Esotericism, symbolism and romanticism in Christopher Brennan's Poems

Abstract

Drawing on evidence from three important areas of Brennan's interest, esotericism, Symbolism and Romanticism (especially early German Romanticism), this thesis argues that Brennan's Poems (1914), regarded as a livre compose, focuses on the notion of an inner, higher or transcendent self, constituted by the imaginative union of the human mind and nature. In the introduction, this point of view is contrasted with the common perception that the single theme of Poems is the quest for Eden. The first chapter examines poems which deal directly with the notion of the higher self, considering them in the context of the conflict between scepticism and the desire for faith in the long nineteenth century (roughly from the 1770s to the early 1900s), and the emergence of various concepts of a higher self during this period. The second and third chapters show that the sequence is central to Brennan's exploration of the relationship of the mind and nature as constitutive of the higher self. Lilith symbolises nature itself, ambiguous in its ability either to trap the human mind in the merely material, or to raise it to a higher level if it can imaginatively unite itself with nature, or find [Lilith] fair. The fourth chapter explores Brennan's concept of moods, a theoretical notion of the union of mind and nature which he derives from German Romantic concepts of Stimrnung (the mood of harmony between mind and nature) and Gemuth (in a specialised sense, employed in esoteric and mystical thought as well as Romantic psychology, the inner imaginative faculty within which the higher self can be brought into being); from early writings of Yeats; from his study of Les Dieux antiques, Stephane Mallarme's work on mythology; and from Walter Pater. The last three chapters show that the notion of moods underpins the structure of Poems. Instances of equations between human experience and the events of the natural cycles of day and year, which Brennan interprets in terms of the esoteric notion of correspondences, are examined in his elegy to Mallarme, in the three poems (two called preludes and one called a Liminary) which survey the entire seasonal cycle, and in the patterning of individual pieces linking certain times of day and year to particular human emotions or experiences. The union of human mind and nature is effected within the poetry itself, art being the only means (as poems such as the Liminary show) by which the higher or transcendent self may actually be grasped.