Having posted a query about an obscure passage in a poem & received some useful feedback, I thouht I’d try again with another thorny passage. The anthology I’m working on has a few poems from the “Delusions” sequence of Charles Madge (a 1930s Marxist poet best known now as an instigator of the “Mass Observation” project). The problematic section runs as follows:
Such is that temple where the holy queen
Blesses the torture chamber and the rack:
In image always, never person, seen,
Long draperies falling behind her back.
She dominates, whether as Abstract Will,
Brennpunkt, inverted Sex, or racial dream,
The old collective phantom lingering still
To fascinate, to murder and to seem.
Evidently in the last stanza he’s alluding to “delusions” that are still hanging over from the 19th century: e.g. the old terminology of “sexual inversion” (for homosexuality) & eugenics theories (“racial dream”). However, “Brennpunkt” completely baffles me–it’s literally “focal point”. & “Abstract Will”–is there an exact source for this phrase? Schopenhauer? Nietzsche?
Your 1930s Marxist poet was educated in German philosophy and culture and how it led Germany aggressively into WWI. He probably saw the rise of Hitler in the 1930s as a reawakening of this German beast that believes in the triumph of the will. Hitler led his armies to destruction because of his insane belief that the will could triumph over all.
Barbara Tuchman in her great book “The Guns of August”, on the German decision to violate Belgian neutrality:
“A hundred years of German philosophy went into the making of this decision in which the seed of self-destruction lay embedded…the hand of Fichte who saw the German people chosen by Providence to occupy the supreme place in the history of the universe, of Hagel who saw them leading the world to a glorious destiny of compulsary Kultur, of Nietzsche who told them that supermen were above ordinary controls, of Treitschke who set the increase of power as the highest moral duty of the state, of the whole German people, who called their temporal ruler the “All-Highest”…the body of accumulated egoism which suckled the German people and created a nation fed on “the desperate delusion of the will that deems itself absolute.””
( With “the desperate delusion of the will that deems itself absolute” Tuchman is quoting “Santayana”)
For an exact cite for the source of “Abstract Will” we will have to wait for a post from some bitter graduate student who was forced to grind through all the German philosophers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Your poet himself may have coined the phrase “Abstract Will”. “Abstract” can mean “conceived apart from any concrete realities or specific object.” The German Kaiser, and later Hitler, certainly strayed into this abstraction when directing their military forces. If your poet was a Marxist he would have felt threatened in the 1930s by Hitler’s rise, due to the Nazis’ pathological hatred of the left wing. The Nazis saw piles of dead Russian soldiers not as human beings but socialist machines, factory bred, lacking free will.