The scriptural exegetists will hold, as Francis Bacon held, that Adam possessed metaphysical knowledge in a very high degree. To him the whole of nature was a book which he could read with ease. He lost his ability to read this language of nature as a result of his fall; and Solomon alone of the sons of men has ever recovered the power to read the book of nature. The business of art is, however, to recover the knowledge of that language which once man held by nature.  (The Classical Trivium, 1943, 16)

Around 1950 McLuhan came to identify the “stages of cognition”, aka the “learning process”, with the “poetic process”, aka “creativity”. That is, the “poetic process” is implicated in all cognition and apprehension whatsoever. Even ‘raw’ perception as the means of learning what is happening around us is subject to a prior process of “stages” in which “creativity” cannot not be exercised.¹

Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry, 1951
Burke [in The Sublime and The Beautiful, 1757] arrived by a single stride at the position that the cognitive process was also the creative process. And it is that awareness in Cezanne and Mallarmé, as later in Joyce and Eliot, which produced the doctrine and practice of ‘significant form’ in modern art.

The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951
Helped by Rimbaud and Mallarmé, Joyce arrived quickly at the formula of the aesthetic moment (…) as consisting in a retracing of the stages of ordinary apprehension. The poetic process he discovered and states in Stephen Hero is the experience of ordinary cognition, but it is that labyrinth reversed, retraced, and [on that basis]¹ epiphanized.  The moment of arrested cognition achieves at once² its stasis and epiphany as a result of the reconstruction of the stages of ordinary apprehension.²

The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951
Joyce, Pound, and Eliot recovered the secret of the dolce stil nuovo through the prismatically arranged landscapes of Rimbaud and Mallarmé. And this secret consists in nothing less than a fusion of the learning and the creative processes in the analysis and reconstruction of the aesthetic moment of arrested awareness. This peculiar fusion of the cognitive and the creative [“the poetic process”] by an act of retracing the stages of apprehension…

Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process, 1951
the figure of the labyrinth [and its retracing] is used everywhere by Joyce as the archetype of cognition and esthetic apprehension, and the modern detective since Poe employs the technique of retracing in order to reconstruct an action exactly as it occurred. Edgar Poe is rightly regarded in France as the father of symbolism because he was the first to formulate the poetic process as one of discovery by retracing. The precise poetic formula for any emotion, he pointed out, was to be found by working backwards from effect…

McLuhan to Ezra Pound, July 24, 1951³
From Joyce’s Stephen Hero, I gather that he had with the combined aid of Aristotle, Dante and Rimbaud decided that the poetic process was nothing else than the process of cognition. That sensation itself was imitation³ since the forms of things in our sensations are already in a new matter. Namely a human organ. So that the first stage of apprehension is already poetic. Dolce stil nuovo [is] based on this learning process as poetic process…

McLuhan to Ezra Pound, August 2, 1951⁴
Cinema was immediate consequence of discovery of discontinuity as principle of picturesque landscape. MOVING PICTURES were made and shown in Naples and London in 1770. Painted scenes on rollers projected by lantern. This led at once to discovery of principle of reconstruction of situation by intellectual retracing. Retracing conditions leading to moment of aesthetic apprehension and arrest was Poe’s discovery.⁵

Sight, Sound, and the Fury, 1954
in cognition we have to interiorize the exterior world. We have to recreate in the medium of our senses and inner faculties the drama of existence. This is the world of the logos poietikos, the agent intellect. In speech we utter that drama which we have analogously recreated within us. In speech we make or poet the world (…) For in cognition itself is the whole of the poetic process. But the artist differs from most men in his power to arrest and then reverse the stages of human apprehension. He learns how to embody the stages of cognition (Aristotle’s “plot”) in an exterior work which can be held up for contemplation.

Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954
The symbolist poet makes of the poem not a vehicle for views, ideas, feelings, but a situation which involves the reader directly in the poetic process. That is why he will always say that the poem is not about anything; it is something. It doesn’t say anything, it does something.⁴

Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954
as we trace the rise of successive communication channels (…) from writing to movies and TV, it is borne in on us that in order for their exterior artifice to be effective it must partake of the character of that interior artifice by which in ordinary perception we incarnate the exterior world. Because human perception is literally incarnation. So that each of us must poet the world or fashion it within us as our primary and constant mode of awareness. And the mechanical or mass media of communication must at least parrot the world in order to hold our attention.

Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954
The creative act of ordinary human perception a greater thing and a more intricate process than any devised by philosophers or scientists. The poetic process is a reversal, a retracing of the stages of human cognition. It has and will always be so; but with Edgar Poe and the symbolists this central human fact was taken up to the level of conscious awareness. It then became the basis of modern science and technology. That is what Whitehead meant when he said that the great event of the nineteenth century was the discovery of the technique of discovery. Because the drama of ordinary perception seen as the poetic process is the prime analogate, the magic casement opening on the secrets of created being.

Note: The phrase “created being” must be taken in multiple ways. In the first instance it refers to everything that exists, everything factual. In the second instance it refers to that special sort of being that exists in, and only in, human experience: artefactual being. In the third place, it refers to that special kind of artefactual being, artistic creation. Now in McLuhan’s view, the third is the key to knowledge of the second which, in turn, is key to knowledge of the first. For the first is known only in experience. If humans can come to real knowledge of the real, this possibility must be a possibility of, and for, artefactual being. That is, artefactual being must be able to reach out of itself to relate to the other in its reality. This is “the magic casement opening on the secrets of created being”. But this true outreach is first of all possible because it is the nature of the relation between Being and beings and, before that, it is the nature of the relation between the plural species of Being within its gigantic genus.

Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954
The whole of nineteenth century art and science is charged with the implications of the poetic process and its discovery. Our own century has seen that process put to work in the so-called mass media.

Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954
And so we arrive at the paradox of this most esoteric of all art doctrines, namely that the most poetic thing in the world is the most ordinary human consciousness.

Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954
Today with the revelation of the poetic process which is involved in ordinary cognition we stand on a (…) threshold (…) to the positive powers of the human spirit in its natural creativity. This door opens on to psychic powers comparable to the physical powers made available via nuclear fission and fusion. Through this door men have seen a possible path to the totalitarian remaking of human nature. Machiavelli showed us the way to a new circle of the Inferno [one that contemporary history is living out]. Knowledge of the creative process in art, science, and cognition shows us the way either to the earthly paradise or to complete madness. It is to be either the top of Mount Purgatory or the abyss.

The Emperor’s New Clothes. 1968
Our relatively recent insights into the power of the preconscious in both the creation and the apprehension of works of art indicate that the subliminal is in fact a strong force in [all] psychic reorganization.

Note: For McLuhan, “psychic reorganization” occurs perpetually, moment by moment by moment. There is no time in human being when it is not faced with all the possibilities of that being and hence with the need to choose between them. (Since identity derives from this choice, who and when and where is that ‘nobody’ that makes it in the first place?)

 From Cliché to Archetype, 1970
The Expressionists had discovered that the creative process is a kind of repetition of the stages of apprehension, somewhat along the lines that relate Coleridge’s Primary and Secondary imagination. In the same way there would seem to be an echo of the formative process of consciousness in the (…) unconscious. This, in turn, implies a close liaison between private and corporate awareness.

Playboy Interview, 1969
For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. (…) [But then]⁵ I began to realize that the greatest artists of the 20th Century — Yeats, Pound. Joyce, Eliot — had discovered a totally different approach, based on the identity of the processes of cognition and creation. I realized that artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience…