Wonder Wednesday

What do we mean by "wonder"?

Hello, dear friends.

There’s been a very welcome influx of new readers to Poetry Today, so I thought I’d use this post to revisit some of the things I touched on in the first installments of Wonder Wednesday.

In fact, as wonder becomes an increasingly discussed topic (much to my delight!) it makes sense to reassert my own research approach, and my own understanding of wonder.

For centuries, the subject of wonder has earned the attention of phenomenologists and the occasional historian or scientist with an interest in its role in driving scientific inquiry. Wonder’s relationship to the literary arts and literary craft has, historically, earned considerably less attention.

So, my PhD focused on understanding how poems succeed in capturing “that strange combination of delight and disturbance”[1] that defines wonder, and how wonder is translated into language. That means I had the chance to reflect on the wide variety of poetic approaches to enacting the sensation through the vehicle of the page over time.

Wonder is no straightforward feeling, as its etymology suggests: from the Old English wundor, thought to be a cognate with the German wunde or wound. The noun form means a surpassing, opening, or blow, a breach of the mind’s faculties, while the verb form means to demonstrate a state of admiration or astonishment, or to search for knowledge, understanding, or meaning.[2] “The verb wonder,” writes Daniel Fusch, “indicates an emotional response to a marvelous incident; the noun wonder indicates both the name for that response and the marvelous incident that provoked it…That is, at the sight of a wonder, we wonder; such are the beautiful complications of the English language.”[3]

From this “beautiful complication” arises wonder’s generative challenge for writers: to capture both the wonder-inducing event and the act of wondering itself without foregoing the feelings of admiration and confusion, that sensation of being “breached,” that wonder invites.

Part of the tricky thing in researching wonder is distinguishing it from the states with which it shares common psychic ground. For example, any exploration of wonder must acknowledge the term’s resonances with the sublime, whose own Latin origins (sub for up to and limen for threshold: the experience or feeling of being led to a threshold) suggest a contest to the mind similar to the one that wonder presents. There’s also awe, surprise, astonishment, and marvel—all of these terms share qualities in common with the wondrous.

But wonder is unique in that it does not expressly wrestle with conflicting states of beauty and terror, though the sublime and the wondrous are alike in this respect: when faced with an object or experience that induces feelings of sublimity or wonder, language falters as a result of a heightened emotional state. Wonder has been noticeably less aestheticized throughout the ages; there is no landscape style that evokes its particular affinities (one thinks of the sublime’s visual stylization in paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, J.W. Turner, or Eugène Delacroix, great tenebrous landscapes in which man, awe-struck, faces a vast expanse), and there is less written that attempts to parse its manifestations in artistic expression, no doubt as a result of its less immediately recognizable visual cues.

I began my research by reading a lot of phenomenology in order to articulate the distinctions between how philosophers talk about wonder and how a literary critic or poet might approach the same questions. There are overlaps, of course, and there are differences. Here’s my brief take on a few of them.

“Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing,” wrote Lucille Clifton. As readers and writers of poems know, poetry’s origins are intrinsically wondrous. Philosophy links poetic wonder to knowledge acquisition (its uses as a teaching tool that stimulates further inquiry have been discussed throughout the ages). As Dennis Quinn summarizes: “Aristotle shows in that branch of logic which is called poetic that the poet fashions his story for the purpose of exciting wonder, and that the further effect of wonder is to excite inquiry.”[1] He continues by stating that most poets have been wonderers, and wonder is a chief effect of poetry.

But while philosophy’s approach to wonder aims to categorize and evaluate its examples, poetry’s power lies in its ability to provoke the sensation in the reader, inviting a foreign mind to experience the feeling in unexpected ways. How a poem accomplishes this feat depends on the particularities of its execution, a question that is entirely separate from philosophy’s efforts to catalogue wonder’s conditions (and the relative merits of their warranting) and distinguish it from its cousin states (marvel, astonishment, surprise). While these distinctions are fascinating in their own right, I have always been interested in evaluating poems for their capacity to capture and induce wonder, as well as in celebrating the luminous ingenuities poets devise in attempting to articulate what lies just beyond articulation.

The 16th century English philosopher Francis Bacon aptly called wonder a form of admiration (the Latin for wonder is admiratio), echoing his classical predecessors by arguing that “after wondering, men began to philosophize; when wonder ceases knowledge begins.”[2] Wonder, Bacon concluded, was merely “broken knowledge,” suggesting that anyone who had gone behind the curtain to glimpse how puppets work could no longer be enchanted by the effect.[3]

Poets, on the other hand, recognize that it is the quality and scope of the looking that informs a poem’s capacity for wonder: there is no “broken knowledge.” In his essay on the phenomenology of wonder, R.H. Hepburn debunks Bacon’s position, positing that our sensory responses to nature—a vividly blue ocean or a dazzling sheet of mountain ice—are undeterred by causal explicability. “It is not the genesis of the phenomenon that elicits the wonder, but the wonder itself,” he states, “color, sound, or combinations of impressions. There is no ‘going behind it.’”[4]

I hope this was a helpful reminder on what I mean by “wonder.” I occasionally use that term loosely for “Wonder Wednesday,” sometimes sharing aspects of my research, and at other times, reflecting on poets and various “wonderful” idiosyncrasies.

I’m so happy you’re here!

xM