In November 1907​ William James, professor of philosophy at Harvard, received an invitation from Oxford. It came from Manchester College – now Harris Manchester and a college of the university, but then an autonomous dissenting institution with a strong Unitarian character, recently relocated from London: its business was to cater to Nonconformist students who were still barred from Oxford. The college asked James for eight lectures that dealt with ‘the religious aspect of your Philosophy’; but, accepting the invitation a few days later, he offered as his title ‘The Present Situation in Philosophy’. When he delivered the lectures the following year they were a tremendous success: reportedly five hundred people came to the first one, so the later lectures had to be moved from Manchester library to a bigger venue, and the principal was pleased to report ‘an audience far larger, I believe, than any philosophical lectures ever given before in Oxford’. James sort of enjoyed himself, though almost no one seems to have talked to him about his lectures, and he found ‘the dinner & lunch parties with no real familiar talk … deadly tiresome’. The highlight seems to have been seeking out the reclusive philosophical eminence F.H. Bradley, who took time to show him around Merton College.

After his Oxford stay, William went to see his brother Henry in Rye, where he was very excited to learn that G.K. Chesterton was staying at the inn next door. Intensely curious to see what Chesterton looked like, and much to his fastidious brother’s acute dismay, William leaned a ladder against the garden wall up which he climbed in the hope of getting a sighting. He was unsuccessful, but they did meet subsequently during the visit, and even took tea, and although, as James reported, Chesterton merely ‘gurgled and giggled’, he apparently came across as ‘lovable’.

Getting a glimpse of Chesterton was irresistible partly, no doubt, because he was enormously, legendarily, fat. Rather more respectably, however, James had long admired him, he told Henry, as a ‘tremendously strong writer and true thinker, despite his mannerism of paradoxes’; he was especially taken by his book Heretics (1905). To like Chesterton despite his paradoxes is a little like liking Venice despite its canals, but you can certainly see what James would have warmed to in Chesterton’s exuberant, if somewhat remorseless, celebration of the ordinary world, a world unconstrained by what Chesterton called ‘modern intellectualism’. We must resist the corrosive influence of such intellectualism, Chesterton says, and accept ‘this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face … We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage.’ He commended to his followers ‘the fact that every instant of conscious life is an unimaginable prodigy’ – precisely the sort of instinctive apprehension that was lost on someone like George Bernard Shaw, who, equipped as he was with an all-encompassing theory of the world, ‘has all the time been silently comparing humanity with something that was not human’. Shaw was typical of the heresy of sterile intellectualism: ‘all aversions to ordinary humanity have this general character,’ Chesterton says. ‘They are not aversions to its feebleness (as is pretended), but to its energy.’ It is only ‘very great artists’, he claims, who ‘are able to be ordinary men – men like Shakespeare or Browning’.

No wonder James was slightly surprised that this buoyant life force of ‘the huge impossible universe’ should have merely ‘gurgled and giggled’ in person. James is never quite so exhausting, but the lectures he gave at Oxford were full of a vindication of ordinary worldly experience of which Chesterton would have thoroughly approved. ‘The whole process of life is due to life’s violation of our logical axioms,’ James told his Oxford audience. ‘Real life laughs at logic’s veto.’ Consequently, we should abandon the long tradition that emphasises ‘discursive thought generally as the sole avenue to truth’ and instead ‘fall back on raw unverbalised life’. ‘It is like the breath of the morning and the song of birds,’ he said, describing the sort of counter-philosophical position of which he approved. ‘It tells of reality itself, instead of merely reiterating what dusty-minded professors have written about what other previous professors have thought.’ Perhaps it is not so surprising that the dons were reluctant to have a chat about lectures in which dusty-minded professors were pronounced guilty of what, in robust Chestertonian spirit, James called ‘the vice of intellectualism’: they might reasonably have thought it not quite the right tone. But the bracing note of evangelism, a Chestertonian ‘strange courage’, is a vital part of the performance. James knew that he was saying the tactless thing, but there was much at stake: ‘the most practical and important thing about a man is … his view of the universe,’ as Chesterton had said, words James had quoted approvingly on the opening page of an earlier book, Pragmatism (1907). It is not about ontological rigour: it is about wellbeing. One of the highest terms of approval in James’s vocabulary was ‘healthy-mindedness’.

What was ‘The Present Situation in Philosophy’? Two things about it were striking: first, it had to change, and there were promising signs that it was starting to; and, second, everything that was wrong with it was down to Oxford – and, most especially, to the hospitable Bradley, who, given the vigour of James’s attack on him, comes out of the story rather well. The philosophy that James wished to see the back of was in origin Hegelian, ‘absolute idealism’, and therefore a version of ‘monism’. Monism, in James’s formulation, depicts what he calls a ‘co-implicated “through-and-through” world’, a world that is ‘one great all-inclusive fact outside of which is nothing – nothing is its only alternative.’ What feels like the diverse life of our experience is only an appearance beyond which we can just about intuit the unity that is really all that matters. And this is indeed very much the world of Bradley, whom James thought ‘the pattern champion of this philosophy in extremis’. Bradley is always saying things like: ‘the universe is one in this sense that its differences exist harmoniously within one whole, beyond which there is nothing.’

It is to this monistic view, the view that the world is not really real if it is not regarded in what James calls its ‘all-form’, that he opposes his own view, which he calls the ‘pluralistic’ view. If the monist, committed to allness, oneness and totality, conceives of the world as real only insofar as it realises its absolute unity, then the pluralist is ‘willing to believe that there may ultimately never be an all-form at all, that the substance of reality may never get totally collected’. In short, in the pluralist’s view of things, all you ever have, or could want to have, is what James calls ‘the each-form’, and not the ‘all-form’, ‘which is our human way of experiencing the world’. ‘“Can a plurality of reals be possible?” Mr Bradley asks, and answers, “No, impossible.”’ ‘He shows an intolerance to pluralism so extreme,’ James comments, ‘that I fancy few of his readers have been able fully to share it.’ James published his lectures under the title A Pluralistic Universe. He is, of course, quite conscious that calling such an explicitly multifarious place a ‘universe’, with the implication of something unitary to it, is something of a paradox: he is happy, in fact, to call it a ‘multiverse’ instead, but he still thinks its multiplicity possesses a kind of rough-and-ready cohesive life, so that, as he puts it, ‘each part hangs together with its very next neighbours in inextricable interfusion’ in what he calls a ‘strung-along type’ of connection. (He would have agreed with Henry that ‘really, universally, relations stop nowhere.’) Such a ‘strung-along’ universe would certainly not have satisfied Mr Bradley of Merton. James’s is, William E. Connolly says, ‘the philosophy of a messy universe’.

His critics have often thought of James as more of a literary than a philosophical figure, which is not a distinction that would have greatly troubled him. One of his biographers duly remarks that ‘his feeling for and intuition about the infinite variety of the world’ showed ‘the sensibility of a poet’; but it is more useful to say that it is a particular sort of sensibility that is at stake. The sensibility in question is the literary companion of the immense 19th-century transformation in attitudes that Isaiah Berlin spent so much of his genius explicating and, on the whole, celebrating: the modern movement in Western thought that he characterised as Romanticism. Put simply: the Romantics turned upside down the centuries-old belief that ‘One is good, Many – diversity – is bad.’ Diversity, the plurality of things, is the new good.

It is, in these terms, a Romantic sensibility that Chesterton revered in Browning, that great poet who also managed to be an ordinary man. Browning was full, the paradoxical Chesterton said, of ‘the glory of the obvious’. ‘He becomes eccentric through his advocacy of the ordinary,’ an advocacy that expresses itself in his ‘singular vitality, curiosity and interest in details’. If, Chesterton speculated, you had asked Browning ‘Is life worth living?’ and asked him to give ‘the real, vital answer that awaited it in his own soul’, then Browning would have said, ‘as likely as not: “Crimson toadstools in Hampshire”’. Chesterton sounds quite mad, but he is thinking of some lines from Browning’s ‘By the Fire-Side’:

By the rose-flesh mushrooms, undivulged
Last evening – nay, in to-day’s first dew
Yon sudden coral nipple bulged,
Where a freaked fawn-coloured flaky crew
Of toadstools peep indulged.

That would seem a very good instance of what James called an ‘each-form’. Browning doesn’t think the toadstools stand for or symbolise anything, let alone the totality of the one: what matters is merely that they are one of what Chesterton calls ‘the great concrete experiences’.

What is so good about Browning’s toadstools is how excessive they seem to requirements: they appear to acquire a sudden life of their own within their poem; and this quality of unruliness is something that, in his own terms, James cherishes too. ‘Sensible reality is too concrete to be entirely manageable,’ he says at one point. One of the most deft moves in A Pluralistic Universe is the observation that the Oxford idealists often surprised within themselves a diversity which they had not expected and for which they could not, except in the most abstract and formal way, find any sort of home: ‘something like a pluralism breaks out,’ as James puts it. ‘It is as if,’ he says in one of his happiest analogies, ‘the characters in a novel were to get up from the pages, and walk away and transact business of their own outside of the author’s story.’ You might think there is no higher praise than to say that a novelist has created characters with ‘a life of their own’; but crediting things with ‘a life of their own’ was precisely what, in James’s reading, the Oxford philosophers were disinclined to do.

Still, as he ventured to hope, times were changing, and we might see his hopeful trend exemplified, a few years later, in the young Louis MacNeice. MacNeice studied philosophy under a pupil of Bradley’s, and spent part of one summer holiday ploughing through the required reading while staying in the South of France:

I was very fond of Bradley’s dictum that every judgment … is a judgment about the universe. It was exciting, when I said I liked aubergines, to be saying something true about the universe – and moreover to be adding something to it; still, it did not help me to understand the Provençal woman who had cooked the aubergine and who after all was in the universe too.

MacNeice remembered his tutors telling him that the man in the street, a naive realist, ‘never/Can see the wood for the trees’. ‘I never thought,’ MacNeice reflected, ‘that I should/Be telling them vice-versa/ That they can’t see the trees for the wood.’ MacNeice, who spoke so witheringly of what he called ‘theory-vendors’, would naturally have found much to like in James’s account of a world which exceeds any general account we can offer of it. ‘Something always escapes,’ James says. In MacNeice’s poem ‘Snow’:

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

James says that philosophy, as generally understood, begins with the urge ‘to correct that aboriginal appearance of things by which savages are not troubled’; MacNeice is happy for things to remain uncorrected, incorrigible. As much as the tangerine and its pips, the Provençal woman, and indeed her aubergine, wonderfully exemplify what W.H. Auden would much later call ‘the happy eachness of all things’, such as crimson toadstools in Hampshire. It applies to us too: ‘we are/Each a unique particular,’ he writes in New Year Letter, where he also envisages, in a Jamesian spirit, life as a place of ‘pluralistic interstices’.

‘Much good may your One-and-Only do you,’ the undergraduate MacNeice wrote obstreperously in a student magazine, ‘but we shall play with our coloured bricks for ever.’ Of course, discovering a tenacious sort of pluralism where you had looked to find oneness can be a less simply celebratory business than MacNeice found it. I don’t want to claim that everyone took enthusiastically to the new Jamesian multiverse. The young T.S. Eliot, another disciple of Bradley, was dismayed to find, rather as James had observed, that Bradley’s final achievement was, paradoxically, to advertise the pluralism of the world which he had sought monistically to correct: the world had proved incorrigibly plural. ‘Upon inspection,’ Eliot says of Bradley’s universe, writing in a journal called the Monist, ‘it falls away into the isolated finite experiences out of which it is put together.’ The Bradleian absolute, ‘pretending to be something which makes finite centres cohere … turns out to be merely the assertion that they do’. The subject matter of such utterances is some way from what normally gets into poems, but I do not think critics such as Hugh Kenner are misguided in making connections, or drawing analogies, between Bradleian wholes falling into their isolated components and the striking experiments with poetic form that Eliot would go on to conduct in The Waste Land.

The Waste Land is not a poem about absolute idealism; still, the curious sense of metaphysical nostalgia that haunts its broken forms must have some relation to ‘the melancholy grace, the languid mastery’ that Eliot found in Bradley. The poem feels like it inhabits, and depicts, a world that lacks the saving authority of a justification, of a something that underwrites it; and this, in a very approximate way, is rather like the yearning for a solving unity that shapes the needy monist. This unhappily pluralist feeling gets into the poem in all sorts of ways:

When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smooths her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.

The brilliant, poignant disjunction of these lines comes from their not managing to be some other lines which they might have been in a different world, lines to which Eliot draws our attention in a note: ‘V. Goldsmith, the song in The Vicar of Wakefield’. The song appears, appropriately enough, in a chapter entitled ‘Fresh Calamities’:

When lovely woman stoops to folly,
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can sooth her melancholy,
What art can wash her guilt away?

As often with the allusions in the poem, this is a dramatised act of misremembering; and here, as elsewhere, it works to suggest that something is fundamentally wrong: this culture can no longer hear itself properly, a failure of connection which has something to do with the sad automatism of the woman and the gimcrack machinery of the record player. Christopher Ricks describes the technique as conveying ‘by sabotage that there was a war on’, and he takes this passage as a prime example: Eliot, he says, is to be seen ‘adopting Oliver Goldsmith’s line … and then undoing it by adding the innocuous little word “and”’. The little word undoes the old rhythm of the original and scuppers the rhyme scheme too: more, it leaves the little word isolated, as though in sympathy with the solitary woman, at the end of the line, where it has no business to be, and thereby placing on it an unexpected emphasis.

‘And’ is a conjunction, so one might think there is some purpose in placing it in so awkward a position in lines that are, after all, about discovering a sad disjunction between people. The Friar inquires at the aborted wedding service in Much Ado about Nothing if there is ‘any inward impediment why you should not be conjoined’; The Waste Land is all about inward impediments to conjoining of one kind or another. Well, okay; but I nurse another thought, which, I admit, is the reason I chose that passage. For the word ‘and’ is a hallmark pluralist word: a thought that is not my own fancy, but what James tells us in the closing lecture of A Pluralistic Universe – ‘The word “and” trails along after every sentence.’ And, he might have added, every sentence effectively begins with an ‘and’ as well. Remember the wonderful opening lines of Pound’s Cantos: ‘And then went down to the ship …’ Every sentence in the pluralistic universe enters in on some previous, unfinished business.

In ‘And’, an essay collected in Habitations of the Word (1984), William H. Gass writes: ‘If we were suddenly to speak of the “andness” of things, we would be rather readily understood to refer to that aspect of life which consists of just one damned thing “and” after another.’ The opening of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ has something of this effect:

Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

That is what John Masefield called ODTAA, an acronym for ‘one damn thing after another’, and the title of his 1926 novel, which really does what it says on the tin. It’s a long tale of futile adventures in the jungle, ‘event after event’, as Masefield says, which end up achieving precisely nothing. Something of that feeling is to be found in Eliot’s lines too. Arnold’s word for the plurality that troubled him was ‘anarchy’; Eliot’s was ‘chaos’ – but they have many points of resemblance.

However, as Gass says, the general form of the word ‘and’ is ‘a simple “next!”’ For Eliot’s sad typist in The Waste Land, it’s an ominous and defeated ‘what next?’, as in Dorothy Parker’s ‘what fresh hell can this be?’ But, of course, James’s ever present ‘and’ can be jubilant as well, a marker of the inexhaustibility of the world, which is what James conveys himself. As you might expect, Browning loves ‘and’. Here he is writing to Elizabeth Barrett about the splendours of the Dulwich Picture Gallery: ‘those two Guidos, the wonderful Rembrandt of Jacob’s vision, such a Watteau, the triumphant three Murillo pictures, a Giorgione music-lesson group, all the Poussins with the “Armida” and “Jupiter’s nursing” – and – no end to “ands” –’. (‘Everything only connected by “and” and “and”’, as Elizabeth Bishop put it.) And here is the voice of Aprile, a poet figure from his early drama Paracelsus, who is detailing his hectically creative plans:

So, I create a world for these my shapes
Fit to sustain their beauty and their strength!
And, at the word, I would contrive and paint
Woods, valleys, rocks and plains, dells, sands and wastes,
Lakes which, when morn breaks on their quivering bed,
Blaze like a wyvern flying round the sun,
And ocean isles so small, the dog-fish tracking
A dead whale, who should find them, would swim thrice
Around them, and fare onward – all to hold
The offspring of my brain. Nor these alone:
Bronze labyrinth, palace, pyramid and crypt,
Baths, galleries, courts, temples and terraces,
Marts, theatres, and wharfs – all filled with men,
Men everywhere! And this performed in turn,
When those who looked on, pined to hear the hopes
And fears and hates and loves which moved the crowd,
I would throw down the pencil as the chisel,
And I would speak …

And he would too.

As one might also expect, MacNeice, the laureate of incorrigible plurality, was a master of ‘and’. Here is a passage from Autumn Journal, his long poem about living through the late 1930s:

Macrocarpa and cypress
And roses on a rustic trellis and mulberry trees
And bacon and eggs in a silver dish for breakfast
And all the inherited assets of bodily ease
And all the inherited worries, rheumatism and taxes,
And whether Stella will marry and what to do with Dick
And the branch of the family that lost their money in Hatry
And the passing of the Morning Post and of life’s climacteric
And the growth of vulgarity, cars that pass the gate-lodge
And crowds undressing on the beach
And the hiking cockney lovers with thoughts directed
Neither to God nor Nation but each to each.

Something of the same quality of sheer plenitude gets into Thom Gunn’s great portrait (a monologue) of his dog, running around excitedly on the beach:

Joy, joy,
being outside with you, active, investigating it all,
with bowels emptied, feeling your approval
and then running on, the big fleet Yoko,
my body in its excellent black coat never lets me down,
returning to you (as I always will, you know that)
and now
filling myself out with myself, no longer confused …

Gunn was more than capable of beautifully devised bits of syntactical engineering, but these lines have no syntactical ambitions at all; and while ‘and’ makes only two appearances here, it seems to me the keyword for the sequential but inconsequential representation of disorganised animal experience that Gunn captures so wonderfully, something with a life of its own, in James’s phrase ‘raw unverbalised life’. ‘“And” is one of the most poetic words in any language,’ Michael Longley writes in one of his essays. ‘It dominates and it insinuates, separates and joins.’

This poetry of pluralism has many virtues, but I am not sure that structure or organisation are among them. Virginia Woolf wondered at the absence of well-managed transitions in Autumn Journal and put it down to MacNeice watching too many films. Eliot’s uneasiness about pluralism is, like Arnold’s, an uneasiness about order; and he associated its modern form with a kind of politics of which he did not approve – namely, ‘the chaos of liberal democracy’. James made a connection between pluralism and political systems too, as Eliot must have known. ‘The pluralistic world is,’ James says, ‘more like a federal republic than like an empire or kingdom.’ It is the philosophy of a new world. An old-style empire or a kingdom has, I suppose, a centralised structure of power within which its subjects live; in a federal republic, by contrast, power is distributed, and its people, while citizens of a single nation, are also inhabitants of a multiplicity of separate states, each with lives of their own.

Order is traditionally a poetic virtue. (‘The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,’ as Wallace Stevens wrote.) But a poetry that emulated pluralistic federal-republican values, whatever other benefits it might gain, could not feel that it has order on its side, exactly. ‘A poem which was really like a political democracy – examples, unfortunately, exist – would be formless, windy, banal and utterly boring,’ Auden wrote. It was naughty of him to say that examples exist and not say what they were. My hunch is that he meant Whitman’s Leaves of Grass – a poem written in a roaming, expansive, potentially unending free verse rather than a more orderly or constrained form. James would not have demurred from Auden on the general principle: he didn’t think his universe amounted to much aesthetically speaking. ‘The pluralistic empiricism which I profess offers but a sorry appearance,’ he gamely admitted to his audience in Oxford. ‘It is a turbid, muddled, gothic sort of an affair, without a sweeping outline and with little pictorial nobility.’ But then, conversely, Auden said:

A society which was really like a good poem, embodying the aesthetic virtues of beauty, order, economy and subordination of detail to the whole, would be a nightmare of horror for, given the historical reality of actual men, such a society could only come into being through selective breeding, extermination of the physically and mentally unfit, absolute obedience to its Director, and a large slave class kept out of sight in cellars.

So it seems we have arrived at an either/or: good poems or pluralism.

Do poets​ really have to leave their pluralism in the locker when they sit down to write their verses? I think there might be a more interesting account of the relationship that can exist between poetry and pluralism than Auden’s rather tendentious antithesis of rival virtues. This brings me back to Isaiah Berlin and that second consequence of his pluralist thinking. Berlin accepted the reality of the diverse, phenomenal world: I don’t think the idea of not doing so ever crossed his mind. His appeal was always to ‘the ordinary resources of empirical observation and ordinary human knowledge’; but his interest in that spectacle lay somewhere other than in the sheer Jamesian fact of things being plural. His interest was, rather, in the plurality of ‘morals’, or, better, ‘values’, for a value can be non-moral – in the fact that ‘we are faced with choices between ends equally ultimate, and claims equally absolute, the realisation of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others.’ This is to experience the innate multifariousness of things all right, but now within the life of the mind: what we discover there is that diverse values, each admirable, often contradict one another. Doing what the call of liberty would require might not be to do what the call of equality would prefer. Those things are certainly ‘incorrigibly plural’, and some philosophers think that is somehow a good thing in itself: Berlin championed pluralism and considered its opposite, monism, not only untrue but, if unchecked, the path to despotism and tyranny. But such plurality is not obviously something simply to celebrate: ‘the necessity of choosing between absolute claims is … an inescapable characteristic of the human condition,’ Berlin says. Therefore, ‘the possibility of conflict – and of tragedy – can never wholly be eliminated from human life.’ ‘We are faced with conflicting values,’ Berlin writes elsewhere: ‘the dogma that they must somehow, somewhere be reconcilable is a mere pious hope; experience shows that it is false.’

So faced with such a plurality of values, how do we choose? There is a vast literature which tries to answer that question, and much of it, hopefully if not piously, invokes political reason or a spirit of reasonable compromise or the discovery of a surprising amount of common ground. Berlin himself was ready to say that you could proceed in a reasonable way when faced with such a dilemma. But if, like Berlin, you believe these diverse values are genuinely ‘incommensurable’, then it is very hard to see how you could judiciously compare them to decide which was best to adopt: by definition, they have nothing in common; trying to weigh up, say, the rival claims of liberty and equality in any particular situation would be like trying to assess the comparative merits of a sunset and a daffodil. Confronted with such a plurality of values, Bernard Williams says, ‘no conflict of values can ever rationally be resolved.’ This is quite a big outcome for the moral life. Berlin was a brilliantly effervescent and life-affirming figure, but the consequences of his pluralism can sometimes seem pretty dark. ‘We are doomed to choose,’ he says. ‘And every choice may entail an irreparable loss.’

Part of the fascination of pluralism lies in this extraordinary emotional range: Berlin’s pluralism, edged with tragic feeling, is utterly unlike the ebullient multifariousness of James’s universe: pluralism, for all its anti-monistic virtues, has become a problem. Berlin does not understate the precariousness of the sorts of decision which are the only ones possible: it is all a matter of ‘promoting and preserving an uneasy equilibrium’, he says, one ‘which is constantly threatened and in constant need of repair’. Williams puts it even more starkly: ‘We have no coherent conception of a world without loss.’ This is a consequence of the pluralism of that world, a world full of necessarily unrealised possibilities.

Of course Berlin was a political philosopher, but in a way, as Williams astutely remarked, his real interest was not in polities but in personalities: ‘the tension between conflicting values in one consciousness’. From this perspective, I am struck by a phrase in Berlin’s great book Four Essays on Liberty in which he refers to ‘the moral or emotional or intellectual collisions, the particular kind of acute mental discomfort which rises to a condition of agony from which great works of the human intellect and imagination have sprung’. What might this pluralist ‘agony’ have to do with works of imagination? Berlin was a deeply literary person and keenly responsive to the literary thinking of his time. (Four Essays is dedicated to Stephen Spender.) But it is William Empson whom I would adduce here as a literary context for Berlin’s pluralism. In a book published in 1951, while discussing the theories of I.A. Richards, Empson comments: ‘It may be that the human mind can recognise actually incommensurable values, and that the chief human value is to stand up between them.’ To ‘stand up between them’ is not exactly to harmonise or reconcile or resolve those plural values, but somehow to keep yourself upright while remaining cognisant of both. It is very much in the spirit of Berlin’s unsteady balancing act, and speaks to something that the young Empson had written years before: ‘Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis.’ Empson was evidently not deterred by the inadequacy of analytical reason to arrive at a solution. ‘Whether or not the values open to us are measurable,’ he said around the same time, ‘we cannot measure them, and it is of much value merely to stand up between the forces to which we are exposed.’

This sort of inner conflict, this ‘acute mental discomfort’ of which Berlin speaks, could push you over the edge; but there may be something to hand: poetry. ‘The effort of writing a good bit of verse has in almost every case been carried through almost as a clinical thing,’ Empson says, writing with what feels like an autobiographical reference. ‘It was done only to save the man’s own sanity.’ Or, as he put the same point in a letter, ‘poetry is insincere unless it is clinical, resolving conflicts in the author and thus preventing him from going mad.’ Auden, in his less categorical moments, would have thoroughly agreed that poetry might emerge from the difficult experience of a diversity of goods. ‘Art arises,’ he writes in a later essay, ‘out of our desire for both beauty and truth and our knowledge that they are not identical.’ We want things two ways, which analysis says we cannot have; but for a moment a poem lets us, in a way that discursive prose, for instance, cannot.

Not all poetry can, or even should, do this; but a work such as Keith Douglas’s ‘Vergissmeinnicht’, written while he was fighting in North Africa in the Second War, seems to articulate the tensions of pluralism in just the way Empson suggests. It describes an abandoned enemy tank that Douglas’s platoon had hit three weeks before. The body of the German soldier still lies there, now decaying, and Douglas notices left in the tank a photograph of the dead man’s girlfriend on which she has written ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ – forget-me-not.

We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that’s hard and good when he’s decayed.

But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move,
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.

If you said this was an anti-war poem, you would be quite wrong: you don’t need to read Douglas’s letters to realise that he was deeply committed to fighting the Germans and he relished military life. The poem’s greatness is to hold the genuine value of that necessarily ugly enterprise against the loveliness of the picture of the girl and all that it symbolises, to which Douglas is no less attuned. Two quite distinct worlds of judgment are held within the moment of the poem in what Berlin might call a precarious balance. It is a wonderful example of what Auden called the ‘pluralist interstices’.