50/1001 - Shelley, Anderson, and Lord Byron
One of the reasons I'm recording what I read for the Bradbury reading plan is because I so quickly forget! Saturday, April 12 was Day 50. I'm officially 1/5 of the way around this track.
Essay: An excerpt from "In Defense of Poetry" by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the center and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. it is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed and withholds from the barren world the nourishment an the succession of the scions of the tree of life...
"Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man can not say it: 'I will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even can not 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 form within, like the color 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... This instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts; a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in the mother's womb; and the very mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations or the media of the process.
"Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world... Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity of man."
There were several points of contact with Northrop Frye in this essay excerpt, which is not surprising at all. I don't know that Frye would go so far as to say the "Poetry is indeed something divine," but he agree that is is the center of language and that to a certain extent it is involuntary.
Poetry is the Center of Language:
"...literature is a coherent order of words and not what Pope calls a wild heap of wit." Frye, The Well-Tempered Critic
In several books and essays, Frye says that Poetry is the center of language. This is because Poetry is "a disinterested use of words." Poetry is an arranging of words as words first, and not primarily as a means to convey a certain single message. Or, if there is an over-arching image the poem is expressing, each word contributes to that image. There are no spare or throw-away words. This is a difficult way of thinking about words and language for us as moderns, since our utilitarianism has sunk to the depth of almost DNA level in us. We only think about language as something to be used to communicate. But poetry is not concerned with communicating in the way we usually mean, to make a point and make it clear. It is first a playful, colorful thing.
"In every properly taught subject, we start at the center and work outwards. To try to teach literature by starting with the applied use of words, or 'effective communication,' as it's often called, then gradually work into literature through the more documentary forms of prose fiction and finally into poetry, seems to me a futile procedure. If literature is to be properly taught, we have to start at its center, which is poetry, and then work outward to literary prose, then outward from there to the applied languages of business and professions and ordinary life. Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quite well developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don't think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you'll see what I mean."
The benefit from starting a child's literary education this way is primarily that of training the ear:
"What poetry can give the student is, first of all, the sense of physical movement. Poetry is not irregular lines in a book, but something very close to dance and song, something to walk down the street keeping time to. Even if the rhythm is free it's still something to be declaimed... There are quieter effects in poetry, of course, but a lot of even of them have to do with physical movement, such as the effect of wit that we get from strict meter, from hearing words stepping along in an ordered marching rhythm. From poetry once can go on to prose, and if one's literary education is sound the first thing one should demand from prose is rhythm. My own teacher, Pelham Edgar, once told me that if the rhythm of a sentence was right, its sense could look after itself...We're often told that to write we must have something to say, but that in its turn means having a certain potential of verbal energy."
Rhythm is an essential influence of poetry on prose, but it is not the only one: "Besides rhythm, the imagery and diction of poetry should be carried out in to other modes of English. The preference of poetry for concrete and simple words, for metaphor and simile and all the figures of associative language, and its ability to contain great reserves of meaning in the simple forms that we call myths and read as stories, are equally important."
Do you see how poetry truly is the center of language? It is the spring or River, and all the tributaries of rhythm and imagery and diction flow from it.
Poetry is Involuntary
Shelley says that, "Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man can not say it: 'I will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even can not say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness..."
Frye agrees. In The Educated Imagination, he writes, "...it isn't what you say but how it's said that's important [in literature]. The literary writer isn't giving information, either about a subject or about his state of mind: he's trying to let something take on it's own form, whether it's a poem or play or novel or whatever. That's why you can't produce literature voluntarily, in the way you'd write a letter or a report. That's also why it's no use telling the poet that he ought to write in a different way so you can understand him better. The writer of literature can only write out what takes shape in his mind."
"If we are writing to convey information, or for any practical reason, our writing is an act of will and intention: we mean what we say, and the words we use represent that meaning directly. It's different in literature, not because the poet doesn't mean what he says too, but because his real effort is one of putting words together. What's important is not what he may have meant to say, but what the words themselves say when they get fitted together. With a novelist it's rather the incidents in the story he tells that get fitted together - as D.H. Lawrence says, don't trust the novelist; trust his story. [This is why plot and not character is what we ought to focus on when we read. We obviously don't ignore character development and motivations, but they are secondary and incidental to the incidents, the action, of the story. It is the actions fitted together that make the story structure. The characters develop and change as a direct result of the actions of the story. This gives a story it's color and ornamentation. But the reason a story like a fairy tale or a myth works without all those details of character development and motivation (and even names, sometimes) is because the essential structure is still present and functional. That is the part that matters most.] That's why so much of a writer's best writing is or seems to be involuntary. It's involuntary because the forms of literature itself are taking control of it, and these forms are what are embodied in the conventions of literature. Conventions, we see, have the same role in literature that they have in life: they impose certain patterns of order and stability on the writer."
Folks like to dog on conventions, because we have this idea that what matters is being "original," but as Frye says about this elsewhere, "that's nonsense." There is no such thing as being original in the sense of something totally new and not at all influenced or derivative is being created. Derivative is not a dirty word. We need conventions in art and literature:
"It's quite wrong to think of the original writer as the opposite of the conventional one. All writers are conventional, because all writers have the same problem of transferring their language from direct speech to the imagination." The language of direct speech is "the language of practical skill or knowledge, which produces information, like science and history." The language of imagination, or literature, is different. Both, Frye says, are valid forms of verbal address, but literature is not a language of direct address. This is why it's true that "Poetry is a disinterested use of words." We are used to thinking about poetry as primarily a self-expression of the poet and that our proper response to poetry is a reciprocated expression, to think about how it emotionally effects or relates to me. But these are incidental, accidental, not the main thing. Poetry is about creating a dense, concrete image in the mind of the reader which contains and from which springs layers of meaning, some of which the poet himself is completely unaware. Poetry is not a verbal confession of the poet's darkest feelings or inner-most thoughts. He can use those to create an image, but if it is only a sort of diary-entry, it's not poetry. It's a stilted trauma dump.
Auden, in his essay, Squares and Oblongs, talks about this process of the work of poetry itself taking over:
"A verbal system cannot be selected completely arbitrarily, nor can one say that any given system is absolutely necessary. The poet searches for the one which seems to him to impose the most just obligations on the feelings..."The process of poetic composition is a work of civilizing. A barbaric horde of emotions which cannot rule themselves are transformed into a just, loving, and self-ruling polis. Unless, however, there is already present in the initial horde a nucleus of self-rule, an idea, a phrase, the poet has no point from which to start. The degree of justice and self-rule possible in a poem is very much higher than in any historical political society. Every good poem is very nearly a Utopia.
"In the earlier stages of composition, the poet has to act like a Greek tyrant; the decision to write this phrase rather than that must be largely his, for the demand of the poem are as yet inarticulate or contradictory. As composition proceeds, the poem begins to take over the job of ruling itself; the transient rule of the poet gets weaker and weaker until, in the final stages, he is like the elected representative of a democracy whose duty it is to listen to and execute the demands of the poem, which now knows exactly what it wishes to be. On completion, the poem rules itself immanently, and the poet is dismissed into private life."
Short Story: "The Snow Queen" by Hans Christian Anderson
I finished teaching A Wrinkle in Time in my Junior High Literature class at our co-op, and this story connected in several ways, most obviously in structure. There was a totally new image of the disembodied Head - the reason un-tempered by emotion or sentiment - that I'd never noticed before which connected with Wrinkle and with C.S. That Hideous Strength and The Dark Tower.
Poem:
Comments
Post a Comment