The University of Notre Dame

Review
Author(s): J. P. Shortall
Review by: J. P. Shortall
Source: Religion & Literature, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 103-104
Published by: The University of Notre Dame
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40059706
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Ritual and Experiment in Modern Poetry
Jacob Korg
St. Martin's Press, 1995. x + 244 pages. Cloth $39.95.

In the 1925 Lowell Lectures, Alfred North Whitehead argued that the
conflict between "the results of science and the beliefs of religion" might
push both toward a deeper understanding of themselves and even effect a
reconciliation between them which might be a beginning as well as an
ending. Ritual and Experiment in Modern Poetry takes up this conflict as an
important beginning point for understanding the work of Yeats, Eliot,
Pound, H. D., and David Jones. These poets did not, claims Korg, effect
"the reconciliation Whitehead hoped for" (1) but experimented with new
combinations of thought and feeling in new poetic forms while salvaging
what they might of the old ones, ritualizing experiment and experimenting
with ritual. One effect of Korg's profoundly suggestive study is to make us
wonder what the conflict was about; ritual and experiment - and religion
and science - begin to surprise us by their similarities.
With a wide field of reference, including contemporaries of the modern
poets as well as more recent authors, Korg clearly develops the terms of his
study. He begins with Mircea Eliade's accounts of the origins and roles of
ritual in The Myth of the Eternal Return. Eliade himself referred to the work of
Joyce and Eliot as an example of authors dedicated to mythic time as an
alternative to and a retreat from the terror of linear history. In the first of
two chapters on Eliot, Korg elucidates 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock"
and The Waste Land through a sensitive application of Rene Girard's
theories of the relationship between violence and ritual, although, as Korg
notes, Girard's theories reject those in Frazer's Golden Bough, a profound
influence on Eliot's work.
Korg's groundwork for his discussion of experiment is laid in biographi-
cal, cultural, and scientific terms. Except for Yeats, all the poets he dis-
cusses suffered from some form of mental illness and participated in
experimental treatments. Here and elsewhere we see that these poets could
be sympathetic toward experimental science. Korg also includes the work
of scientists critical of nineteenth-century positivism. Einstein, Heisenberg,
Popper, Bachelard, and even Whitehead "supported a subjective and even
religious approach to science in general and to experiment in particular"
(5). A more recent critic of science, Paul Feyerabend, argues that "the
advancement of science requires freedom from reason and empiricism. He
declares that many of the elements identified with religion and humanistic

R&L 29.2 (Summer 1997)

103

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 1 04 Religion & Literature

pursuits, such as propaganda, intuition, style, and beauty, are essential to

the continuing vitality of science" (6).
Korg's study casts much new light on accepted knowledge about mod-
ern poetry, indicating that he has tapped one of modern poetry's springs.
An example of this is Korg's revaluation of the connection between the
work of Blake and Yeats made by Harold Bloom and others. Referring to
Yeats's A Vision, Korg writes: "In his system, experimental science and
imagination are locked in a Blakean pattern of contraries necessary for
progression, mutually correcting each other, living each other's life and
dying each other's death"(36). Korg also explores Yeats's interest in magic
and the occult as "a discipline that combines the ritual resources of religion
with the experimental methods of science" (37). Early in their careers,
both Eliot and Pound stressed the importance of scientific objectivity and
followed scientific models in both their criticism and poetry. Korg claims
that the model of literary tradition found in "Tradition and the Individual
Talent" draws on the example of the history of science, where new discov-
eries always "change what has been known in the past but also form a
continuation of it" (40). Pound's early interest in both Imagism and Vorticism
reflect an effort to unite ritual and experimental elements. Imagism's
presentation of concrete objects with an eye toward scientific objectivity
leads to an intense moment of vision closely resembling "the Joycean
epiphany, a secularized version of a phase of Christian and pagan ritual"
(80). Korg makes somewhat convincing claims that H. D. and David Jones
join ritual and experimental sensibility more successfully than do Yeats,
Eliot, or Pound. He suggests that "H. D.'s poetry might be regarded as an
effort to create.... a poetic art in which the religious and the scientific
forms of cognition might coexist in a spiritually therapeutic unity" (137).
David Jones seems to have thought of his own work most explicitly in terms
of ritual and experiment. He thought of all art as a sacramental sign and
was constantly concerned with the influence of science on sacramentality;
in the preface to The Anathemata, for example, he speculates on whether
water as H2O can have sacramental value.
Throughout his study Korg refers to the conflict between scientific and
religious discourse as Timothy J. Reiss sets it up in The Discourse of Modern-
ism. Reiss claims that the proliferation of discourse which deviates from it
might be an indication "that the limit of analytico-referential discourse has
been reached and that an alternative mode must be found" (191). Korg
has gone a long way toward suggesting that this alternative is the discourse
of modern poetry.

J.P.Shortall

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