New and Selected Essays

by Denise Levertov

  Pegasus has wings added unto his equine completeness. And the poet has, beyond even the penetrative gift of intuition, the power of imagination. The bridle of skill and craft may give Bellerophon power to direct the flight of the horse; but no skill, no effort, can produce wings where there are none. The imagination is the horse’s wings, a form of grace, unmerited, unattainable, amazing, and freely given. It is with awe that any who receive it must respond.

  * * *

  *Tanglewood Tales.

  Presented at the What Is a Poet? conference at the University of Alabama in 1984 and published with the other papers of this event in the volume of the same title, edited by Hank Lazer.

  Great Possessions

  “SONGS ARE THOUGHTS, SUNG out with the breath when people are moved by great forces and ordinary speech no longer suffices,” said Orpingalik, the Eskimo poet, to Rasmussen (quoted in Sir Maurice Bowra’s Primitive Song).

  We are living in a time of dread and of awe, of wan hope and of wild hope; a time when joy has to the full its poignance of a mortal flower, and deep content is rare as some fabled Himalayan herb. Ordinary speech no longer suffices.

  Yet much of what is currently acclaimed, in poetry as well as in prose, does not go beyond the most devitalized ordinary speech. Like the bleached dead wheat of which so much American bread is made (supposedly “enriched” by returning to the worthless flour a small fraction of the life that once was in it) such poems bloat us but do not nourish. Proust wrote in Time Retrieved,

  How could documentary realism have any value at all since it is underneath little details such as it notes down that reality is hidden—the grandeur in the distant sound of an airplane or in the lines of the spires of St.-Hilaire, the past contained in the savor of a madeleine, and so forth—and they have no meaning if one does not extract it from them. Stored up little by little in our memory, it is the chain of all the inaccurate impressions, in which there is nothing left of what we really experienced, which constitutes for us our thoughts, our life, reality, and a so-called “art taken from life” would simply reproduce that lie, an art as thin and poor as life itself [as that superficial, lying life, that is to say] without any beauty, a repetition of what our eyes see and our intelligence notes [again I gloss this as meaning superficial intelligence as distinct from our understanding], so wearisome, so futile that one is at a loss to understand where the artist who devotes himself to that finds the joyous, energizing spark that can stimulate him to activity and enable him to go forward with his task. The grandeur of real art, on the contrary … is to rediscover, grasp again, and lay before us that reality from which we become more and more separated as the formal knowledge which we substitute for it grows in thickness and imperviousness—that reality which there is grave danger we might die without having known and yet which is simply our life.

  Instead, we get too many mere notations. The lack of a unifying intelligence, of the implicit presence of an interpreting spirit behind such notations, is associated—and not accidentally—with a lack of music. By music I don’t mean mere euphony, but the verbal music that consists of the consonance of sound and rhythm with the meaning of the words. These wizened offshoots of Williams’s zeal for the recognition of the rhythmic structure of the American language demonstrate the mistake of supposing he was advocating a process of reproduction, of facile imitation—whereas what he was after was origins, springs of vitality: the rediscovery, wherever it might turn up (in language or incident), of that power of the imagination which first conceived and grasped newness in a new world, though the realization was ever and again nipped in the bud, blighted, covered over with old habits and strangling fears. Read him—the short early and later poems, and Paterson, and the longer poems of the great final flowering, from The Desert Music on; and the prose: In the American Grain, and essays like “The American Background,” as well as the specifically “literary” essays such as those on Pound, Sandburg, or Stein, and the unclassifiable pieces such as “The Simplicity of Disorder.” It is all there, said many ways, but clear and profound.

  Williams emphasizes the necessity for the poet to deal with specifics, to locate himself in history—but never at the expense of the imagination. “They found,” he wrote in “The American Background” of the first settlers, “that they had not only left England but that they had arrived somewhere else: at a place whose pressing reality demanded not only a tremendous bodily devotion but as well, and more importunately, great powers of adaptability, a complete reconstruction of their most intimate cultural make-up, to accord with the new conditions.”

  It is the failure, over and over, to make that adaptation—the timid clinging to forms created out of other circumstances— that he deplores, grieves over; the rare leap of imagination into the newly necessary, the necessary new, that he rejoices in. When he blasts Sandburg (in 1948, when Sandburg’s Complete Poems came out), it is for formlessness, for lack of invention. If he underestimated Whitman (and sometimes he did), it was because he believed Whitman had failed to go far enough and to provide a structural model others after him could have used to go further—so that Whitman, by default, set American poetry back rather than advancing it (though surely this was equally due to the unreadiness of any young writers of Whitman’s time to recognize what he was doing and pick up from it). While Williams criticizes Whitman and Sandburg, both of whom dealt with homespun “content” and whose diction was distinctively American, he praises Poe, Cummings, Pound, Marianne Moore, none of whom consistently, and some of whom never, wrote in simple imitation, reproduction, of the American idiom, as understood by some of those who today take Williams’s name in vain in defense of their own banalities. Thoughts and impressions do not become songs, images do not flare, because the deep unconscious sources of song and image are battened under hatches. In reaction, there exists an equally prevalent and equally inadequate poetry that I think of as mechanical surrealism— the appearance of surrealism without its genuine content: poems strung together out of notebook jottings saved for a rainy day, poems that do not explore but contrive a fake, deliberate irrationality, works not of imagination, not of fancy—which has its genuine light charms—but of spurious imagination.

  Underneath surface differences of content these two kinds of poetry are really very similar, and this underlying similarity is attested to in the lack of distinct formal differences between them. Whether the poet writes of beer cans, the Sunday funnies, and provincial malaise, or of strenuously strange and vague phantasmagoria, these competent jottings remain … competent jottings, rhythmically and sonically undistinguished, indistinguishable.

  What then do we need? We need a new realization of the artist as translator. I am not talking about translation from one language to another, but of the translation of experience, and the translation of the reader into other worlds. To quote Proust again: “I perceived that, to describe these impressions, to write that essential book, the only true book, a great writer does not need to invent it, in the current sense of the term, since it already exists in each of us, but merely to translate it. The duty and task of a writer are those of a translator.” What did he mean? The word comes from the past participle of the Latin transferre, “to transfer”: to carry across, to ferry to the far shore. What Proust calls “documentary realism” only relates; that is, it carries us back, not forward; the process has that “photographic” fidelity he speaks of as insufficient for the complexity of our experience.* Since almost all experience goes by too fast, too superficially for our apperception, what we most need is not to re-taste it (just as superficially) but really to taste for the first time the gratuitous, the autonomous identity of its essence. My 1865 Webster’s defines translation as “being conveyed from one place to another; removed to heaven without dying.” We must have an art that translates, conveys us to the heaven of that deepest reality which otherwise “we may die without ever having known”; that transmits us there, not in the sense of bringing the information to the receiver but of putting the r
eceiver in the place of the event—alive. Transmit (like mission and missive) comes from the same Latin root (mittere, “to send”) as mettre and mettere in French and Italian, both meaning “to put.” In English, transmits gives one the feeling of being at the sending end; the Italian trasmettere suggests being at the receiving end, as if it said “transput,” and 1 am now using the English word with this latter feeling. If a poetic translation, or attempted act of translation, is weak or an operation of mere fancy, it does not “increase our sense of living, of being alive,” which Wallace Stevens said was an essential function of poetry, but instead removes us from reality in a lapse of perception, taking us not deeper into but farther away from the world—a kind of dying. We must have poems that move away from the discursively confessional, merely descriptive, and from the fancies of inauthentic surrealism to the intense, wrought, bodied-forth and magical—poems that make us cry out with Carlyle, “Ah, but this sings!”

  A poetry that merely describes, and that features the trivial egotism of the writer (an egotism that obstructs any profound self-explorations), is not liberated from contingency and does not fulfill what David Jones has called the sine qua non of art, “the gratuitous setting up of sacred objects to the unknown god.” “By that sort of paradox,” he says also, “man can act gratuitously only because he is dedicated to the gods. When he falls from dedication … the utile is all he knows and his works take on something of the nature of the works of the termite.” (See David Jones’s essay “Art and Democracy” in Epoch and Artist.) Poetry that is merely “self-expressive” in the current sense of the term is not even ultimately utile to the greatest degree, for while it temporarily “relieves feelings” or builds ego, it does not, cannot, give the writer—and certainly fails to give the reader—the deeper satisfaction of a work of autonomy and gratuitousness.

  The distinction is between the temporarily therapeutic self-expression, which is equivalent to a gesture, expending its whole substance in the act —a letting off of steam—and the disinterested expression of being, which Walter F. Otto (as quoted by Kerenyi in his book Asklepios) describes in the following passage: “Wherever a creature emits even the simplest sequence of musical tones, it evinces a state of mind entirely different from that which occurs in the uncontrolled outcry. And this state of mind is the essential when we ask about the nature of the primordial musicality. It is often unmistakable that the song, even of animals, is sufficient unto itself, that is not intended to serve any purpose or produce any sort of effect. Such songs have aptly been characterized as self-expressions. They arise from an intrinsic need of the creature to give expression to its being. ”* It is clear, I think, that here the emphasis must be on the word sef—self-expression, the expression of the creature’s very being, not self-expression, the blowing off of steam. As Otto continues, it becomes clear too how self-expression relates to the dynamic, kinetic concept of translation: “But self-expression demands a presence, for which it occurs. This presence is the environing world. No creature exists for itself alone; all are in the world, and this means: each one in its own world. Thus the singing creature expresses itself in and for its world. In expressing itself* it becomes happily aware of the world, it cries out joyfully, it lays claim to the world.” (And here I would add, “Or it becomes unhappily aware of the world, but its cry of self-expression is still an affirmative act, for all awareness, all acknowledgment of self and world, is essentially affirmation.” As Jane Harrison reminded us, “Aristotle said that poetry had two forms, praise which issued in hymns and heroic poetry, blame which yielded … satire…. We analyze and distinguish but at bottom is the one double-edged impulse, the impulse toward life” (from Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion). “The lark rises,” Otto goes on:

  to dizzy heights in the column of air that is its world; without other purpose, it is at the same time the language of the world’s reality. A living knowledge rings in the song. When man makes music he doubtless has a much broader and richer environment. But the phenomenon is fundamentally the same. He too must express himself in tones, without purpose and regardless of whether or not he is heard by others. But here again self-expression and revelation of the world are one and the same. As he expresses himself the reality of the being that enfolds him speaks in his tones.

  It may be objected that if the reality of an individual’s being is indeed banal, then his banal expression of it should be accepted as valid. I disagree because I do not believe in the intrinsic banality of any existence. I believe with Carlyle that “no most gifted eye can exhaust the significance of any object” (On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, 1841)—and if this inexhaustible significance is to be found in things, inanimate and animate, how can it not be true of man? But, says Rilke, “If a thing is to speak to you, you must for a certain time regard it as the only thing that exists, the unique phenomenon that your diligent and exclusive love has placed at the center of the universe, something the angels serve that very day upon that matchless spot” (Selected Letters). But that intensity of attention is rarely exercised—an attention which would lead the writer into a deeper, more vibrant language and so translate the reader into the heavens and hells that lie about us in all seemingly ordinary objects and experiences.

  If we are to survive the disasters that threaten, and survive our own struggle to make it new—a struggle to which I believe we have no choice but to commit ourselves—we need tremendous transfusions of imaginative energy. We need life, and abundantly—we need poems of the spirit, to inform us of the essential, to help us live the great social changes that are necessary, and which must be internal if their external form is to succeed.

  I had chosen the title “Great Possessions” from the I Cbing hexagram without a clear sense of what I meant by it until I focussed on another sentence from Proust:

  That reality from which we become more and more separated as the formal knowledge which we substitute for it grows in thickness and imperviousness—that reality which there is grave danger we might die without having known and yet which is simply our life.

  And in Thoreau’s notebooks I found this entry:

  Thurs. Dec. 10 1840. I discover a strange track in the snow, and learn that some migrating otter has made across from the river to the wood, by my yard and the smith’s shop, in the silence of the night.—I cannot but smile at my own wealth, when I am thus reminded that every chink and cranny of nature is full to overflowing.—That each instant is crowded full of great events.

  Artists must go more deeply into their dormant, unused, idle “great possessions.”

  All authentic art shows up the vagueness and slackness of ninety per cent of our lives—so that art is in its nature revolutionary, a factor instigating radical change, even while (giving “the shock of recognition,” and naming and praising what is) it is conservative in a real sense.

  The poet in our time, “moved by great forces,” must live in the body as actively as he lives in his head; he must learn to extend himself into whatever actions he can perform, in order to be “part of the solution and not part of the problem,” and not to negate, by passivity and hypocrisy, the force of his own words.

  But personal commitment, along with a close attention to things and people, to the passing moments filled to the brim with past, present, and future, to the Great Possessions that are our real life, is inseparable from attention to language and form. Poetry is intrinsically revolutionary, that is, a dynamic force, but it is not so by virtue of talking about any one subject rather than another (though if the poet has political concerns they will not be excluded, and not to have political concerns—in the broad and deep sense of the term—is surely impossible to the aware adult in the last quarter of the twentieth century). Broad or narrow in focus, sad, angry, or joyful, “song that suffices our need” does so by way of its very substance of sound and vision.

  * * *

  *I’m using the term photographic idiomatically. For the art of photography I have every respect.
>
  *My italics.

  The Poet in the World

  (1967)

  THE POET IS IN labor. She has been told that it will not hurt but it has hurt so much that pain and struggle seem, just now, the only reality. But at the very moment when she feels she will die, or that she is already in hell, she hears the doctor saying, “Those are the shoulders you are feeling now”—and she knows the head is out then, and the child is pushing and sliding out of her, insistent, a poem.

  The poet is a father. Into the air, into the fictional landscape of the delivery room, wholly man-made, cluttered with shining hard surfaces, steel and glass—ruthlessly illuminated, dominated by brilliant whitenesses—into this alien human scene emerges, slime-covered, skinny-legged, with a head of fine black hair, the remote consequence of a dream of his, acted out nine months before, the rhythm that became words, the words that were spoken, written down.

  The poet is being born. Blind, he nevertheless is aware of a new world around him, the walls of the womb are gone, something harsh enters his nose and mouth and lungs, and he uses it to call out to the world with what he finds in his voice, in a cry of anger, pathos, or is it pure announcement?—he has no tears as yet, much less laughter. And some other harshness teases his eyes, premonition of sight, a promise that begins at once to be fulfilled. A sharp smell of disinfectant is assaulting his new nostrils; flat, hard, rattling sounds multiply, objects being placed on glass surfaces, a wheeled table pushes out of the way, several voices speaking; hands are holding him, moving on his skin, doing things to his body—wetness, dry softness, and then up-ness, down-ness, moving-along-ness: to stillness in some kind of container, and the extraordinary experience, lasting an eternity, of lying upon a permanently flat surface—and finally closeness to something vaguely familiar, something warm that interposes a soothing voice between him and all else until he sleeps.