New and Selected Essays

by Denise Levertov

  An example of an excellent biography which combines two functions is Walter Jackson Bate’s Life of Keats. Together with all its well-indexed factual data. Bate suggests what less cut-and-dried factors may have entered into the composition of this or that poem; but he refrains from psychologizing for the sake of psychologizing. The work itself is always the central focus of his attention. The people, places, books, conversations, and impressions of Keats’ life are discussed because of their bearing on his poems, the raison d’etre of the biography, and not in order to satisfy any mere inquisitiveness. In contrast, the biographies I deplore focus on any scandalous or dramatic peculiarities of the poet, and whether they are relevant to the poems as works of art is not seriously questioned.

  If biographies like Bate’s and others of its caliber constitute personal critiques and tributes without straying into the over-subjective, much less into mere sensationalism and gossip, they are helped in this by the time elapsed since their subjects lived and died. One problem with modern biography is that “lives” get written before their subjects are cold in their graves. (If they go a step further and biographize living persons, authorization or vigorous denial can at least take place!) But with or without a decent interval, there should be a recognition that although our understanding of cultural history is increased by a certain range of factual information, yet all that is most interesting about an artist’s life must be in the work itself. There the autobiographical is often completely transformed, or, if undisguisedly recounted, is selected, and invested with a significance which transcends the ephemeral and narrowly personal. When this transcendence does not take place, autobiographical material lacks the resonance we find in poems pervaded by a larger context. Yeats’ Maude Gonne is not just Maude Gonne, and the poet is not just Willy Yeats who was in love with her. She is Cathleen Ni Houlihan, she is Ireland herself, and he the Irish people in love with their country. In our own time, Milosz only writes explicitly of his own life-story as much as is demanded by his major theme, the human intellect and the human soul within the turmoil of twentieth century history. No one could extract a biography from his Collected Poems. William Carlos Williams, who so strongly emphasized the virtue of the concrete image and of “finding the universal in the local,” was equally discreet and selective in his poems. They come directly out of his experience, yes, yet we can learn from them precious little in the way of biography: that he was a doctor, most of whose patients were poor immigrants; that his wife’s name was Floss; that he lived in New Jersey, in sight of the New York skyline across the Hudson—that’s about it. Even when, in old age, he obliquely confesses to Floss the infidelities which accompanied his love for her, he does not even verge on making public the physical details of events intrinsically intimate. Biographically speaking, Williams reveals almost as little as Wallace Stevens or T. S. Eliot. As A. N. Wilson wrote in a review of a life of Arthur Ransome, the author of Swallows and Amazons and other first-rate children’s books, “the money, the illnesses, the marriages … are just the chaff which the imagination has discarded.” In other words, the lives of poets and other artists are not usually more interesting than anyone else’s. Conversely, great novels make us realize that the most uneventful of lives can have deep interest. Those subtle currents of feeling and perception a great writer of fiction can reveal beneath the surface of “ordinary” lives are far more interesting than the scandals and dramas some biographers bring to the fore. If a poet’s life is more interesting than his or her poetry, it doesn’t say much for the poems. It is in these, if they are good, that one can trace those essential hidden streams of inner life.

  Perhaps in the kind of poem from which it seems as if not enough chaff has been discarded, the real problem is not so much a lack of selectivity as an insistent inclusion of material once thought of as private, and which can dominate a poem to the detriment of its intended focus and its artistic integrity. When this happens, the relation between poet and reader—or poem and reader—changes. Just as alcoholism, mental breakdowns, violence, and turbulent sexual histories of celebrities in any field makes them magnets for popular curiosity, so the inclusion in poems of certain kinds of intimate data lays them open to a prying kind of reading even before a biographer embarks on any investigation of the author.

  There is a restraint in, for instance, the enduringly moving elegies of the past—whether we think, in our own century, of Rexroth’s poem to his first wife, Andrée Rexroth, or back to Ben Jonson’s farewell to his seven-year-old first-born son, or the Exequy of Henry King—a restraint rarely found in more contemporary poems of bereavement. (A notable exception seems to me to be David Ray’s Sam’s Book, because what emerges most strongly from this group of poems is not so much the father’s inconsolable grief slowly modulating from initial shock to full integration with his ongoing life—though that is strongly and memorably conveyed—as the vivid spirit of the boy Sam himself, individual, yet archetypal.)

  As much as lack of restraint, perhaps what troubles me in many comparable contemporary poems is their egotism. Elegies which are self-centered or excessively confessional often make us feel guilty of unkindness and insensitivity if we dare to think for a moment that the recently dead beloved is, in effect, being exploited. It is not that we doubt the reality of the anguish itself; yet we feel manipulated by its instant and repeated public display. When the protagonists of a particular real-life love-story broken by death are spotlighted in the survivor’s poems (which one by one may be beautiful) these poems as a set cannot convey archetypal grief but remain exclusively attached to a specific life-history. The same is true of love poems: a sensuality evoked by anecdotally restricted means is less erotic than that which is less explicit, more stylized, more mysterious.

  What motivates poets to give away information which makes them more than normally vulnerable to vulgar curiosity? We need to couple this question with a similar enquiry into the public appetite for scandal, shock, and any kind of intimate revelation—which in some degree all of us share, as we all breathe the same cultural air. I cannot pretend to unravel the social psychology involved; but I think I see some historical factors that have affected certain poetic practices and their acceptance by readers.

  One of these was that during the 1950s or early ’60s William Carlos Williams’ emphasis on the concrete local particulars of daily life as a poet’s vital source quietly began to be diluted and distorted. The result was thousands of banal poems, poems in which a description (possibly of intrinsic interest) of something the writer had seen was prefaced by the entirely superfluous information that he had seen it and was on his way to a tavern at the time as he needed a beer. The setting had gobbled up the gemstone, since at least as much time was given to the preface as to the point. Poems of this type became so prevalent that they were accepted as the norm (and they have certainly not disappeared from the scene). This norm, with its gratuitous reiteration of the first person singular, paved the way for the further narcissism which ensued as the confessional school came to the fore. (I should mention here that though Robert Lowell is cited as that school’s chief instigator, his own work in the confessional vein is sharply differentiated by his overriding historical sense, which places all that stems from his individual history into a larger objective configuration.) Then, later in the ’60s, a number of concepts began to be voiced in American society which, as they filtered slowly into some degree of general acceptance and into the minds of poets too, underwent distortion just as Williams’ ideas had done. One of these concepts was encapsulated in the slogan, “Let it all hang out.” Whether this expression originated with one of the Beat poets or elsewhere, its primary significance was political, and its aesthetic adoption was a secondary effect, dependent on individual artistic judgment and choice.

  As people awoke to the hypocrisy of the state’s claim to be defending democracy rather than admitting that the war in Vietnam, like other wars, was being fought for a whole complex of economic and geopolitical reasons, a lot of other
hypocrisies came to light at the same time. A whole generation became aware of the disparity between their parents’ way of living and their stated values. “Let it all hang out” emerged as a cry for truthfulness, for an end to lying in politics and the whole social fabric; a call to proclaim that the Emperor (in this case, what in those days we called The War Machine, and by extension the social system supporting it) had no clothes of truth and justice. Naturally the arts could not but be affected; however, instead of the ever-greater concern for artistic precision and integrity which should have been the logical translation into creative works of this underlying meaning, the slogan was interpreted as a justification for an aesthetic of exhibitionism.

  There is a difference between dragging a skeleton out of a cupboard into daylight and keeping the skeleton on permanent display. The “group grope” (does anyone remember that expression?) may be the opposite of prudery but is not its only alternative. In a D.C. jail after a big demonstration and mass arrest in the early 70s I recall seeing a young woman masturbating in the midst of a crowd of other women. No one made even a whispered comment. That a private act was being made utterly public was apparently considered acceptable—or at least no one dared to remonstrate for fear of being thought puritanical. Modesty was taken for prudery, an attachment to privacy was mistaken for elitism and a lack of open-hearted frankness.

  The slogan “the personal is political” came into use around the same time. What this should mean, I think, is that how you act in daily life should reflect your political convictions. For example, it is hypocritical and also ineffective to work for peace and justice if you are belligerent to family and friends. But by many people it was used as an excuse to retreat from political action of any kind; and to some poets, it seems to have meant that the “particular and local” were enough in themselves without any concern for finding the universal. Of course, it is fatal to go in deliberate search of universality—that way only pomposity lies; yet a poet does need to know and acknowledge a larger frame of reference than his or her own accidental particulars; and without some longing to reach out to such a context, little of poetic substance will result.

  Linked to this theme of “the personal is political” is the journal-writing movement of the 70s and ’80s, an outgrowth of “human potential,” “personal growth,” and other holistic programs, and closely associated with feminism though it is not exclusive to women’s groups. Keeping a journal or diary can be really valuable to anyone—though one has to beware that one doesn’t start to make it the goal of living. But for poets it can create a problem. Journals or diaries are in essence private. Poems, too, deal with intimate experience, but they select and transform it, if they are good poems. Too often, the measure of candor appropriate to a free-standing work of art is superseded by the much larger measure that may serve a cathartic purpose in the psychological development of the diarist, whose pages are to be read by no one but their writer—and perhaps only once by him or her, since the act of writing has itself fulfilled the need. The widespread encouragement of journal-writing and its discussion as an art genre, along with the publication of selections from the journals of living writers, has tended to blur the distinctions between “private” and “public.” It seems that some poets lose a sense of where diary ends and poem begins. Journal entries which consist of philosophical or other reflections, record observations of nature, and so forth, are a fascinating kind of informal essay; and from those in which a writer or other artist talks about craft and creative process, or edges up on a work about to begin, there is often much more to be learned than from formal essays. One is grateful to the author for granting a glimpse into the alchemist’s kitchen. But I’ve seen other published diary excerpts of such a confidential nature that, once again, one questions motivation.

  Is there perhaps, in every act of artistic communication, something questionable? We poets are strangely willing to read in public, thus baring our souls with more immediacy than when paper and print intervene, and exposing; them, after the reading, to impertinent questions from total strangers. I wonder about this willingness every time I read! The justification, of course, is the belief that one has made a work. All makers of art must believe that they are contributing a thing to the sum of things, and that it has some value and a life of its own to live. Without such belief they would not be able to serve the art they practice; however modest, however self-critical, without that grain of faith an artist is paralyzed. But that justification cannot extend to genuine journals. Isn’t there something kinky about voluntarily “sharing,” as they say, something the very nature of which is destroyed by so doing? A compulsive need, like a Dostoyevsky character, to turn the reader into a voyeur? It is the same phenomenon I have remarked on in regard to some poems. And again, audience compliance involves us all in some measure.

  A blurring of the boundary between private and public leads to the gradual loss of the very idea of privacy—a loss which, like the increasing attrition of certain grammatical nuances, and a vocabulary shrinking except in technological words, is a form of erosion affecting the whole human ecology. Television and the development of communications technology are generally, and I think correctly, held responsible for some of this erosion. As everyone knows, extreme violence, actual and fictive, has long since erupted into people’s living rooms, interspersed with advertisements, comedy, and scenes of explicit sexual intercourse, in such a way that all these things run together—equally vivid, equally meaningless. The telephone has intruded into our lives at unwelcome moments for over a century now. Data banks contain, we are told, all manner of information about us which we were not aware of having imparted to anyone. Marked trails, garbage cans, and garbage (not always in the cans) make a sense of solitude hard to find for those who seek it in what is supposed to be wilderness. One might think privacy and intimacy would be all the more valued in such an environment, but instead their very nature is obscured. When external factors invade what we possess of them, they meet little resistance. How many people, for example, take any steps to prevent telemarketing calls, calls which not only interrupt them at the dinner table or whatever else they happen to be doing, but in which the caller immediately addresses them by their first name?

  Yet another factor, deeper than these, is contemporary embarrassment at formalities, at anything recognized as ritual (though unrecognized rituals exist in daily life). This is clear in religious ceremonies, where something parallel to excessive naturalism in the dramatic theater is often substituted for the powerful distancing inherent in the traditional liturgical practices of any religion—practices from which theater itself evolved. Yet there is a deep human need for ritual. Old forms of it, like old prosodic forms, may not accommodate, unchanged, the changing needs of the people, but the new forms that evolve lose their power if they lose the very character of ritual or ceremony, just as new formal explorations in poetry must retain their intrinsically poetic character and not become a form of journalism.

  The embarrassment at formality which (along with a lack of imagination) results in unsatisfactory alternatives to rituals that have ceased to be emotionally effective, seems to be related to that same blurring of boundaries. When everything is made personal (as in a priest greeting the people at the beginning of Mass with “Good morning,” to which they reply, “Good morning, Father,” instead of saying “Peace be with you” and receiving the response, “And with thy spirit”), then the personal is indistinguishable from the public: the priest is greeted as an individual, and this obscures the nature of his office as priest, which transcends the personal. In the same way, a certain distancing which the great poets of the past demonstrate— the assumption of the bard’s mantle, like the vestments of the priest—has been forgone in our time, less for the sake of relevancy than out of some feeling that ceremony is absurd (as indeed it can be when it is undertaken self-consciously and without conviction).

  The publication of poems which like diaries (though sometimes with an undeniable beauty or f
orce of language) present unmediated, untransformed, accounts of the most intimate experience, represent a kind of self-invasion. And one of the most troubling aspects of this is its disregard for others.

  My love’s manners in bed

  are not to be discussed by me

  wrote Robert Creeley in 1959. I’ve read many a poem that made me feel the author would have done well to profit by this maxim. But adults can object and defend themselves if they feel exposed and exploited as characters in someone’s drama of self-revelation; children can not. Yet there are many poems in which a parent—and I have to acknowledge that, in my observation, it is most often a mother—writes of a child in ways liable to cause acute, even traumatic embarrassment when that child sooner or later reads that poem. These are poems—or images in poems—which focus on the child’s body, and in particular its genitalia. Imagine a shy adolescent finding in print a graphic description of his little penis at age five, its color and shape! Worse, imagine his schoolmates reading the poem and teasing him about it! Was the description vital to the poem? Often, I would say it was not. But in some instances it may be. In that case, the writer should have recognized, I think, that though tone and intent were tender, the poem should remain unpublished—at least until the child is an adult and his consent can be requested.*

  It is important to note a type of autobiographical poem which does not partake of the gratuitous and self-important, but which brings to light acts of oppression and cruelty. Victims of racism, rape, torture, incest, and other abuses and crimes who dare to tell their stories speak for others who have been stifled and silenced by their own sufferings and who too often have felt, in some confused way, complicit. Some degree of liberation may come to them in knowing that they are not unique in what happened to them. Whether a more general knowledge of, for example, child abuse, actually helps to make a society less prone to it I doubt, however; it almost seems, depressingly, as if the more instances that are uncovered the more it proliferates. This seems true of rape also. But this can only be a matter of conjecture, whereas the breaking of silence in such instances is of clear personal benefit, and if it results in poems of high integrity these should, of course, be published.