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Notes Toward Beauty

Written by

Reginald Shepherd

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February 21, 2007


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"I don't trust beauty anymore," I once wrote, "when will I stop believing it?" And elsewhere, "because beauty (fixed, triumphant) isn't my friend, is it?" That is part of the truth. The other part of the truth is that without a notion of beauty, an embodiment of the possible beyond the abjections of the mundane, I would not have become a poet, would not, perhaps, have left behind the Bronx housing projects and tenements at all. It is very fashionable, indeed almost de rigueur, to condemn beauty as oppressive: at worst an ideological mystification, at best a distraction from the real work. (Lenin couldn't listen to music for this reason: he distrusted the power it had over him, fearing it would enervate him and make him too soft to do the hard things that had to be done).

As poet Jay Hopler writes, "It is hard to believe beauty is the new ugliness. / But it must be, why else would so many of my contemporaries mock it so?" And simplified, distorted notions of beauty have too often been deployed for vicious ends: the Nazi cult of Aryan beauty is the most egregious example. (Though I am also reminded that the sculptures of Arno Breker, Hitler's court artist, are actually ugly. But Leni Riefenstahl's straining, triumphant Olympians are not.) Adorno's point remains: "Beauty of any kind has to face the question of whether it is in fact beautiful or whether it is just a fake claim resting on static affirmation."

It is common to confuse the beautiful with the pretty, an ornamental irrelevance, to oppose the pleasing to some more exigent or severe realm above and beyond the merely beautiful. This perspective situates beauty at the midpoint of a continuum from the pretty to the beautiful to the sublime: beauty is thus a form of mediocrity or compromise. It was Edmund Burke who first distinguished between the beautiful and the sublime as that which submits to us versus that which overwhelms us, that which could destroy us but does not. Immanuel Kant and (more recently) Jean-François Lyotard have elaborated on this distinction. In this view, beauty reassures and comforts: it supplies us with the already known, while the sublime crashes over us like the storm surge of an out-of-season hurricane.

As Susan Sontag has observed, "Beauty is part of the history of idealizing, which is itself part of the history of consolation. But beauty may not always console. The beauty of face and figure torments, subjugates; that beauty is imperious. The beauty that is human, and the beauty that is made (art)—both raise the fantasy of possession. Our model of the disinterested comes from the beauty of nature—a nature that is distant, overarching, unpossessable." Beauty is insistent; it makes demands. It demands that we see it and acknowledge it, that we acknowledge our seeing, that we be changed by the experience. As Rilke wrote, beauty is the beginning of a terror that we are barely able to endure. And as Francis Bacon wrote, there is no beauty that hath not some proportion of strangeness in it. To quote Thomas Nashe's "A Litany in Time of Plague," a poem that celebrates and embodies the beauty of annihilation, a poem whose speaker is, in part, dying of beauty,

Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen's eye.
I am sick, I must die.

The terror that Kant equated with the sublime is synonymous with Rilke's beauty: the sublime is beauty's true face, like Zeus revealing himself to Semele in all his glory, like Yahweh whose back alone can be glimpsed by the mortal eye. Beauty is not kind or benign; it is a natural force, amoral, beyond good and evil. Like the pleasure/pain of orgasm, like Roland Barthes's jouissance, it is shattering, ecstatic: we are beside ourselves, outside ourselves. Beauty burns and devours: we die to our old selves and rise reborn.


This is one of the things poetry means to me: the possibility of mediating between being and desire, of bridging alterity by articulating it. "To articulate" also means "to connect." One way a poem begins for me is with the question, "How do these things relate to one another?" Language itself is articulation in two senses: it speaks and it connects. Liminal, nothing in itself but everything in relation, a bridge between the material and the immaterial, between image and idea, signifier and signified, all language is conjunction, copula, commingling. The real waits in a corner, never to be spoken, but only spoken of. . . Only connect, as E. M. Forster wrote.

I decided I wanted to be a poet (an asymptote, approached but never truly reached: in that regard like beauty itself) because I was overwhelmed by the ambivalent, contradictory beauty of Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which seemed not simply to speak to and of my life but to replace it, if only fleetingly, with something more meaningful. Amorphous misery had been made form, suffering had been transformed to shape. I hated the poem for eluding me, for not surrendering itself immediately to my understanding; I loved it for its power of fascination. I sought by becoming a poet a share in that power, to be, if not a thing of beauty in myself (that would have been too much to ask for), then at least a source of beauty. As Frank O'Hara writes in his "Autobiographia Literaria," "And here I am, the / center of all beauty! / writing these poems! / Imagine!" So much for the unkind animals and the fleeing birds. . .



Again in Rilke's words, there is no part that does not see you: you must change your life. The rightness of beauty is a form of justice: just proportion, just harmony (even in seeming discord), the just relation of parts to the whole and the whole to the parts. In this sense beauty, in its form rather than its content, offers an imago of the just society. Friedrich Schlegel makes this analogy explicit when he writes that "Poetry is republican speech: a speech which is its own law and end unto itself, and in which all the parts are free citizens and have the right to vote." The pain that beauty often induces (beauty is something we undergo, a passion) is the pain of the awareness of the absence of such a thing in or as our lives, beauty's reminder of our own inadequacy. Rilke's archaic torso is after all a fragment of a god: beauty shines out in what remains, reminding us of a wholeness just out of reach. It reminds us of the possible that does not exist.


Works Cited


Hopler, Jay. Green Squall. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.

O'Hara, Frank. The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara. Ed. Donald Allen. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971.

Shepherd, Reginald. Some Are Drowning. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994.

Sontag, Susan. "An Argument About Beauty." At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches. Eds. Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007.
