The Diabolical Imagination and the Poetry of Karl Marx

Part I: Unrestrained Romantic “love” and the desire for annihilation

In my last post, I explored how fiction has the unique ability to bring us into contact with reality, even the highest reality. It is through the “fiction” or “illusion” of story, song, and symbol that we finite creatures are able to glimpse the universal. The power of reason or analytical thinking simply cannot take us to “the beyond” in the same way that concrete and immediate imagery can.

However, fiction or illusion has not only the power to illuminate but also the incredible and awful power to deceive. Communism, democratism, globalism, feminism, “anti-racism,” anti-natalism, LGBTQism and countless other “isms” draw their strength from their hold over the imagination. Communism, Black Lives Matter, the gender ideology movement—all appeal to our reasoning faculty, to be sure. They marshal “evidence” for what they claim is scientific fact—historical materialism, systemic racism, gender is fluid—in order to support an entire vision of reality that has already been formed in the imagination.

The Western philosophical tradition has long distrusted the imagination because of this power to deceive. This has caused many to mistakenly believe that it must be harnessed by the more sober, rational part of the mind. Plato is the touchstone for this way of thinking about the imagination.

What is needed, instead, is to focus on cultivating the right kind of imagination. Only imagination can combat imagination. Natural law precepts, moral principles, points of the catechism—these learned facts are not enough to withstand powerful desires that strike us viscerally, concretely, and immediately. We must have access to a competing vision, one that presents the likely outcome of giving in to the temptation and simultaneously makes the alternative path appealing. This requires the ability to exercise restraint. The will is involved, but it works in tandem with the imagination. Reason merely plays a supporting role.

Karl Marx, perhaps more than any other figure, represents the near total replacement of the Classical and Christian virtues that imply restraint with the modern romantic “morality” that scorns all limits, even those that would be self-imposed. Under this new dispensation, restraint is overruled by an effusive “humanitarianism.” Marx, in a certain sense, represents the logical conclusion of the Romantic movement. His philosophy of communism is the ultimate Romantic expression that, in defiance of logic and all known facts about human nature and society, puts forth a theory of politics based entirely on longing.

The power of the romantic imagination! The figure on the right is, we are supposed to believe, the young Karl Marx. The figure on the left is dour and portly fellow we all remember.

Yet the spirit of communism is not to be found in The Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital but in Marx’s poetry. Yes, Marx was a poet. In fact, this was his first aspiration. His very first published writings were two poems under the appropriate heading “Savage Songs,” published in a Berlin literary magazine in 1841. The first of these, “The Player,” is about a mad violinist, wild and impassioned in his playing. Images of untamed nature reflect the violinist’s own tempests and reveal the distinct influences of the Romantic period. Marx unites the tumultuous passion that is so characteristic of Romanticism with the desire for annihilation. Take a look:

“The Player”

The player strikes up on the violin,

His blond hair falling down.

He wears a sword at his side,

And a wide, wrinkled gown.

“O player, why playest thou so wild?

Why the savage look in the eyes?

Why the leaping blood, the soaring waves?

Why tearest thou thy bow to shreds?”

“I play for the sake of the thundering sea

Crashing upon the walls of the cliffs,

That my eyes be blinded and my heart burst

And my soul resound in the depths of Hell.”

“O player, why tearest thou thy heart to shreds

In mockery? This art was given thee

By a shining God to elevate the mind

Into the swelling music of the starry dance.”

“Look now, my blood-dark sword shall stab

Unerringly within thy soul.

God neither knows nor honors art.

The hellish vapors rise and fill the brain,

“Till I go mad and my heart is utterly changed.

See this sword—the Prince of Darkness sold it to me.

For me he beats the time and gives the signs.

Ever more boldly I play the dance of death.

“I must play darkly, I must play lightly,

Until my heart, and my violin, burst.”

The player strikes up on the violin,

His blond hair falling down.

He wears a sword at his side,

And a wide, wrinkled gown.¹

Marx here exemplifies the Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”) period of Romanticism and its penchant for morbid hyperbole. The sheer expansiveness of the Romantic imagination, “That my eyes be blinded and my heart burst,” in this case leads to the desire for a hellish demise.

Romantic love (that is, of the Romantic period, but also afterward love that takes on the same characteristics) often assumes the quality of pure longing for an abstract and indefinite beloved. Its quintessence is “being in love with love.” As soon as the Romantic possesses his beloved, she is no longer desirable. The ideal is so far from the real that the Romantic is nearly always disappointed with life. Melancholy is ubiquitous among these idealists. If you’re interested in learning more about the Romantic movement, see my four-part series.

When taken to the extreme, the indefinite longing that characterizes “love” for the Romantic, turns into a desire for destruction. Suicide over unrequited love is a Romantic trope (although not the exclusive provenance of Romanticism). Marx’s second poem, “Nocturnal Love” exemplifies this dynamic. At the time, Marx was in love with his would-be wife Jenny, but their future together was far from assured. This poem would seem to be about his burning desire for her—a desire so fierce that if Marx couldn’t have her, no one should.

Two lovers lie in each other’s arms, watching the world fade as the poison takes effect:

"Pain so burns you, Dear,

And at my breath you sigh.

"Oh, you have drunk my soul.

Mine is your glow, in truth.

Marx garbs this morbidly dark decision in lovely sounding language, as if the two were uniting in marital union. It almost sounds like Byron:

"Gliding, dearest, gliding,

Glowing, stars, glowing.

Let us go heavenwards riding,

Our souls together flowing."

But this is the intoxicated hallucination of a couple committing suicide:

"You have drunk poison, Love.

With me you must away.

The sky is dark above,

No more I see the day."

Their diffuse longing for love, for a world other than that which they have inherited, has driven them to the ultimate rejection of God and His Creation: their mutual annihilation. This is Romanticism taken to the extreme, yet it also bears the mark of Marx’s own diabolical imagination.

This poem is all the more chilling given that two of Marx’s three daughters would die by suicide, one in a pact with her husband.

It is interesting to compare this poem with an episode from the Romantic 1801 novella “Atala” by Chateaubriand. Atala, who is a Christian and has taken a vow of chastity, falls in love with Chactas, a Native American. Despairing that she cannot have him, Atala consumes poison and on her deathbed declares that, when she beheld Chactas she wished “to be the only other living creature on earth; sometimes, feeling a divinity that restrained me in my dreadful transports, I would have wished that divinity annihilated as long as I might have been hurled, clasped in your arms, from abyss to abyss with the ruins of God and the world!”

Arch-Romantic William Blake mingles ideas of Christ and redemption with “self annihilation and eternal death” in his epic poem Milton. Blake explores his own unorthodox ideas about God, Heaven and Hell, and judgment through the figure Milton. Like other Romantics, he confuses the emotional excesses implied in the very idea of “self-annihilation” with godliness and purification.

In “Nocturnal Love” Marx presents suicide as beautiful, even desirable—all the more so for seeming out of reach of ordinary, bourgeois folk. Only beautiful souls who are able to feel as intensely as Marx and his protagonists could go through with such a shocking decision. Through a veil of illusion, and indeed much delusion, Marx garbs the diabolical with lovely, fine drapery:

Sweetest, so pale your face,

So wondrous strange your words.

See, rich in music’s grace

The lofty gliding worlds

Ethereal images would have us believe that these lovers are full of grace, reaching toward the divine, and indeed about to make contact with the heavenly. But Marx deceives himself. If he is not being satirical, which I do not think he is, he believes that the universal and the infinite is to be gleaned in the moments before utter and irreversible self-destruction. For Marx, there is beauty in violence. This should come as no surprise given that Marx’s legacy is a political system that demanded violence on scale unknown in all of human history.

Stay tuned for part II of this series on the diabolical imagination.

1. Translation from the biography of Robert Payne, Marx (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), pp. 62-63.