Percy Bysshe Shelley:
Poetry is the record of the happiest and best moments of the happiest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforseen and departing unbidden; but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so that even in the desire and the regret they leave there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object. It is as it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own, but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination. And the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last self appears as what it is, an atom to an Universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined organization, but they can colour all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this etherial world; a word, a trait in the representation of a scene or a passion will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate in those who have ever experienced these emotions the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life; and veiling them or in language or in form sends them forth among mankind bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide—abide because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.
Poetry turns all things to loveliness: it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed: it marries exultation and horror; grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms.
All things exist as they are perceived; at least in relation to the percipient. “The mind is its own place, and of itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”15 But Poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common Universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it urges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by re-iteration. It justifies that bold and true word of Tasso: Non merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta.16
The following articles can be found in Poets.org:
The Poet
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
A moody child and wildly wise
Pursued the game with joyful eyes,
Which chose, like meteors, their way,
And rived the dark with private ray:
They overleapt the horizon’s edge,
Searched with Apollo’s privilege;
Through man, and woman, and sea, and star
Saw the dance of nature forward far;
Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times
Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.
Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young,
And always keep us so.
Those who are esteemed umpires of taste are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination of what is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgement of color or form, which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul. There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy. We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan to be carried about; but there is no accurate adjustment between the spirit and the organ, much less is the latter the germination of the former. So in regard to other forms, the intellectual men do not believe in any essential dependence of the material world on thought and volition. Theologians think it a pretty air-castle to talk of the spiritual meaning of a ship or a cloud, of a city or a contract, but they prefer to come again to the solid ground of historical evidence; and even the poets are contented with a civil and conformed manner of living, and to write poems from the fancy, at a safe distance from their own experience. But the highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or shall I say the quadruple or the centuple or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact; Orpheus, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swedenborg, and the masters of sculpture, picture and poetry. For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted and at two or three removes, when we know least about it. And this hidden truth, that the fountains whence all this river of Time and its creatures floweth are intrinsically ideal and beautiful, draws us to the consideration of the nature and functions of the Poet, or the man of Beauty; to the means and materials he uses, and to the general aspect of the art in the present time.
The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is representative. He stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the common wealth. The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is. They receive of the soul as he also receives, but they more. Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. He is isolated among his contemporaries by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.
Notwithstanding this necessity to be published, adequate expression is rare. I know not how it is that we need an interpreter, but the great majority of men seem to be minors, who have not yet come into possession of their own, or mutes, who cannot report the conversation they have had with nature. There is no man who does not anticipate a supersensual utility in the sun and stars, earth and water. These stand and wait to render him a peculiar service. But there is some obstruction or some excess of phlegm in our constitution, which does not suffer them to yield the due effect. Too feeble fall the impression of nature on us to make us artists. Every touch should thrill. Every man should be so much an artist that he could report in conversation what had befallen him. Yet, in our experience, the rays or appulses have sufficient force to arrive at the senses, but not enough to reach the quick and compel the reproduction of themselves in speech. The poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart.
For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear under different names in every system of thought, whether they be called cause, operation and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit and the Son; but which we will call her the Knower, the Doer and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty. These three are equal. Each is that which he is, essentially, so that he cannot be surmounted or analyzed, and each of these three has the power of the others latent in him and his own, patent.
The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe. Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own right. Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact that some man, namely poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action but who quit it to imitate the sayers. But Homer’s words are as costly and admirable to Homer as Agamemnon’s victories are to Agamemnon. The poet does not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they act and think primarily, so he writes primarily what will and must be spoken, reckoning the others though primaries also, yet, in respect to him, secondaries and servants; as sitters or models in the studio of a painter, or as assistants who bring building-material to an architect.
For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a work or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations. For nature is as truly beautiful as it is good, or as it is reasonable, and must as much appear as it must be done, or be known. Words and deeds are quite indifferent modes of the divine energy. Words are also actions, an actions are a kind of words.
The sign and credentials of the poet are that he announces that which no man foretold. He is the true and only doctor; he knows and tells; he is the only teller of news, for he was present and privy to the appearance which he describes. He is a beholder of ideas and an utterer of the necessary and causal. For we do not speak now of men of poetical talents, or of industry and skill in metre, but he of the true poet. I took part in a conversation the other day concerning a recent writer of lyrics, a man of subtle mind, whose head appeared to be a music-box of delicate tunes and rhythms, and whose skill and command of language we could not sufficiently praise. But when the question arose whether he was not only a lyrist but a poet, we were obliged to confess that he is plainly a contemporary, not an eternal man. He does not stand out of our low limitations, like a Chimborazo under the line, running up from a torrid base through all the climates of the globe, with belts of the herbage of every latitude on its high and mottled sides; but this genius is the landscape-garden of a modern house, adorned with fountains and statues, with well-bred men and women standing and sitting in the walks and terraces. We hear, through all the varied music, the ground-tone of conventional life. Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music. The argument is secondary, the finish of the verses is primary.
For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem–a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought; he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. For the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet. I remember when I was young how much I was moved one morning by tidings that genius had appeared in a youth who sat near me at table. He had left his work and gone rambling none knew whither, and had written hundreds of lines, but could not tell whether that which was in him was therein told; he could tell nothing but that all was changed–man, beast, heaven, earth and sea. How gladly we listened! how credulous! Society seemed to be compromised. We sat in the aurora of a sunrise which was to put out all the stars. Boston seemed to be at twice the distance it had the night before, or was much farther than that. Rome–what was Rome? Plutarch and Shakespeare were in the yellow leaf, and Homer no more should be heard of. It is much to know that poetry has been written this very day, under this very roof, by your side. What! that wonderful spirit has not expired! These stony moments are still sparkling and animated! I had fancied that the oracles were all silent, and nature had spent her fires; and behold! all night from every pore, these fine auroras have been streaming. Every one has some interest in the advent of the poet, and no one knows how much it may concern him. We know that the secret of the world is profound, but who or what shall be our interpreter, we know not. A mountain ramble, a new style of face, a new person, may put the key into our hands. Of course the value of genius to us is in the veracity of its report. Talent may frolic and juggle; genius realizes and adds. Mankind in good earnest have availed so far in understanding themselves and their work, that the foremost watchman on the peak announces his news. It is the truest word ever spoken, and the phrase will be the fittest, most musical, and the unerring voice of the world for that time.
All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chonology. Man, never so often deceived, still watches for the arrival of a brother who can hold him steady to a truth until he has made it his own. With what joy I begin to read a poem which I confide in as an inspiration! And now my chains are to be broken; I shall mount above these clouds and opaque airs in which I live–opaque, though they seem transparent–and from the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my relations. That will reconcile me to life and renovate nature, to see trifles animated by a tendency, and to know what I am doing. Life will no more be a noise; now I shall see men and women, and know the signs by which they may be discerned from fools and satans. This day shall be better than my birthday: then I became an animal; now I am invited into the science of the real. Such is the hope, but the fruition is postponed. Oftener it falls that his winged man, who will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into mists, then leaps and frisks about with me as it were from cloud to cloud, still affirming that he is bound heaven-ward; and I, being myself a novice, am slow in perceiving that he does not know the way into the heavens, and is merely bent that I should admire his skill to rise like a fowl or a flying fish, a little way from the ground or the water; but the all-piercing, all-feeding and ocular air of heaven that man shall never inhabit. I tumble down again soon into my old nooks, and lead the life of exaggerations as before, and have lost my faith in the possibility of any guide who can lead me thither where I would be.
But, leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with new hope, observe how nature, by worthier impulses, has insured the poets fidelity to his office of announcement and affirming, namely by the beauty of things, which becomes a new and higher beauty when expressed. Nature offers all her creatures to him as picture-language. Being used as a type, a second wonderful value appears in the object, far better than its old value; as the carpenter’s stretched cord, if you hold your ear close enough, is musical in the breeze. “Things more excellent than every image,” says Jamblichus, “are expressed through images.” Things admit of being used as symbols because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part. Every line we can draw in the sand has expression; and there is no body without its spirit or genius. All form is an effect of character; all condition, of the quality of the life; all harmony, of health; and for this reason a perception of beauty should be sympathetic, or proper only to the good. The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary. The soul makes the body, as the wise Spenser teaches:–
So every spirit, as it is more pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairly dight,
With cheerful grace and amiable sight.
For, of the soul, the body form doth take,
For soul is form, and doth the body make.
Here we find ourselves suddenly not in a critical speculation but in a holy place, and should go very warily and reverently. We stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance and Unity into Variety.
The Universe is the externalization of the soul. Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore superficial. The earth and the heavenly bodies, physics and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if they were self-existent; but these are the retinue of that Being we have. “The mighty heaven,” said Proclus, “exhibits, in its transfigurations, clear images of the splendor of intellectual perceptions; being moved in conjunction with the unapparent periods of intellectual natures.” Therefore science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or the state of science is an index of our self-knowledge. Since every thing in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark it is because the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.
No wonder then, if these waters be so deep, that we hover over them with a religious regard. The beauty of the fable proves the importance of the sense; to the poet, and to all others; or, if you please, every man is so far a poet as to be susceptible of these enchantments of nature; for all men have the thoughts whereof the universe is the celebration. I find that the fascination resides in the symbol. Who loves nature? Who does not? It is only poets, and men of leisure and cultivation, who live with her? No; but also hunters, farmers, grooms and butchers, though they express their affection in their choice of life and not in their choice of words. The writer wonders what the coachman or the hunter values in riding, in horses and dogs. It is not superficial qualities. When you talk with him he holds these at as slight a rate as you. His worship is sympathetic; he has no definitions, but he is commanded in nature by the living power which he feels to be there present. No imitation or playing of these things would content him; he loves the earnest of the north wind, of rain, of stone and wood and iron. A beauty not explicable is dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end of. It is nature the symbol, nature certifying the supernatural, body overflowed by life which he worships with coarse but sincere rites.
The inwardness and mystery of this attachment drive men of every class to the use of emblems. The schools of poets and philosophers are not more intoxicated with their symbols than the populace with theirs. In our political parties, compute the power of badges and emblems. See the great ball which they roll from Baltimore to Bunker Hill! In the political processions, Lowell goes in a loom, and Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship. Witness the cider-barrel, the log-cabin, the hickory-stick, the palmetto, and all the cognizances of party. See the power of national emblems. Some stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle, or other figure which came into credit God knows know, on an old rag of bunting, blowing in the wind on a fort at the ends of the earth, shall make the blood tingle under the rudest or the most conventional exterior. The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics!
Beyond this universality of the symbolic language, we are appraised of the divineness of this superior use of things, whereby the world is a temple whose walls are covered with emblems, pictures and commandments of the Deity–in this, that there is no fact in nature which does not carry the whole sense of nature; and the distinctions which we make in events and in affairs, of low and high, honest and base, disappear when nature is used as a symbol. Thought makes everything fit for use. The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connection of thought. The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive. Small and mean things serve as well as great symbols. The meaner the type by which a law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and the more lasting in the memories of men; just as we choose the smallest box or case in which any needful utensil can be carried. Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind; as it is related of Lord Chatham that he was accustomed to read in Bailey’s Dictionary when he was preparing to speak in Parliament. The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought. Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity. It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word. Also we use defects and deformities to a sacred purpose, so expressing our sense that the evils of the world are such only to the evil eye. In the old mythology, mythologists observe, defects are ascribed to divine natures, as lameness to Vulcan, blindness to Cupid, and the like–to signify exuberances.
For as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole–re-attaching even artificial things and violation of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight–disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts. Readers of poetry see the factory-village and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these; for these works of art are not yet consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them fall within the great Order not less than the beehive or the spider’s geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she loves like her own. Besides, in a centered mind, it signifies nothing how many mechanical inventions you exhibit. Though you add millions, and never so surprising, the fact of mechanics has not gained a grain’s weight. The spiritual fact remains unalterable, by many or by few particulars; as no mountain is of any appreciable height to break the curve of the sphere. A shrewd country-boy goes to the city for the first time, and the complacent citizen is not satisfied with his little wonder. It is not that he does not see all the fine houses and know that he never saw such before, but he disposes of them as easily as the poet finds place for the railway. The chief value of the new fact is to enhance the great and constant fact of Life, which can dwarf any and every circumstance, and to which the belt of wampum and the commerce of America are alike.
The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the poet is he who can articulate it. For though life is great, and fascinates and absorbs; and though all men are intelligent of the symbols through which it is named; yet they cannot originally use them. We are symbols and inhabit symbols; workmen, work, and tools, words and things, birth and death, all are emblems; but we sympathize with the symbols, and being infatuated with the economical uses of things, we do not know that they are thoughts. The poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, gives them a power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes and a tongue into every dumb and inanimate object. He perceives the independence of the thought on the symbol, the stability of the thought, the accidency and fugacity of the symbol. As the eyes of Lyncæus were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession. For through that better perception he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform; that within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a higher form; and following with his eyes the life, uses the forms which express that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing of nature. All the facts of the animal economy, sex, nutriment, gestation, birth, growth, are symbols of the passage of the world into the soul of man, to suffer there a change and reappear a new and higher fact. He uses forms according to the life, and not according to the form. This is true science. The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain or meadow of space was strown with these flowers we call suns and moons and stars; why the great deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.
THE POET’S TRADE
by Amy Lowell
No one expects a man to make a chair without first learning how, but there is a popular impression that the poet is born, not made, and that his verses burst from his overflowing heart of themselves. As a matter of fact, the poet must learn his trade in the same manner, and with the same painstaking care, as the cabinet-maker. His heart may overflow with high thoughts and sparkling fancies, but if he cannot convey them to his reader by means of written word he has no claim to be considered a poet. A workman may be pardoned, therefore, for spending a few moments to explain and describe the technique of his trade. A work of beauty which cannot stand an intimate examination is a poor and jerry-built thing.
In the first place, I wish to state my firm belief that poetry should not try to teach, that it should exist simply because it is a created beauty, even if sometimes the beauty of a gothic grotesque. We do not ask the trees to teach us moral lessons, and only the Salvation Army feels it necessary to pin texts upon them. We know that these texts are ridiculous, but many of us do not yet see that to write an obvious moral all over a work of art, picture, statue, or poem, is not only ridiculous, but timid and vulgar. We distrust a beauty we only half understand, and rush in with our impertinent suggestions. How far are we from “admitting the Universe”! The Universe, which flings down its continents and seas, and leaves them without comment. Art is as much a function of the Universe as an Equinoctial gale, or the Law of Gravitation; and we insist upon considering it merely a little scroll-work, or no great importance unless it be studded with nails from which pretty and uplifting sentiments may be hung!
© 1997 – 2007 by The Academy of American Poets.
FOREWORDS, AFTERWARDS: A KEYNOTE ADDRESS
by Cynthia Ozick
At the Pierpont Morgan Library on May 5, 1997, the Academy presented its 1996 awards to Joshua Clover, Guy Davenport, Adrienne Rich, David Rivard, Charles Wright, and Jay Wright. Academy President Jonathan Galassi made welcoming remarks and Cynthia Ozick delivered the keynote address. The following is a transcript of Ms. Ozick’s speech.
To ask the question “What is poetry about?” is different from asking what poems are about. “Poems,” in the plural, will mean an aggregate of individual poems—and despite the bundling together, we think of singularity. Each poem is the unique vessel of its own intent, focus, tone, theme, language, discovery, astonishment: it resists category, except perhaps the category of form. A poem may consent to being called a haiku, or a sonnet, or a villanelle; it may be content to being called “free,” and once upon a time—a time that now begins to take on a kind of autumnal browning—it was delighted to stand under the eaves of the term “modern.” And still it is possible, or nearly possible, to say what any single poem is “about”—although a poem may be less about what it is about, and more about its intimations, its penumbra, its scent, its own hiddenness or elusiveness. A poem is “edgelit,” to borrow a word from Adrienne Rich.
So if we can say, even if only more or less, what a single poem is about, can we say what “poetry” is about? Is “poetry” a collective? Is it a plural? Is it a universe? Is it an emanation, and if so, an emanation of what? From what does it derive? Is it endemic in our biological being, like the human hand with its opposable thumb? Does it belong to song, or is it the child, or perhaps the parent, of philosophy?
Turn for a moment from poetry to pots. The archaeologist’s pots: vessels to store grain in, or meat, or wine; vessels to cook with, over an open fire. Pots have been the intimate companions of humankind since we evolved; pots define us. They are present in every human culture. Utility ordained that the prehistoric clay pot would indeed be a pot: a concave object. Utility also prescribed a base suitable for standing or storage or shipping, and often enough, a spout, a lid, a handle or a pair of handles. But utility did not envision the fanciful shapes of animals or birds; nor did it demand decorative design, coarser in one culture, more brilliantly complex in another. The drive to mark the most ordinary articles with the impress of art is humanly universal and appears to be humanly innate.
And art not only attaches to the utilitarian, but even—and especially—to the imagery of the divine: from Osiris and Ishtar to Athena and Zeus, from Vishnu and Shiva to Buddha and Jesus, there has been figuration. Art may have gravitated to mere utensils, to express a human drive; but it inhabited religion—or put it that religion inhabited art. The thousands of talismans unearthed in the excavations of extinct settlements; the monumental sculptures of ancient Egypt; the towering statue of Athena in the Parthenon; the torrent of Christian carvings and paintings and the talismanic cross and crucifix; the manifold Hindu representations of deities; the serene Buddha-busts, both mammoth and domestic—all these testify to religion’s habitation in art.
Through the ministrations of art, concepts became concrete, idea turned into thing, mystery metamorphosed into matter. Some may regard this nearly universal flood of representation as a tribute to the human imagination, and so it is. But Judaism, Islam, and iconoclastic elements of the Protestant Reformation, all under the influence of the Second Commandment, refused representations of the divine. The Second Commandment is usually thought to be the instrument of the suppression of art—yet what ultimately flowered from this denial of divine representation was, paradoxically, the freer flowering of art itself.
The Second Commandment, in its opposition to graven images, sought to liberate religion from art, and the Creator from anthropomorphism. In the second century before the Common Era, when the Greek Syrians conquered Jerusalem and found no statue of a god in the First Temple, they supposed the Jews to be an atheist people. But in freeing the metaphysical from the limits of literalism, the Second Commandment also freed art to impulse, permitting it to wander limitlessly, to become purely itself, manumitted from clerical servitude. It is the Second Commandment that is the author of Picasso.
For poetry—for Word—there can be no Second Commandment. Creation and the Creator cannot be separated from Word. We will look in vain for a scriptural admonition that omits or prohibits or silences poetry. “Va-y’hi or,” says the God of Genesis: Let there be light: and light, and then life, are spoken into existence. “In the beginning was the word,” says the Gospel in Greek, summing up the Hebrew of Genesis. Something there is in poetry that clings to what we lamely and tamely call the metaphysical—the questions that are beyond our capacity to formulate, the portraits that are beyond our capacity to trace. Poetry is not often prophecy, and surely poets are not often prophets, but it is inescapable that all true prophets are poets.
Poetry itself, because it is written, because it is spoken, because it creates a world in the mind, tends to the scriptural—”the heterocosm,” Harold Bloom calls it in an essay on Yeats, “or the poem as an alternative world to that of nature.” But poetry also aspirates the given and actual cosmos, and rounds the mundane earth—mundane yet not profane. Here is Charles Wright, fashioning a scripture of plum blossoms:
Belief in transcendence,
belief in something beyond belief,
Is what the blossoms solidify
In their fall through the two worlds—
The imaging of the invisible, the slow dream of metaphor,
Sanction our going up and our going down, our days
And the lives we enfold inside them,
our yes and yes.
There is no Second Commandment to inhibit the imagery of the invisible in words. The visual arts cannot make scripture—they only falsify it. God’s promise was that God’s Face would never be shown; who can copy what isn’t revealed? But poetry is an echo of revelation itself: in Adrienne Rich’s lines,
…poetry means refusing
the choice to kill or die,
and this succinct refusal is not unlike Abraham’s hot refusal of God’s judgment of the Cities of the Plain. Milton wrote a scriptural parallel with the sacral scripture of the ages; Blake did the same.
Yet no one would claim that every poet is metaphysical, or that every poem is written in the breeze made by the turning-away of god’s galaxies. Nor does every poem aspire to be a heterocosm, or to hold a mirror up to nature, existence, or eternity. “I measure time by how a body sways,” says Theodore Roethke, declining eternity. And Anne Sexton looks at an earthworm cut in half and asks, ontologically, teleologically: “Have you no beginning and end?” To be saturated with eternality means to feel the ache of the ephemeral; to take precise note of the immediate means to sink into contemplation of the eternal.
A poem can be about anything at all: a mouse, a bat, a plum, a jar, a wind, a sigh, a thigh. But poetry is about what is eternal, and therefore about the fracture in time that is a single moment. Or say it the other way around: poetry is about impingements on the senses, including the sense of innerness, and is therefore about what the senses, including the sense of innerness, cannot grasp in the outer oceans of Being. Whatever any single poem may be about, poetry is about the trail, the trace, the veil of gossamer motes, that fall from the outskirts of Genesis. Poetry is the Word that can send its dipper into the formless void—tohu va-vohu, as Genesis has it—and draw up light.
“I, too, dislike it,” said the poet who wore a tricornered hat: she who took note of how every corner of her surround was stocked. This is a sentiment, however ironic, that a poet has a right to, since poetry is generally more skeptical than romantic. But poetry has its party of opposition, its passionate dispraisers, who go even further into negation: call them our contemporary cultural anthropologists. “Irrelevant,” they say—a term that has been abused for three decades, having been put to use chiefly for purposes of contempt. Yet irrelevant to what? To the three Screens that, like the three Fates, absorb and shape our span: movie, TV, computer? Unlike those, poetry is not a universal toy of our society. And so no one can successfully deny that a poem, even when it concerns the everyday, is disjunctive with the everyday, collides or veers away from it. Poetry belongs to the strange—and in saying that, there are two meanings that I would instantly reject. The first is “strange” wearing its aura of “the uncanny,” a formula that comes to us from fashionable academic theorists via Freud. And the second is “strange” in the sense of “spiritual,” a term that, in my view, resists poetry at its root. The uncanny is beyond human expression—the work of succubi, of ghosts. The idea of the spiritual is equally ghostly, with an added faith in the penetrating power of external magicking. Neither derives from the labor of human imagination; both leave the work of discovery and revelation (and the work of instinct) to mysterious forces outside human capacity. The so-called uncanny and spiritual thrive in the dilution of language; both skirt intelligibility.
But when we say that poetry is strange, we mean not that it is less than intelligible, but exactly the opposite: poetry is intelligibility heightened, strengthened, distilled; and also made manifold. Metaphor is intelligibility’s great imperative, its engine of radical amazement.
What is strange about poetry is what is most manifest: not so much the unpredictable surge of its music as the words of which it is made. Everyone uses words; from minute to minute, from a million larynxes, a deluge of words falls on the air. Every word has its own history, and is a magnet for cultural accretion. A poet has the same access to the language-pool as a tailor, an archaeologist, or a felon. How strange that, scooping up words from the selfsame pool as everyone else, a poet will reconfigure, startle, and restart those words! How strange that what we call the norms of life—sociology, anthropology, the common sense of common observations of nature: call it whatever you like—how strange that all these habits and pursuits to which poetry is said to be irrelevant are precisely what poetry has the magisterial will and the intimate attentiveness to decode!
Let us come back to pots. I read, the other day, an essay on translation of the Analects of Confucius. One of these is recorded as follows: “A gentleman is not a pot.” Other renderings are: “A gentlemen is not a utensil,” “A gentleman is not an implement.” This is taken to be a declaration on behalf of a generalized cultivation of insight as opposed to the specialist’s performance of a narrow concrete task. To those who insist that poetry is irrelevant to our common preoccupations, one can only reply: Poetry is not a pot.
And poetry, because it is timeless, takes time. Let W. H. Auden have the last word on things both infinite and infinitesimal that poetry is about:
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
This article originally appeared in American Poet, the biannual journal of the Academy of American Poets. Copyright © 2006 by The Academy of American Poets. All rights reserved. To subscribe to American Poet, become a member online. Cynthia Ozick photo by Sara Barrett.
