A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

insists, I believe, that poets make a more distinctive use of this activity than other men. He quotes some of the classic confidences of poets themselves: Keats’s “If a sparrow come before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel”; and Goethe on the sheep pictured by the artist Roos, “I always feel uneasy when I look at these beasts. Their state, so limited, dull, gaping, and dreaming, excites in me such sympathy that I fear I shall become a sheep, and almost think the artist must have been one.” I can match this Goethe story with the prayer of little Larry H., son of an eminent Harvard biologist. Larry, at the age of six, was taken by his mother to the top of a Vermont hill-pasture, where, for the first time in his life, he saw a herd of cows and was thrilled by their glorious bigness and nearness and novelty. When he said his prayers that night, he was enough of a poet to change his usual formula into this:

 

“Jesus, tender Shepherd, hear me,

Bless thy little cow to-night”—

Larry being the cow.

 

“There was a child went forth every day,”

records Walt Whitman,

 

“And the first object he look’d upon that object

he became.”

Professor Fairchild quotes these lines from Whitman, and a few of the many passages of the same purport from Coleridge and Wordsworth. They are all summed up in Coleridge’s heart-broken

 

“Oh, Lady, we receive but what we give,

And in our life alone does Nature live.”

This “animism,” or identifying imagination, by means of which the child or the primitive man or the poet transfers his own life into the unorganic or organic world, is one of the oldest and surest indications of poetic faculty, and as far as we can see, it is antecedent to the use of verbal images or symbols.

Another characteristic of the poetic temperament, allied with the preceding, likewise seems to belong in the region where words are not as yet emerging above the threshold of consciousness. I mean the strange feeling, witnessed to by many poets, of the fluidity, fusibility, transparency—the infinitely changing and interchangeable aspects—of the world as it appears to the senses. It is evident that poets are not looking—at least when in this mood—at our “logical” world of hard, clear fact and law. They are gazing rather at what Whitman called “the eternal float of solution,” the “flowing of all things” of the Greeks, the “river within the river” of Emerson. This tendency is peculiarly marked, of course, in artists possessing the “diffluent” type of imagination, and Romantic poets and critics have had much to say about it. The imagination, said Wordsworth, “recoils from everything but the plastic, the pliant, the indefinite.” [Footnote: Preface to 1815 edition of his Poems.] “Shakespeare, too,” says Carlye, [Footnote: Essay on Goethe’s Works.] “does not look at a thing, but into it, through it; so that he constructively comprehends it, can take it asunder and put it together again; the thing melts as it were, into light under his eye, and anew creates itself before him. That is to say, he is a Poet. For Goethe, as for Shakespeare, the world lies all translucent, all fusible we might call it, encircled with Wonder; the Natural in reality the Supernatural, for to the seer’s eyes both become one.”

In his essay on Tieck Carlyle remarks again upon this characteristic of the mind of the typical poet: “He is no mere observer and compiler; rendering back to us, with additions or subtractions, the Beauty which existing things have of themselves presented to him; but a true Maker, to whom the actual and external is but the excitement for ideal creations representing and ennobling its effects.”

Coleridge’s formula is briefer still; the imagination “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create.” [Footnote: Biographia Literaria.]

Such passages help us to understand the mystical moments which many poets have recorded, in which their feeling of “diffusion” has led them to doubt the existence of the external world. Wordsworth grasping “at a wall or tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality,” and Tennyson’s “weird seizures” which he transferred from his own experience to his imaginary Prince in The Princess, are familiar examples of this type of mysticism. But the sense of the infinite fusibility and change in the objective world is deeper than that revealed in any one type of diffluent imagination. It is a profound characteristic of the poetic mind as such. Yet it should be remembered that the philosopher and the scientist likewise assert that ours is a vital, ever-flowing, onward-urging world, in the process of “becoming” rather than merely “being.” “We are far from the noon of man” sang Tennyson, in a late-Victorian and evolutionary version of St. John’s “It doth not yet appear what we shall be.” “The primary imagination,” asserted Coleridge, “is a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am.” [Footnote: Biographia Literaria, chap. 13.] Here, evidently, unless the “God-intoxicated” Coleridge is talking nonsense, we are in the presence of powers that do not need as yet any use of verbal symbols.

 

4. Verbal Images

The plasticity of the world as it appears to the mind of the poet is clearly evidenced by the swarm of images which present themselves to the poet’s consciousness. In the representation of these pictures to us the poet is forced, of course, to use verbal images. The precise point at which he becomes conscious of employing words no doubt varies with the individual, and depends upon the relative balance of auditory, visual or tactile images in his mind. Swinburne often impresses us as working primarily with the “stuff” of word-sounds, as Browning with the stuff of sharp-cut tactile or motor images, and Victor Hugo with the stuff of visual impressions. But in each case the poet’s sole medium of expression to us is through verbal symbols, and it is hard to get behind these into the real workshop of the brain where each poet is busily minting his own peculiar raw material into the current coin of human speech.

Nevertheless, many poets have been sufficiently conscious of what is going on within their workshop to tell us something about it. Professor Fairchild has made an interesting collection [Footnote: The Making of Poetry, pp. 78, 79.] of testimony relating to the tumultuous crowding of images, each clamoring, as it were, for recognition and crying “take me!” He instances, as other critics have done, the extraordinary succession of images by which Shelley strives to portray the spirit of the skylark. The similes actually chosen by Shelley seem to have been merely the lucky candidates selected from an infinitely greater number. In Francis Thompson’s captivating description of Shelley as a glorious child the reader is conscious of the same initial rush of images, although the medium of expression here is heightened prose instead of verse: [Footnote: Dublin Review, July, 1908.]

 

“Coming to Shelley’s poetry, we peep over the wild mask of

revolutionary metaphysics, and we see the winsome face of the child.

Perhaps none of his poems is more purely and typically Shelleian than

The Cloud, and it is interesting to note how essentially it springs

from the faculty of make-believe. The same thing is conspicuous,

though less purely conspicuous, throughout his singing; it is the

child’s faculty of make-believe raised to the nth power. He is still

at play, save only that his play is such as manhood stops to watch,

and his playthings are those which the gods give their children. The

universe is his box of toys. He dabbles his fingers in the day-fall.

He is gold-dusty with tumbling amidst the stars. He makes bright

mischief with the moon. The meteors nuzzle their noses in his hand.

He teases into growling the kennelled thunder, and laughs at the

shaking of its fiery chain. He dances in and out of the gates of

heaven: its floor is littered with his broken fancies. He runs wild

over the fields of ether. He chases the rolling world. He gets

between the feet of the horses of the sun. He stands in the lap of

patient Nature, and twines her loosened tresses after a hundred

wilful fashions, to see how she will look nicest in his song.”

 

5. The Selection and Control of Images

It is easier, no doubt, to realize something of the swarming of images in the stream of consciousness than it is to understand how these images are selected, combined and controlled. Some principle of association, some law governing the synthesis, there must be; and English criticism has long treasured some of the clairvoyant words of Coleridge and Wordsworth upon this matter. The essential problem is suggested by Wordsworth’s phrase “the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.” Is the “excitement,” then, the chief factor in the selection and combination of images, and do the “feelings,” as if with delicate tentacles, instinctively choose and reject and integrate such images as blend with the poet’s mood?

Coleridge, with his subtle builder’s instinct, uses his favorite word “synthesis” not merely as applied to images as such, but to all the faculties of the soul:

“The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and a spirit of unity, that blends, and as it were fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination.” “Synthetic and magical power,” indeed, with a Coleridge as Master of the Mysteries! But the perplexed student of poetry may well wish a more exact description of what really takes place.

An American critic, after much searching in recent psychological explanations of artistic creation, attempts to describe the genesis of a poem in these words: [Footnote: Lewis E. Gates, Studies and Appreciations, p. 215. Macmillan, 1900.]

 

“The poet concentrates his thought on some concrete piece of life, on

some incident, character, or bit of personal experience; because of

his emotional temperament, this concentration of interest stirs in

him a quick play of feeling and prompts the swift concurrence of many

images. Under the incitement of these feelings, and in accordance

with laws of association that may at least in part be described,

these images grow bright and clear, take definite shapes, fall into

significant groupings, branch and ramify, and break into sparkling

mimicry of the actual world of the senses—all the time delicately

controlled by the poet’s conscious purpose and so growing

intellectually significant, but all the time, if the work of art is

to be vital, impelled also in their alert weaving of patterns by the

moods of the poet, by his fine instinctive sense of the emotional

expressiveness of this or that image that lurks in the background of

his consciousness. For this intricate web of images, tinged with his

most intimate moods, the poet through his intuitive command of words

finds an apt series of sound-symbols and records them with written

characters. And so a poem arises through an exquisite distillation of

personal moods into imagery and into language, and is ready to offer

to all future generations its undiminishing store of spiritual joy

and strength.”

A better description than this we are not likely to find, although some critics would question the phrase, “all the time delicately controlled by the poet’s conscious purpose.” [Footnote: “Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, ‘I will compose poetry.’… It is not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind. … Its