Twentieth-century Sages

George P. Landow

Although twentieth-century sages tend not to employ the full prophetic structure that marks Victorian works in this form, they employ all the other devices of the sage. These include (1) a characteristic alternation of satire and positive, even visionary statement, that is frequently accompanied by (2) a parallel alternation of attacks upon the audience and attempts to reassure or inspire it; (3) a frequent concentration upon apparently trivial phenomena as the subject of interpretation; (4) an episodic or discontinuous literary structure that depends upon analogical relations for unity and coherence; (5) a reliance upon grotesque contemporary phenomena, such as the murder of children, or grotesque metaphor, parable, and analogy; (6) satiric and idiosyncratic definitions of key terms; (7) and an essential reliance upon ethos, or the appeal to credibility. The first five of these techniques obviously derive from the prophetic pattern, and the last two function to accommodate it to the situation in which the Victorian sage finds himself -- to the situation, that is, in which he no longer speaks literally as the prophet of God.

Since Milton, Blake, and Wordsworth all draw upon the traditions of Old Testament prophecy and even occasionally present themselves as prophets, why do they not have a place in this study of the sage? Or, to point this question differently, why do I believe they do not write as sages in the sense that I define the term? The answer has little to do with the fact that they write in verse while those I consider sages write in prose. The answer lies instead in these poets' relations to their audiences, for although, as James H. Coombs has shown, Milton and Wordsworth shared many assumptions about themselves as poet-prophets, neither wrote with that particularly contentious, eccentric, opposing vantage point of both the Old Testament prophet and the Victorian sage. Milton, of course, describes himself in Paradise Lost and elsewhere as an isolated prophet courageously presenting unwelcome truths, but in practice the practice of justifying the ways of God to man -- he writes as an epic poet and from the self-assured position of the epic poet. However much he dramatizes himself as a beleaguered prophet, Milton (like Wordsworth) writes as if his message is a central, rather than an eccentric, one, and he therefore does not employ the kind of rhetorical devices adopted by the sage. The case is similar with Blake, but other factors also distinguish his writings from those of the sage. In the first place, his manner of publication, which greatly restricted the size of his audience, prevented him from having the kind of public encounter with an audience that characterizes the earlier sages. Second, there is the matter of his poetic obscurity, which also both restricts the size of his audience and prevents his producing the abrasive effect of the sage.

Last modified 2000