Guardians of Matter: Timothy Steele's "Anima" and the Pathetic Fallacy

Soundtrack to this episode

For text of poem, please see episode transcript at versecraft.buzzsprout.com.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-C'est Moi, MBS's response to my episode Giving the Devil His Due

-My review of Matthew's book, "Midlife," entitled The Poet Laureate of Crushed Dreams

-My episode on the Pathetic Fallacy with Matthew and Alice

-"Of the Pathetic Fallacy" by John Ruskin

-Who're you callin "pathetic?" 

-Pro and Contra

-Figurative language vs. the fallacy

-The new edition of "All the Fun's In How You Say A Thing" 

-I'm interviewing Tim! 

-Watch the reading with David, Matthew, and Ryan here! 

-The Winters circle

-The New Formalism

-The pathetic fallacy is coming from inside the house! 

-Supreme fictions and noble lies

-God, Machine, and Man

-Animism and Shinto

-The Jungian anima and the feminine turn

-In pursuit of Agape

Transcript

Versecraft 7-1: “Anima” by Timothy Steele

At this point, I have expressed many opinions and pronounced many judgments on this podcast, whether of a spiritual, aesthetic, literary, or ethical nature. It is therefore amusing to me that the opinion I have been most frequently challenged on, other than the perennial question of “to meter or not to meter,” is a relatively minor one. The challenge takes the following form: “What exactly is so bad about the pathetic fallacy?” Now, I’ve only made passing reference to the pathetic fallacy on Versecraft, usually in disapproving terms, but many of you may recall that my debut episode of Sleerickets featured a conversation with Matthew and Alice about Anthony Hecht’s essay defending the pathetic fallacy, which I’ll put a link to in the show notes. On that episode I showed little love to Hecht’s arguments, and little love to the pathetic fallacy, and so I suppose I’ve since gained something of a reputation for being the pathetic fallacy Torquemada. 

For those who don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, here’s a brief breakdown. The pathetic fallacy is a literary device which is neither pathetic nor fallacious in the modern senses of those terms. In this case, “pathetic” refers to having to do with pathos– emotions– and “fallacy” refers not to logical error but to general falsehood or deception. As defined by the Victorian critic John Ruskin, the pathetic fallacy is a particular subspecies of personification which occurs when human feelings or actions, particularly ones related to the feelings or actions of a poetic speaker, are projected onto non-human creatures or objects. For instance, to claim in a poem that the sea is cruel, that trees wail, or that chipmunks bury their heads in commiseration with a forlorn lover is to commit the pathetic fallacy. For the purposes of the foregoing discussion, I will be speaking about the pathetic fallacy as used by a lyric I. Much can be gotten away with in the voices of characters that would not fly as direct speech. 

As used by a lyric I, the pathetic fallacy is an attempt to make the environment or atmosphere of a poem sympathetic to the human feelings being expressed, and to thereby heighten the intensity of those feelings and their expression. From a moral point of view, the problem with this strategy is threefold. For one thing, the pathetic fallacy makes a false claim about reality– non-human entities do not possess human feelings, motives, or attributes, and to claim that they do indicates that the poet places a higher priority on emotion than accuracy or truth. Already, however, we might encounter two protests. The first goes something like this: “The reader is not an idiot– obviously they know that the sea cannot actually be cruel, and that trees do not have the mouths or the minds to wail. The risk of deceiving the reader as to the nature of reality is effectively zero.” 

Fair enough, we might say. But that is not actually the danger at hand. The danger is firstly that a tolerance for the pathetic fallacy implies and encourages a tolerance for the literary fudging of reality more generally. When we have a culture where accurate representation of reality does not matter, where the goal of mimesis is thrown out the window, we may no longer rely on art to fulfill one of its most exalted tasks– to reveal the truth of nature and human experience to us. Instead, art becomes merely an instrument for entertainment or emotional titillation. Only by critically insisting that art tell us the truth can we cultivate a culture wherein such ambitious art will flourish. 

Note that this does not mean that science fiction, fantasy, or other speculative fiction should be thrown out the window. We only require that works in these genres should be self-consistent and faithfully convey truth about our reality and our human nature through the hypothetical lens of their alternate reality: how would a real person act in such and such fantastical situation? To pick up a thread from the previous episode, we do not require of Paradise Lost that devils or angels be real– merely that this imaginative scenario tell us truths about ourselves and our relationship to the real world. One of the problems with the pathetic fallacy is that it takes as its subject matter the actual world we live in, but obscures and distorts it in order to achieve a particular effect. 

  The second danger is a bit more subtle. When challenged, of course we will say that we do not believe that non-human entities possess human traits. But if we are surrounded by media, especially media that we like, which puts us into the headspace of believing that the world is humanlike and sympathetic to our interior life, we will be more likely, in our own lives, to romanticize our surroundings in ways which do not do justice to their true nature and their true beauty. 

The second protest goes something like this: “You say you don’t want falsehood in literature. But what about metaphor? To get rid of metaphorical language would be to destroy a huge part of what makes literature beautiful and compelling.” That is true, and I would never wish to get rid of metaphorical language, either in literature or outside of it. But metaphor does not do quite the same thing as the pathetic fallacy. 

If I say that a man is a snake, it will be immediately clear from context whether I am speaking about a literal transmogrification or a figurative comparison. If it is a figurative comparison, the statement is the rhetorical equivalent of saying: this man is sneaky, untrustworthy, and predatory. This claim may or may not be true, but there is no inherent distortion of reality here. A metaphor is nothing more than an implicit comparison between two things. Symbolism and allegory are similarly innocent. If, in a novel, peeling walls represent the deterioration of the protagonist’s mind, it is still a plausible fact in the story that the walls are peeling. 

By contrast, a pathetic fallacy does distort reality. If I say that the trees are wailing, this is not just a colorful way of saying that wind is blowing through the trees with a sound reminiscent of wailing. I am ascribing an emotional action to the trees, and this emotional ascription is false. 

I have already alluded to the second problem with the pathetic fallacy. Namely, that it is an appeal to sentimentality and melodrama. The pathetic fallacy does not only distort reality, but does so for the purpose of artificially amping up an emotional effect, rendering it excessive to the situation at hand. The ethos behind the pathetic fallacy thereby not only betrays art’s obligation to truth, but its obligation to model wisdom. Strong emotions are necessary at times, and can be healthy, but emotion disproportionate to its object never is. That way lies irrationality, self-pity, mob mentality, madness. 

Of course a melodramatic poem is not by itself going to inspire madness in its reader, that’s not the point. The point is that the greatest art will always seek wisdom rather than folly, and that every piece of media, every piece of communication, contributes to the general tenor of culture. Having a mature artistic culture will not fix injustice or turn bad people into good ones, but a toxic artistic culture can do a great deal of spiritual harm, not only to those who grow up with it and don’t know any better, but especially to the artists themselves who get sucked into it. Aristotle was correct to say that art can be a force for good, but Plato was also right to say that because art is powerful, it must be cultivated with care. If you do not think that art has a moral dimension, you are essentially admitting that you do not think art is important or impactful. 

Finally, the third problem is that the pathetic fallacy is an exercise in self-absorption and solipsism. In a quasi-mystical way, it asserts that the world is somehow tapped into and shaped by the emotional life of the speaker. Needless to say, this is not only not true, but a delusional and unhealthy space for the mind to dwell in. 

It may seem that I am making a mountain out of a molehill, and it is true that the use or abandonment of the pathetic fallacy is not exactly a life or death issue. However, I hope I have made clear that one’s position on this matter reveals much about one’s overall aesthetic position. 

I tend to be pretty firm in my opinions, but at the same time I try to always remain open to new arguments and new perspectives. I believe that one of the great things that a poem can do is force us to reassess our position or reconfigure our attitude toward an issue, and this is exactly what Timothy Steele’s poem, “Anima,” has done for me apropos of this subject.  More elegantly and effectively than Hecht or anyone else, Steele gives a compelling argument for the value of the pathetic fallacy, and has made me consider it in a new light. Before we get to the poem though, a few words about the tremendous man himself. 

The first thing to say is that without Tim Steele, there would be no Versecraft as we know it– he has been the single greatest influence on my approach to metrical prosody, and, to a certain extent, the formal analysis sections of Versecraft episodes are exercises in Steelian theory. As I stated in the very first episode, his magnus opus on prosody– “All the Fun’s In How You Say A Thing,” has been seminal for me, and invaluable to my understanding of poetry. I am therefore incredibly excited to announce that this September, Ohio University Press will be publishing a special 25th anniversary edition of “All the Fun,” which you should all buy, and that I will have the opportunity to interview Tim later this summer in preparation for the release, so stay tuned for that. As a side-note, I also just uploaded a video recording to Youtube of the fabulous reading that I hosted in Cleveland for George David Clark, Matthew Buckley Smith, and Ryan Wilson, so if you’re interested in witnessing one of the finest poetry reading lineups this decade, please see my link in the show notes. 

Timothy Steele was born in Vermont in 1948, and his interest in poetry was piqued early on by the nearby presence of Robert Frost, who was the Vermont Poet Laureate during Steele’s teenage years. Nevertheless, the young man originally flirted with studying mathematics, and it was only after enrolling at Stanford in 1970, just two years after the death of Yvor Winters, that he became convinced by the excellence of the English department, which included Helen Pinkerton and Winters’ wife Janet Lewis, to devote himself to the study of literature. Having been raised on a diet of Frost and Shakespeare, and now inspired by the Wintersian atmosphere of Stanford, Steele devoted himself to the study and composition of formal verse, galvanized by contemporary luminaries like Richard Wilbur, W.H. Auden, and Philip Larkin, and Wintersians like J.V. Cunningham, Thom Gunn, and Edgar Bowers. Steele would go on to study with Cunningham at Brandeis, and it was under the elder poet’s stern and watchful eye that Steele developed his craft. Anyone who has read Steele’s poetry can testify to to the double-influence of Winters, who lies behind many of his sharply descriptive poems of the California landscape, and Cunningham, whose austere, philosophical wit Steele channels in poems like “Ethics,” and “Chansons Philosophiques.” After his doctorate, Steele received a Stegner Fellowship and returned to California, where he has remained and taught at various universities for the rest of his long and distinguished career.

Though Steele bristles at the term “New Formalist,” preferring to simply call himself a “metrical poet,” it is undeniable that he is, alongside Dana Gioia, one of the most central founding fathers of that movement which aimed to restore meter, rhyme, and traditional forms to contemporary poetics and larger culture in the late 20th century. Among the first generation of New Formalists, though Gioia was certainly the louder voice in the culture wars, it was Steele who was both the most formally rigorous in his own work and the most devoted to promoting the study of metrical art. Deeply unfashionable in his unapologetic devotion to strict meter, rhyme, and form, Steele nevertheless gained mainstream success for the sensuous charm, generous spirit, and coolheaded lucidity of his poetry. This success, combined with the influence of his aforementioned prosodic manual “All the Fun’s In How You Say A Thing,” as well as his brilliant critical analysis of Modernism’s abandonment of meter, “Missing Measures,” has cemented Steele’s legacy as one of the greatest living champions of metrical art. The younger generations of formal poets, myself included, owe Steele an immeasurable debt for his efforts to reintroduce metrical poetry and prosodic literacy into the mainstream. 

As a poet, Steele balances a plain-spoken clarity of utterance with a sharp eye for quotidian description and a knack for casual rhetorical argument. His love of self-sufficient imagery makes him, at times, a mild-mannered cousin of the Parnassians, while his witty excurses into the realm of ideas have an air of common-sense Augustan delicacy. One gets the sense that his primary goal is not to blow minds or stab hearts, but to quietly communicate the sober beauty of the world. To read him is like quaffing a tall glass of cool water after a warm run. 

The poem of his I have chosen, “Anima,” requires no introductory exegesis, but can effortlessly speak for itself. It is a little long, but easy to follow. It goes like this:

Anima

The way the latch clicks on the heart-shaped locket,

Assures us that our treasure’s safe with it;

Leather creaks warmly when, to form a pocket,

we wrap a baseball in the catcher’s mitt; 

The yo-yo, falling, seems to understand

The lightest tug, and climbs back to our hand. 

And when we’ve blown an essay or a test,

The book bag that imagined we were wise

Slumps on our bed, despondent and distressed;

The stuffed bear lifts us sadly shining eyes

And as it both reproaches and condoles,

Hints that all things have sympathies and souls. 

Hence if somebody steals our bike, a chief

Concern is for its plight: We fear the thief

Will curse and kick it if it slips its chain,

Will score its rims when forced to change its tires,

Will smash its headlamp, leave it out in the rain,

Till it, exhausted by abuse, expires. 

Hence, too, our guilt– for few of us can flatter

Ourselves that we’re good guardians of matter.

Despite materialistic appetites,

We let paint peel, tools rust, and don’t take time

To give the car a bath till someone writes,

Wash me, in the rear windshield’s dust and grime. 

It is, then, well that we retain a sense

That objects feel and suffer as we do:

It checks our carelessness and negligence.

It makes us see familiar things anew,

As when, condemned for having breached some rule,

I clapped chalk-choked erasers after school: 

Pretending I made thunder helped me belt

Clouds from their tightly packed black strips of felt;

Returning to the classroom where all day

I’d fidgeted or bowed my head and prepped,

I set them in the blackboard’s scalloped tray,

cheered that they’d now breathe freely as they slept. 

The form of the poem is simple enough: 36 lines of rhymed iambic pentameter divided into a logarithmically satisfying sextet of sestets. When we look at the rhyme scheme though, we notice something clever: the first two stanzas have the structure ABABCC; the third and fourth stanzas reverse the arrangement– AABCB; the fifth stanza returns to ABABCC; and the final stanza reverses it once again. The poem is therefore not only typographically organized into six parts, but organized on a larger scale by rhyme scheme into four parts. These four parts mirror and mark the rhetorical shifts in thought in the poem. The first two stanzas are devoted to illustrating a phenomenon; the third and fourth to illustrating the emotional reaction to this phenomenon; the fifth to drawing a moral point; and the sixth to illustrating this point with a personal anecdote. In the spirit of Horace and Cicero, Dryden and Pope, Steele showcases the intimate relationship between poetry and rhetoric, demonstrating that verse and oratory do not betray but may actually reinforce one another. 

Unusual these days even for a formalist, Steele limits himself to true rhymes, and is metrically very smooth. The substitutions of which he avails himself most are the most commonly accepted ones: feminine endings, and first foot trochaic substitutions, which begin roughly 20 percent of the lines in this poem. 

Steele however is not averse to the sparing use of other substitutions if the conditions are right. In the very first line, we have a third foot trochee on the words “clicks on,” creating a small percussive effect to mimic the clicking shut of the locket. In the last line of the fourth stanza, we have a daring double trochee substitution in the first and second foot: “Wash me, in the rear windshield’s dust and grime.” Steele gets away with this because the first trochee is a quote, and is therefore slightly isolated from the rest of the line, and because the second trochee is very light. In the fifth line of the third stanza, we end on an anapest: “Will smash its headlamp, leave it out in the rain.” Here, the quick break out of the meter may suggest the casting aside of the bicycle. 

For the most part, though, Steele obtains musical interest not through substitution but rhythmic modulation, varying the weights of words and the placement of pauses to create variety. For instance, consider the following three lines: “We let paint peel, tools rust, and don’t take time;” “leather creaks warmly when, to form a pocket;”  “ourselves that we’re good guardians of matter;” putting aside the feminine or masculine element, none of these have quite the same rhythm, but they are all still iambic pentameter. 

I have sometimes been irritated by the assumption poets make that the pathetic fallacy is a nigh-irresistible temptation. Stevens claims that one must have a “mind of winter” not to “think of any misery in the sound of the wind,” and Frost claims that one must be “versed in country things,” not to believe that nearby birds are weeping for a burning house. “Give me a break,” I want to say. Do these poets really believe that we are all so sentimental, that we are all closet Wordsworths who must be periodically disillusioned in order to see the world clearly? One of the striking things about Steele’s poem is that he convincingly points out that even if we are not swooning romantics, even if we are sober, common sense sort of people who do not project our sorrows onto nature, who do not believe that nature has any special sympathy for us, the romantic fallacy is still an imaginative indulgence that we commit in small ways all the time. It is simply part of our psychology, especially when it comes to things we own, interact with, or rely upon to fulfill a certain function– a locket, a bookbag, a teddy bear, a bike, a car. When we swear at a table for stubbing our toes, command a precariously balanced pile of books to stay put, or give thanks to a website for letting us log on quickly, the same process is occurring. 

When we do this, we are not being delusional per se– we are instead consciously entertaining an illusion which allows us to feel more engaged with the world around us. Wallace Stevens was fascinated by this phenomenon of projecting imaginative fictions that are known to be fictions onto reality in order to enrich experience, and for a time was convinced that such projections held existential salvation. Unfortunately, fictions that are known to be fictions are never satisfying for long– if, like money, or imaginary numbers, they serve a practical function, they may stick around, but they are little good in spiritual matters, where objective truth and permanence are the only qualities that suffice. 

This psychological tendency to personify, whether knowingly or unknowingly, does however have profound implications. Atheists have often used some version of this phenomenon to claim, in effect, that belief in God is merely the pathetic fallacy writ cosmically large– the ultimate submission to the common but fallacious temptation to project a mind like our own onto reality. On the other hand, some theologians have argued that the overwhelming and universal desire humans possess to envision a mind in and behind creation is in fact evidence of such a mind. 

On a lower level of abstraction, the pathetic fallacy is growing ever more relevant as AI increasingly blurs the line– or at least appears to blur the line– between unthinking object and thinking being. I know that I personally have a difficult time speaking to a chatbot as anything other than a real person– I find myself trying to refrain from saying anything rude to it or embarrassing myself in front of it, despite knowing full well that I am talking to a dumb hunk of metals, minerals, and wires. As AI rapidly improves and continues to infiltrate our lives, this illusion will only grow more severe and more confusing. Already I have seen truly depressing ads for A.I. girlfriends, and I fear that the days of living in a Philip K. Dick novel are only a couple decades away. 

To remain civilized, it is necessary that we remain continuously aware of our tendency to personify, both so that we do not distort our relationship with nature in general and in order to combat the increasing threat of a simulated meta-reality. Nevertheless, Steele warms my icy heart when he says, in the lines which constitute the heart of his poem:

It is, then, well that we retain a sense

That objects feel and suffer as we do:

It checks our carelessness and negligence.

Here, Steele is channeling the wisdom of a Shinto sage. In Shintoism, a form of Animism, it is believed that every discrete object, whether a person, an animal, a tree, or a rock, possesses a soul. Depending on how these souls, known as kami, are treated, they respond more or less favorably to human beings. When Buddhism entered Japan, the concept of karma served as a parallel and complementary idea. The Western rationalist may scoff at such apparent superstition, but if we judge an ideology by its fruits, we must admit that there is wisdom in it. 

Unlike in the West, it is a fundamental part of Japanese culture– to say nothing of many indigenous cultures around the world–  to see oneself as, in Steele’s phrase, a “guardian of matter.” Reverence for the natural world, the aesthetic appreciation of objects in their natural state, painstaking care for the craftsmanship, quality, and maintenance of one’s belongings– these are all undeniably virtuous behaviors, especially compared to the evil, miserable, wasteful, cheap, destructive, heartless approach of industrial hypercapitalism. We recall that the Romantics themselves faced a similar dichotomy–frustrated and disgusted by the ugliness and injustice of the industrial revolution, they understandably sought communion with nature, albeit with more starry-eyed enthusiasm than religious discipline. What Steele and animistic cultures like the Japanese suggest, however, is that the pathetic fallacy may, when used mindfully, contribute not to sentimental delusions of reality but affectionate harmonization with it. Especially in these times of environmental crisis, it is undeniably in our interest, both as moral creatures and as creatures which wish to survive on this planet, to treat our surroundings with greater appreciation and reverence than we have heretofore. 

I do not think it is necessary to believe that trees and rocks have souls in order to care for the environment, just as I do not believe it is necessary to think of animals as having minds like ourselves in order to care for them. Part of my grievance with the pathetic fallacy is that it obfuscates the wonderful alien strangeness of the world, which is so worthy of adoration on its own terms. Nevertheless, a doctrine that denies human nature is a foolhardy doctrine, and it may be that the psychological need to personify is a trait that we ought to make use of rather than deny. While always keeping objective reality in our rear-view, it may behoove us to periodically ask ourselves: how would I behave if everything around me were sentient? By performing such an exercise, we may not only find ourselves getting into better, more mindful habits, but developing and deepening our overall powers of compassion. 

The title of Steele’s poem, “Anima,” has two meanings, both of which I believe he intends. Most basically, it is the word for “soul” in Latin– here, a reference to entertaining the possibility that all objects possess a soul, aka Animism. However, “Anima” is also a term used in Jungian psychology to specifically refer to the feminine aspect of the soul. Steele’s poem is not only a series of psychologically astute observations, but a call to moral action: how much greater a world would we live in, he implies, if, as a culture at large, we were more attuned to the feminine aspects of ourselves: if we were more conscientious, empathetic, and nurturing to those around us, more emotionally intelligent and attuned to the needs of our environment. This sort of spiritual turn does not require us to live in a world of make believe or remake nature in our own image– instead, it calls upon us to expand our ethical concern to encompass all things, and extend to all things the same care we would show to a person that we love. If a hypothetical consideration of the pathetic fallacy can lead one to such a path of sainthood, I am all for it. 

Once again, this is “Anima,” by Timothy Steele: 

Anima

The way the latch clicks on the heart-shaped locket,

Assures us that our treasure’s safe with it;

Leather creaks warmly when, to form a pocket,

we wrap a baseball in the catcher’s mitt; 

The yo-yo, falling, seems to understand

The lightest tug, and climbs back to our hand. 

And when we’ve blown an essay or a test,

The book bag that imagined we were wise

Slumps on our bed, despondent and distressed;

The stuffed bear lifts us sadly shining eyes

And as it both reproaches and condoles,

Hints that all things have sympathies and souls. 

Hence if somebody steals our bike, a chief

Concern is for its plight: We fear the thief

Will curse and kick it if it slips its chain,

Will score its rims when forced to change its tires,

Will smash its headlamp, leave it out in the rain,

Till it, exhausted by abuse, expires. 

Hence, too, our guilt– for few of us can flatter

Ourselves that we’re good guardians of matter.

Despite materialistic appetites,

We let paint peel, tools rust, and don’t take time

To give the car a bath till someone writes,

Wash me, in the rear windshield’s dust and grime. 

It is, then, well that we retain a sense

That objects feel and suffer as we do:

It checks our carelessness and negligence.

It makes us see familiar things anew,

As when, condemned for having breached some rule,

I clapped chalk-choked erasers after school: 

Pretending I made thunder helped me belt

Clouds from their tightly packed black strips of felt;

Returning to the classroom where all day

I’d fidgeted or bowed my head and prepped,

I set them in the blackboard’s scalloped tray,

cheered that they’d now breathe freely as they slept.