Binding Life to Language: Meditations on

Poetry and Culture

Joseph M. Ditta
English Department, Dakota Wesleyan University, Mitchell, USA

Introduction
Many 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 the
poems, stories, and novels we read, they do not care about them. They read
in order to get a grade. This is not so for my creative writing students. They
care. In spite of the battles we have over what is and what is not a poem or
a story, they are vitally interested.
Two types of students take my Creative Writing classes; the one type consists of aspiring writers, the other of those preparing to be high school English
teachers. There is a third, but they are not numerous. These last are mainly
the curious, who take the class out of some vague notion of the need for
personal cultivation. Some of these are art majors, others business majors, a
few hale from the sciences; some of these show talent but little understanding
of and passion for the aesthetic issues and the transformations of the self that
the discipline of writing demands.
As a teacher of Creative Writing mostly poetry I face the challenge of
separating students from the idea that self-expression is the primary value
and ultimate goal of writing, and the challenge of instilling in the place of
this notion a respect for craft and an awareness of the self as a tool, an instrument for engaging the world, and that this engagement is the primary value
and ultimate goal of writing. How to use the self as a tool is what the creative
writing class is all about, I inform them. The first general rebellion in the class
takes place in response to this issue.
Once craft enters the picture, I also face a kind of obstinacy of refusal. Craft
forces them out of their usage habits, and writing becomes more deliberate
and disciplined than they are used to. From their perspective, nothing more
retards their progress and diminishes their pleasure than having to learn craft.
By craft, I mean what we normally understand: the inherited prosody of Western Civilization, not only the metrics and stanzaics of traditional forms like
blank verse, the sonnet, the ballad, and the villanelle, but also the appropriate
occasions of their use. Almost all our aesthetic argumentation takes place in
regard to these two issues: the goal of writing and the role of craft in achieving
that goal.
I settle the matter of diverse cultural origins, which always comes up as a
defense of their refusal, by insisting that:

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(1) Students are welcome to explore the prosodic traditions of their ancestor
culture 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 of
how they may modify or alter them in later years.
I have never believed that the teacher in the Creative Writing class should
let his or her students write whatever they wished, however they wished. I
also have never believed that it is the purpose of the teacher to put the student
in 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. Imagination apart from an object is meaningless; if the object is the self, the
expression that follows is merely that, expression. The student might as well
keep a diary and quit the class. I try to make the class understand that
expression needs justification, and that the fact that they feel it is not in
itself sufficient justification for the writing. Until what they feel also involves
the 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 among
them of something alien to what they understand poetry to be. Because they
are passionate about these matters, it is helpful to begin each class with a
discussion of certain definitions: What is poetry? What is the role of craft in
writing poetry? What is a poet? What is art? And with a discussion of certain
questions: Does beauty matter? How does a poem mean? What do we mean
by mean? Does a poet make meaning or does he find meanings that already
exist 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 the
world need its poets?
The essay that follows is a collection of meditations on these definitions and
questions. It represents my take on them and what I try to pass on to my
students, though in the pressure-cooker of the classroom, discussion is never
neat and orderly and much never gets said. The essay is organised in paragraph units, each unit dedicated to the exploration of one definition or question. It may seem, as one reads, that the units take up issues haphazardly, in
no particular order, and that some issues are only tangentially related to
poetry. But there is an order and everything relates. Partly, the order arises
from the natural progression of our classroom discussions, but also the order
is cumulative, progressing from the more basic to the more complex, with
earlier units informing later ones.
One cannot stress enough the fact that no pedagogy in the poetry writing
class can succeed if it is not grounded in an aesthetic that offers a vision of
the whatness and whereforeness of the art. This vision will (and should) form
the basis of everything one does in the classroom, from the fashioning of
assignments to the criteria of success in assessing them. Before one argues
with the definitions that follow and with the discussions of the issues as they
arise, I would ask the reader to finish the essay. I believe the whole is complete
and sound, so that removing or altering one stone may well cause the edifice
to collapse. Afterwards, if difference of vision about the whatness and where-

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foreness of poetry should prompt the creative writing teacher to raise ones
own questions and think them through to ones own conclusions, then I would
regard this effort as successful.
Correspondence
Any correspondence should be directed to Joseph M. Ditta, English
Department, Dakota Wesleyan University, Mitchell, SD 57301, USA
(JoDitta@dwu.edu).

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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 more
or less intensely, rapidly, as the body moves in the course of its day the
heart beats in response to the demands made on it, beats hard and speeds
up, relaxes and slows down. These rhythms keep the body stable. So with the
poem the poem is a response of the whole being of the poet, keeping the
rhythms of his life responsive to his needs.
The poetic medium
This is especially suited to penetrating the opaquenesses of personal, private
experience, connecting that experience to other, larger realms of human knowing 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 knows
it or not; and we are affected by it, as human beings, whether we intend to be
or not. (T.S. Eliot, Religion and Literature)
What is happening to literature
What is happening in literature has been happening to culture and to the
structures 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 be
free and is offered as self expression. And there is well crafted verse. By free
what is meant is a form that takes its direction from meaning growing more or
less organically from the unanticipated direction of the thought as it unfolds. Free
means no attempt is made to predetermine meaning, to channel it into rhythms,
lines, stanzas whose forms are extrinsic to the unfolding thought and feeling the
poem is realising in the act of composition. This meaning of free is not free in
the sense that so much poetry is written today. This type of freedom demands
the 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 poetry
like metrical regularity, repeating stanzas, figurative language with its identifying phrasal structures (like the heroic simile or the zeugma), rhyme, rhythm,
with all their subtle interactions and nuances are in some negative way artificial. Genuineness and sincerity are somehow compromised by these old
prosodic conventions, which are left now to old ladies at their local poetry
societies and to scribblers of religious verse. As though genuineness and sincerity are natural opposites of artificiality. They are not. Genuineness and sincerity are the products of discipline and are never better displayed than in
mastery of craft. Give me a well turned couplet and keep your self-expression.

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Free verse and ethnic experience

A formula for every kind of indulgence. Free verse as it has come to be
practised today requires no emotional discipline and no craft; ethnic experience
as subject requires no imagination or thought but relies on long-ingrained habits of perception. Thus anyone who wishes may be a poet; everyone who writes
is one. We live in an age afflicted with banality. Personal memory! The problem
here is that ethnic experience is nothing more than conditioned experience
given an undeserved interest by the word ethnic.
To rise above banality
The writer must have two traits that all poets share; first, gravitas a seriousness of purpose that puts the reader immediately into the presence of ultimates. By ultimates I dont mean profundities of metaphysical or theological
speculation, but feelings, thoughts, experiences, images, figures of all kinds
that are felt as meaningful in a way that compels the reader to a serious contemplation 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 that
the 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 the
anonymous mass of poets writing at any given time. A poet may project any
type of mood humorous, satirical, lyrical, passionate, religious, meditative,
contemplative, active, folksy, or in any particular volume score all of these
across his or her lines Frost is many of these, and he is always identifiably
Frost. Gravitas and voice. Purpose and craft. Meaning and form. We all know
what these are. What they mean.
The poet
The 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 intellectual
and political life of the country its conflicts, movements, ideologies, alignments and associations, or activity of some exceptional kind in the social
domain of everyday life; we mean travel, exposure to other cultures, to the
arts, to a broad range of people, and so on. A poets most important experience
is 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. The
poets gift is peculiarly that he or she can universalise this local and private
experience and through it as through a lens help us to view cultural and social
concerns that form the climate of our times the poet sees through the obfuscations and opaquenesses that block awareness and limit our lives.
A poem is not a treatise
Too 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 identical with the language of discourse. This points up the fact that we are losing
or have already lost understanding of what poetry is, how to read it, to experience it, to live with it. For one thing, craft is what makes the difference between
poetry and discourse. Where there is no craft there is no art, where there is

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no art there is no difference. Thus much of what is written today is grist for
the critical mill, and poetry recedes ever further into a lost past. When poetry
becomes entirely heritage, it will be as eclipsed as Greek sculpture.
Nature is an expression of a particular culture
The 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 current
mechanistic and materialistic view of nature as a product of blind physical and
chemical processes are all expressions of the world-view of the cultures that
hold such ideas. Teihard de Chardin, priest, theologian, anthropologist, one of
the discoverers of Homo Erectus, conceived of nature as a kind of spiritual
force that had direction and purpose; contrasting paleontological remains with
present-day species, he saw in nature an evolutionary teleology that worked
towards the production of higher forms. He believed that the advent of consciousness and self-consciousness in humanity were stages in the process of
this teleology, and that we could, on the basis of this understanding of the
meaning of our self-consciousness, reconcile a materialistic science with religion. But his thinking has had no impact on our world-view, beyond its popularity for a while with a non-scientific readership. Why is this not surprising? A
world-view cannot be changed by an individual, since it is the product of so
many intersecting forces at work in a culture scientific, economic, social,
technological that no one person or even group of people can alter it in
any significant way. Change, when it comes, comes as a slow and cumulative
transformation of assumptions and premises, no one of which is recognised
as change when it occurs. On the other hand, no culture makes a complete
break with its own past, with its heritage. The past persists as a kind of bedrock
upon which new cultural formations are erected a bedrock that has indeed
many layers, very much as one finds in an archeological dig so that at any
given time in a culture, world-views overlap; thus Christianity persists, still very
much as a foundation force, in our contemporary world, in spite of the fact that
our 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-century
materialistic science is deadening to the spirit of mankind and is certainly not
the last word in our conception of nature. There is no going back. There is
only new vision. The project of poetry is to explore, to bring to the contemporary
menu of human possibilities direct that is, aesthetic, sensual contact with
alternative world-views. Today one poem, tomorrow two. Until a chorus of
voices sing in unison.
For myself
I ask the biologists question: what is the adaptational value the value for
survival of a particular behaviour for a species? This is how scientists understand the meaning of animal behaviour an animals expenditure of energy
must be accounted for on the basis of that expenditures contribution to some
long-term survival strategy. Thus they look for a purely mechanistic answer to
the question of why a certain species evolves certain behavioural characteristics mating rituals, herding, migration, the singing of birds, dominance hier-

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archies, social behaviours of all sorts like grooming, cooperative rearing of

young, etc. What about human love? The feelings associated with love are
chemically traceable to the effects of a particular enzyme released in the body
in 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 about
are interpreted as secondary (that is, variable) effects of the procreative drive,
the object of which is to deposit ones genes into the next generation. Thus
an environmental stimulus produces a chemical reaction inducing behaviours
(these are variable in that they are culturally determined) that lead to procreation this is the mechanism in biological terms that explains the meaning
of love. But no one who has ever experienced love could ever be satisfied by
such a mechanical analysis what the scientist dismisses as secondary effects
constitutes all our interest at the conscious level. The scientist would respond
by saying that the so-called deeper meanings upon which we construct our
myths and our images of human worth are illusions, perhaps necessary, but
illusions nevertheless, since cultures vary dramatically regarding how they
interpret the meaning of love, as do individuals within a culture, and, furthermore, 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 is
caused by partial apprehension? By an emphasis at one time by one people
on one aspect of a complex of meaning, and at another time by another people
on some other aspect? Why must we emphasise a materialistic basis and
mechanical cause-effect answer to the question of human love? It seems we
emphasise such an answer because that vision is the world-view of our present
moment. Mechanistic answers to the puzzles of human behaviour, however,
are more and more unsatisfactory the further removed we become from physiology and chemistry. Why do we write poetry? What is the adaptational value
of metrical language and rhyme? The energy it takes to write a satisfying
second line of a couplet can sometimes be painfully sapping. Why do we have
an aesthetic sensibility at all? Is the skyscraper merely an extension of the
cave? Why do we study astronomy? Why do we want to know the answers to
these questions? Why are we driven, often against our better judgments, frequently against the collective wisdom of our village, to find meaning in our
lives?
Why does a particular art form rise into prominence for a while and
then die away?
Leaving behind its products for a society that no longer knows how to
respond 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 talking
about poems with traditional and non-traditional students alike, I find that they
come to the experience with an expectation that they are unable to read and
construe, to make meaning out of poetic strategies, even to grasp the poets
tone of voice. This expectation is not a product of failed teaching. It is a product
of the perception among them that poetry is not written for them and therefore
doesnt connect with their lives. For them the poem has lost its aura of meaningfulness, and they view it much as they view a math problem something
that they must learn how to decipher. Once deciphered it is quickly forgotten.

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Because the meaning got from the activity is so intimately connected to the
poems formal properties, and because these properties have never been in
use among them as ways of making meaning, they find no value in poems
for their lives beyond the classroom. Much the same is true for painting and
sculpture. 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 civilisation
today know how to relate themselves to the male and female nude that dominated Greek sculpture? The free-standing larger-than-life nude only puzzles
us as we walk around it, because we do not carry in our sense of life the
complex religious and social assumptions and aesthetic conventions that such
a figure addresses in its three-dimensional immediacy and thereness. We view
the nude only from our perspective which sees in it something monumental
that we fail to grasp, and sees in it exposure, which embarrasses us, in spite
of our familiarity with nudity through the contemporary media. For us nudity
has no meaning other than the sexual, and as a consequence we do not see
the Greek statue, we see ourselves. The same is true for the arts that gave
us the great cathedrals we have lost the culture world from which and about
which these arts spoke and these cathedrals remain for us today merely monuments. They inspire wonder and perhaps awe, but they do not communicate
anything intimate to the daily round of our lives. The religious and aesthetic
world-view these cathedrals express may be learned by historical study in the
college classroom, but they no longer communicate anything vital to our sense
of life and hence no longer energise our emotions and imaginations. Painting
and sculpture today, however varied their techniques, materials, and subject
matter, have lost their communicative vitality because people dont go to them
anymore for the unique kinds of aesthetic satisfaction they offer. This doesnt
mean that these artists have ceased to produce. It does mean that what they
produce no longer defines for us the images we look to for our personal and
collective revelations. Images that have these resonances for us are now controlled by the mass media for the purposes of commerce. Must I then accept
this fact that poetry, like the Greek nude and the great cathedral, is no longer
relevant to our lives and times? I answer no, and for two reasons: first, writing
poems is still for the poet, like painting and sculpture for those artists, a vital
way to discover and make meaning the excitement doesnt diminish, the
satisfaction doesnt pale, even if no one reads the poems; secondly, the poem
is and will always be a form of talk, however much in the present moment we
associate the poem with print; talking will not pass out of the culture world.
The mass media with their emphases on information and entertainment have
eclipsed talking as a form of meditation and as an aesthetic experience. But I
am convinced that this is only a temporary condition and that poetry, the most
direct and intimate of all our arts, will become again and remain a vital aesthetic
medium however our culture evolves.
Their [the poets] language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks
the before unapprehended relations of things, and perpetuates their
apprehension, until the words which represent them, become through
time signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral
thoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the

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associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead

to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse. (Shelley, A Defense
of Poetry)
We know now that language is perpetually renewed by the changing conditions of society and by each generations drive to establish its own style of
usage, and that these phenomena continually produce abundance of metaphorical expressions as well as neologisms, and that these renewals and creative usages, furthermore, take place in the common speech of the people.
Nevertheless, there is some truth in what Shelley says about the relation of
poetry to language. He is not talking about language per se so much as how
language is used as a medium of perception, how poetic language marks the
before unapprehended relations of things. It is this apprehension that constitutes the importance and value of poetry for culture. If no new poets arise to
create new perceptions and thus enrich our consciousness with new ways of
seeing, will language then be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse? What are the nobler purposes Shelley refers to? The poet, he argues,
apprehends the true and the beautiful in the relation between existence and
perception on the one hand and between perception and expression on the
other. And further, he argues, the poet draws into a certain propinquity with
the true and the beautiful an apprehension of the agencies of the invisible
world which is called religion. By religion Shelley doesnt mean the conventional institutional religions of a particular culture, but those spiritual insights
and intuitions from which spring the creative identity of a people. For the poet
beholds not only the present as it is, but also the future that is contained within
it, beholds not as a prophet but uniquely as a poet that is, in his shaping of
language (and here Shelley means specifically metrical language), he rises out
of the quotidian into a world of eternal verities accessible only through language
itself, because language gives us the most direct representation of the actions
and 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 systematically debunked and demystified the concept of the spiritual, denying the existence of truth except as a specific relation in a specific context in a particular
moment, and relegating the beautiful to individual taste (and thereby depriving
it of social value), so that the concept of universals is narrowed exclusively to
the mechanistic laws of science? Try as I may, I cannot find, either in my
personal life (as a private citizen, husband and father, son and brother, member
of a community) or in my professional life, any concepts of the beautiful that
are intended to be anything more than personal preference; we have no cultural
consensus concerning the beautiful and have no delineated principles by which
it may be conceived, crafted, or judged. The beautiful is no longer a category
of thought among literary critics, and we are not taught to distinguish the beautiful in any level of our educational system. The nobler purposes of human intercourse, as Shelley thought of them, have withdrawn from our culture as a vital
part of its creative thought. The relation between existence and perception and
between perception and expression is now governed by our scientific worldview and by utility grammatical correctness and efficient use of a particular

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fields technical jargon, which often serves to confine a discourse to initiates.

Are truth and beauty as Shelley understood them concepts with real value to
any society that might hold them, or are they merely the dead conventions of
a bygone era with no usefulness for the spiritual, aesthetic, and psychological
health of our 21st century information-oriented culture? My first impulse is to
note that these concepts, especially the beautiful, may well be dependent upon
a caste-organised society, for only in such can an ideal of beauty have both
an origin and a culture-wide force. And the very words ideal of beauty inevitably carry me back to the iconography of Mary, so that it seems the beautiful
may also require a religious connotation for it to have an impact across castes.
Can a democratic society, profoundly technology oriented, increasingly multicultural, ever be motivated by a shared ideal of the beautiful? Doesnt the concept require for its very existence a hierarchically ordered, homogeneous
society? Wouldnt the impact of such an ideal tend to order and unify a people
who are culturally disparate, and thus be even more unlikely in a society that
has been learning to cultivate and appreciate its differences? We cannot deny
a social component to the concept of the beautiful, a certain relativity grounded
in economic status and ethnic origin. But it is a question whether this social
component is everything; whether there isnt also something transcendent and
non-contingent in the beautiful, something worth searching for. Our sense of
product design in the goods and wares of the marketplace is highly refined.
Our textiles are more handsomely textured and coloured and are available in
a greater variety of materials than ever before. Our architecture ranges from
awesomely monumental to standardised, but is often also unique, pleasing,
human-scaled, and functional. At least in the United States, our everyday
material environment has never been more attractive to the senses. And yet
none of these products of the principles of design enter into what we mean
when we speak of the beautiful for when we use this term, we mean to name
an elevated feeling that occurs in us in response to a made object, an internal,
emotional experience that emerges from the contingencies of the object itself
and connects us to it. The beautiful is an affective relation to the object that
provokes the feeling. And is it too much to say that this affective relation has
also become rare in our world? In spite of the attractiveness of our material
environment, who can argue with the reiterated complaint that our culture has
become increasingly vulgar, profane, violent, and, in many ways, especially
those involving our communal behaviours, ugly? We dont seem to be a people
any longer predisposed to the emotion.
The functions of the poetical faculty are two-fold; by one it creates
new materials of knowledge, and power and pleasure; by the other it
engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according
to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the
good. (Shelley, A Defense of Poetry)
I will not say with Shelley that poetry is the centre and circumference of
knowledge. Nor will I, without some qualifications, say with him that poetry
creates new materials of knowledge. Perhaps it is no longer possible to use
the word knowledge as Shelley used it. On the one hand, the positivism of the
20th century has limited the words meaning too much and confined it to too

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narrow a range of human endeavour, and on the other our obsessions with
information and facts can only give rise to the worst confusions in Shelleys
statements. The poet sees a likeness between two things perhaps he is
driving at night on the prairie and a barnyard light off in the distance shines
for him, as it does for many people, as a statement of mans isolation and
solitude, of self-reliance and independence, but out of the perception arises a
living feeling, a new sensation, of the interconnectedness and importance of
certain emotions loneliness and self-sufficiency which then begins to manifest itself in the concrete situation of a poem whose words begin to acquire
resonances that they didnt have before. In writing the poem the poet now
makes meanings that did not exist in that connection before. These meanings
are what I take Shelley to mean by knowledge. In this sense, the poet is the
centre and circumference of knowledge, for only he makes such meanings.
What differentiates the poet from other perceivers for the perception itself is
available 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 pleasure (there is much to contemplate in these words); and it drives the poet to
reproduce and arrange his perceptions according to a certain rhythm and order
which may be called the beautiful and the good. By rhythm and order Shelley
doesnt mean exclusively the conventional poetic forms, though he does say
that 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 sake
invention is desirable. Its the two-foldedness that matters some people perceive the likenesses but do not make the poems; many people make poems
but lack the power of perception that carries into the poem and gives it its
force and gives us the pleasure of the beautiful and the good.
The passage from intuition to reflection, from knowledge of the real
to expression of that knowledge in viable form is always precarious and
difficult. It is, in short, a kind of translation, not from one language into
another, but from one state of existence into another, from the receptive
into the creative, from the purely sensuous impression into the purely
reflective and critical act. (Joyce Cary, Art and Reality)
Here novelist Cary advances Shelleys argument a step further. Shelley
believed that the poet apprehends the true and the beautiful in the relation
between existence and perception and perception and expression. This apprehension of the true and the beautiful is the poets intuition. Cary calls the perception itself intuition. But what he adds is an awareness that the passage
from perception to expression involves a change of state in the perceiver, a
change from receptivity to reflectivity. What is it that enables the artist to
accomplish this change? I think Shelley and Cary would both agree that what
enables this translation is craft. Craft is the instrument of reflection for the
poet, just as it is for the painter and the sculptor. The poet tries a line, an
image, a figure is unsatisfied and tries again. He doesnt know what the right
language and form are, he only knows that what he writes is not right. When
the line comes in, it leads unexpectedly to another, and these two then to yet
another, and thus begins a process of reflection by which the original intuition

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is transformed into an artifact. The experiential states of receptivity and

reflectivity are both grounded in the intuition and are complementary in that
each needs the other in order to be what it is. And it is craft that engenders
both, for without the craft there could be no reflectivity, and without this there
would be no readiness for the receptive state to bring it into existence. Most
people most of the time perceive according to the conventional patterns of their
social world, because these conventions most of the time thoroughly serve
their needs and purposes. That is, after all, one of the major benefits of social
existence as individuals we do not have to rely on our individual abilities to
interpret the world around us, much of that is done for us and conditioned into
us by our society.
A man cannot say, I will compose poetry. The greatest poet even
cannot say it: for the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some
invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness: this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades
and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures
are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict
the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is
already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been
communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original
conception of the poet. (Shelley, A Defense of Poetry)
The inspiration lights the mind and after its impression has been made it
fades, and the poet writes either from within the waning, if he is lucky, or from
the lingering effects of the impression that last a good deal longer, perhaps
permanently. This passage by Shelley is famous as one of the great insights
into the creative act. I love the phrasing: the mind in creation is as a fading coal
which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory
brightness. To pursue his metaphor a bit, I almost feel the theme of Wordsworths Intimations ode: the mind shines brightest during the period of uninhibited childhood, and as it is subjected to the mores and restrictions of civilised
society, shades of the prison house close it in, until it fades altogether into the
light of common day. But it remains a crusted ember to be awakened from
time to time by the breezes of inspiration. As much as I admire Shelley and
am moved by Wordworths sonorous language and deeply nostalgic feeling, I
dont agree with this picture of poetic inspiration. I dont deny the fact of inspiration, or Shelleys beautiful description of the relation between the flash and
the resulting poem. But this is not all there is. Inspiration, if it is thought of in
terms of the metaphor of light, becomes something that waxes and wanes in
brilliance that has an illuminatory nature. Shelleys image of the ember a
burning that is concealed by the white ash of the surface, is a beautiful image
of the unconscious mind, the source of the sudden uprushings of awareness
that probably did blind him by their intensity. But there are at least two other
metaphors that enable us to conceive this fact of our creative experience very
differently. There is the voice that cries in the darkness or whispers as in a
dream (Socrates had such a voice, as did St. Augustine); and there is the
companion whose presence infuses one with a sense of meaning (didnt St.

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Paul have such a companion and Dante?); inspiration, revelation, whatever

one calls it, is as unique an experience as the individual who has it. Yeats had
his other-world communicants, Coleridge his opium (the beat generation had
a pharmacopoeia of drugs). The surrealists had their techniques for plumbing
the unconscious. Asian Bhuddism teaches techniques for circumventing the
ego in its devotees life-long pursuit of enlightenment; meditation, repetition of
a sacred sound, the memento mori humankind has a large repertory of
means to bring that inspirational moment into the field of conscious experience
and make it durable. Frost described that inspirational moment for him it was
inseparable from the writing of the poem as an ice cube on a hot stove riding
on its own melting. I love this image, too. But even if we take Shelley without
reservations, I would argue that craft is the means by which the poet translates
his or her intuitional grasp into the durable facticity of shared experience, and
that this translation is, perhaps, never perfect but more or less nearly so
depending on the discipline and gifts of the poet. The relation between existence 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 making
of the poem?
Frederick von Schiller
Frederick von Schiller in his Naive and Sentimental Poetry makes a useful
observation: civilised man, immersed in the highly refined codes of his urban
society, looks to nature for an ideal of harmony and balance, but the natural
or primitive man, whose life reflects that ideal in his habits of living within the
seasons and cycles that govern his work and rituals, can neither recognise this
ideal nor live it in his own life. Consciousness of the difference (and of the
separation from nature in the artificialities of civilised life) is the key that makes
the 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 of
nature and the natural would not stand up to scrutiny in our demythologised
and materialistic age. Similarly, his notion of the primitive; and, more damaging
yet, his notions of harmony and balance have fallen out of our discourse and
consequently seem quaint to us today. All the notions we hold that might
replace those of Schillers most probably will themselves be quaint and dated
to people 200 years from now. Its not the validity of his notions of nature and
the primitive per se that interest me. In the primitive man Schiller saw a directness toward living and a unity between man and nature that made for a wholeness 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 faces
that we meet. Schiller saw the primitive man as undivided from himself by
social conventions and thus as unable to play the social games of class and
status and superiority. But his very naturalness was no credit to him on moral
grounds, 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

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idealist in terms of social laughter and the perceived superiority of those who
perpetuate and maintain their social mastery. Such an idealist Schiller called
a naf, and he believed that the ideal was an important basis for discriminating
moral and immoral behaviour. I regard the poet as a naf in Schillers sense,
while recognising his plumbing for naturalness among natures people the
village and rural folk who pursued their antique lives outside the influence of
the modern cities and advanced culture as the product of the prejudices of
his city culture. For what Schiller was defining did not require the concepts of
nature, naturalness, the primitive, and so on. He was defining what we might
have 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, in
which the one is directly manifest in the other. Schiller would argue that the
sophistication of a civilisation can be measured by the size of this gap. In late
18th century urban society, the person who wore his motivations and his feelings on his shirtsleeves was laughed at as a simpleton; Schiller might argue
that such directness was a sign of honesty and purety of character, difficult to
achieve at best, and therefore always to be honoured as the expression of a
moral nature a refusal to dissemble, to complexify the direct experience of
life and thus keep intimacy with it always beyond reach. In 21st century society
such a person, I am afraid, would still be laughed at as a social inferior, if not
thought of as defective, as suffering from mental disorder. Freud has taught
us that the psychic landscape is defined by this gap between the source of
our motivations and desires, the unconscious, on the one hand, and the ego,
our conscious and therefore public selves on the other. Psychic health is
determined by the extent to which we can bring these motivations and desires
under the control of the ego and Freud was not optimistic about the health
of 20th century man. But Schiller is talking about a different aspect of our
psychic lives. The concept of the unconscious was unavailable to him, and he
therefore could not think in its terms. Schiller was defining what he regarded
as a conscious aspect of social experience: the manipulation of appearances
for social advantage and personal gain with all its malice towards those with
whom we compete and its thrills of success; a manipulation which everyone
practised and which therefore had to be taken into account as a calculus in
determining the meaning of peoples behaviour their aims, ambitions, intentions, and the like. It was the game of the will to power, which we play today
in every aspect of our lives. It was this calculus, Schiller believed, that detached
us from nature and deprived us of that direct experience of life which he
regarded as the source of our moral natures. The so-called primitive man, by
his habitual and therefore unreflective immersion in nature, could not be conscious of its moral import. He could not know the meaning of his own life. This
notion 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 professional
life. The common mans judgments about art and literature, about morality, his
spiritual experiences and the metaphors he uses to represent them to himself
and others, his untutored arts and crafts, his opinions about commerce and
politics everything and anything make up what we call the culture of the

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masses, or popular culture, and as such this culture may form the matter for
scientific study but itself does not enter the lists of what we consider reputable
judgment. We have our own distinctions between culture and nature, only
we use a different vocabulary to mediate them. We fail, in a profound way, to
realise that we are all common when we speak from outside the cubby-holes
of our specialisations. Nevertheless, Schillers perception is a valuable one, in
spite of the faulty concepts from which it springs. One of the ways in which
we manifest the will to power is in our turf battles; our expropriation of a realm
of human experience as a province for specialisation in which we alone are
experts capable of valid judgment. New turfs are also constantly being identified and mapped out, from which the experience of the common man is henceforth excluded as possessing validity. A recent case illustrates the phenomenon: some Human Services professionals who specialise in family relations
have gotten authorities in some states to advise children in homes where child
abuse is suspected to call a predetermined number if their parents attempt to
discipline them. This kind of intervention in the parent-child relationship is
grounded in the belief that the professional can know from outside the family
context and independently of its social and emotional dynamics how to deal
with the textures of its daily life. This is the will to power with a vengeance. As
the totality of our lives are divided and subdivided by these expropriations, we
are, as Schiller detected in a different context, further and further removed from
the natural. But used in this way, what can I possibly mean by natural? Dont
I have the same problem Schiller had of trying to find fundamental meaning in
a wholly conventional concept? The word implies some kind of pristine state
which every social convention somehow tears us away from, until, finally, it
ceases to exist or exists in such distorted form as to be unrecognisable. This
was Schillers view. But we know now that there never was a pristine state, a
state of relatedness to nature prior to any inhibiting or behaviour-releasing
norms. Today we would have to define the word natural differently, and this
is where the poet, as Shelley conceives of him, comes to play his role in the
complex processes of culture formation. Shelley defines the poets openness
and receptivity to life, in general, as the source of our intuitions all across the
spectrum of human endeavour in the arts and sciences, in religion, in the
domains of social and political thought and experience the poet is, in
Shelleys bell-peeling language, the unacknowledged legislator of the world.
It is the poets openness and receptivity that enables him to orient himself to
our collective life experience in a meaningful way, and this orientation, as it
spreads into the consciousness of the people as a whole, is a primary source
of that feeling of being at home in the world that is what we mean to name
by the word natural; what is meaningful to us has the feel of the natural and
is what we mean by the word, while what disorients and confuses, what
ambushes our sense of normality in everyday life is decidedly unnatural. This
openness and receptivity is a state of relatedness to the world around that can
only be experienced by denying the will to power, by detaching oneself from
its 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 the
pursuits of professional and social status. Thus detached, the poet becomes,
as Heidegger observed, passive not inert, but, outside the lifestream, still,

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able thus to observe and note, to relate, to understand, to see in the sense of
seeing through the veil of appearances that the will to power must inevitably
hang as blinders to our broader vision in order to keep us focused on the
objects that we will. This passivity is thus a wise passivity. And through it the
poet sees the world differently; he sees it in as close to a state of naturalness
as is allowed to us, being what we are.
What is meaningful to us has the feel of the natural
Gravitas, that sense of seriousness of purpose that infuses our vision with
a feeling of meaningfulness. It all seems like so much circling around an
unformed idea, the better to form it. But it is not mere circling. Within the context
of the good and the beautiful, that is, in the aesthetic experience, what is meaningful 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 until
we are immersed in it. What is that feeling? Again, we cannot know until we
experience it. Frost assembles his Assorted characters of death and blight
and, after a moments contemplation, is appalled by their implications. The
insight follows from contact with the chance, unrepeatable, and unique particularities of the world around. For the poet there is no set of meanings, in the
mathematical sense. There is only experience. Upon reflection, one finds that
in a certain sense all experience of meaning is mystical. The word is a dangerous one to use in this context, for it inevitably conjures up that large, overwhelming union with the one from which we have historically derived our revelations of the divine. I have never had and am unlikely to have such a mystical
experience. I know no one who has had such an experience. In the literature
on the subject several things seem to stand out about it. The mystical experience is always said to be beyond the power of words to describe, yet it is
almost always described as an intense feeling of awareness of both the multiplicity and oneness of things, of life, of the universe itself. When put in language, of course, the revelation is exceedingly non-revelatory. That is because
the words themselves are not and cannot be charged with the feelings that
accompany or perhaps generate the mystical vision. When I say that in a certain sense all experience of meaning is mystical, I do not mean mystical in this
overwhelming sense, but what I mean is not unrelated to it. The mystics vision
of multiplicity and oneness I believe underlies all our sense of meaningfulness
in the everyday, common world. The word meaning is itself sometimes a barrier to our thinking on the subject. There are many kinds of meaning, and many
ways in which things mean, our experience included. An expression on a face
may mean doubt. A red sunrise may mean stormy weather for the day. An
object of everyday life may suddenly become numinous and, by thus standing
out, enable us to see relationships and connections that otherwise would have
been invisible to us. The sudden pronouncing of our names may mean we
have just angered someone by something we have said or done. The aroma
wafting from the barbecue may mean steaks for supper. And so on. I am not
interested in cataloguing, but in suggesting. These types of meanings are not
made; rather, they emerge from the particular and concrete circumstances in
which we are set and their range both defines these circumstances and is
saturated with them. However, one of the characteristics of our humanness is

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our ability to critically stand outside these circumstances, to abstract from them
their separable elements, and to sort and classify, and this kind of meaning
making carries us into a very different realm of being. Usually, when we speak
of meaning, it is of this latter kind those teachable meanings that form the
bases of our education, the meanings of our science and philosophy, of our
commerce and politics our shared and public meanings. The mystics vision
of multiplicity and oneness is of the former kind; it is an affective state arising
out of the concrete, unrepeatable circumstances of the here and now. This is
the realm of meaning from which our religious feelings come, and this is why
these meanings are not accessible to scientific scrutiny. I am speaking then
of meaning in the sense of those experiences that open us to the mysteries
of our own being. Such an experience that Tolstoy gives to Levin when contemplating a blade of grass at the end of Anna Karenina. The mystery is felt as a
response to the moment, and that feeling carries the meaning. When the poet
steps out of the lifestream, this world is suddenly illuminated. He sees it in
ways and with an intensity that we cannot know when we are exerting our wills
in the marketplaces of daily life. Whitman directly addresses this stepping out
and 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 presence 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 presence 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.

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It is not just the self or the human context that is drawn into the state, but the
multiplicity of being itself the insignificant with the significant, a state in which
such differentiation between significant and insignificant becomes meaningless the ant and the poke-weed are also brothers and sisters and are
absorbed into that feeling of love that permeates the whole experience. This
is 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 this
mystery, Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent. And of course, for
the 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 so
difficult to understand this feeling, this sense of presence, of Being. The words
imply some kind of profundity that only philosophers might care about and that
has no bearing on our lives as ordinary people. But this is not true. We all
have 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, the
especially 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 in
spring, the bright yellow and orange foliage and crispness of air in fall that
make the world around seem drenched in colour produces a sense of
strangeness that makes us feel the presence of a rich and uttermost beauty
and calmness; such moments are rare, but when we have them, even the air
against our skin feels satiny, so that we have a heightened tactile connection
to the vision as well hence its strangeness. We see the fragments of the
robins blue eggshell in the grass and we see the robin collecting insects in
the lawn and flying off to the trees and we are gripped by a feeling for the lives
of robins, we become aware of them as living creatures in a way we didnt
attend to before. We startle a rabbit on the lawn and it makes for the evergreen
beside the garden when a grackle alights in the grass a few feet off its path
to the tree, and as it nears the grackle, the rabbit lunges at it and then resumes
its original path. And we cant help but to feel that that lunge was a purely
gratuitous act, a deliberate attempt to scare the grackle, and we begin to
wonder about the personality of that rabbit we have had a glimpse into the
mystery of the other, and we know it by our own feeling for what that lunge
means. Once, after an automobile accident, I carried that sense of strangeness
of the world around for several days before it faded it seemed odd to me to
walk on the ground, the ground seemed somehow different, ordinary things
had a kind of luminousness that made me feel out of place. Perhaps we need
to lose that feeling in order to become a part of the world we live in and be at
home there. But we all have these experiences. We become aware of our own
existence as a part of the larger life of things, and although this awareness
makes us feel strange, it also makes us feel more natural, more akin to the
life around us. This is the mystery, we feel it, and we feel ourselves to be
mysterious too, the fact that we are, that we exist. The mystic who has the
big feeling goes beyond these everyday ones, but his experience is essentially
the same. Its of the same mystery. A good question to ask is why, as biological
organisms evolved through time, we have such feelings at all. Certainly, any
answer that attempts to link them to adaptation and survival rings hollow to

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us. Normally, we live in the world around unreflectively and pursue our daily
rounds in the grip of habit. We are usually awakened to the grooves that habit
scores in our daily experience when we are pushed out of them by the
unplanned, and when we are thus jarred loose we become highly conscious
and deliberative. Schiller attributed a disruptive function of this kind to civilisation; he believed that the civilised mans highly self-reflexive, manipulative
existence tore him from the at-oneness with the world around; an at-oneness
that was the normal mode of existence of the primitive. Today we know that
the codes, norms, and conventions that govern our collective lives, what
Schiller regarded as culture, serve only to all the more immerse us in our routines and that our sense of ordinariness is rooted in them. What is peculiar
about the mystics vision and the poets stepping out of the lifestream is that
their feelings jar us from this sense of ordinariness, they waken us to a dimension of life that we dont ordinarily experience. This dimension underlies all our
sense of meaningfulness. What is meaningful is so to the extent that this
dimension is brought out in it. The poets openness and receptivity to these
feelings confirm our own experience of them, and his intuitions of meaning that
derive 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 medium
When 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 in
any social intercourse, were preparing to respond to as we listen. Obviously,
this description of poetry would exclude many types of poems dramatic
poems, for example, such as My Last Duchess by Browning, and long narrative poems, such as Tennysons Idylls of the King. Of the three voices of poetry
that Eliot defined, the dramatic, the lyrical, and the expository, only the expository would seem to be characterised by this description the poem that is
spoken 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 to
no one in particular. Of the dramatic voice, one could say that its essential
nature has been expropriated by both fiction and cinema. For sheer interests
sake, the dramatic poem cannot equal the mimetic richness of either fiction or
cinema. The lyrical voice, on the other hand, would seem to have no other
means of expression than the poem, and to define poetry in such a way as to
exclude it would seem to be self-defeating. But I think that on careful analysis
one would find that the lyrical and the expository voices are essentially the
same, differing only in that the one addresses personal and private states of
mind and feeling without being situated in place and time and without regard
to a conceptualised audience, and the other addresses the same but is situated
in relation to some objective incident which the reader can be expected to know
or sufficiently imagine so as to share in it as a communicant with the voice
that speaks. In either case, the voice calls upon the reader to implicate him or
herself 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 the
experience of the characters. Objective incident or private experience we

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have immediate access to both through our shared living and our shared natures. Conceived in this way, the difference between the lyrical and expository
voices is so small as to vanish. And many poems seem by nature to be both
lyrical and expository. And some poems seem to defy any attempt to define,
for definitions are by nature artificial. Frosts Acquainted With the Night is
spoken in the lyrical voice, but the setting is so particularised and the details so
concrete that they combine to make an objective incident which is immediately
accessible. By contrast, Frosts Design is spoken in the expository voice he
is speaking as himself directly to the reader and yet the poem turns into a
cry of dismay in the presence of a surreal concatenation of eerily suggestive
images. Matthew Arnolds Dover Beach appears at first to be written in the
dramatic 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 act
of reading and thus are implicated as a communicant, and the poem is experienced as though it were written in the expository voice.
But I would argue that unless the poem implicates the reader as a communicant in a silent dialogue, there is no poetry. That dialogue is the experience
of the poem; it is only through our interaction with the voice that both understanding 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 is
only through voice that this orientation acquires its various shadings of feeling
and tone. Voice is not the personal, private, unique identity of the poet, it is a
crafted element, an artifact, the source of a poems power and its pleasure,
and is the thing within the poem that makes perception possible and expression
poetic. The so-called poet John Smith who speaks in his poem as himself of
his own personal and private experience is not writing poetry, is not making a
poem; rather, he is self-expressing a different affair altogether, which causes
one to wonder!
The poem lives in the body
At 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 the
poem is self-expression. Other poets have said much the same, and unless
we are willing to say that the poets self is different from the ordinary man, we
must make more careful distinctions in locating the origin of the poem. Galway
Kinnell, a poet I admire, observed, We all use language; and at those moments
when were really deeply affected by something, we often express our
response in words. When these come directly out of our feelings, whether we
write them down and work them up into a poem that can have a public life or
not, in some way weve uttered poetry (An Interview with Galway Kinnell Modern Poetry Studies XI 1982: 107). When something deeply affects us and we
respond in words directly from our feelings, in some way we have uttered
poetry. This is the raw material of poetry, what presumably is shaped into the
poem if we have the opportunity and the inclination to write. This idea seems
on the surface much like Shelleys description of inspiration, a chance wind
which fans the mind (or feelings) into brightness, but which passes and leaves

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the mind to fade before we have the chance to write. But let me push Kinnells
description always a good test of an idea. Many of us experience moments
when we are deeply affected by some event, some chance happening in the
world around us, and we respond in language that comes directly from our
feelings. God #@*! son-of-a-*&#!% mother-* +#@! is a typical expression in
language of such an event. Is the uttering of this expression in some way
poetry? No doubt Kinnell is describing his own experience as a poet, and I
respect him enough to allow that his feelings in response to the world around
him 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 the
feelings aroused or both that differentiate the poetic from the crude and profane this something we should search for, because it must lead us to some
insight into the nature of aesthetics what Shelley and others have called the
true and the beautiful. The difference between Kinnells and Shelleys characterisation of the origin of the poem lies in this attribution of something especially
meaningful in the pre-verbal feeling that comes as a response to some provoking stimulus and gives rise through its very meaningfulness to a verbal
expression. For Shelley, the inspiration is not limited to feeling. For him, it is
a knowing of some sort, an uprushing into awareness of a complex of meaning,
which has prophetic as well as aesthetic values, and which ennobles human
discourse. He wrote a great ode on such a moment of inspiration, the Hymn
to Intellectual Beauty. In our American tradition, however, we have the great
shadow 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 being
through 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 of
the divine in our own beings by becoming transparent to the socialised, conditioned world of conventional life. This we can do by detaching ourselves from
the village, the city, from Main Street, and immersing ourselves in the wilderness or in any nearby patch of woods. Reliance on these pre-verbal, prerational feelings is, for Emerson, reliance on that part of ourselves which we
share 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 source
of our communing with the good. These are wonderful and powerful ideas,
which to some extent still motivate our thinking today for they are grounded
in an idealisation of nature which we have incorporated into our environmentalism, our ecotourism, and in our commitment to preserve habitat and endangered species. Unfortunately, we have seen too much of mans baser nature in
the 20th century to believe that our feelings are separable into categories of
natural and conditioned. Pre-rational human impulse, whim, which Emerson
valued as expressions of the nature within, are as likely to be murderous and
aggressively self-serving as transcendently good and spiritual. Emerson did
warn against our lower nature, and gave due credence to the base and profane
within, but he seems to have meant by these almost exclusively our acquisitive
and 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 the
revelatory, to being susceptible to stimuli that awaken the mystical side of our
nature. Some poets are, and I wouldnt hesitate to place Kinnell among them.

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But not all poets are so predisposed and susceptible, and there is no guarantee
that one who is will necessarily write great or even good poetry. Some of our
greatest poets are decidedly not of this type. Wallace Stevens is many things
but he is no mystic, nor is Frost, nor Williams, nor Lowell, nor Auden, nor
Pound. Roethke is, and Eliot at times achieves a mystical vision. And, of
course, there is Whitman, lying on the grass, his visionary Camerado plunging
his tongue into his chest. Secondly, one may argue that be what may the
personal vision of the poet, poetry lies ultimately in what he or she does with
it, that is, in the discipline and rigours of craft, in the beauties of form and
language. But this way also proves unsatisfactory, for beauties of form and
language aside, if there were no underlying substance upon which these can
work their way, poetry would be meaningless craft, empty discipline. This was
the wrongheaded charge that Ivor Winters made against Frost in his The Poet
as Spiritual Drifter. In contemporary parlance, the poet is seen as irrelevant
and his craft as merely one moment in an intertextual history of the medium
that has its own life quite apart from the individual poet who takes it up. We
have 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 of
the poet, keeping the rhythms of his life responsive to his needs. And in this
I think the real truth about the origin of the poem lies. Our emotional response
to 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 events
bring out the worst in us, some few bring out the best. We are connected to
these events, that is, to the world, by our natural and unnatural desires, our
fears, lusts, wants and needs, as well as by our more beneficent feelings and
will 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 who
are poets, includes being a poet, and that necessarily involves our taking a
different slant on our serendipitous, chance interactions with the world, for we
use ourselves as instruments of feeling to make poems, we use our total
selves, to assess and evaluate experience, to discriminate what is useful for
our way of seeing in the poem from what is not useful, what can be spoken
and what not, what is worthwhile speaking and what not. Thus, the poetic voice
that speaks for us in the poem is an identity of our own making which, as a
special kind of consciousness, is ceaselessly working to integrate our private
with our aesthetic selves the private being the source of material, the aesthetic 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, constantly led astray, over-emotional or under-developed, or both, and that we are
often seekers after truths that do not exist and which we probably wouldnt
recognise if they did, even though no nirvana ever comes, and no inkling of
what such a state would be like is ever convincing, we are nevertheless, as
poets, drawing things together, binding life to language, and in our saying
finding satisfaction, for the saying is, if it is said right, a truth after all and a
thing through which we come to experience the beautiful.