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Writings on Writing
By May Sarton OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1980 May Sarton
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1791-6
CHAPTER 1
The School of Babylon
This is the School of Babylon
And at its hands we learn
To walk into the furnaces
And whistle as we burn.
Thomas Blackburn
I must warn you at once that I am not a critic, except of my own work, but perhaps I should not offer this fact as an apology for surely the great poet-critics of our time — Yeats, Valery, Eliot — have used what has been sometimes taken as dispassionate criticism of others as a means of orienting themselves and of grounding their own work in an aesthetic. Perhaps criticism from poets is always self-criticism.
I should like to reconsider and shape once more some tentative answers to questions I have been asking myself for many, many years, questions about tension and equilibrium within the writing of poetry and within the poet's life.
Eugen Herrigel in a small but explosive book, Zen in the Art of Archery, speaks of the aim of the Zen masters as not "the ability of the sportsman, which can be controlled, more or less, by bodily exercises, but an ability whose origin is to be sought in spiritual exercises and whose aim consists in hitting a spiritual goal, so that fundamentally the marksman aims at himself and may even succeed in hitting himself." So let me draw my bow and point the arrow inward ...
I have an idea that somewhere in his forties the poet reaches a turning point, at which he either becomes a more public or a more private person, that he has a choice, and on that choice depends the kind of work he will produce, as well as the kind of life he will live. In the dialogue between the world and himself, he fights to preserve the innocence and the intensity without which art cannot exist. And it is just when he is in his forties that the pressures to lecture, to review other men's books, and to be a public person begin to assert themselves. My theme is tension in equilibrium, that dangerous tension, that perilous equilibrium which exist in every great poem, and in the life of every poet; and I have just touched on one of the permanent tensions, that between the public and the private person, the poet who lectures and the poet who writes the poems: they are opposite poles. Each of us seeks out his own solution to this never-solved problem. But I suspect, nevertheless, that the tension between the public and private self is not an unfruitful one. One of the fascinations of Yeats' growth is that his assaults on the world, as a founder of the Abbey Theatre, and later as a senator, helped him to forge his style. Without the fierce tension between what he called "The Mask and the Self," would he have hammered out the iron of his later style? Who knows?
Tension ... my Webster defines it in several ways. Here are three which I can appropriate: 1) A strained condition of relations, as between nations. 2) A device to produce a desired tension or pull, as in a loom. 3) Elec.: The quality in consequence of which an electric charge tends to discharge itself.
As I pondered these provocative definitions, I jotted down some of the tensions I experience in the process of writing a poem, tensions which discharge a load of experience in a most beneficent and exciting way when the piece of weaving on the loom turns out to be a real poem:
1) The tension between past and present,
2) between idea and image,
3) between music and meaning,
4) between particular and universal,
5) between creator and critic,
6) between silence and words.
Parallel with them are the tensions within daily life:
1) between the living and the dead,
2) between the public and the private person,
3) between art and life.
Once I had noted down these apparently organized but actually haphazard ideas, I took refuge at once in the equilibrium and organization of a poem, Thomas Blackburn's "The School of Babylon," from which I have borrowed the title of this essay. (The relief it was to rest in this "momentary stay against confusion"!) I might tell you that the epigraph of Blackburn's poem is from Daniel, "Men loose walking in the midst of fire" (3:25). This is the second and final stanza:
Although a wine-glass or a cup
Can hold as little of the sea
As you and I of our own selves,
Pin-pointed by mortality,
We still, that something of the whole,
May quicken in the finite part,
Must labour for a deeper breath
And greater tension of the heart.
Out of their windy distances
The further energies draw near
And kindling in our tongues and hands
Increase the glory and the fear.
But still as the unspoken word
Swings slowly downward into speech
And in becoming us reveals
Another word beyond our reach,
We praise the School of Babylon,
For where else could we learn
To walk into the furnaces
And whistle as we burn?
Of course, one of the springs of poetry is our strained relations with our own immediate past, the warring nations within the self; then the poem itself becomes a device by means of which this electric charge discharges itself. And one of the springs of poetry is joy — joy and grief as opposed to happiness and depression; the difference in intensity between the former and the latter is my point. In a formal sense, each poem also discharges and balances the tension between the whole past of poetic invention and itself; each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature. Those poets who wish to affirm their freedom from the past by pretending that all old forms are dead, deny themselves this fruitful tension. Their poems are intended to be wholly "present," but we experience the present as a kind of equilibrium between past and future, and there is only tension, no balance between present and future. Such poems, like the children of Brave New World, are test-tube poems. I think that the answer may be in the distance in time between the points of tension: we have to move back more than one generation to find the fruitful polarity. Valery makes this clear in his unexpected praise of Victor Hugo (the poet's Hugo as against the public's Hugo) for going back to the then unfashionable sixteenth-century French poets for some of his forms. So Hugo remains a source in a way that Vigny, de Musset, Lamartine do not.
"The poetic player," as Valery puts it in another context, "can choose his game: some prefer roulette, others chess." If you are a chess player, what you are looking for is a new opening, a new device by which you may win within the old rules; a means of taking your opponent by surprise. The dynamics of form have to do with our intimate relation with the past, and our natural instinct for what we can use for a particular poem, the form that can best become a vehicle for its electric current, the tension between the whole rich past and this poem now. Like a pregnant woman who must suddenly have strawberries, I once found myself going back to Herbert for the form of a poem which created an equilibrium for me (in this case a permanent one) out of the excruciating tensions set up by my mother's death from cancer. The poem itself I could only write four years later; I could write it partly because I had found in George Herbert a viable structure.
Sometimes the polarity expresses itself, not through metrics, but by means of an echo. Eliot has often used this device, in the earlier poems for purposes of irony, in the later ones as a way of condensing time. How effective it can be, Yeats proved in "A Bronze Head," when suddenly he allows Herbert and the particular reverberations Herbert brings with him to act as catharsis for his revaluation of Maud Gonne. I need not remind you of the climax of Herbert's "The Collar":
But as I rav'd and grew more fierce and wilde
At every word,
Me thought I heard one calling, Child!
And I reply'd, My Lord.
Here is the third stanza of "A Bronze Head":
But even at the starting-post, all sleek and new,
I saw the wildness in her and I thought
A vision of terror that it must live through
Had shattered her soul. Propinquity had brought
Imagination to that pitch where it casts out
All that is not itself: I had grown wild
And wandered murmuring everywhere, 'My child, my child!'
And let us not forget that, as Valery says, "Everyone knows that to aim at not following or imitating someone is still in some way to imitate him. The mirror reverses images." The poet cannot escape from the tension between past and present even when the tension is expressed by total rejection of the past.
He cannot do so any more than any one of us can escape from our individual past, for to do so is to murder a part of ourselves. The tension between the living and the dead, especially perhaps that between oneself and one's parents, after their death, may become especially powerful in middle age. Yeats' father and grandfather are always there back of the poems, and so too with Edwin Muir. I must regard my whole life as an attempt to bring into focus and so be able fully to use the rich gifts I was given by a scholar father and an artist mother, each strong in his own right. I do not summon them, but they are there, pivotal tensions. Everything must be tested and questioned against their innocence, their passion, and my whole life a precarious balance between their two kinds of genius.
Let us return to poetry itself and the writing of poems. At once I find myself rebelling against the act of criticism because it must, if it is to explain anything at all, make an indivisible act divisible and partial. In fact, it is possible that we recognize the birth of a true poem as distinct from what Louise Bogan calls "imitation poems" by this very state, a state in which a series of complexes exist together, and find their way to equilibrium without ever having been separated out into distinct functions or threads. Idea and image, music and meaning, creation and criticism, the particular and the universal, silence and utterance — when we are ready to write a poem, all these separate modes work together at the same time. "Poetry," as Valery puts it, "must extend over the whole being; it stimulates the muscular organization by its rhythms, it frees or unleashes the verbal faculties, ennobling their whole action, it regulates our depths, for poetry aims to arouse or reproduce the unity and harmony of the living person, an extraordinary unity that shows itself when a man is possessed by an intense feeling that leaves none of his powers disengaged." Unfortunately the act of criticism imposes the necessity to disengage certain powers, and is therefore always in some sense, false.
A true poem does not begin with a feeling, however compelling, and of course we feel a great many things that never become poems. A poem emerges when a tension that has been something experienced, felt, seen, suddenly releases a kind of anxious stirring about of words and images; at this moment there is a mysterious shift of energy; the energy that was absorbed in experience itself, now becomes an energy of an entirely different kind, and all that matters is to solve the sort of puzzle, the sort of maze in which certain phrases, and a certain rhythm lie around like counters in a game of Scrabble. So a great grief may turn into a certain kind of imaginative energy and lift the sufferer right out of himself into the joys of creation.
Let me give you a ludicrous example which will serve as well as any to give you some idea as to how the process works. Some years ago I was given a magnificent Teddy bear as a Valentine and he has become one of the Lares, sits on a big desk in the little parlor and emits a muted bellow when you pick him up. One day I seemed to hear him singing a little song, a rhyme, and, once in my head, I could not get it out for a whole day. It goes
Only, only,
lonely, lonely,
moanly, moanly,
groanly, groanly.
True poems may make their appearance in just the way this rhyme did, and take over the day, interrupt whatever we may be doing, insist on making themselves heard, willy-nilly. For us, who are not Teddy bears, the music may be more subtle, though it may not (you remember Edith Sitwell's "Daisy and Lily, lazy and silly," no doubt?). In a true poem, this "musical stir" as Maritain calls it, this tension of a phrase asking to be musically resolved, is always accompanied by an image. The rhyme of the bear is not a poem for many reasons, and one is that the bear himself does not appear. If the bear-song could have incorporated bear himself, it might have become one. Everything in the psyche takes place for a reason. Why did something in me identify itself with the Teddy bear? No doubt I too was feeling lonely and moanly. If this state had been about to be translated into a poem, I would have had to enter the maze of bear, the puzzle of bear, and find my way out of it, or rather into its center and heart. And I might have sat down to ask myself some questions.
Did the bear begin to sing for me because he suggests innocence, childhood, and also the whole unconscious animal world, the sensual world, of which at that time I felt deprived? And is the sensual world always there when we feel wholly ourselves? So that to be deprived of our animal self is in some way to be deprived also of its polarity, the angel self? The bear seems also to be consolation — he sings a lonely song because I feel lonely, and I am comforted by this image of childhood. Why is an image of childhood consoling to an adult?
But while I am asking myself these questions, the music the bear is chanting runs along all the time underneath, emerging now and then into an actual phrase, imposing upon me the metrical form the poem will take. And a high tension, a delightful inner humming is set up between the apparently innocuous rhyme, the image back of it, and my own response, both conscious and unconscious, to what is going on in my head.
There are points at which the arts, especially those of painting and poetry, bisect each other. Painters, too, think their way through, by means of images lifted out by a present shock of emotion, and polarizing the whole past. I want to steal here a fairly long excerpt from Ben Shahn's book The Shape of Content. He is analyzing the sources of a painting of his called "Allegory." The immediate seminal image was that of a fire in Chicago in which a man had lost his four children.
It seemed to me that the implications of this event transcended the immediate story; there was a universality about man's dread of fire, and his sufferings from fire. There was a universality in the pity which such disaster invokes. Even racial injustice, which had played its part in this event, had its overtones. ...
I now began to devise symbols of an almost abstract nature, to work in terms of such symbols. Then I rejected that approach too. For in the abstracting of an idea one may lose the very intimate humanity of it, and this deep and common tragedy was above all things human. I returned then to the small family contacts, to the familiar experiences of all of us, to the furniture, the clothes, the look of ordinary people, and on that level made my bid for universality and for the compassion that I hoped and believed the narrative would arouse.
Of all the symbols which I had begun or sought to develop, I retained only one in my illustrations — a highly formalized wreath of flames with which I crowned the plain shape of the house which had burned. ...
The narrative of the fire had roused in me a chain of personal memories. There were two great fires in my own childhood, one only colorful, the other disastrous and unforgettable. Of the first, I remember only that the little Russian village in which my grandfather lived burned, and I was there. I remember the excitement, the flames breaking out everywhere, the lines of men passing buckets to and from the river which ran through the town, the mad-woman who had escaped from someone's house during the confusion, and whose face I saw, dead-white in all the reflected color.
The other fire left its mark upon me and all my family, and left its scars on my father's hands and face, for he had clambered up a drainpipe and taken each of my brothers and sisters and me out of the house one by one, burning himself painfully in the process. Meanwhile our house and all our belongings were consumed, and my parents stricken beyond their power to recover.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Writings on Writing by May Sarton. Copyright © 1980 May Sarton. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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