New and Selected Essays

by Denise Levertov

  It is two years later. The poet is in a vast open space covered by rectangular gray cobblestones. In some of the crevices between them there is bright green moss. If he pokes it with a finger it feels cold, it gives under pressure but is slightly prickly. His attention is whirled away from it by a great beating of wings around him and a loud roucouing. People with long legs who surround him are afraid he will take fright at the flock of pigeons, but he laughs in wild pleasure as they put lumps of bread into his hands for him to throw to the birds. He throws with both hands, and the pigeons vanish over his head and someone says. Cathedral. See the big building, it’s a Cathedral. But he sees only an enormous door, a mouth, darkness inside it. There is a feather on his coat. And then he is indoors under a table in the darkish room, among the legs of the table and of the people, the people’s feet in shoes, one pair without shoes, empty shoes kicked off nearby. Emerging unseen he steps hard on something, a toy train belonging to another child, and it breaks, and there is a great commotion and beating of wings again and loud voices, and he alone is silent in the midst of it, quite silent and alone, and the birds flying and the other child crying over its broken train and the word cathedral, yes, it is ten years later and the twin towers of it share the gray of the cobblestones in the back of a large space in his mind where flying buttresses and flying pigeons mean cathedral and the silence he knows is inside the great door’s darkness is the same silence he maintained down among the feet and legs of adults who beat their wings up above him in the dark air and vanished into the sky.

  It is Time that pushed them into the sky, and he has been living ten, twenty, thirty years; he has read and forgotten thousands of books, and thousands of books have entered him with their scenes and people, their sounds, ideas, logics, irrationalities, are singing and dancing and walking and crawling and shouting and keeping still in his mind, not only in his mind but in his way of moving his body and in his actions and decisions and in his dreams by night and by day and in the way he puts one word before another to pass from the gate of an avenue and into the cathedral that looms at the far end of it holding silence and darkness in its inner space as a finger’s-breadth of moss is held between two stones.

  All the books he has read are in the poet’s mind (having arrived there by way of his eyes and ears, his apperceptive brain-centers, his heartbeat, his arteries, his bones) as it grasps a pen with which to sign yes or no. Life or death? Peace or war?

  He has read what Rilke wrote:

  … verses are not, as people imagine, simply feelings (we have those soon enough); they are experiences. In order to write a single poem, one must see many cities, and people, and things; one must get to know animals and the flight of birds, and the gestures that flowers make when they open to the morning. One must be able to return to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected encounters, to partings long foreseen; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, and to parents whom one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for somebody else); to childhood illnesses that begin so strangely with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days spent in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to oceans, to nights of travel that rushed along loftily and flew with all the stars—and still it is not enough to be able to think of all this. There must be memories of many nights of love, each one unlike the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of women in childbed, light and blanched and sleeping, shutting themselves in. But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in a room with open windows and with fitful noises. And still it is not yet enough, to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many and one must have die immense patience to wait till they are come again. For the memories themselves are still nothing. Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them. (From The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge 1908.)

  This the poet has known, and he has known in his own flesh equivalent things. He has seen suddenly coming round a corner the deep-lined, jowled faces and uncertain, unfocusing eyes, never meeting his for more than an unwilling second, of men of power. All the machines of his life have directed upon him their power, whether of speed or flickering information or disembodied music. He has seen enormous mountains from above, from higher than eagles ever fly; and skimmed upstream over the strong flow of rivers; and crossed in a day the great oceans his ancestors labored across in many months. He has sat in a bathtub listening to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, he has looked up from the death of Socrates, disturbed by some extra noise amid the jarring and lurching of the subway train and the many rhythmic rattlings of its parts, and seen one man stab another and a third spring from his seat to assist the wounded one. He has seen the lifted fork pause in the air laden with its morsel of TV dinner as the eyes of the woman holding it paused for a moment at the image on the screen that showed a bamboo hut go up in flames and a Vietnamese child run screaming toward the camera—and he has seen the fork move on toward its waiting mouth, and the jaws continue their halted movement of mastication as the next image glided across the screen.

  He has breathed in dust and poetry, he has breathed out dust and poetry, he has written:

  Slowly men and women move in life,

  cumbered.

  The passing of sorrow, the passing

  of joy. All awareness

  is the awareness of time.

  Passion,

  however it seems to leap and pounce,

  is a slow thing.

  It blunders,

  cracking twigs in the woods of the world.

  He has read E. M. Forster’s words, “Only connect,” and typed them out and pasted them on the wall over his desk along with other sayings:

  The task of the poet is to make clear to himself, and thereby to others, the temporal and eternal questions which are astir in the age and community to which he belongs.

  —Ibsen

  We have the daily struggle, inescapable and deadly serious, to seize upon the word and bring it into the directest possible contact with all that is felt, seen, thought, imagined, experienced.

  —Goethe

  The task of the church is to keep open communication between man and God.

  —Swedenborg

  And below this the poet has written, “For church read poet. For God read man and his imagination, man and his senses, man and man, man and nature—well, maybe ‘god,’ then, or ‘the gods’ …”

  What am I saying?

  I am saying that for the poet, for the man who makes literature, there is no such thing as an isolated study of literature. And for those who desire to know what the poet has made, there is therefore no purely literary study either. Why “therefore”? Because the understanding of a result is incomplete if there is ignorance of its process. The literary critic or the teacher of literature is merely scratching a section of surface if he does not live out in his own life some experience of the multitudinous interactions in time, space, memory, dream, and instinct that at every word tremble into synthesis in the work of a poet, or if he keeps his reading separate from his actions in a box labeled “aesthetic experiences.” The interaction of life on art and of art on life is continuous. Poetry is necessary to a whole man, and that poetry be not divided from the rest of life is necessary to it. Both life and poetry fade, wilt, shrink, when they are divorced.

  Literature—the writing of it, the study of it, the teaching of it—is a part of your lives. It sustains you, in one way or another. Do not allow that fatal divorce to take place between it and your actions.

  It was Rilke, the most devoted of poets, the one who gave himself most wholly to the service of his art, who wrote:

  … art does not ultimately tend to produce more artists. It does not mean to call anyone over to it, indeed it has always
been my guess that it is not concerned at all with any effect. But while its creations, having issued irresistibly from an inexhaustible source, stand there strangely quiet and surpassable among things, it may be that involuntarily they become somehow exemplary for every human activity by reason of their innate disinterestedness, freedom and intensity….*

  For as much as the artist in us is concerned with work, the realization of it, its existence and duration quite apart from ourselves—we shall only be wholly in the right when we understand that even this most urgent realization of a higher reality appears, from some last and extreme vantage point, only as a means to win something once more invisible, something inward and unspectacular—a saner state in the midst of our being.*

  He is saying, in these two passages from letters, that though the work of art does not aim at effect but is a thing imbued with life, that lives that life for its own sake, it nevertheless has effect; and that that effect is ultimately moral. And morality, at certain points in history, of which I believe this is one—this year, even if not this day—demands of us that we sometimes leave our desks, our classrooms, our libraries, and manifest in the streets, and by radical political actions, that love of the good and beautiful, that love of life and its arts, to which otherwise we pay only lip service. Last spring (1966) at a Danforth Conference, Tom Bradley, one of the speakers, said (I quote from my notes): “Literature is dynamite because it asks—proposes— moral questions and seeks to define the nature and worth of man’s life.” (And this is as true of the most “unengaged” lyric poem, intrinsically, as of the most didactic or discursive or contentious). Bradley continued, “The vision of man we get from art conditions our vision of society and therefore our political behavior…. Art and social life are in a dialectical relationship to each other that is synthesized by political action.”

  The obligation of the poet (and, by extension, of others committed to the love of literature, as critics and teachers or simply as readers) is not necessarily to write “political” poems (or to focus attention primarily on such poems as more “relevant” than other poems or fictions). The obligation of the writer is: to take personal and active responsibility for his words, whatever they are, and to acknowledge their potential influence on the lives of others. The obligation of teachers and critics is: not to block the dynamic consequences of the words they try to bring due to students and readers. And the obligation of readers is: not to indulge in the hypocrisy of merely vicarious experience, thereby reducing literature to the concept of “just words,” ultimately a frivolity, an irrelevance when the chips are down…. When words penetrate deep into us they change the chemistry of the soul, of the imagination. We have no right to do that to people if we don’t share the consequences.

  People are always asking me how I can reconcile poetry and political action, poetry and talk of revolution. Don’t you feel, they say to me, that you and other poets are betraying your work as poets when you spend time participating in sit-ins, marching in the streets, helping to write leaflets, etc. My answer is no; precisely because I am a poet, I know, and those other poets who do likewise know, that we must fulfill the poet’s total involvement in life in this aspect also. “But is not the task of the poet essentially one of conservation?” the question comes. Yes, and if I speak of revolution it is because I believe that only revolution* can now save that earthly life, that miracle of being, which poetry conserves and celebrates. “But history shows us that poets—even great poets—more often fulfill their lives as observers than as participants in political action—when they do become embroiled in politics they usually write bad poems.” I answer, good poets write bad political poems only if they let themselves write deliberate, opinionated rhetoric, misusing their art as propaganda. The poet does not use poetry, but is at the service of poetry. To use it is to misuse it. A poet driven to speak to himself, to maintain a dialogue with himself, concerning politics, can expect to write as well upon that theme as upon any other. He can not separate it from everything else in his life. But it is not whether or not good “political” poems are a possibility that is in question. What is in question is the role of the poet as observer or as participant in the life of his time. And if history is invoked to prove that more poets have stood aside, have watched or ignored the events of their moment in history, than have spent time and energy in bodily participation in those events, I must answer that a sense of history must involve a sense of the present, a vivid awareness of change, a response to crisis, a realization that what was appropriate in this or that situation in the past is inadequate to the demands of the present, that we are living our whole lives in a state of emergency which is—for reasons I’m sure I don’t have to spell out for you by discussing nuclear and chemical weapons or ecological disasters and threats—unparalleled in all history.

  When I was seven or eight and my sister sixteen or seventeen, she described the mind to me as a room full of boxes, in aisles like the shelves of a library, each box with its label. I had heard the term “gray matter,” and so I visualized room and boxes as gray, dust-gray. Her confident description impressed me, but I am glad to say I felt an immediate doubt of its authenticity. Yet I have since seen lovers of poetry, lovers of literature, behave as if it were indeed so, and allow no fruitful reciprocity between poem and action.*

  “No ideas but in things,” said William Carlos Williams. This does not mean “no ideas.” It means (and here I quote Wordsworth) that “language is not the dress but the incarnation of thoughts.” “No ideas but in things,” means, essentially, “Only connect.” And it is therefore not only a craft-statement, not only an aesthetic statement (though it is these things also, and importantly), but a moral statement. Only connect. No ideas but in things, The words reverberate through the poet’s life, through my life, and I hope through your lives, joining with other knowledge in the mind, that place that is not a gray room full of little boxes….

  * * *

  *From a letter to Rudolf Bödlander, letters of Raimer Maria Rilke, Vol. II.

  *From a letter to Gertrude Oukama Knoop in Rilke, Selected Letters.

  *In the late 1960s the word “revolution” was in common use among peace activities of almost all kinds. Although we might disagree about the exact form revolution should take and how it was to come about, there was consensus about the need for radical changes in the way human society organized itself. Most people who were infants then or not yet born—today’s generation—have no positive associations with the word; and though many of us who are older see no less need for such changes, we are hesitant to use a term which unfortunately more often conveys the idea of bloody violence and civil war than a vision of a just and peaceful community. Yet “radical change” is a phrase visited by being meaninglessly repeated by politicians as they seek election. One has no recurrence but to beg the reader’s cooperation in attempting to comprehend the intention of words which have lost their efficacy but for which at this time (1992) there seem to be no alternatives.

  *At this point in the talk as originally given, I inserted the poem, “O Taste and See,” from my book of the same title.

  Written for a symposium on the question, “Is There a Purdy Literary Study?” held at Geneseo, New York, in April 1967.

  Paradox and Equilibrium

  (1988)

  TO SUPPOSE THAT ART (of any kind—literary, visual, theatrical, etc.) can be politically and socially “engaged” and still possess its aesthetic integrity is to concede to art an unrestricted, multifarious nature that includes hortatory, and consequently even the (morally) utile. Pure poetry, diatribe, and passionate exhortation meet in the prophets. But the modern artist who wants at once to show truth and urge action must confront the fact that violent and horrific images are commonplace in the age of “live coverage” and instant replays. How can it serve to record, in words or pictures, “man’s inhumanity to man”—and to the earth and all that is in it—when people have developed such protective shells of numbness? There is only one way—the
way of aesthetic power.

  The Japanese painters Iri and Toshi Maruki, with unexampled single-mindedness and stamina (both emotional and aesthetic) have devoted their lives’ best energies to documenting and evoking the bleakest and most dread realities of their— of our—time. The double paradox of their achievement is that they have made beauty from horror, yet have not, in doing so, softened or diluted the horror.

  Though I have long defended the possibility of writing “engaged” poetry that is as fully poetry, with all its artistic values intact, as any other, I cannot think of a body of poetic work one might cite as equivalent in this paradoxical intensity, with the exception of Dante’s Inferno. I am not claiming that what is beautiful in the Marukis’ work is equal (or similar) in beauty to that in Dante’s poetry, but that their attainment of an extraordinarily sustained synthesis of irreconcilable elements is one to which I can think of no other parallel.

  Literature is full of moments of such synthesis, but provides no comparable unrelenting lifetime engagement. In visual art, one recalls Goya; but the Disasters of War form only one part of his large oeuvre (even if many would feel it is the most essential part). Kollwitz maintained a consistent focus, but on a far smaller range of images; besides, hers is a world not only of poverty and oppression but of struggle, maternal protectiveness, heroism, and thus of hope—like the worlds of Brecht, Hikmet, or Neruda. And Dante knows that Purgatory and Paradise lie ahead, no less real than Hell. But in an interview Toshi Maruki admits to despair, “because we have not the strength to stop war,” and Iri Makuri says that “we don’t paint this reality so that people will rethink things or so that we can create a world that is not so hellish. It wouldn’t do to paint with such a sense of self-importance…. The point is that all of us, all living beings, are living in that reality. We paint that reality.”