The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History

by Elizabeth Sewell

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Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Literary Criticism, Criticism, British Literature, History

Paperback

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

Elizabeth Sewell (March 9, 1919 – January 12, 2001) was a British-American critic, poet, novelist, and professor who often wrote about the connections between science and literature. Among her published works were five books of criticism, four novels, three books of poetry, and many short stories, essays, and other work in periodicals in North America and Europe. Of her books, the most widely held by libraries is The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History.

Sewell completed the requirements for a Bachelor of Arts from Cambridge University in 1942. From then to the end of World War II, she worked for the Ministry of Education in London before returning to Cambridge for a Master of Arts (1945) and a Ph.D. (1949) in modern languages. She first visited the United States in 1949 and became a U.S. citizen in 1973. She taught at Vassar College, the University of Notre Dame, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Fordham University, Tougaloo College, and Hunter College, and she was a visiting professor or writer at other universities.

She held a Simon Fellowship at Manchester University (1955−57), a Howard Research Fellowship at Ohio State University (1949−50), an Ashley Fellowship at Trent University (1979), and a Presidential Scholarship at Mercer University (1982). In 1981, she won poetry, fiction, and nonfiction awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Sewell married Anthony C. Sirignano, a university lecturer in classics, in 1971. She died in 2001 in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Reviews

[Martha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sewell claims the myth of Orpheus prefigures what happened to poetry in the last 500 years or so. Using poets from Shakespeare to Goethe to Rilke, Sewell finds an Orphic tradition which she uses to define myth, myth-thinking and imagination as powers of mind available to everyone but often overlooked in the quest for what has become the dominant mode of analysis today - taking apart rather than connecting, science displacing art, the supposed split between imagination and science. Sewell says these categories "are tidy and they are mistaken." There is documentation throughout, and liberal use of provocative quotations in the best sense. Example, "Why has though dragged Diana from her car," Poe asks of Science. There is power in this writing and validation for all who believe in the power of imagination.

[Lewis Carnelian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sewell’s writing is not easy, it demands a certain faith, although she frequently reiterates her themes, so, barreling on, if one misses the idea at first, it will be reinforced later. That said, her work is a classic example of criticism that is creating something out of the threads of others, a stitching together of themes and crumbs to pave a very specific path, and that’s what I mean by faith, one must believe in the validity of the journey if you want to walk this path. If you’re looking for a cold, logical process, well, such even a method is antithetical to Sewell’s whole ethos. And so, many people might find this labyrinth overgrown, or at least the vine work asphyxiating (perhaps especially in the sections on Bacon). But it is thrilling, ambitious criticism, criticism that effectively *is* Orphic, and the stakes are high. What Sewell manages to do is reconstitute epic poetry (and by epic, I mean of course Sewell’s definition) into a metaphysical desire to union the stars with mind, to calibrate being as poetry to nature. She understands she’s just skimming the surface; hopefully humanity lasts longer to step further into the pool.

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Poetry is a form of power. It fell to early thought to make the power visible and human, and the story of Orpheus is that vision and that mortality.” That’s how The Orphic Voice by Elizabeth Sewell begins. I tried to follow, but I’m not that smart. #FridayReads

[Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quickie review:

I didn’t love all of this, but the parts I loved I really loved. Eccentric scholarship at its absolute best.

[Kaj Efrayim · Rating 2 out of 5]

To be honest, I tried. I really tried. Several attempts, but alas I gave up. The author writes in circles and contradictions, saying “… No opinion excludes or invalidates others in these speculative fields.” Which I assume poetic analysis/criticism falls under. She then goes on to deconstruct Swedenborg and say “What happens in Swedenborg is not that he misdirects himself into theology, but that he misunderstands the Word, in the full Christian sense, and hence of the language he is to work with. So he fuses the language of the Bible in rigid and congealed hypostasis, and then mistakes the role of the interpreter, opting not for hieroglyphic but cipher.”
What? Maybe the author should build a time machine and help Swedenborg to not be “mistaken”. Then we can go and live in a world without Blake.

She leads the reader from nowhere into nowhere.
Perhaps she felt compelled to prove herself as a female scholar writing to male intelligentsia in the mid twentieth century.

Better off reading Simone Weil, Giambattista Vico or Max Picard when it comes to artistic analysis; particularly Vico and Picard in regard to poetry.

[Meic Alger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recently republished masterpiece. Not an easy read, but worth studying. Sewell is revolutionary in her thought!