation of metaphysics and at the summit toward which metaphysics strives. Through a "union of contradictories," of contrary images that self-destruct and advance us toward what is imageless and indeterminable; through a coincidence of opposites(7)-for example, passivity and activity, and consciousness and unconsciousness-poetry helps us to go beyond what is given "here below," but, in a move that resembles what Wahl elsewhere calls "transdescendence," also allows us to return to the world below in which we find ourselves, to "join immanence to transcendence."

And yet, as becomes evident over the course of the essay, poetry can only be understood through its relationship to metaphysics, while metaphysics can in turn only be understood through its relationship to poetry. Each may shed light on the other, but neither ultimately stands autonomous. What we have is a sort of unending dialectic in which "they always remain linked, living from their reciprocal deaths, each emerging at the moment when the other is destroyed but living also from their reciprocal lives."

Wahl shows, for example, how Whitehead expresses philosophically what Percy Bysshe Shelley's poetry "makes us feel" about nature "in its incessant mobility." But Shelley's poetry itself rests on certain "philosophical intuitions," which themselves derive in part from the philosopher-poet Plato.(8) Wahl reveals similar connections with re spect to the themes of memory in Alfred de Musset, immobile nature in William Words worth, time in Charles Baudelaire and Stephane Mallarme, space in William Blake, causality in Paul Claudel, and even non-knowledge in the early poetry of G. W. F. Hegel. He also notes equivalents between two hypotheses of Plato's Parmenides and the work of Arthur Rimbaud, and between the great kinds of being in Plato's Sophist and poets such as Paul Valery, Walt Whitman, Novalis, and Gerard de Nerval. And he explains how even the simplest, least metaphysical poem by someone like Friedrich Holderlin may lead us to philosophical insight.

Refusing to take sides, Wahl's own work embodies the inconclusive dialectic between metaphysics and poetry. Their fusion is uncertain, but Wahl, whether in his prose or verse, never stopped striving "for the metaphysico-poetic Truth to appear."