Meditation on Poetry and Culture

Binding Life to Language: Meditations onPoetry and Culture

Joseph M. DittaEnglish Department, Dakota Wesleyan University, Mitchell, USA

IntroductionMany if not most of the students in my literature classes find reading to be

a chore. Because they do not see themselves as the intended audience for thepoems, stories, and novels we read, they do not care about them. They readin order to get a grade. This is not so for my creative writing students. Theycare. In spite of the battles we have over what is and what is not a poem ora story, they are vitally interested.

Two types of students take my Creative Writing classes; the one type con-sists of aspiring writers, the other of those preparing to be high school Englishteachers. There is a third, but they are not numerous. These last are mainlythe curious, who take the class out of some vague notion of the need forpersonal cultivation. Some of these are art majors, others business majors, afew hale from the sciences; some of these show talent but little understandingof and passion for the aesthetic issues and the transformations of the self thatthe discipline of writing demands.

As a teacher of Creative Writing mostly poetry I face the challenge ofseparating students from the idea that self-expression is the primary valueand ultimate goal of writing, and the challenge of instilling in the place ofthis notion a respect for craft and an awareness of the self as a tool, an instru-ment for engaging the world, and that this engagement is the primary valueand ultimate goal of writing. How to use the self as a tool is what the creativewriting class is all about, I inform them. The first general rebellion in the classtakes place in response to this issue.

Once craft enters the picture, I also face a kind of obstinacy of refusal. Craftforces them out of their usage habits, and writing becomes more deliberateand disciplined than they are used to. From their perspective, nothing moreretards their progress and diminishes their pleasure than having to learn craft.By craft, I mean what we normally understand: the inherited prosody of West-ern Civilization, not only the metrics and stanzaics of traditional forms likeblank verse, the sonnet, the ballad, and the villanelle, but also the appropriateoccasions of their use. Almost all our aesthetic argumentation takes place inregard to these two issues: the goal of writing and the role of craft in achievingthat goal.

I settle the matter of diverse cultural origins, which always comes up as adefense of their refusal, by insisting that:

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(1) Students are welcome to explore the prosodic traditions of their ancestorculture if they choose, but that in any case;

(2) historically, our language and national traditions are Western in origin,and that they need to begin their aesthetic educations here, regardless ofhow they may modify or alter them in later years.

I have never believed that the teacher in the Creative Writing class shouldlet his or her students write whatever they wished, however they wished. Ialso have never believed that it is the purpose of the teacher to put the studentin touch with his or her inner self and with his or her so-called imagination,with the poem as the effective evidence of success in the endeavor. Imagin-ation apart from an object is meaningless; if the object is the self, theexpression that follows is merely that, expression. The student might as wellkeep a diary and quit the class. I try to make the class understand thatexpression needs justification, and that the fact that they feel it is not initself sufficient justification for the writing. Until what they feel also involvesthe reader, they will not have written a poem.

I have found it necessary over the years to defend these few principles.Students do not like them, and the principles create an impression amongthem of something alien to what they understand poetry to be. Because theyare passionate about these matters, it is helpful to begin each class with adiscussion of certain definitions: What is poetry? What is the role of craft inwriting poetry? What is a poet? What is art? And with a discussion of certainquestions: Does beauty matter? How does a poem mean? What do we meanby mean? Does a poet make meaning or does he find meanings that alreadyexist in the everyday world? Is the poet, for the purposes of her art and craft,different from other people? If she is, in what way? Does it matter? Does theworld need its poets?

The essay that follows is a collection of meditations on these definitions andquestions. It represents my take on them and what I try to pass on to mystudents, though in the pressure-cooker of the classroom, discussion is neverneat and orderly and much never gets said. The essay is organised in para-graph units, each unit dedicated to the exploration of one definition or ques-tion. It may seem, as one reads, that the units take up issues haphazardly, inno particular order, and that some issues are only tangentially related topoetry. But there is an order and everything relates. Partly, the order arisesfrom the natural progression of our classroom discussions, but also the orderis cumulative, progressing from the more basic to the more complex, withearlier units informing later ones.

One cannot stress enough the fact that no pedagogy in the poetry writingclass can succeed if it is not grounded in an aesthetic that offers a vision ofthe whatness and whereforeness of the art. This vision will (and should) formthe basis of everything one does in the classroom, from the fashioning ofassignments to the criteria of success in assessing them. Before one argueswith the definitions that follow and with the discussions of the issues as theyarise, I would ask the reader to finish the essay. I believe the whole is completeand sound, so that removing or altering one stone may well cause the edificeto collapse. Afterwards, if difference of vision about the whatness and where-

70 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

foreness of poetry should prompt the creative writing teacher to raise onesown questions and think them through to ones own conclusions, then I wouldregard this effort as successful.

CorrespondenceAny correspondence should be directed to Joseph M. Ditta, English

Department, Dakota Wesleyan University, Mitchell, SD 57301, USA([email protected]).


Binding Life to Language: Meditations on Poetry and Culture

Origin of the poem

It lives in the body and manifests itself like the pulse, rising and falling moreor less intensely, rapidly, as the body moves in the course of its day theheart beats in response to the demands made on it, beats hard and speedsup, relaxes and slows down. These rhythms keep the body stable. So with thepoem the poem is a response of the whole being of the poet, keeping therhythms of his life responsive to his needs.

The poetic medium

This is especially suited to penetrating the opaquenesses of personal, privateexperience, connecting that experience to other, larger realms of human know-ing and intuition that radiate meaningfulness into our lives.

The author of a work of imagination

The author is trying to affect us wholly, as human beings, whether he knowsit or not; and we are affected by it, as human beings, whether we intend to beor not. (T.S. Eliot, Religion and Literature)What is happening to literature

What is happening in literature has been happening to culture and to thestructures of society in our time. It is losing a sense of its place in the past,and it is losing a sense of its value to the present.

Free verse

There is no such thing as free verse. There is sloppy verse that pretends to befree and is offered as self expression. And there is well crafted verse. By freewhat is meant is a form that takes its direction from meaning growing more orless organically from the unanticipated direction of the thought as it unfolds. Freemeans no attempt is made to predetermine meaning, to channel it into rhythms,lines, stanzas whose forms are extrinsic to the unfolding thought and feeling thepoem is realising in the act of composition. This meaning of free is not free inthe sense that so much poetry is written today. This type of freedom demandsthe highest discipline and conscience, and that is uncommon in all times.

Craft

There is a widespread notion in our time that the formal properties of poetrylike metrical regularity, repeating stanzas, figurative language with its ident-ifying phrasal structures (like the heroic simile or the zeugma), rhyme, rhythm,with all their subtle interactions and nuances are in some negative way arti-ficial. Genuineness and sincerity are somehow compromised by these oldprosodic conventions, which are left now to old ladies at their local poetrysocieties and to scribblers of religious verse. As though genuineness and sin-cerity are natural opposites of artificiality. They are not. Genuineness and sin-cerity are the products of discipline and are never better displayed than inmastery of craft. Give me a well turned couplet and keep your self-expression.


Free verse and ethnic experienceA formula for every kind of indulgence. Free verse as it has come to be

practised today requires no emotional discipline and no craft; ethnic experienceas subject requires no imagination or thought but relies on long-ingrained hab-its of perception. Thus anyone who wishes may be a poet; everyone who writesis one. We live in an age afflicted with banality. Personal memory! The problemhere is that ethnic experience is nothing more than conditioned experiencegiven an undeserved interest by the word ethnic.

To rise above banalityThe writer must have two traits that all poets share; first, gravitas a serious-

ness of purpose that puts the reader immediately into the presence of ulti-mates. By ultimates I dont mean profundities of metaphysical or theologicalspeculation, but feelings, thoughts, experiences, images, figures of all kindsthat are felt as meaningful in a way that compels the reader to a serious con-templation of his or her own experience. Secondly, the poet must have a voice,must be able to project in his or her verse an identifiable persona, one thatthe reader can immediately detect not necessarily identify with, like or enjoy,but necessarily one that he or she can hear and not mistake for any of theanonymous mass of poets writing at any given time. A poet may project anytype of mood humorous, satirical, lyrical, passionate, religious, meditative,contemplative, active, folksy, or in any particular volume score all of theseacross his or her lines Frost is many of these, and he is always identifiablyFrost. Gravitas and voice. Purpose and craft. Meaning and form. We all knowwhat these are. What they mean.

The poetThe poet need not be and often is not a man or woman of experience. By

experience we usually mean involvement in and commitment to the intellectualand political life of the country its conflicts, movements, ideologies, align-ments and associations, or activity of some exceptional kind in the socialdomain of everyday life; we mean travel, exposure to other cultures, to thearts, to a broad range of people, and so on. A poets most important experienceis of what goes on in his or her head in the world most immediate to the senses,and that kind of experience is local and personal and often very private. Thepoets gift is peculiarly that he or she can universalise this local and privateexperience and through it as through a lens help us to view cultural and socialconcerns that form the climate of our times the poet sees through the obfus-cations and opaquenesses that block awareness and limit our lives.

A poem is not a treatiseToo many critics approach the poem as though it were an argument, or as

though it didnt know that it was an argument. Its language is treated as ident-ical with the language of discourse. This points up the fact that we are losingor have already lost understanding of what poetry is, how to read it, to experi-ence it, to live with it. For one thing, craft is what makes the difference betweenpoetry and discourse. Where there is no craft there is no art, where there is


no art there is no difference. Thus much of what is written today is grist forthe critical mill, and poetry recedes ever further into a lost past. When poetrybecomes entirely heritage, it will be as eclipsed as Greek sculpture.

Nature is an expression of a particular cultureThe old pagan belief that spirits reside in animate and inanimate objects,

the medieval vision of nature as an expression of the divine will, and the currentmechanistic and materialistic view of nature as a product of blind physical andchemical processes are all expressions of the world-view of the cultures thathold such ideas. Teihard de Chardin, priest, theologian, anthropologist, one ofthe discoverers of Homo Erectus, conceived of nature as a kind of spiritualforce that had direction and purpose; contrasting paleontological remains withpresent-day species, he saw in nature an evolutionary teleology that workedtowards the production of higher forms. He believed that the advent of con-sciousness and self-consciousness in humanity were stages in the process ofthis teleology, and that we could, on the basis of this understanding of themeaning of our self-consciousness, reconcile a materialistic science with reli-gion. But his thinking has had no impact on our world-view, beyond its popu-larity for a while with a non-scientific readership. Why is this not surprising? Aworld-view cannot be changed by an individual, since it is the product of somany intersecting forces at work in a culture scientific, economic, social,technological that no one person or even group of people can alter it inany significant way. Change, when it comes, comes as a slow and cumulativetransformation of assumptions and premises, no one of which is recognisedas change when it occurs. On the other hand, no culture makes a completebreak with its own past, with its heritage. The past persists as a kind of bedrockupon which new cultural formations are erected a bedrock that has indeedmany layers, very much as one finds in an archeological dig so that at anygiven time in a culture, world-views overlap; thus Christianity persists, still verymuch as a foundation force, in our contemporary world, in spite of the fact thatour world-view has become so antithetical to its vision of God, man, and nature.This is the challenge for poets. Not reconciliation but vision; twentieth-centurymaterialistic science is deadening to the spirit of mankind and is certainly notthe last word in our conception of nature. There is no going back. There isonly new vision. The project of poetry is to explore, to bring to the contemporarymenu of human possibilities direct that is, aesthetic, sensual contact withalternative world-views. Today one poem, tomorrow two. Until a chorus ofvoices sing in unison.

For myselfI ask the biologists question: what is the adaptational value the value for

survival of a particular behaviour for a species? This is how scientists under-stand the meaning of animal behaviour an animals expenditure of energymust be accounted for on the basis of that expenditures contribution to somelong-term survival strategy. Thus they look for a purely mechanistic answer tothe question of why a certain species evolves certain behavioural character-istics mating rituals, herding, migration, the singing of birds, dominance hier-


archies, social behaviours of all sorts like grooming, cooperative rearing ofyoung, etc. What about human love? The feelings associated with love arechemically traceable to the effects of a particular enzyme released in the bodyin response to a host of visual and olfactory cues in a certain social setting;but all these feelings and the behaviours we engage in to bring them aboutare interpreted as secondary (that is, variable) effects of the procreative drive,the object of which is to deposit ones genes into the next generation. Thusan environmental stimulus produces a chemical reaction inducing behaviours(these are variable in that they are culturally determined) that lead to pro-creation this is the mechanism in biological terms that explains the meaningof love. But no one who has ever experienced love could ever be satisfied bysuch a mechanical analysis what the scientist dismisses as secondary effectsconstitutes all our interest at the conscious level. The scientist would respondby saying that the so-called deeper meanings upon which we construct ourmyths and our images of human worth are illusions, perhaps necessary, butillusions nevertheless, since cultures vary dramatically regarding how theyinterpret the meaning of love, as do individuals within a culture, and, further-more, these meanings vary from one time period to another within a culture.But what if our intuitions of meaning are not illusions? What if difference iscaused by partial apprehension? By an emphasis at one time by one peopleon one aspect of a complex of meaning, and at another time by another peopleon some other aspect? Why must we emphasise a materialistic basis andmechanical cause-effect answer to the question of human love? It seems weemphasise such an answer because that vision is the world-view of our presentmoment. Mechanistic answers to the puzzles of human behaviour, however,are more and more unsatisfactory the further removed we become from physi-ology and chemistry. Why do we write poetry? What is the adaptational valueof metrical language and rhyme? The energy it takes to write a satisfyingsecond line of a couplet can sometimes be painfully sapping. Why do we havean aesthetic sensibility at all? Is the skyscraper merely an extension of thecave? Why do we study astronomy? Why do we want to know the answers tothese questions? Why are we driven, often against our better judgments, fre-quently against the collective wisdom of our village, to find meaning in ourlives?

Why does a particular art form rise into prominence for a while andthen die away?

Leaving behind its products for a society that no longer knows how torespond to them? This seems true of poetry today. Not only youth, but adults,people of all ages, no longer know how to read a poem. In reading and talkingabout poems with traditional and non-traditional students alike, I find that theycome to the experience with an expectation that they are unable to read andconstrue, to make meaning out of poetic strategies, even to grasp the poetstone of voice. This expectation is not a product of failed teaching. It is a productof the perception among them that poetry is not written for them and thereforedoesnt connect with their lives. For them the poem has lost its aura of mean-ingfulness, and they view it much as they view a math problem somethingthat they must learn how to decipher. Once deciphered it is quickly forgotten.


Because the meaning got from the activity is so intimately connected to thepoems formal properties, and because these properties have never been inuse among them as ways of making meaning, they find no value in poemsfor their lives beyond the classroom. Much the same is true for painting andsculpture. As decorative arts these forms remain in use in our everyday lives,but as art they have also lost their radiance. How many people in our civilisationtoday know how to relate themselves to the male and female nude that domi-nated Greek sculpture? The free-standing larger-than-life nude only puzzlesus as we walk around it, because we do not carry in our sense of life thecomplex religious and social assumptions and aesthetic conventions that sucha figure addresses in its three-dimensional immediacy and thereness. We viewthe nude only from our perspective which sees in it something monumentalthat we fail to grasp, and sees in it exposure, which embarrasses us, in spiteof our familiarity with nudity through the contemporary media. For us nudityhas no meaning other than the sexual, and as a consequence we do not seethe Greek statue, we see ourselves. The same is true for the arts that gaveus the great cathedrals we have lost the culture world from which and aboutwhich these arts spoke and these cathedrals remain for us today merely monu-ments. They inspire wonder and perhaps awe, but they do not communicateanything intimate to the daily round of our lives. The religious and aestheticworld-view these cathedrals express may be learned by historical study in thecollege classroom, but they no longer communicate anything vital to our senseof life and hence no longer energise our emotions and imaginations. Paintingand sculpture today, however varied their techniques, materials, and subjectmatter, have lost their communicative vitality because people dont go to themanymore for the unique kinds of aesthetic satisfaction they offer. This doesntmean that these artists have ceased to produce. It does mean that what theyproduce no longer defines for us the images we look to for our personal andcollective revelations. Images that have these resonances for us are now con-trolled by the mass media for the purposes of commerce. Must I then acceptthis fact that poetry, like the Greek nude and the great cathedral, is no longerrelevant to our lives and times? I answer no, and for two reasons: first, writingpoems is still for the poet, like painting and sculpture for those artists, a vitalway to discover and make meaning the excitement doesnt diminish, thesatisfaction doesnt pale, even if no one reads the poems; secondly, the poemis and will always be a form of talk, however much in the present moment weassociate the poem with print; talking will not pass out of the culture world.The mass media with their emphases on information and entertainment haveeclipsed talking as a form of meditation and as an aesthetic experience. But Iam convinced that this is only a temporary condition and that poetry, the mostdirect and intimate of all our arts, will become again and remain a vital aestheticmedium however our culture evolves.

Their [the poets] language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marksthe before unapprehended relations of things, and perpetuates theirapprehension, until the words which represent them, become throughtime signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integralthoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the


associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be deadto all the nobler purposes of human intercourse. (Shelley, A Defenseof Poetry)

We know now that language is perpetually renewed by the changing con-ditions of society and by each generations drive to establish its own style ofusage, and that these phenomena continually produce abundance of meta-phorical expressions as well as neologisms, and that these renewals and cre-ative usages, furthermore, take place in the common speech of the people.Nevertheless, there is some truth in what Shelley says about the relation ofpoetry to language. He is not talking about language per se so much as howlanguage is used as a medium of perception, how poetic language marks thebefore unapprehended relations of things. It is this apprehension that consti-tutes the importance and value of poetry for culture. If no new poets arise tocreate new perceptions and thus enrich our consciousness with new ways ofseeing, will language then be dead to all the nobler purposes of human inter-course? What are the nobler purposes Shelley refers to? The poet, he argues,apprehends the true and the beautiful in the relation between existence andperception on the one hand and between perception and expression on theother. And further, he argues, the poet draws into a certain propinquity withthe true and the beautiful an apprehension of the agencies of the invisibleworld which is called religion. By religion Shelley doesnt mean the conven-tional institutional religions of a particular culture, but those spiritual insightsand intuitions from which spring the creative identity of a people. For the poetbeholds not only the present as it is, but also the future that is contained withinit, beholds not as a prophet but uniquely as a poet that is, in his shaping oflanguage (and here Shelley means specifically metrical language), he rises outof the quotidian into a world of eternal verities accessible only through languageitself, because language gives us the most direct representation of the actionsand passions of our internal being.What do the true and the beautiful mean for us?

Might we not say that our age can be characterised by how it has systemati-cally debunked and demystified the concept of the spiritual, denying the exist-ence of truth except as a specific relation in a specific context in a particularmoment, and relegating the beautiful to individual taste (and thereby deprivingit of social value), so that the concept of universals is narrowed exclusively tothe mechanistic laws of science? Try as I may, I cannot find, either in mypersonal life (as a private citizen, husband and father, son and brother, memberof a community) or in my professional life, any concepts of the beautiful thatare intended to be anything more than personal preference; we have no culturalconsensus concerning the beautiful and have no delineated principles by whichit may be conceived, crafted, or judged. The beautiful is no longer a categoryof thought among literary critics, and we are not taught to distinguish the beauti-ful in any level of our educational system. The nobler purposes of human inter-course, as Shelley thought of them, have withdrawn from our culture as a vitalpart of its creative thought. The relation between existence and perception andbetween perception and expression is now governed by our scientific world-view and by utility grammatical correctness and efficient use of a particular


fields technical jargon, which often serves to confine a discourse to initiates.Are truth and beauty as Shelley understood them concepts with real value toany society that might hold them, or are they merely the dead conventions ofa bygone era with no usefulness for the spiritual, aesthetic, and psychologicalhealth of our 21st century information-oriented culture? My first impulse is tonote that these concepts, especially the beautiful, may well be dependent upona caste-organised society, for only in such can an ideal of beauty have bothan origin and a culture-wide force. And the very words ideal of beauty inevi-tably carry me back to the iconography of Mary, so that it seems the beautifulmay also require a religious connotation for it to have an impact across castes.Can a democratic society, profoundly technology oriented, increasingly multi-cultural, ever be motivated by a shared ideal of the beautiful? Doesnt the con-cept require for its very existence a hierarchically ordered, homogeneoussociety? Wouldnt the impact of such an ideal tend to order and unify a peoplewho are culturally disparate, and thus be even more unlikely in a society thathas been learning to cultivate and appreciate its differences? We cannot denya social component to the concept of the beautiful, a certain relativity groundedin economic status and ethnic origin. But it is a question whether this socialcomponent is everything; whether there isnt also something transcendent andnon-contingent in the beautiful, something worth searching for. Our sense ofproduct design in the goods and wares of the marketplace is highly refined.Our textiles are more handsomely textured and coloured and are available ina greater variety of materials than ever before. Our architecture ranges fromawesomely monumental to standardised, but is often also unique, pleasing,human-scaled, and functional. At least in the United States, our everydaymaterial environment has never been more attractive to the senses. And yetnone of these products of the principles of design enter into what we meanwhen we speak of the beautiful for when we use this term, we mean to namean elevated feeling that occurs in us in response to a made object, an internal,emotional experience that emerges from the contingencies of the object itselfand connects us to it. The beautiful is an affective relation to the object thatprovokes the feeling. And is it too much to say that this affective relation hasalso become rare in our world? In spite of the attractiveness of our materialenvironment, who can argue with the reiterated complaint that our culture hasbecome increasingly vulgar, profane, violent, and, in many ways, especiallythose involving our communal behaviours, ugly? We dont seem to be a peopleany longer predisposed to the emotion.

The functions of the poetical faculty are two-fold; by one it createsnew materials of knowledge, and power and pleasure; by the other itengenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them accordingto a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and thegood. (Shelley, A Defense of Poetry)

I will not say with Shelley that poetry is the centre and circumference ofknowledge. Nor will I, without some qualifications, say with him that poetrycreates new materials of knowledge. Perhaps it is no longer possible to usethe word knowledge as Shelley used it. On the one hand, the positivism of the20th century has limited the words meaning too much and confined it to too


narrow a range of human endeavour, and on the other our obsessions withinformation and facts can only give rise to the worst confusions in Shelleysstatements. The poet sees a likeness between two things perhaps he isdriving at night on the prairie and a barnyard light off in the distance shinesfor him, as it does for many people, as a statement of mans isolation andsolitude, of self-reliance and independence, but out of the perception arises aliving feeling, a new sensation, of the interconnectedness and importance ofcertain emotions loneliness and self-sufficiency which then begins to mani-fest itself in the concrete situation of a poem whose words begin to acquireresonances that they didnt have before. In writing the poem the poet nowmakes meanings that did not exist in that connection before. These meaningsare what I take Shelley to mean by knowledge. In this sense, the poet is thecentre and circumference of knowledge, for only he makes such meanings.What differentiates the poet from other perceivers for the perception itself isavailable as a likeness to anyone sensitive to the relations between things is the making of the poem. The poetical faculty is two-fold, as Shelley says it creates new materials of knowledge (new meanings), and power and pleas-ure (there is much to contemplate in these words); and it drives the poet toreproduce and arrange his perceptions according to a certain rhythm and orderwhich may be called the beautiful and the good. By rhythm and order Shelleydoesnt mean exclusively the conventional poetic forms, though he does saythat these are useful means to the creation of the beautiful and the good.Shelley recognises that every poet must be original and that for poetrys sakeinvention is desirable. Its the two-foldedness that matters some people per-ceive the likenesses but do not make the poems; many people make poemsbut lack the power of perception that carries into the poem and gives it itsforce and gives us the pleasure of the beautiful and the good.

The passage from intuition to reflection, from knowledge of the realto expression of that knowledge in viable form is always precarious anddifficult. It is, in short, a kind of translation, not from one language intoanother, but from one state of existence into another, from the receptiveinto the creative, from the purely sensuous impression into the purelyreflective and critical act. (Joyce Cary, Art and Reality)

Here novelist Cary advances Shelleys argument a step further. Shelleybelieved that the poet apprehends the true and the beautiful in the relationbetween existence and perception and perception and expression. This appre-hension of the true and the beautiful is the poets intuition. Cary calls the per-ception itself intuition. But what he adds is an awareness that the passagefrom perception to expression involves a change of state in the perceiver, achange from receptivity to reflectivity. What is it that enables the artist toaccomplish this change? I think Shelley and Cary would both agree that whatenables this translation is craft. Craft is the instrument of reflection for thepoet, just as it is for the painter and the sculptor. The poet tries a line, animage, a figure is unsatisfied and tries again. He doesnt know what the rightlanguage and form are, he only knows that what he writes is not right. Whenthe line comes in, it leads unexpectedly to another, and these two then to yetanother, and thus begins a process of reflection by which the original intuition


is transformed into an artifact. The experiential states of receptivity andreflectivity are both grounded in the intuition and are complementary in thateach needs the other in order to be what it is. And it is craft that engendersboth, for without the craft there could be no reflectivity, and without this therewould be no readiness for the receptive state to bring it into existence. Mostpeople most of the time perceive according to the conventional patterns of theirsocial world, because these conventions most of the time thoroughly servetheir needs and purposes. That is, after all, one of the major benefits of socialexistence as individuals we do not have to rely on our individual abilities tointerpret the world around us, much of that is done for us and conditioned intous by our society.

A man cannot say, I will compose poetry. The greatest poet evencannot say it: for the mind in creation is as a fading coal which someinvisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory bright-ness: this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fadesand changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our naturesare unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influ-ence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predictthe greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration isalready on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever beencommunicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the originalconception of the poet. (Shelley, A Defense of Poetry)

The inspiration lights the mind and after its impression has been made itfades, and the poet writes either from within the waning, if he is lucky, or fromthe lingering effects of the impression that last a good deal longer, perhapspermanently. This passage by Shelley is famous as one of the great insightsinto the creative act. I love the phrasing: the mind in creation is as a fading coalwhich some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitorybrightness. To pursue his metaphor a bit, I almost feel the theme of Word-sworths Intimations ode: the mind shines brightest during the period of unin-hibited childhood, and as it is subjected to the mores and restrictions of civilisedsociety, shades of the prison house close it in, until it fades altogether into thelight of common day. But it remains a crusted ember to be awakened fromtime to time by the breezes of inspiration. As much as I admire Shelley andam moved by Wordworths sonorous language and deeply nostalgic feeling, Idont agree with this picture of poetic inspiration. I dont deny the fact of inspi-ration, or Shelleys beautiful description of the relation between the flash andthe resulting poem. But this is not all there is. Inspiration, if it is thought of interms of the metaphor of light, becomes something that waxes and wanes inbrilliance that has an illuminatory nature. Shelleys image of the ember aburning that is concealed by the white ash of the surface, is a beautiful imageof the unconscious mind, the source of the sudden uprushings of awarenessthat probably did blind him by their intensity. But there are at least two othermetaphors that enable us to conceive this fact of our creative experience verydifferently. There is the voice that cries in the darkness or whispers as in adream (Socrates had such a voice, as did St. Augustine); and there is thecompanion whose presence infuses one with a sense of meaning (didnt St.


Paul have such a companion and Dante?); inspiration, revelation, whateverone calls it, is as unique an experience as the individual who has it. Yeats hadhis other-world communicants, Coleridge his opium (the beat generation hada pharmacopoeia of drugs). The surrealists had their techniques for plumbingthe unconscious. Asian Bhuddism teaches techniques for circumventing theego in its devotees life-long pursuit of enlightenment; meditation, repetition ofa sacred sound, the memento mori humankind has a large repertory ofmeans to bring that inspirational moment into the field of conscious experienceand make it durable. Frost described that inspirational moment for him it wasinseparable from the writing of the poem as an ice cube on a hot stove ridingon its own melting. I love this image, too. But even if we take Shelley withoutreservations, I would argue that craft is the means by which the poet translateshis or her intuitional grasp into the durable facticity of shared experience, andthat this translation is, perhaps, never perfect but more or less nearly sodepending on the discipline and gifts of the poet. The relation between exist-ence and perception and perception and expression is mediated by craft without it there is neither inspiration nor poem (or painting, sculpture, aria, play,or novel). For Shelley recognises that in the aesthetic experience, the good the true and the beautiful consists in the relation between the inspiration the perception and the expression, and what is that relation but the makingof the poem?

Frederick von SchillerFrederick von Schiller in his Naive and Sentimental Poetry makes a useful

observation: civilised man, immersed in the highly refined codes of his urbansociety, looks to nature for an ideal of harmony and balance, but the naturalor primitive man, whose life reflects that ideal in his habits of living within theseasons and cycles that govern his work and rituals, can neither recognise thisideal nor live it in his own life. Consciousness of the difference (and of theseparation from nature in the artificialities of civilised life) is the key that makesthe ideal recognisable as such and gives to it its moral importance. Of course,today we would question all of Schillers assumptions the notion he held ofnature and the natural would not stand up to scrutiny in our demythologisedand materialistic age. Similarly, his notion of the primitive; and, more damagingyet, his notions of harmony and balance have fallen out of our discourse andconsequently seem quaint to us today. All the notions we hold that mightreplace those of Schillers most probably will themselves be quaint and datedto people 200 years from now. Its not the validity of his notions of nature andthe primitive per se that interest me. In the primitive man Schiller saw a direct-ness toward living and a unity between man and nature that made for a whole-ness that was not fissured by the civilised habits of deceit and concealment,of, as Eliot says in the voice of Prufrock, putting on a face to meet the facesthat we meet. Schiller saw the primitive man as undivided from himself bysocial conventions and thus as unable to play the social games of class andstatus and superiority. But his very naturalness was no credit to him on moralgrounds, since it was the product of spontaneous, unreflective life and habit.Among the civilised, this naturalness, this unity of consciousness and being,could be achieved as an ideal only by effort and at great personal cost to the


idealist in terms of social laughter and the perceived superiority of those whoperpetuate and maintain their social mastery. Such an idealist Schiller calleda naf, and he believed that the ideal was an important basis for discriminatingmoral and immoral behaviour. I regard the poet as a naf in Schillers sense,while recognising his plumbing for naturalness among natures people thevillage and rural folk who pursued their antique lives outside the influence ofthe modern cities and advanced culture as the product of the prejudices ofhis city culture. For what Schiller was defining did not require the concepts ofnature, naturalness, the primitive, and so on. He was defining what we mighthave called with the existentialists in the post-World War II period authenticity.Today, this concept is largely gone from our conversations about art and life.What is authenticity? Schiller would define it as essentially a unity of being,a condition of life in which there is no gap between desire and behaviour, inwhich the one is directly manifest in the other. Schiller would argue that thesophistication of a civilisation can be measured by the size of this gap. In late18th century urban society, the person who wore his motivations and his feel-ings on his shirtsleeves was laughed at as a simpleton; Schiller might arguethat such directness was a sign of honesty and purety of character, difficult toachieve at best, and therefore always to be honoured as the expression of amoral nature a refusal to dissemble, to complexify the direct experience oflife and thus keep intimacy with it always beyond reach. In 21st century societysuch a person, I am afraid, would still be laughed at as a social inferior, if notthought of as defective, as suffering from mental disorder. Freud has taughtus that the psychic landscape is defined by this gap between the source ofour motivations and desires, the unconscious, on the one hand, and the ego,our conscious and therefore public selves on the other. Psychic health isdetermined by the extent to which we can bring these motivations and desiresunder the control of the ego and Freud was not optimistic about the healthof 20th century man. But Schiller is talking about a different aspect of ourpsychic lives. The concept of the unconscious was unavailable to him, and hetherefore could not think in its terms. Schiller was defining what he regardedas a conscious aspect of social experience: the manipulation of appearancesfor social advantage and personal gain with all its malice towards those withwhom we compete and its thrills of success; a manipulation which everyonepractised and which therefore had to be taken into account as a calculus indetermining the meaning of peoples behaviour their aims, ambitions, inten-tions, and the like. It was the game of the will to power, which we play todayin every aspect of our lives. It was this calculus, Schiller believed, that detachedus from nature and deprived us of that direct experience of life which heregarded as the source of our moral natures. The so-called primitive man, byhis habitual and therefore unreflective immersion in nature, could not be con-scious of its moral import. He could not know the meaning of his own life. Thisnotion is, of course, nonsense, an artifact of popular thought in Schillers time,an artifact that is still with us in the turf divisions of intellectual and professionallife. The common mans judgments about art and literature, about morality, hisspiritual experiences and the metaphors he uses to represent them to himselfand others, his untutored arts and crafts, his opinions about commerce andpolitics everything and anything make up what we call the culture of the


masses, or popular culture, and as such this culture may form the matter forscientific study but itself does not enter the lists of what we consider reputablejudgment. We have our own distinctions between culture and nature, onlywe use a different vocabulary to mediate them. We fail, in a profound way, torealise that we are all common when we speak from outside the cubby-holesof our specialisations. Nevertheless, Schillers perception is a valuable one, inspite of the faulty concepts from which it springs. One of the ways in whichwe manifest the will to power is in our turf battles; our expropriation of a realmof human experience as a province for specialisation in which we alone areexperts capable of valid judgment. New turfs are also constantly being ident-ified and mapped out, from which the experience of the common man is hence-forth excluded as possessing validity. A recent case illustrates the phenom-enon: some Human Services professionals who specialise in family relationshave gotten authorities in some states to advise children in homes where childabuse is suspected to call a predetermined number if their parents attempt todiscipline them. This kind of intervention in the parent-child relationship isgrounded in the belief that the professional can know from outside the familycontext and independently of its social and emotional dynamics how to dealwith the textures of its daily life. This is the will to power with a vengeance. Asthe totality of our lives are divided and subdivided by these expropriations, weare, as Schiller detected in a different context, further and further removed fromthe natural. But used in this way, what can I possibly mean by natural? DontI have the same problem Schiller had of trying to find fundamental meaning ina wholly conventional concept? The word implies some kind of pristine statewhich every social convention somehow tears us away from, until, finally, itceases to exist or exists in such distorted form as to be unrecognisable. Thiswas Schillers view. But we know now that there never was a pristine state, astate of relatedness to nature prior to any inhibiting or behaviour-releasingnorms. Today we would have to define the word natural differently, and thisis where the poet, as Shelley conceives of him, comes to play his role in thecomplex processes of culture formation. Shelley defines the poets opennessand receptivity to life, in general, as the source of our intuitions all across thespectrum of human endeavour in the arts and sciences, in religion, in thedomains of social and political thought and experience the poet is, inShelleys bell-peeling language, the unacknowledged legislator of the world.It is the poets openness and receptivity that enables him to orient himself toour collective life experience in a meaningful way, and this orientation, as itspreads into the consciousness of the people as a whole, is a primary sourceof that feeling of being at home in the world that is what we mean to nameby the word natural; what is meaningful to us has the feel of the natural andis what we mean by the word, while what disorients and confuses, whatambushes our sense of normality in everyday life is decidedly unnatural. Thisopenness and receptivity is a state of relatedness to the world around that canonly be experienced by denying the will to power, by detaching oneself fromits currents and eddies in the people and situations one meets, upon which,when one is immersed in the routines of daily life, one is swept or idled in thepursuits of professional and social status. Thus detached, the poet becomes,as Heidegger observed, passive not inert, but, outside the lifestream, still,


able thus to observe and note, to relate, to understand, to see in the sense ofseeing through the veil of appearances that the will to power must inevitablyhang as blinders to our broader vision in order to keep us focused on theobjects that we will. This passivity is thus a wise passivity. And through it thepoet sees the world differently; he sees it in as close to a state of naturalnessas is allowed to us, being what we are.

What is meaningful to us has the feel of the naturalGravitas, that sense of seriousness of purpose that infuses our vision with

a feeling of meaningfulness. It all seems like so much circling around anunformed idea, the better to form it. But it is not mere circling. Within the contextof the good and the beautiful, that is, in the aesthetic experience, what is mean-ingful is always something concrete and particular that is charged with feeling.What is that something? We cannot know until we have it before us or untilwe are immersed in it. What is that feeling? Again, we cannot know until weexperience it. Frost assembles his Assorted characters of death and blightand, after a moments contemplation, is appalled by their implications. Theinsight follows from contact with the chance, unrepeatable, and unique particu-larities of the world around. For the poet there is no set of meanings, in themathematical sense. There is only experience. Upon reflection, one finds thatin a certain sense all experience of meaning is mystical. The word is a danger-ous one to use in this context, for it inevitably conjures up that large, over-whelming union with the one from which we have historically derived our rev-elations of the divine. I have never had and am unlikely to have such a mysticalexperience. I know no one who has had such an experience. In the literatureon the subject several things seem to stand out about it. The mystical experi-ence is always said to be beyond the power of words to describe, yet it isalmost always described as an intense feeling of awareness of both the multi-plicity and oneness of things, of life, of the universe itself. When put in langu-age, of course, the revelation is exceedingly non-revelatory. That is becausethe words themselves are not and cannot be charged with the feelings thataccompany or perhaps generate the mystical vision. When I say that in a cer-tain sense all experience of meaning is mystical, I do not mean mystical in thisoverwhelming sense, but what I mean is not unrelated to it. The mystics visionof multiplicity and oneness I believe underlies all our sense of meaningfulnessin the everyday, common world. The word meaning is itself sometimes a bar-rier to our thinking on the subject. There are many kinds of meaning, and manyways in which things mean, our experience included. An expression on a facemay mean doubt. A red sunrise may mean stormy weather for the day. Anobject of everyday life may suddenly become numinous and, by thus standingout, enable us to see relationships and connections that otherwise would havebeen invisible to us. The sudden pronouncing of our names may mean wehave just angered someone by something we have said or done. The aromawafting from the barbecue may mean steaks for supper. And so on. I am notinterested in cataloguing, but in suggesting. These types of meanings are notmade; rather, they emerge from the particular and concrete circumstances inwhich we are set and their range both defines these circumstances and issaturated with them. However, one of the characteristics of our humanness is


our ability to critically stand outside these circumstances, to abstract from themtheir separable elements, and to sort and classify, and this kind of meaningmaking carries us into a very different realm of being. Usually, when we speakof meaning, it is of this latter kind those teachable meanings that form thebases of our education, the meanings of our science and philosophy, of ourcommerce and politics our shared and public meanings. The mystics visionof multiplicity and oneness is of the former kind; it is an affective state arisingout of the concrete, unrepeatable circumstances of the here and now. This isthe realm of meaning from which our religious feelings come, and this is whythese meanings are not accessible to scientific scrutiny. I am speaking thenof meaning in the sense of those experiences that open us to the mysteriesof our own being. Such an experience that Tolstoy gives to Levin when contem-plating a blade of grass at the end of Anna Karenina. The mystery is felt as aresponse to the moment, and that feeling carries the meaning. When the poetsteps out of the lifestream, this world is suddenly illuminated. He sees it inways and with an intensity that we cannot know when we are exerting our willsin the marketplaces of daily life. Whitman directly addresses this stepping outand the effects it has on him:

I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,And you must not be abased to the other.Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even

the best,Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

The mystic also feels a pervasive presence in the multiplicity and oneness,and this presence is usually identified with the divine. The poet feels this pres-ence too, it is the presence of Being, the mystery of his own and of all life.Whitman goes on in the passage just cited to as full a description of this pres-ence as we have in our poetry:

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turnd over upon

me,And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to

my bare-stript heart,And reachd till you felt my beard, and reachd till you held my feet.Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass

all the argument of the earth,And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my

sisters and lovers,And that a kelson of the creation is love,And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heapd stones, elder, mullein and

poke-weed.


It is not just the self or the human context that is drawn into the state, but themultiplicity of being itself the insignificant with the significant, a state in whichsuch differentiation between significant and insignificant becomes meaning-less the ant and the poke-weed are also brothers and sisters and areabsorbed into that feeling of love that permeates the whole experience. Thisis the mystery of being. In the presence of it, we ordinarily become speechless.One of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, Wittgenstein, said of thismystery, Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent. And of course, forthe philosopher, this is true. But the poet speaks perhaps never perfectly,but that is his nature; and the speaking is always directed to us, wherein,through our own sensitivities to his language, we become involved. It is not sodifficult to understand this feeling, this sense of presence, of Being. The wordsimply some kind of profundity that only philosophers might care about and thathas no bearing on our lives as ordinary people. But this is not true. We allhave and know this feeling, for it is a common part of everyday life. Sometimes,for example, in the spring and fall, the combination of translucent air, theespecially bright quality of the sunlight, and the changing world around us that light golden-green of new grass and the unfolding leaves of the trees inspring, the bright yellow and orange foliage and crispness of air in fall thatmake the world around seem drenched in colour produces a sense ofstrangeness that makes us feel the presence of a rich and uttermost beautyand calmness; such moments are rare, but when we have them, even the airagainst our skin feels satiny, so that we have a heightened tactile connectionto the vision as well hence its strangeness. We see the fragments of therobins blue eggshell in the grass and we see the robin collecting insects inthe lawn and flying off to the trees and we are gripped by a feeling for the livesof robins, we become aware of them as living creatures in a way we didntattend to before. We startle a rabbit on the lawn and it makes for the evergreenbeside the garden when a grackle alights in the grass a few feet off its pathto the tree, and as it nears the grackle, the rabbit lunges at it and then resumesits original path. And we cant help but to feel that that lunge was a purelygratuitous act, a deliberate attempt to scare the grackle, and we begin towonder about the personality of that rabbit we have had a glimpse into themystery of the other, and we know it by our own feeling for what that lungemeans. Once, after an automobile accident, I carried that sense of strangenessof the world around for several days before it faded it seemed odd to me towalk on the ground, the ground seemed somehow different, ordinary thingshad a kind of luminousness that made me feel out of place. Perhaps we needto lose that feeling in order to become a part of the world we live in and be athome there. But we all have these experiences. We become aware of our ownexistence as a part of the larger life of things, and although this awarenessmakes us feel strange, it also makes us feel more natural, more akin to thelife around us. This is the mystery, we feel it, and we feel ourselves to bemysterious too, the fact that we are, that we exist. The mystic who has thebig feeling goes beyond these everyday ones, but his experience is essentiallythe same. Its of the same mystery. A good question to ask is why, as biologicalorganisms evolved through time, we have such feelings at all. Certainly, anyanswer that attempts to link them to adaptation and survival rings hollow to


us. Normally, we live in the world around unreflectively and pursue our dailyrounds in the grip of habit. We are usually awakened to the grooves that habitscores in our daily experience when we are pushed out of them by theunplanned, and when we are thus jarred loose we become highly consciousand deliberative. Schiller attributed a disruptive function of this kind to civilis-ation; he believed that the civilised mans highly self-reflexive, manipulativeexistence tore him from the at-oneness with the world around; an at-onenessthat was the normal mode of existence of the primitive. Today we know thatthe codes, norms, and conventions that govern our collective lives, whatSchiller regarded as culture, serve only to all the more immerse us in our rou-tines and that our sense of ordinariness is rooted in them. What is peculiarabout the mystics vision and the poets stepping out of the lifestream is thattheir feelings jar us from this sense of ordinariness, they waken us to a dimen-sion of life that we dont ordinarily experience. This dimension underlies all oursense of meaningfulness. What is meaningful is so to the extent that thisdimension is brought out in it. The poets openness and receptivity to thesefeelings confirm our own experience of them, and his intuitions of meaning thatderive from them are our source of understanding of the good and the beautiful,which makes us feel at home with our own strangeness and mysteriousness.

Poetry is essentially an oral mediumWhen we experience it, it should come to us as though it were part of a

conversation, a spontaneous response to something we ourselves have said,or as the beginning of a conversation, a spoken something which we, as inany social intercourse, were preparing to respond to as we listen. Obviously,this description of poetry would exclude many types of poems dramaticpoems, for example, such as My Last Duchess by Browning, and long narra-tive poems, such as Tennysons Idylls of the King. Of the three voices of poetrythat Eliot defined, the dramatic, the lyrical, and the expository, only the exposi-tory would seem to be characterised by this description the poem that isspoken in the voice of the poet directly to the reader, for the lyrical voice is,as Eliot maintained, the voice that comes from nowhere and is addressed tono one in particular. Of the dramatic voice, one could say that its essentialnature has been expropriated by both fiction and cinema. For sheer interestssake, the dramatic poem cannot equal the mimetic richness of either fiction orcinema. The lyrical voice, on the other hand, would seem to have no othermeans of expression than the poem, and to define poetry in such a way as toexclude it would seem to be self-defeating. But I think that on careful analysisone would find that the lyrical and the expository voices are essentially thesame, differing only in that the one addresses personal and private states ofmind and feeling without being situated in place and time and without regardto a conceptualised audience, and the other addresses the same but is situatedin relation to some objective incident which the reader can be expected to knowor sufficiently imagine so as to share in it as a communicant with the voicethat speaks. In either case, the voice calls upon the reader to implicate him orherself in the matter it addresses. The reader is not, as with the dramatic voice,an observer who is located outside the poem and overhears or watches theexperience of the characters. Objective incident or private experience we


have immediate access to both through our shared living and our shared nat-ures. Conceived in this way, the difference between the lyrical and expositoryvoices is so small as to vanish. And many poems seem by nature to be bothlyrical and expository. And some poems seem to defy any attempt to define,for definitions are by nature artificial. Frosts Acquainted With the Night isspoken in the lyrical voice, but the setting is so particularised and the details soconcrete that they combine to make an objective incident which is immediatelyaccessible. By contrast, Frosts Design is spoken in the expository voice heis speaking as himself directly to the reader and yet the poem turns into acry of dismay in the presence of a surreal concatenation of eerily suggestiveimages. Matthew Arnolds Dover Beach appears at first to be written in thedramatic voice, that of a man speaking to a female companion wife or lover until we realise that we necessarily play the role of that companion in the actof reading and thus are implicated as a communicant, and the poem is experi-enced as though it were written in the expository voice.

But I would argue that unless the poem implicates the reader as a communi-cant in a silent dialogue, there is no poetry. That dialogue is the experienceof the poem; it is only through our interaction with the voice that both under-standing and appreciation take place. This is the importance of voice in poetry it is the human element of the poem, what gives the subject its significance,for it is voice and voice alone that orients the reader to the subject, and it isonly through voice that this orientation acquires its various shadings of feelingand tone. Voice is not the personal, private, unique identity of the poet, it is acrafted element, an artifact, the source of a poems power and its pleasure,and is the thing within the poem that makes perception possible and expressionpoetic. The so-called poet John Smith who speaks in his poem as himself ofhis own personal and private experience is not writing poetry, is not making apoem; rather, he is self-expressing a different affair altogether, which causesone to wonder!

The poem lives in the bodyAt the beginning of these notes I said that the poem lives in the body and

manifests itself like the pulse, rising and falling more or less intensely, rapidly,as the body moves in the course of its day. This is close to saying that thepoem is self-expression. Other poets have said much the same, and unlesswe are willing to say that the poets self is different from the ordinary man, wemust make more careful distinctions in locating the origin of the poem. GalwayKinnell, a poet I admire, observed, We all use language; and at those momentswhen were really deeply affected by something, we often express ourresponse in words. When these come directly out of our feelings, whether wewrite them down and work them up into a poem that can have a public life ornot, in some way weve uttered poetry (An Interview with Galway Kinnell Mod-ern Poetry Studies XI 1982: 107). When something deeply affects us and werespond in words directly from our feelings, in some way we have utteredpoetry. This is the raw material of poetry, what presumably is shaped into thepoem if we have the opportunity and the inclination to write. This idea seemson the surface much like Shelleys description of inspiration, a chance windwhich fans the mind (or feelings) into brightness, but which passes and leaves


the mind to fade before we have the chance to write. But let me push Kinnellsdescription always a good test of an idea. Many of us experience momentswhen we are deeply affected by some event, some chance happening in theworld around us, and we respond in language that comes directly from ourfeelings. God #@*! son-of-a-*!% mother-*

+#@! is a typical expression in

language of such an event. Is the uttering of this expression in some waypoetry? No doubt Kinnell is describing his own experience as a poet, and Irespect him enough to allow that his feelings in response to the world aroundhim are intense, profound, and often deeply suffused with a mystical insight.There is something in either the nature of the experience or the quality of thefeelings aroused or both that differentiate the poetic from the crude and pro-fane this something we should search for, because it must lead us to someinsight into the nature of aesthetics what Shelley and others have called thetrue and the beautiful. The difference between Kinnells and Shelleys charac-terisation of the origin of the poem lies in this attribution of something especiallymeaningful in the pre-verbal feeling that comes as a response to some provok-ing stimulus and gives rise through its very meaningfulness to a verbalexpression. For Shelley, the inspiration is not limited to feeling. For him, it isa knowing of some sort, an uprushing into awareness of a complex of meaning,which has prophetic as well as aesthetic values, and which ennobles humandiscourse. He wrote a great ode on such a moment of inspiration, the Hymnto Intellectual Beauty. In our American tradition, however, we have the greatshadow of Emerson that lies across the path of our thinking on this matter.For Emerson, we are most directly connected to the spiritual realm of beingthrough our feelings; what he calls Nature rises in us through our pre-rational,non-conventional selves which we can come to know and trust as a source ofthe divine in our own beings by becoming transparent to the socialised, con-ditioned world of conventional life. This we can do by detaching ourselves fromthe village, the city, from Main Street, and immersing ourselves in the wilder-ness or in any nearby patch of woods. Reliance on these pre-verbal, pre-rational feelings is, for Emerson, reliance on that part of ourselves which weshare with all other life, for these are as purely natural as we are ever to know;and since nature itself cannot be other than good, these feeling are the sourceof our communing with the good. These are wonderful and powerful ideas,which to some extent still motivate our thinking today for they are groundedin an idealisation of nature which we have incorporated into our environmen-talism, our ecotourism, and in our commitment to preserve habitat and endang-ered species. Unfortunately, we have seen too much of mans baser nature inthe 20th century to believe that our feelings are separable into categories ofnatural and conditioned. Pre-rational human impulse, whim, which Emersonvalued as expressions of the nature within, are as likely to be murderous andaggressively self-serving as transcendently good and spiritual. Emerson didwarn against our lower nature, and gave due credence to the base and profanewithin, but he seems to have meant by these almost exclusively our acquisitiveand sexual natures. So what do we make of Kinnells idealisation of feelings?One may argue, first, that the poet is a person who is predisposed to therevelatory, to being susceptible to stimuli that awaken the mystical side of ournature. Some poets are, and I wouldnt hesitate to place Kinnell among them.


But not all poets are so predisposed and susceptible, and there is no guaranteethat one who is will necessarily write great or even good poetry. Some of ourgreatest poets are decidedly not of this type. Wallace Stevens is many thingsbut he is no mystic, nor is Frost, nor Williams, nor Lowell, nor Auden, norPound. Roethke is, and Eliot at times achieves a mystical vision. And, ofcourse, there is Whitman, lying on the grass, his visionary Camerado plunginghis tongue into his chest. Secondly, one may argue that be what may thepersonal vision of the poet, poetry lies ultimately in what he or she does withit, that is, in the discipline and rigours of craft, in the beauties of form andlanguage. But this way also proves unsatisfactory, for beauties of form andlanguage aside, if there were no underlying substance upon which these canwork their way, poetry would be meaningless craft, empty discipline. This wasthe wrongheaded charge that Ivor Winters made against Frost in his The Poetas Spiritual Drifter. In contemporary parlance, the poet is seen as irrelevantand his craft as merely one moment in an intertextual history of the mediumthat has its own life quite apart from the individual poet who takes it up. Wehave stopped thinking on the subject.The poem is a response of the whole being of the poet

But my first note continues: the poem is a response of the whole being ofthe poet, keeping the rhythms of his life responsive to his needs. And in thisI think the real truth about the origin of the poem lies. Our emotional responseto the world around us is as serendipitous as the chance events of every day.Any event is as likely to arouse negative as positive feelings, some eventsbring out the worst in us, some few bring out the best. We are connected tothese events, that is, to the world, by our natural and unnatural desires, ourfears, lusts, wants and needs, as well as by our more beneficent feelings andwill to do good, our curiosity, and our habits of avoidance and involvement.What we are as a totality of being, we must remember, for those of us whoare poets, includes being a poet, and that necessarily involves our taking adifferent slant on our serendipitous, chance interactions with the world, for weuse ourselves as instruments of feeling to make poems, we use our totalselves, to assess and evaluate experience, to discriminate what is useful forour way of seeing in the poem from what is not useful, what can be spokenand what not, what is worthwhile speaking and what not. Thus, the poetic voicethat speaks for us in the poem is an identity of our own making which, as aspecial kind of consciousness, is ceaselessly working to integrate our privatewith our aesthetic selves the private being the source of material, the aes-thetic being the rarefying vision that makes a whole of our lives.

Even though our lives are never made whole by anything we think or do,and may be characterised more accurately as disorganised, undisciplined, con-stantly led astray, over-emotional or under-developed, or both, and that we areoften seekers after truths that do not exist and which we probably wouldntrecognise if they did, even though no nirvana ever comes, and no inkling ofwhat such a state would be like is ever convincing, we are nevertheless, aspoets, drawing things together, binding life to language, and in our sayingfinding satisfaction, for the saying is, if it is said right, a truth after all and athing through which we come to experience the beautiful.

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Meditation on Poetry and Culture