Any artist who cherishes the tradition of which he is a part must wonder, now & again, whether there is a proper relation of technical innovation to the past. I am given, in general, to making art rather than discussing it. As this subject is now clear and present to my mind’s eye, however, I will continue in this mode for so long as seems proper and complete.
The greatest technical innovations of art are surely the golden byproducts of the sincere need to crystallize something, and the subtler & loftier the better, which has as yet no satisfying articulation. What is more, there is surely no subtler & loftier art than sacred art, for that dreamcatcher which praises must be rarefied indeed! in order to exist as symbols.
The liberty with which William Blake’s 'prophetic' books adapted and expanded the poetic devices with which our civilization equipped him is an example of this process, as are the dash poems of Emily Dickinson, the sprung rhythm poems of Gerald Manley Hopkins, & Friedrich Holderlin's odes. All of these examples are deliberately chosen for having composed sacred verse; not that that verse is sacred, or that the art is sacred, but that the subject of that art pertains first of all to the sacred and only second of all to anything particular whatever.
I would emphasize as well that I am merely drawing attention to a category worthy of perusal and not limiting its expressions to this single subset. Nor am I limiting the field to sacred verse, nor yet to art, for I also acknowledge any number of sacred modes. If it pleases Spirit to flow into any mode that It chooses to consecrate, then it pleases Spirit.
These exponents of sacred art precede & underly the sterile presumptuousness of early 20th century poetic Modernism, which arrogated to itself the claim of having begun this process as opposed to being its profane echo. This is not to say that individual poetic Modernists did not make a valid, beautiful & mindful contribution. The sterile presumptuousness is that of the overarching claim to be the 'official' literary generation to "Make it new", which is hogwash. [In retrospect, one finds this way of putting matters rather unfair really to the Modernists, and would consider there to have been two 'peaks' to Modernism instead, which is a much healthier construction: the first peak the likes of Hopkins, Dickinson, and Whitman; the second peak the likes of Eliot, Pound, and Thomas.]
