Thinking in verse The “Pish!” uttered by “Byron” is attractive A good deal of the best recent commentary on Romantic poetry might almost have taken its cue from it Yet the skin and bones of any reader’s experience of verse are made up largely of the kind of consideration addressed here by “Shelley.” “Byron” cuts into those speculations with a sharp opposition between art and craft Under this regime, sounds and syllables are “mechanical contrivances.” To this machinery is then joined an opposition between the generous and the venal Syllable-catchers are also penny-pinchers The response of “Shelley” to this is remarkable The first move is obvious enough: the poet need not any of this consciously The second is much more surprising: “I say that they all depend upon reason, in which they live and move, and have their being; and that he who brings them out into the light of distinct consciousness, beside satisfying an instinctive desire of his own nature, will be more secure and more commanding.” This claim decisively rejects the assignation of prosody to the sub-field of craft Instead it develops a difference between “reason” and “distinct consciousness.” The latter is to be understood in the tradition of the philosophical opposition between “clear and distinct” ideas and “obscure and vague” ones “Distinct consciousness” does not merely refer to sentience as such, but to reflective consciousness To bring these “operations” into “distinct consciousness” is to make them explicit Reason, conversely, is understood as the very element or condition of possibility of these “symphonic” operations These symphonic operations, that is, live and move and have their being in reason, and yet they are not necessarily or ordinarily visible to distinct consciousness (The atheist poet, “Shelley,” alludes here to St Paul, who, on the Areopagus, offered to identify for the pagans the unknown god to whom their altar was inscribed Prosodic artifice may, Shelley implies, be thought of as that element in which our communication lives, whether we choose to thematize it or not.) They are, this is to say, a form of prereflective cognition Far from being essentially mechanical contrivances or calculations, these operations are forms of knowledge Moreover, an undecidability creeps in as to the status of these operations It would be common sense to think that they are mental operations Yet what is said is that the operations are in the line All this raises the possibility – a possibility more uncanny than any melodrama of emptiness – that the poem might know something we don’t; so that when “Shelley” reverts to his primary claim, “This line, therefore, is it not altogether a work of art?,” we can see how much more this means than it seemed to mean before The line is altogether a work of art, not only in the sense that it is a work of art when taken together, as a whole, but in the sense that it is a work of art to the very cartilage of its letters, words, and syllables, and not merely in the spirit of its thoughts, feelings, metaphors, etc Each line is a cognitive artifact 101 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008