The Orphic Voice by Elizabeth Sewell

I’m suggesting this opening to the new edition of Sewell’s The Orphic Voice (1960) as a reading for all the participants in the current lecture series. Thursday we’ll be dealing with the poetic basis of mind, beginning with Corbin and Hillman, but then moving into other territory, and this very provocative book is food for thought. Schenk’s Introduction is a wonderful preliminary.

[It’s not too late to sign up for the lectures. Most of those registered aren’t able to make it live anyway and are getting it all through the recordings. Thursday is #4.]

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INTRODUCTION by David Schenk

“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 Anthropocene. 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.

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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.

Steiner says, quite helpfully, that The Orphic Voice is “a book by a poet for poets . . . being itself a kind of sustained argumentative poetry.” Sewell would add that we are all poets (though not necessarily very good ones, she would inevitably put in, wickedly), because poetry is how the mind works. Indeed, going further with the Ovidian undercurrent, poetry is how the universe works. Neither we—nor perhaps Orpheus and his poets—have begun really to grasp the nature, the full capacity, the power of language.

And now for the promised organizational strategy: As an experiment in what Sewell came to call “cluster thinking,” take a blank sheet of paper, turn it sideways (landscape view) and write Bacon just above the middle of the page, Shakespeare just below that. Put Pico della Mirandola to the left and down, Ovid to the left and up; Hölderlin, Novalis, and Goethe to the right middle; Coleridge and Victor Hugo to the right and up, along with Edgar Allan Poe, and then drop Teilhard de Chardin with a dotted line down to the right and in parentheses. Go farther into the lower right and put D’Arcy Thompson and Ezra Pound. Now put Milton near Bacon and Shakespeare, to the right middle, and Giambattista Vico to Milton’s right. Over Bacon and Shakespeare, Sir Phillip Sydney and his foil Thomas Sprat; and under them George Puttenham and Henry Reynolds. Now stare at what you’ve done. This is how she is thinking. And all of this is unfolding Orpheus.

For the next cluster, out of The Orphic Voice Part Three, on a fresh sheet of paper begin with Erasmus Darwin and Goethe in the center, reach back left to Ovid once more, and forward right to Coleridge and Emerson, once more, and on to D’Arcy Thompson and Polanyi—and note the constants. Add in Charles Darwin and T. H. Huxley to the right and up, and Novalis and Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve below them. Go to the left and up for Bishop Warburton and Thomas Taylor, and left and down for Carolus Linnaeus and his critic Michel Adanson. Left middle for Swedenborg and Vico, and still farther to the left for Pico and Bacon. For Part Four, you have a simpler task, as this section is completely dominated by Wordsworth. But you will also want Rilke in the center, with Coleridge, Hugo, and Ernest Renan to the right. Again, reach back left to Ovid, and indeed Milton. Add in Shelley and Goethe, below left, and you’re done.

In sum, whenever you feel yourself getting lost in The Orphic Voice, stop and do a cluster diagram. Not on lined paper, however— and never, never on (Cartesian!) grid paper. You want an open page for the imagination; lines that loop are likewise encouraged.

But now, if you really want to challenge your mind, place your three cluster diagrams in a pile so that you have, in effect, a three-layered map. Then imagine that pile blown up into a three-dimensional space. This is the mental space of The Orphic Voice, and on any given page, Sewell is likely to jump to any given point within that space. This would be one definition of a maddening— and transformative—text.

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If, to close these reflections, we ask who is doing Orphic work today, I would answer that one of the most promising places to look is to the biologists—more specifically to those developing the discipline of biosemiotics. I think especially of the work of Jesper Hoffmeyer and Kalevi Kull, both of whom build on the Thomas Sebeok’s reading of Charles S. Peirce. This progression would have pleased Sewell greatly in one way and deeply distressed her in another. That semiotics and the investigation of language should become central for biology would have made total sense to her. That nature was itself language, and human language fully nature and biological, also would have made total sense to her. But that biology had gone to philosophy rather than to poetry for guidance—this she would have found distressing, in a curiously partisan fashion, almost as if she had found her friends cheering for the wrong soccer team. For in the quarrel between the poets and the philosophers she was, despite her love for Polanyi, always reflexively and passionately on the side of the poets.

Also deserving mention here is that cluster of disciplines investigating the Anthropocene, geographers and geologists in particular (geosemiotics). Which is especially interesting given that Orpheus returns to the elements at the last. And of course Ovid begins the Metamorphoses with the world emerging from the elements—a mythic symmetry here, as we will, by the end of The Orphic Voice, expect.

Before land was and sea—before air and sky Arched over all, all Nature was all Chaos, The rounded body of all things in one,

The living elements at war with lifelessness; But then:

As God unlocked all elemental things,

Fire climbed celestial vaults, air followed it

To float in heavens below; and earth which carried All heavier things with it dropped under air;

Water fell farthest, embracing shores and islands.

—Ovid, The Metamorphoses, Book 1, translated by Horace Gregory

Orpheus is alive and stirring among the sciences; very well. But what about poetry? Where are the poets continuing the Orphic line of research in the twentieth century? We have D. H. Lawrence and H. D. quite literally captured by the Orpheus and Eurydice portion of the myth—and to a much more bitter end Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath as well. But it is hard to see a poet who has taken up after Rilke left off. In America, we have A. R. Ammons soaked in science, drawing imagery and frameworks from biology. We have our nature poets W. S. Merwin, Mary Oliver, and Wendell Berry; and we have a new wave associated with ecopoetics who are explicitly addressing the Anthropocene, Evelyn Reilly, Ed Roberson, Forrest Gander, Juliana Spahr, and Jorie Graham among them. But do we have any truly Orphic poets, in Sewell’s sense? I suggest this as an inquiry for the reader to take up after completing The Orphic Voice. For my part, I would say the answer to that question is “Not yet.”

If myth is in some sense, or any sense, shaping the development of our minds, then, it can be argued, as Sewell does, that it has a prophetic dimension—an anticipatory component. The Orphic poet is reading and rewriting or extending a pattern that is already there.

Let us take this up as an invitation, then, and ask what prophecy can be read in the next phase of Orphic unfoldment, if we follow Sewell and take Rilke as the last major Orphic voice, and look at the century that has passed since his final songs. Might we want to say that the Anthropocene is included in the prophetic dimension of the Orphic myth? Or maybe be more precise and note that “metamorphosis” might be a more fruitful mythic frame to approach this enormous shift in the geological record and viability of the biosphere than the term “Anthropocene.” For the inner structure of the Anthropocene is finally that of a myth of the fall. Not hard to imagine, really, that we would be better served by a myth of transformation, of metamorphosis.

Take the Orphic severed head as marking a crisis for our species, maybe even our endgame, but—according to the myth—not the end of Orpheus. How can we imagine such a metamorphosis? No Orphic poet has gone that far—or maybe, more chillingly, they have, and the music is so inhuman (and inhumane) as to be as yet unheard.

Maybe the next Orphic poet is the river itself. Or the wind. The clear truth, I would propose, is that Nature has always been the composer and Orpheus the musician. How does the song go on after the singer returns to the elements? Not hard to grasp, if Orpheus was simply their instrument from the beginning, elements singing through the human. And so the transformation— the emptying out—of Orpheus into the elements, and the return of the song to sky and cave, is actually the restoration of song to its origin point. Song, on loan to Orpheus, now back into the Cosmos: music of the spheres.

And if this is so, the trajectory of our inquiry must shift. We go from “How did human intellect arise from natural history?” to “How does nature use human intellect to express herself?” And perhaps the end of the myth means that nature will find new ways to express herself, once the human singer is gone. Which is surely true. Humanity is not the capstone song but one set of singers along the way. One way station in a series of Ovidian metamorphoses.

All the world—every bit and parcel, every planet and galaxy, every crustacean and ameba, every lichen and fungus—is open to, and communicating with, all that constitutes its umwelt. This communicating is the voicing of the universe that Orpheus taps into and manifests. This is why the trees and animals listen. Yet this much new and concentrated power is a dangerous thing— there is no more constant theme in all mythology than this. Has the sparagmós portion of the Orphic myth not as yet been fully addressed because it prefigured the unimaginable—prefigured the Anthropocene? Metamorphoses brought humans and Orpheus into being. And, as result of metamorphosis, nature will phase us out.

This is a deeper truth of the myth that Sewell’s poets, for the most part, did not move into, as she says, but of which biology and geology are making us most aware. There are clues to this in the apocalyptic mind of Milton. And in Rilke, and definitely Mallarmé. But perhaps Lawrence (an Orphic voice much of his life, I would argue) captures the truths of radical metamorphosis better than anyone else in the Orphic line in this totally amazing passage at the end of Women in Love:

Whatever the mystery which has brought forth man and the universe, it is a non-human mystery, it has its own great ends, man is not the criterion

. . .

The fountain-head was incorruptible and unsearchable. It had no limits. It could bring forth miracles, create utter new races and new species, in its own hour, new forms of consciousness, new forms of body, new units of being. To be man was as nothing compared to the possibilities of the creative mystery. To have one’s pulse beating direct from the mystery, this was perfection, unutterable satisfaction.

Huge events we are witnessing: the recognition of Gaia and the Anthropocene, the acknowledgment of the biosphere and the climate emergency. One way to speak of them is to say that they mark the discovery that it is nature that is signing/singing, not Orpheus. And now we wait for next major Orphic poet to come forward, the one who will see/foresee the next metamorphosis! This would be the poet the Anthropocene calls for. The poet who grasps that song is now on the verge of being dispersed into the elements—to the air, water, earth, and fire—Orpheus’s breath going out of him, his head into the river, his limbs scattered across the earth, his lyre rising to join the fiery stars. Perhaps that poet is out there. Perhaps The Orphic Voice can encourage her to come forward.

Sewell closes The Orphic Voice with a set of working poems. In turn, I take the liberty of closing this introduction by offering the reader my figured image of this Orphic poet to hold on to while making your way into this maddening, intimidating, nourishing, enlivening book:

Set Again to the Wheel

Do you read time both ways, old woman,

Eyes fixed on the eternal round?

Show the single imaging power,

Memory and prophecy as one.

Raise before us the wall of fire.

—David Schenck

Buy the book: NYRB Books