The Great Rich Vine
I
THE poet is an accident combining a boundless variety of sympathies, quick physical responses, a tough saneness of resistance, an incredible conviction that he stands under the middle of the arch of the world, and a hard necessity to share, to teach, to tell — all these in one body owning a set of five sharp senses, a heart always a little too full, an eagerly curious mind, and a greed for every possible experience.
It is no easier for him to cultivate his inward estate to something like orderly productivity and endurable habitation than it is for someone else to bound that area and enclose it with a sturdy definition. His borders are forever shifting. He hopes they are enlarging, and his peculiar acquisitiveness for lively memories from the country of the mind makes it rather certain that they are. Sometimes his estate seems to shape itself with a wide emphasis south southeast, while his customary latitudes are abandoned. Sometimes his residence and activities are at the opposite direction of the compass. But in the course of time he pushes his borders farther and farther out from the centre, and makes them symmetrical; within he seeds here and harvests there, repairs highroads and tramps out fresh bypaths, inspects old ideas and fences in new ones. Some fields he passes by and looks the other way. He is as patient as nature with others, and eager as the wind with still others. And somewhere in this soil the deep-thrust roots of the tree of life draw nourishment, and find it rich.
Having language, the poet is able to tell what it is he feels about his world, both the inner and the outer. Before he had language, we do not know what he did; he may have run up a hill and looked abroad, like stout Balboa on a peak in Darien, and shouted loudly. But a shout cannot be written down for second performance. He may have found satisfaction in pounding the trunk of a tree with a good thick club; but that, too, would be a little difficult to record. He may have danced his delight, or his terror, or hatred, or reverence, and probably did; the dance could be remembered and repeated.
But when there was a language, and therefore determined meanings for certain sounds, it was his great pleasure to make words dance with the exact posture, the same swiftness, the same satisfaction of rhythm that patterned his dance. There is even a mode of taste that returns through the nameless centuries to catch again that shout, that hearty tree-drubbing, in what is also called poetry. However, in imitation by words lies the art of poetry; and at last, when the words themselves have come to have such rolling reverberations of meaning, such ghostly genealogies of memory, such Saturn rings of light around them, all the dance is in the words: poetry is words. The poet finds himself under a compulsion to arrange words in patterns, the most tangible parts of which seem to be printer’s ink on a white page. Actually what drives him is a necessity for summoning these ancestries of meaning into significant order; for arranging these overtones into a symphony; for translating the subtly outgoing signals into a newer message. These intangibilities rise from the black letters into the astonished and illumined brain of the reader, and that is poetry.
It is when words have been put together, and words so plain in themselves joined to make phrases like ‘this goodly frame, the earth . . . this majestic roof fretted with golden fire,’ or ‘the bright boroughs, the quivering citadels there,’ or ‘how sweet the moonlight sleepes upon this banke,’ that there falls that inexplicable radiance upon the page, and round the very room where the page is read. It has taken more than words to do this; there was an urgency in the poet that brimmed and he could not help it; it overflowed and he was glad. Unless that surge of wonder, that intolerable beating of wings in the poet’s mind, had found the right words, we never should have cared. There is poetry in words, much blood in words, but there is a thing that moves behind them, a spirit that puts them on like a garment and wears them, filling the infinite possibilities of their drapery with a body that lives and moves, and goes up and down to delight us with its grace and stir us with its vigor.
II
It is the sum of what the poet teaches himself that determines his quality. In the midst of external activity, he may, like Yeats rehearsing a play, suddenly perceive that ‘tragedy must always be a drowning and breaking of the dykes that separate man from man’; or gradually come to place, like George Moore, the capacity for revision of the written page above all the virtues. All this and much more is hidden behind the greatness of the poetry we read, and has added its beam to the light. The poet may have learned Mozart’s lesson, that ‘when I am feeling well and in good humor, thoughts come in swarms and with marvelous ease,’ or it may be that, as an artist, those are not at all the conditions for getting things done. Analogies may teach him, if he has the eyes for them, like the one Hazlitt drew between the writer and the Indian jugglers of knives. Or he may discover, because of his knowledge of the poetry of the past, that one of his contemporaries, by adapting, accepting, exaggerating old methods, has fashioned and used a new one.
Failure teaches him that all failure in the arts may possibly be mended in the next attempt. Praise teaches him, perhaps, how imperfectly he has transmitted himself, so unpredictable and often so absurd praise is. All pronouncements on style, by poets of his own generation or those of years ago, help him to shape the idea of his own, for he knows that his style must be his own or nothing. He learns, by experiences he would hardly care to tell about, what medicine cures or eases an unwillingness to make an imaginative effort. The weather of his mind is an affair of low pressure areas and sudden storms that he must learn to predict with unfailing accuracy. He watches the least stirring of leaves that indicates a rising wind, and he knows what planets draw his tides. He supports the findings of an almost instrumental skill in self-knowledge of this kind with an old native wisdom of intuition and shrewd speculation. Time concerns him, that he may not waste it; no waking day is ever quite long enough for creation. And at last he learns what all great artists know, each in their kind: to hold to a single ruthlessness of purpose, and that purpose poetry.
Any description of the poet as human being must underline his inclusiveness and his intensity; and it is easy to translate that truth into the part truth that this means an abundance of all that is good and happy and affirmative. But when Walt Whitman said that he, too, ‘knitted the old knot of contrariety, had guile, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak, was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow,’ he gave evidence of one extreme. But there was also Keats, ‘happy as a man may be . . . with the yearning passion I have for the beautiful, connected and made one with the ambition of my intellect’; and there is William Butler Yeats, in one mood ‘blest by everything, everything I look upon is blest,’ and in another, ‘timid, entangled, empty, and abashed.’
T. W. H. Crosland helps the variety with the ‘furious wise will and heart of stone,’ and D. H. Lawrence with his cry of ‘My great religion is a belief in the blood!’ Sir Thomas Browne had ‘all Africa and her prodigies’ in him. Conrad Aiken bids us ‘laugh with fool’s delight that heavenly folly made the world so bright’; Bliss Perry reminds us that the poet has always been genus irritabile — the irritable kind; John Donne must have the soul descend to affections and to faculties, ‘else a great Prince in prison lies’; and Shakespeare marks bitterly ‘the expense of spirit in a waste of shame.’ John Masefield remembers, as most poets do, that ‘man with his burning soul has but an hour of breath’; Emerson walks across Cambridge Common, ‘glad almost to the brink of fear’; Katherine Mansfield in the grimness of grief writes in her journal, ‘To-day I am hardening my heart. I am walking all around my heart and building up the defenses’; and Keats feels ‘an awful warmth about my heart like a load of immortality.’
And yet all these are not a fraction of the poet’s capacity for life. There was Milton, who knew the courts of heaven, and Villon, who knew the alleys of Paris. Chaucer rode down to Canterbury with priests, shipmen, millers, knights, and nuns; George Herbert lived in the retirement of a country parish and his mother’s house. Blake was mad (or was he sane?) and Alexander Pope was very sane.
III
‘Not only poems, but songs, snatches and raptures of a flaming spirit,’ said a seventeenth-century writer, of the psalms of David. It is the heat of the blood that differentiates the poet. It was clever of Oscar Wilde to say that several drinks of whiskey can induce an effect very similar to intoxication. But in one of the mightiest of short English poems James Thomson says, ‘He reeleth with his own heart, that great rich vine.’
It is not an accident that the poet is articulate; for sometimes one feels that writers of all kinds have an unearned advantage over the rest of the world because they can get a hearing for their pains and joys, as if no one else felt at all. But the special quality of the poet includes the involuntary voice. With such a necessity laid upon him, seeing as he does the golden outline that defines people standing between one’s self and the low sun, he may not silence the vivid sense of life in him. It beats and surges into words. The sum and total of the words may be only a declaration of being, an emphatic I AM: the world was thus when I was in it — active, growing, decaying, complex, passionate, pitiful, miraculous. It is simply that a current passes through his body; sometimes it convulses him with its enormous voltage, but more often he is a good conductor, pure metal, and passes on the flow of life to later times and other men.
For people who are afraid of the life in the wires, poetry is dangerous to read. Because the drift of days seldom makes the average man shiver and glow with a sudden shock of life, he feels in the unusual behavior of the poet something deplorable and not quite brave, because it is unusual. The average man has also had unpleasant experience of the poet of mixed and baser metal, the imperfect conductor of the current. But the real poet is the norm for mankind; in his quality of living, the man all would wish to be. It is T. W. H. Crosland who reminds us of the old falsehood to the effect that a writer of poems, especially of sonnets, is a person in precarious health, or of abnormal behavior. But, he says, as a matter of fact, the great poets ‘are not only the sanest people in the world, but physically and temperamentally the toughest.’ How could this not be so? Men and women weak in body and nerves burn out after a little of the current. But in the great spirits, Shakespeare, Goethe, Whitman, Yeats, there is a calmness, and a confident strength. They are in accord with the force flowing through them; there is room enough in them, and no obstructions.
But all metaphors are a view from one side. To speak of poets as good conductors is to imply passive reception and release; the figure is not the whole truth. This is because the poet also imparts a special quality to the life flowing through him, so that it is changed by the passage. One element of this change is the new rhythm he gives to the stream of life. Each poet is tuned to a different pitch, not necessarily higher or lower, but more intense than another, or less so in a special way. It has been his study to discover his inner rhythm, and to make himself a resonant instrument for its music. All life that enters his perception beats thereafter to that unmistakable vibration.
Another and essential element of the change in the life the poet feels is his powerful affection for it. Proust, though not a versifier, transmitted his sense of life colored by love that dwells in every scene, on every hour, reluctant to be called away even to the next hour and the following episode. The poet knows that loving particularity. James Stephens says the poet makes grief beautiful — ‘caring for grief he cares his grief away.’ It may be, too, that a sharp sense of the appalling limits of time is what makes the poet wish to linger — ‘the lyf so short,’ as Chaucer knew. But after all, the poet is one who, because he feels in the air time rushing by, knows more than most men about it, and has power over it. He can stop time. By his passionately scrupulous examination of one moment, he can re-create it as it is and let it go. Nothing is ever lost, no experience is ever in vain.
And the poet, who can free all men as well as himself from time, loves what he writes of, and writes of what he loves. If he protests, if he mourns, if he hates, and writes about that, love is not far; it is that powerful affection thwarted of which he speaks. And to a certain extent he loves the hateful thing, if only it has life in it. ‘As to the poetic character itself,’ wrote Keats in a letter, ‘it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated — it has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen.’
IV
In containing and changing the flow of life, the artist who is a poet has enemies and allies, some within himself, and some, the least important, outside himself. The indifferent, the stubborn, the willfully blind, never cease to reproduce themselves in the world, and they are the enemies of art. But the temptation to publish what will satisfy nearly everyone, and not, in his own heart, himself, is the poet’s more immediate adversary. Time is always a potential enemy. In merciless and unforeseen ways Time destroys all but the most honest poetry. Yet victory over the temptation to haste can conquer both indifference and Time.
Sudden inspiration, bringing completion of the poem, is a treacherous friend, for it glosses the surface with what seems to be the light of poetry. But the light fades, and the workmanship loosens in its joints, and the poem that creation without toil had fashioned falls apart. Or the waste of emptiness may threaten; but here, as Ben Jonson says, ‘the mind is like a bow, the stronger by being unbent.’ Infertile hours are not failure or defeat, but a part of the process of writing, a process that has, like green things growing, spaces of rest. Danger may come in an excess of loyalty to some one method, or poet, or audience, till proportion is destroyed. The complex pull of affections, habits, duties, or pleasures in one’s life as a private citizen may also distort artistry; since these things go very deep into existence, one or another is sometimes the most corruptive enemy of all, having place and power within and without. It is an expensive but important chapter in the poet’s history that tells how he learned to adjust his poetic to his private life, and both to his life in public. It is a story of the unfailing renewal of an exact balance between the three.
His allies in self-preservation are his self-respect as an artist, the attraction of the goal still before him, and the height of his old vows. Knowledge of life and of all poetry is obviously a loyal part of his forces. Mastery of his creative power is something he has learned slowly and thoroughly, and can usually summon to the endeavor, and control. In composition his allies serve with a vital allegiance, but not always with their presence when it is most fervently asked. Health and peace of mind are his allies, or, lacking them, the drive of such a necessity from within that the writing gets done, but this is costly. The support of the subconscious mind, while powerful, is unpredictable. In the crisis a memory of things he had forgotten may rush in, and a knowledge of things he had never learned. But the subconscious mind may not add its final impetus at all, and it may desert at the time when it is most needed and used.
The object of all this complex and endless study, all this tireless application to the acquisition of knowledge of himself, of life, of the genius of language, is to write poetry. The poet wants that poetry to be an exact representation of his own peculiar inner rhythm, and that rhythm so confirmed and set free that it will sound its own note, original and significant, in the poetry of his age. And who will know whether or not he has succeeded? He will know. That is his greatest satisfaction, even though he may have found readers who have been pleased and moved by poetry he has written ever since before he knew what poetry really was. He knows, too, that other poets will know. He has learned to value most the praise of equals, and next the confidence of living men. To those of his contemporaries whose sense of life he has enriched he is grateful for their attendance on his work, and he is fulfilled by it. As an artist he wants approval by his kind. ‘The oration is to the orator,’ said Whitman, ‘the acting is to the actor and actress, not to the audience.’ The poet values their response because they understand as artists, not only the finished thing, but the rigors of devotion to the art.
Wherever the poet stands, the hills and houses and the thinking of mankind centre on him like the spokes of a wheel or the threads of a spider’s web. He looks out in every direction with as fresh an excitement as if the world had never been thrust upon the eyes of man till then. This is a mad conviction, but it is the key to the mystery of the universe, what Goethe calls the ‘open secret,’ open to all, seen by almost none. It never occurs to him not to dare to say what he sees and feels; to him it is an overwhelming wonder that he is there at all, and it seems only natural that, so placed, he should communicate his astonishment and delight. This confidence is an element of genius, but every poet shares it. He feels a kind of godhead; not egotistic assumption, but the fullness of life and his nearness to the source. In vision he has time and space for latitude, as well as such intense apprehension that the commonplace is miraculous and the nearat-hand a wonder fetched home for his pleasure. Whenever the scale of things seems meagre to him, because the gods were tired, or daylight not illumination enough, he heightens through his own creativeness the proportions, and he focuses a single beam of light which the sun will not dim by its going down. When natural music is faint to the ears of mankind, the poet magnifies it. Gaps in the created order are his to fill, and the future, however impenetrable a curtain it seems to drop between it and ourselves, is his to prophesy. To do these things, to sharpen, to reënforce, to heighten, to prophesy, is to exercise his highest power, that of creator.