The first words set down on paper that ultimately contributed to The Wars of Love (which is a "short epic" of around 30 pages) appeared in 1967. In the year 2000 the poem was substantially complete, except for a few tinny lines that I had finally dealt with, as well as I could, by 2005. So the poem essentially took 33 years to write. While many other poets of my generation were descending into bathos, trying to write in "everyday" language and rejecting poetry as a heightened, "magical" speech capable of rendering the Sublime - as witness Coleman Barks' sometimes very beautiful, but assiduously anti-Sublime, renderings of Rumi - I, with William Blake and Dylan Thomas and William Butler Yeats and the King James Isaiah stuck in my ear, was going the other way, by one-hundred and eighty degrees - for all I knew, alone. Sometime in the 1970's, in San Francisco, the "mandarin" poet Jack Gilbert asked his students who among them aspired to produce a masterpiece. There were no takers. But for myself, I took the risk any poet must take who feels called to give voice to a superhuman Majesty and Beauty - the risk of suddenly turning up full of hot air, in a "bathetic" slide from the sublime to the ridiculous, at the precise point where the shimmering pearls of Irish lyricism are suddenly rent and trampled upon by a dry, cynical, cackling Irish laughter. (Not that I can call myself Irish, though my family tree is not without its Moores and Lewises, but both my teachers and my detractors were Irish, and Welsh, and as a lyric poet I can at least claim to be stage-Irish, Irish by profession.) I have only the greatest respect for those poets who, like the traditional ballad-singers of Britain and Kentucky - and like Yeats - can pack the Sublime into canny, salty, ground-level human speech. I learned that lesson, or part of it, from my teacher Lew Welch... .but then I ran off after the singing, soaring larks, or the phosphorescent fish of deep ocean crushed under fifty atmospheres, and thus fulfilled, not what I think "the contemporary poet" should do, but what (for all its instabilities and limitations) I myself could do. I wanted to write a Prophetic Book like William Blake. I wanted to re-write the Bible. I wanted the lyric poem to be more than a momentary glint off a single facet of the great, shadowy shape which is the Human Form as a spoken Word of God, still resounding with the fading echoes of the Tongue that expressed it. I wanted to see that whole Form in one flash, naked as the day it was born. And so I wrote my second epic poem - sequel to Panic Grass (City Lights, 1968) and predicted and heralded by one specific line therein - entitled The Wars of Love. Here it is. I took the fire of Blake, the water of Dylan Thomas, the attar of roses of Rumi and Hafiz, mixed it with my own unregenerate earth, buried it in a mountain, then blasted and dug and burned it free a generation later, to be a voice - a mere structure of words - capable of standing up to and emotionally transmuting - in its feeble, epical/lyrical way, the way of mere words - the terror of our times.

In two of my earlier books, Hammering Hot Iron (Quest, 1993) and The System of Antichrist (Sophia Perennis, 2001), I refer to a poem with the same title as this one; several passages from it are quoted in Hot Iron. It is not the same poem, however, but an earlier and much longer version of it, which I conceived of as a "modern Gnostic system." A few copies of it are undoubtedly still floating around somewhere; one (or part of it) apparently did duty for a while as a "scripture" used by a Neo-Gnostic church named Ecclesia Gnostica. Some time after composing it, however, I came to the realization that the last thing the world needs is another heterodox tour-de-force by a spiritual free-lance ~~ so I extracted only the most poetically viable sections, re-wrote them, composed some further sections, and so produced the Fall-and-Redemption cycle that is about to appear before your eyes. The "system" upon which the original was based, purified of its heterodox elements and its pretension to quasi-revelation, is now "The Shadows of God," an analysis of the universal roots of idolatry, the first elements of the human ego, which makes up Chapter Five of The System of Antichrist. Another branch of the original vision that ultimately resulted in The Wars of Love, which came to me at the age of seventeen ~~ the part having to do with Creation and Apocatastasis ~~ became an article entitled "We are the Bees of the Invisible: Physics, Metaphysics and the Spiritual Path," which was published in the journal Sacred Web 6 in the year 2000.

If you don't "buy" the voice and language of this poem - and to buy it you will have to pay with something dearly precious, which it may be the better part of wisdom to keep safe - it will leave you cold. But if you do come up with the price of it, then it will rear up out of its dream kingdom, take you on its back, and ride you around the whole country - God's country - from north to south, from east to west, from end to end.

© 2005 - Charles Upton