Helen Adam and Jack Spicer
April 11, 1957

Notes

Helen Adam's ballads show the enduring vitality of the Romantic spirit which rose--as if anew from the grave, to thrive--in the 18th century and flowerd forth as the dominant mode in the 19th century. She has command of major poetic powers in her ballads, and the ground in which her command is rooted is establishd by her devotion to--and thru her devotion, her deep and extensive knowledge of---the poetry of the Sublime. The aesthetics of the sublime, Burke in his Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful says, realized itself in "a sort of delight full of horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror"(1756). Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), the Gothic romance after Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764), Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789): these are high water marks of the new tide. In the l8th century too there was everywhere revival of old lore--ballads, occult societies like the Masons and Rosicrucians, and most important new sciences of anthropology in folklore and linguistics searchd out roots and origins in the pagan world. It is thru the supernatural nature that passion can find realization in the imagination--a world of faerie, demonic powers, revenants, druid and dree. From Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" thru Yeats's Vision a tide at its full provides masterpiece after masterpiece. Eliot, Pound, H.D., Edith Sitwell all show in their major work belief in occult magical powers.
    The poetry of the Romantic spirit includes not only the poetry in verse, but the poetry in novels like MacDonald's magnificent Lilith--and most important the poetry in painting that we see in the works of Blake, Fuseli, Palmer, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Ryder, Stanley Spencer and Bacon--and in the aesthetics of the marvelous which Surrealism realized out of Dada, in Ernst, Lenore Fini, Leonora Carrington, Tanguy etc.
    The belief underlying this art is in an Other World accessible to the imagination from which the world of this natural derives its passionate meanings.

In Jack Spicer's poetry elements of the Romantic "World" appear as expressive statements of the personality--we are aware in his work not of the reality of an other world, but of the reality of an isolated psyche. Spicer speaks not as a Romantic creator but as a romantic creature. Scene, character and statement in his poetry are not realities but propositions. The reality we are shown is the predicament of the poet. In discussing the Sublime Burke wrote: "Beauty unites, the Sublime isolates." The Romantic poet addressd the Sublime; but, as a creature of the Sublime, in the 19th century, poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Saltus and Crowley strove to extend deeper the new poetics as a responsibility. Outstanding in our century have been Lorca in his New York poems and Artaud in such works as his Van Gogh and To Have Done with the Judgment of God. It is toward these ends that Spicer's work properly goes. Morality has been substituted for aesthetics in relation to the Sublime; the new aesthetics is Expression. The belief underlying this art is in the self (individual) as the sublime hero. It is not Romance but Confession that is the form; not the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" but "Mon Coeur Mis Nu" (My Heart Laid Bare) that furnishes the prototype.
 
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