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The Orphic Voice, page 1

 

The Orphic Voice
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The Orphic Voice


  ELIZABETH SEWELL (1919–2001) was born to British parents in Coonoor, India. During the Second World War, she worked for the Ministry of Education in London and attended Cambridge University, where, in 1949, she earned her doctorate in modern languages. That same year, she traveled for the first time to the United States, which she would later make her home, teaching at Vassar College, the University of Notre Dame, Fordham University, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Sewell is best known for her books of criticism, which explore the formalist verse of Valéry and Eliot, the nonsense verse of Lear and Carroll, and the links between literature and science. She is also the author of four novels, three poetry collections, and a memoir.

  DAVID SCHENCK is a writer and bioethicist. He is the coauthor of Healers: Extraordinary Clinicians at Work and What Patients Teach: The Everyday Ethics of Health Care, and is currently at work on a new book, Into the Field of Suffering: Transformation and the Healer’s Vocation. A friend and colleague of Elizabeth Sewell’s for over twenty years, Schenck now serves as her literary executor.

  THE ORPHIC VOICE

  Poetry and Natural History

  ELIZABETH SEWELL

  Introduction by

  DAVID SCHENCK

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1960 by Elizabeth Sewell

  Introduction copyright © 2022 by David Schenck

  All rights reserved.

  First published as a New York Review Books Classic in 2022.

  Cover image: Eileen Agar, Orpheus, c. 1959; private collection; Estate of Eileen Agar/Bridgeman Images

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Sewell, Elizabeth, 1919–2001, author. | Schenck, David, 1951— writer of introduction.

  Title: The Orphic voice / by Elizabeth Sewell ; introduction by David Schenck.

  Description: New York: New York Review Books, [2022] | Series: New York Review Books classics | Published previously by Yale University Press in 1960 and by Harper Torchbooks in 1971.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021014417 (print) | LCCN 2021014418 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681372181 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681372198 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Poetry. | Literature and science. | Orpheus (Greek mythological character)— In literature.

  Classification: LCC PN1031 .S475 2021 (print) | LCC PN1031 (ebook) | DDC 809.1/936—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021014417

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021014418

  ISBN 978-1-68137-602-8

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction to the 2022 Edition

  Preface

  PART I

  Introduction

  PART II

  Bacon and Shakespeare: Postlogical Thinking

  PART III

  Erasmus Darwin and Goethe: Linnaean and Ovidian Taxonomy

  PART IV

  Wordsworth and Rilke: Toward a Biology of Thinking

  PART V

  Working Poems for The Orphic Voice

  Notes

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  “POETRY is a form of power.” This, the first sentence of Elizabeth Sewell’s Orphic Voice, lets you know immediately that what you have in hand is nothing that can be conveniently labeled “literary criticism.” This is another voice entirely, one ranging from Bacon and Shakespeare to Erasmus Darwin, Linnaeus, and the scientific works of Goethe; from Pico to Vico; from Novalis to Hölderlin to Rilke; with side trips to France for Hugo on Shakespeare, Renan on evolution, and Mallarmé on Orpheus. You find yourself confronted at every turn with a mind of great power investigating the origins of the powers of the mind. A suitably Orphic movement, as you will learn.

  This is an investigation of thinking, guided by poets and biologists, keyed off myth—the myth of Orpheus. Better: It is a “being read” by Orpheus and his poets. Not just a study of said poets, or of Orpheus. Literary criticism could be considered the domestication of poetry; The Orphic Voice, to the contrary, would be its liberation. The Orphic Voice, first published in 1960, can be profitably read alongside works on evolution, like Gregory Bateson’s Mind and Nature and Jesper Hoffmeyer’s Biosemiotics, and works of literary critics, like Walter A. Strauss, Charles Segal, and Ihab Hassan on Orpheus, his myth, and its metempsychoses.

  In an early review, George Steiner spoke of The Orphic Voice as “a difficult, maddening book,” before concluding with the simple declaration: “It is a great work.” And it is indeed both. The book’s introduction will dash you along on one of the more extravagant intellectual courses ever; it’s intoxicating, demanding, exuberant. But immediately after, you find yourself plunged into thickets of technicalities with Lord Bacon and his seconds and their foes, likely wondering what in the world has happened. The truly maddening nature of the book, its difficulty, however, lies not in these overt challenges. Rather, it is this: The Orphic Voice is a book designed and written to force your mind to work in Orphic fashion. Sewell insists that the reader trained in linear, logical methods must go postlogical, to work in clusters and concentric circles. Simultaneity and analogue are watchwords; linearity and logic are not. Primary evidence in this inquiry into the mind is poems—not just “poetry” as an activity but specific works. This is where the Orphic taxonomy is focused, and rightly so.

  The aim is general, as befits a discipline of investigation into the biology of thinking, a study of the development of the mind-body in the world of nature alive and dead. Of this The Prelude and the Sonette an Orpheus are textbooks, and in their thinking and validity akin to, and coequal with, every branch of biology, in the widest possible sense including psychology and anthropology, having a similar aim and field.

  Poetry is to take the lead as method:

  Orpheus, who is poetry and myth and postlogic thinking about itself, is not subject to interpretation by other disciplines; he is himself interpretation, the specific instrument of the poet’s researches.

  Indeed, it is crucial to science, Sewell argues, that biology reexamine its own mythology, its proper method:

  Biology has mistaken its mythology. It needs poetry rather than mathematics or language-as-science to think with; not an exclusive but an inclusive mythology to match the principle of inclusion inherent in all of its living and organic and synthetic subject matter.

  For there is here a careful effort to stress the continuity of intellect throughout natural history, one of Emerson’s—another of Sewell’s Orphic heroes—great themes.

  We have to think of the Orphic mind as a natural phenomenon.

  [Human language is] . . . the making explicit of something implicit in life from the beginning. All striving and learning is mythologizing; and language is the mythology of thought and action, a system of working figures made manifest.

  The core questions that will organize inquiry in The Orphic Voice are two:

  What power and place has poetry in the living universe?

  What is the biological function of poetry in the natural history of the human organism?

  In this time of the sixth extinction and climate emergency what could be more important than these two questions about the relationship of poetry and biology, of the human to the biosphere?

  The startling thesis of The Orphic Voice is that myth itself is an active power, as well as a depiction of its own power. As such, myth shapes poets, and poets shape myth. Myth as an evolving, living power, with its own autonomy.

  It is Orpheus’ function to mark out the essential poetic tradition in any period by indicating those who are at work on the peculiar question and task of poetry in their time; also, to make plain the nature of that questioning endeavor.

  The claim is that certain myths, Orpheus preeminent among them, guide as well as elucidate the history of culture and thought.

  It is going to be the theme of the rest of this book that for the last 400 years, with the coming of what one might call the modern age, poetry has been struggling to evolve and perfect the inclusive mythology on which language works and all thought in words is carried on, and that this type of thinking is the only adequate instrument for thinking about change, process, organisms, and life.

  All this is entailed in focusing on myth as method.

  Sewell tells us that the story of Orpheus can be divided into three main components, and it is this division that provides the framework for her text:

  The first period, Shakespearean and Baconian, will fall under the first part of the story, where Orpheus exercises his power over rocks and trees and animals. Eurydice and the journey to love and death will uphold the Goethean stage, and the Romantics; and with Rilke there will be the final high and mysterious figure, the severed prophetic head unconquered even in its destruction, and the human music among the stars, by the help of which we shall have to set poetry’s face forward if we can.

  What I want to suggest to the reader is that the death and dismemberment of Orpheus may well be a promising figure for us to use in thinking about the Anthropoc
ene. Shortly, we will turn to those who could be considered to be extending the Orphic work today, and will suggest that it is the scientists, not the poets, who are doing the most essential work. Sewell herself says that the third portion of the myth is the least explored, and it is that portion that is crying out now for concentrated attention. We can agree, I think, that we are, in fitting Orphic fashion, in the shadow of descent into darkness, now impelled to investigate the destruction of human culture by an infuriated nature.

  •

  I offer now three briefs, which I hope will be of use to the reader of The Orphic Voice at its most maddening moments: 1) A précis of the textual lineage this work stands in, and where it rests in Sewell’s own oeuvre, which was considerable. Like her aunt, the novelist and educator Elizabeth Missing Sewell, she was at home in many genres, and was remarkably prolific: six works of criticism, four novels, three books of poetry, one collection of essays, and a memoir (which features, oddly but unsurprisingly, Bacon and Coleridge). 2) Biosketches of the two scientists who influenced The Orphic Voice, whom Sewell knew well and deeply loved. 3) A description of an organizational strategy that Sewell herself used in her teaching to utilize, if in extremis, to help hold the various players straight in the three main chapters of The Orphic Voice.

  But first a few quick facts about the life. Sewell was born in 1919 in India of British parents, subsequently educated in England, taking her BA, MA, and PhD at Newnham College, Cambridge. She died in 2001 in Greensboro, North Carolina, after having come to the United States in 1949 and spending much of the 1950s and ‘60s in and around New York City. Sewell had a knack for being where the action was. She saw war service in London during World War II. She was, amidst considerable controversy, one of the first women graduating from Cambridge to be awarded an actual PhD, as opposed to a “certificate of PhD.” She taught in historically black colleges at pivotal moments and places during the civil rights era—at Bennett College in Greensboro in 1961, the year of the sit-ins, and at Tugaloo College in Mississippi, amidst the violence of 1963. In her later life, whenever the Ku Klux Klan marched in Greensboro, she was always present in a countermarch. “Never forget,” she would say, “Hitler was elected.”

  Though thoroughly British, Sewell was British with a difference. She was born and raised in India, and spent the bulk of her life in the United States, “this wild, violent, beautiful country.” The change in citizenship came several years after having been, in her words, “shown the door at Cambridge.” She was, overtly, permanently displaced, staying in no job for more than three years, and living out in her last decades a pledge to keep all jobs to six weeks or less. And yet, in another sense, she was never displaced, being preternaturally attuned, one might say, to Ovid’s Metamorphoses— always prepared for change, always alert for signs, always ready for the next opening.

  One: The key figure for placing Sewell as a critic—or, rather, as a “poet-critic,” she would have vehemently insisted—is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. And, in particular, the Coleridge of the essays on method in The Friend. This is the Coleridge who recognized immediately, who sponsored and nourished and honored, the greatness of his friend William Wordsworth. Indeed, The Orphic Voice is itself a continuation and deepening of Coleridge’s reading of Wordsworth; it was while reading a new edition of the 1805 Prelude that the whole plan for The Orphic Voice came to Sewell. Whenever you get lost, think Coleridge and Wordsworth. This from Coleridge is a perfect description of the project undertaken in The Orphic Voice:

  O! few have there been among critics who have followed with the eye of the imagination the imperishable yet ever wandering spirit of poetry through its various metempsychoses, and consequent metamorphoses . . .

  And this likewise from Coleridge gives the essential clue to how Sewell chose to focus on the key figures we find in The Orphic Voice:

  The poet is not only the man made to solve the riddle of the universe, but he is also the man who feels where it is not solved.

  More specifically, The Orphic Voice is a continuation of the inquiry Sewell began in her rather controversial dissertation at Cambridge, which was later published as The Structure of Poetry. Her marvelous memoir of the time of the writing of this work is entitled “A Cautionary Tale,” and in it she recounts her discovery that, despite her Cambridge education, she didn’t know what thinking was. So she began to read logicians and poets, philosophers and psychologists—indeed, she studied anyone and everyone. Which is precisely what her Cambridge committee objected to. The Orphic Voice is a continuation of that line of research, but this time under the sponsorship of Michael Polanyi, who had a total and complete appreciation of his young protégé.

  Two: Which brings us to the two scientists so critical for Sewell’s development: her father, R. B. Seymour Sewell, a zoologist and Fellow of the Royal Society, and her mentor, Polanyi, a chemist and likewise Fellow of the Royal Society. Both initially were trained as physicians and both served in that capacity—on opposite sides—in the first world war. Seymour Sewell was trained at Christ College, Cambridge, during the time William Bateson was championing Mendelian inheritance and helping to establish the discipline of genetics.

  Seymour Sewell was associated with the Indian Medical Service for more than twenty-five years. He made many oceanographic research voyages as a surgeon-naturalist, which culminated in his selection as the chief scientist of the acclaimed John Murray Expedition to the Indian Ocean of 1933–1934. After leaving India, he returned to England and worked in the Department of Zoology at Cambridge until his death in 1964. Between 1903 and 1958 he published more than seventy scientific papers across a variety of disciplines—including taxonomy, oceanography, marine biology, evolutionary biology, geography, ecology, and physical anthropology.

  Polanyi is a far more prominent figure—a chemist, social philosopher, and, most important for our purposes, philosopher of science. His major work, Personal Knowledge, is easily one of the most important books of the twentieth century on the epistemology and philosophy of science. He was also deeply interested in the philosophy of biology, and particularly in the emergence of life and intelligence. Sewell spent two years in Manchester on a Simon Fellowship where she worked directly with him. She is named in the acknowledgments to Personal Knowledge as one of the four people who worked through the entire manuscript with Polanyi as he was preparing it for publication.

  So we find Sewell at the time she began to write The Orphic Voice, working as an established and esteemed critic, poet, and novelist, collaborating with one of the great scientists and philosophers of the twentieth century in the writing of his magnum opus—and carrying with her proudly the heritage of being the daughter of an eminent zoologist, as well as being the niece of an eminent Victorian author.

  Three: To the American reader, to the twenty-first-century reader, Part Two of The Orphic Voice on Bacon and Shakespeare is likely to be tortuous. Partly it’s the unfamiliar names—and then there’s the awkwardness to our ears of Renaissance English argumentation and diction. (Not to mention the untranslated passages of Latin!) But mostly the trouble is the deep conflictedness within Bacon, which Sewell is determined to follow in infuriating fidelity.

  But do not despair! I encourage the discouraged reader to move about freely in The Orphic Voice. Treat it as a work of architecture, as a memory palace. After you have read its Introduction— surely one of the most marvelous pieces of writing ever about method and thinking—you have the key in your hand. Feel free now to leap around in the text; I have jumped, for example, from the introduction to Rilke to Erasmus Darwin and back to Shakespeare with great profit. After all, myth, as Sewell teaches us, opens backwards and forwards. Often there are no linear steps to follow; confusion is to be expected. This is a land of simultaneity. My advice is to plow on ahead and expect that after ten or so pages, you will find yourself saying, “Oh, that’s what that was.” This sort of unexpected discovery—and recovery— being one of the pleasures of enigmatic texts.

 
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