“The Power to Enchant that Comes from Disillusion”: W. H. Auden’s Anti-Magical Poetics

This chapter examines Auden’s vision of the body and the broader material character of existence by elaborating his critique of “magical thinking,” which for Auden marks an attempt to subsume the material otherness of the world into human subjectivity. As a late modernist, Auden is writing against what he takes to be two distorted modernist responses to secular “disenchantment”: magic, which disavows the gap between subject and object, and pagan immanence, which identifies with and seeks to resacralize the very inhumanness of the world’s material energy. Auden, rather, accepts the secular disenchantment of the world, which for him uncovers a new possibility: an ethical relation to material life, including the life of one’s own body, as the nonhuman other. But he simultaneously preserves a Christian, nonreductive vision of the human world as a domain of responsibility, original action, and transcendent aspiration. He thus develops what I call a nonhierarchical “affirmative dualism,” a vision of two distinct orders given equal standing.

Introduction: Modernist Secularism and its Discontents

There is a famous passage in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse where Mrs. Ramsay, knitting in solitude after her children have gone to bed, accesses a “self” beneath her social identity. She calls this self “a wedge-shaped core of darkness.”1 Its fluidity and obscurity allow her to ignore the boundaries that establish discrete identities and separate things from one another. In this darkness there is no “personality” that confronts the world as a series of competing objects to be placated, mastered, or managed; rather, there is a “summoning together” of all things in a complete “rest” outside “the fret, the hurry,” and “the stir.” As Mrs. Ramsay watches the stroke of the lighthouse on the horizon, “she bec[omes] the thing she looked at” (...

“The World was Paradise Malformed”: Poetic Language, Anthropomorphism, and Secularism in Wallace Stevens

That Stevens’s poetry repeatedly returns to the death of God as a condition of existential vertigo is a scholarly commonplace, but this chapter argues that for Stevens, language itself harbors a dangerous bias toward transcendence. Stevens is mistrustful of the way metaphor slides into metaphysics, the way an analogical worldview becomes a theological one, and the ways in which signs and symbols tend to refer solid, immanent things to supersensible narratives or “meanings.” In the face of this danger, he develops a poetics of tautology meant to divest language of such bias. Yet later in his career, this chapter contends, he returns to analogy as a mode of transcendence-in-immanence, and establishes a concept of “description without place” in which imagined goods, which have no immanent existence, correspond to details of a particular scene. Stevens is, in other words, working out a version of Nietzsche’s famous claim that we are not rid of God until we are rid of grammar while simultaneously harnessing the religious possibilities of language.

Conclusion: Evil and the Adequacy of the Earth

This chapter contends that modernists find themselves entangled in a distinctly secular version of the “problem of evil.” As secularists they want to affirm the abundance of the immanent, material world, but this very world seems to resist the desires and needs specific to human personhood. This leads, in different writers, to a critique of “secular humanism” or to a valorization of the world as a scene of conflict. The chapter suggests, however, that Auden’s Christian understanding of secularity is able to elude this problem of evil by relinquishing the expectation that the material world satisfy the desires proper to embodied persons.

“Tangled in a Golden Mesh”: Virginia Woolf and the “Deceptiveness” of Beauty

There has been a small movement among recent critics and philosophers to rehabilitate the reputation of beauty, which suffered under the modernist fascination with ugliness, Romantic and postmodern prejudice in favor of the sublime, and political criticism of beauty as elitist, inefficacious, and complicit with injustice. This chapter seeks to reframe these debates by examining the link between beauty and religious ontologies. Weber, following Nietzsche, insisted that secular modernity had broken sympathetic relations between beauty and goodness, but in Woolf’s novels the beautiful cannot shed its theological aura: its promise of reconciliation, peace, and divine benevolence. Woolf’s famous conception of “the world as a work of art”—which has, nevertheless, no “creator”—remains entangled in the aesthetic theodicies she repudiates. Her novels struggle to conceptualize secular, mundane models of beauty while simultaneously clinging to intimations of a metaphysical and moral order implicit in aesthetic experience. Beauty is, in her writing, the last and most intractable stronghold of mystical feeling.

“Homer is My Example”: Yeats, Paganism, and the Emotions

There has been a resurgence of contemporary literary and theoretical interest in the status of emotion and affect. The example of Yeats suggests that the discourse surrounding emotion must take into account the religious and secular paradigms within which emotion is evaluated. This chapter shows how Yeats rejected the cultural authority of what he called “spiritual emotion,” “vague propagandistic emotion,” and “modern lyric feeling”—all inheritances, for him, of the inward, ascetic Christian self and its “affections”—and sought to replace them with the pagan “passions.” These passions assent to the singular, despotic nature of the will’s claims on the world and refuse to be subjugated to therapeutic or moral ends. They are equally martial states; they welcome conflict as the condition of their amplification. But in his treatment of “joy,” which he understands as the energy underwriting all manifestations of passion, Yeats “vacillates” between Christian models of the receptivity, gratuitousness, and communal reciprocity of joy, and pagan models where joy is an achievement of the victorious “will.”