Where does poetry come from?
On creativity
The first issue of The Colosseum, coming out of Franciscan University and the University of Saint Thomas, places two essays together that have scratched one of my perennial itches. What is the nature of creative inspiration? Where does poetry come from? Is it an intellectual act, entirely within the human mind, but alienated to some degree from the conscious process?
Andrew Frisardi’s “Dante’s Poetic Knowledge” follows a few steps after Michael Martin’s “Notes Towards a Poetic Metaphysics.” The first is a brief, unsystematic survey of how Dante’s love of learning and proclivity for intense study found its way into his poetry. The master is shown to have been voraciously drawn to tomes of all types, contributing to the personality that produced the Commedia (which doesn’t want my puny praise). Meanwhile, Martin’s essay, through some aphoristic passages, fires some McLuhanesque probes about the nature of poetic composition: Is the poet merely describing the images arising in his imagination, or is he actually interpreting an inspired intuition in the act of creation? Martin finds this overlooked, as he does his other probe a few pages later: “Take the proposition ‘Tolkien “discovered” Middle Earth.’ Was Middle Earth there all along? Once having been ‘created,’ is it still ‘there’ (wherever ‘there’ is)?”
Since I was a young lad, I’ve plunked away at pianos. I never went in for the patient acquisition of skill, but I had a natural ability to improvise. I’ve spent a lot of time writing tunes (they never came to much: It’s tough to follow through without patient acquisition of skill). That ability has always been mysterious to me, particularly when I am met with someone who claims they have zero capability to improvise. They might ask me how I do it. I just have to shrug, because it bottoms out at an irreducibility. There’s an interview somewhere with Johnny Marr, guitarist for The Smiths, where the host asks him “Where do the melodies come from?” Marr gives a half-smile and an eye twinkle and says, “I don’t know.”
Now, my improvisations developed tremendously as I aged. I’ve picked up some music theory. Through exposure to a range of music, I’ve learned different chord progressions, scales, little melodic lifts that sound good, rhythms, etc. Those form a certain language that I compose with — though, again, at bottom, there’s an irreducibility. It’s like the original inspiration is still there, but filtered — or, better, interpreted — through the language I have acquired over time. As a kid, the inspiration was raw, and was interpreted in the rudimentary language of a kid with awkward control of the keyboard and no connection with the tradition. As an adult, the inspiration remains but is elaborated through the sprawling apparatus of my person.
Another anecdote: Ravel was on a train when he was suddenly struck with the gorgeous legato melody for his Piano Concerto in G major. He spent the next months unraveling that crystalline theme, that appeared perfect in his imagination, according to his personal tastes and the tradition he was steeped in. A great deal of intellectual work went into the elaboration of that melody which appeared without effort.
Dante’s Commedia is another world. The plot is one of visionary inspiration! And yet, as Frisardi details, is packed with Dante’s zealously acquired knowledge. The didactic verse was crafted with clear intention, in a way that Ravel’s melody was not. However, it is almost certainly the case that Dante received an initial impulse, a guiding flash, in which the entire structure of his spiritual tour was revealed — and yet! That structure is itself one that emerges from acquired knowledge, in this case Thomistic philosophy.
Martin considers in another section whether these inspired images “[house] the potential for the disclosure of divinity, or at least truth.” In humility he suggests that “to place too many conditions on what can or can’t appear is to pretend that we know how the soul operates or how divinity can speak to us.”
This consideration struck me profoundly this summer as I began reading James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover. Merrill’s long poem, mostly pristine blank verse with sublime and sudden twists into rhyme, was maieutically delivered out of sessions with a Ouija board. I’m bound both by doctrinal pronouncements and the immediate pangs of conscience to disavow any personal use of such divination devices. I also do not trust them, philosophically. Nevertheless, Merrill’s poem is unmistakably brilliant. He weaves the cupwritten prophecies from what he (tentatively, at first) believes is the afterlife into verse of exceptional quality, elaborating the inspirations from the board into an autobiographical narrative about the soul’s fulfillment, artistic production, and the comforts of friendship. Benedict XVI talked about a true beauty and a false beauty, such that the former wounds and causes man to lift his head in greater participation with the world. Look, Ouija boards are evil, but Merrill’s poem is good. It’s beautiful. It follows, then, that insofar as it is good and beautiful, it is true.
What this example reveals about the overarching theme, here, is that Merrill’s Ouija board made explicit and external something that I think must be going on with any artist. The Ouija board is a dangerous tool to enhance the reception of inspiration — it is a tool of decompression. The danger comes from enhancing what must already be sensitive in the artist, which is that mystical reception that makes improvisation possible, lets melodies float into the head, or renders intuitions to be interpreted.
It is only by a proper metaphysics that literature and its infinite interpretability can be understood. Martin grasps keenly, and probably feels the same disgust response I do, that the word cannot be reduced to any totalizing principle, whether it be psychoanalytic (immanent in the author) or sociological (transcendent of the author). I find it interesting that Martin decries the allegorist in the strongest terms: “The allegorist trusts in neither God nor man. The images do not lead to revelation.” Meanwhile, Northrop Frye praises complex allegory as the highest form of poetry, Dante & Spenser being the leading lights. Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism presents a totalizing view of literature, so it is no surprise he ‘calculates,’ as it were, the optimal form.
Literature, whether writing it or reading it, is an affair that is wrapped up in the whole person, which is an utterly unique finite creation of an infinite Creator. The person is the means by which inspirations become art. Each reader is a person encountering another person and a simpler inspiration. We find a trinity whenever we are faced with a work of art. It’s that trinity that makes literature inexhaustibly rich.