Towards the Condition of Birdsong

Abstract: Walter Pater's much-studied, suggestive statement, "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music," is rooted in "Anders-streben" or "other-striving." In passing, contemporary poet John Bevis ventures a mischievous mishearing of Pater's dictum: What could it mean to aspire towards the condition of birdsong—other-striving of another order? In a heterodox history of ideas from Charles Darwin through Charles Hartshorne, birdsong reintegrates music and language. Listening to birdsong, Anglophone poets have heard echoes of an analogous human capacity, all but lost. In birdsong poems by John Clare, Robert Frost, Edward Thomas, and Elizabeth Bishop, a poetics of radical other-striving emerges.