New and Selected Essays

by Denise Levertov

  The next Rilke that I read was the Letters to a Young Poet in the Reginald Snell edition (London, Sidgewick and Jackson, 1945). Here, of course, it is in Letter I that he speaks at more length, and more specifically, about the needs of the poet than in any of the other ten (perhaps because it soon became clear to him that Herr Kappus was not destined for the life of art, and would be a receiver rather than a maker). That first letter in the series was my second lesson: again it was a reinforcement, a seal of approval for the instinct which had always told me not to run hither and thither seeking advice. Like everyone else I needed occasional reassurance, a word of approval, a warning against some weakness; but I knew, somehow, what Rilke’s words now stated for me, that the underlying necessity was to ask not others but oneself for confirmation. And he specified the primary question not as “Is what I have written any good?” but rather, “Must I write?” I came at some point to recognize that when he says Herr Kappus ought to continue only if he could honestly answer “Yes,” he meant the question (for every poet) to be a perennial one, not something asked and settled once and for all. Likewise, when, in the same letter, he states that “a work of art is good only if it has grown out of necessity,” he is not merely repeating that injunction; the first imperative had to do with an initial sense of being inexorably drawn to the making of poems, while this second one demands that the poet apply the same standard to each separate work.

  Rilke does not emphasize to Kappus the aesthetic, structural, needs of each poem; but his own oeuvre amply manifests that concern. Thus one is provided with a threefold basis for artistic integrity: scrupulous attention to three necessities— need as a person to write in order to fulfill one’s being; the need of each separate poem to be written; and the aesthetic needs of each poem—each line. This implication of a standard of aesthetic ethics does not exclude the playful, the role of the artist as illusionist—it encompasses it. And it is important to remember, too, that Rilke did not scorn irony—goes out of his way to tell Kappus that it can be “one more means of seizing life,” but that it is a dangerous resort in unproductive moments (leading then, he implies, to mere cheap cynicism) and that it does not function at the profoundest depths of experience.

  Another lesson from Rilke which reinforced something I knew already concerned the value of solitude. (Isn’t all that we really leam the affirmation of what our experience already hints or what our intuition can assent to?) I had learned as a child to enjoy being alone; now I saw how Rilke pointed to solditude as necessary for the poet’s inner development, for that selfhood which must be in order to experience all the multifold otherness of life. Later on, the phrase he used in relation to marriage or a comparable relationship, “the mutual bordering and guarding of two solitudes,” dimly understood at first, became a cardinal point in my map of love; and still later in my life I came to see solitude, and the individual development for which it is a condition, as the only valid ground on which communion of the many, the plural Other of brother-and-sisterhood, can take place. (Rilke himself, of course, shunned the many in practice, and can scarcely be claimed as democratic in theory either; yet there are letters of his written in the revolutionary Munich of 1918 which show him to have been too open-hearted, apolitical and aristocratic though he was, to have been altogether irresponsive to that stir of new possibility, even if he soon became disillusioned with it.)

  When I think of the Selected Letters (translated by R.F.C. Hull; London, Seeker and Warburg, 1946) which was the third, and in many ways the most important, book of Rilke’s that I obtained, it is as if of a palimpsest. So many passages, read at different times in my life, have yielded up so many layers of significance to me. Some I know almost by heart; yet there are others that I come upon as if for the first time. Early in 1947 I began making my own index for this volume, to supplement the ordinary one; and—like the wonderful poem-titles of Wallace Stevens—this list alone gives quite a strong, peculiar sense of the contents: autumn the creator—standing at windows—as ready for joy as for pain—how can we exist?—the tower of fear—the savor of creation—each step an arrival—vowels of affliction—alone in cities—our conflicts a part of our riches—strings of lamentation—the mouse in the wainscot—further than work—open secret—and so on. From each passage I received, of course, something specific; but they all combined—and not only those I indexed but, importantly and enduringly, others in which he described and evoked the working life of Rodin and Cézanne—to increase my understanding of the vocation of art, the obstinate devotion to it which, though it may not lead to any ordinary happiness, is nevertheless at the opposite pole to the morbid self-absorption often mistakenly supposed to be typical of artists. The models Rilke presents as truly great—even though he sadly reports on what he perceived as Rodin’s decline from integrity in old age, and even though he did not underestimate Cézanne’s mistrustful and surly personality—were heroically and exhilaratingly impassioned about art itself, and unflagging in its alluring, demanding service. “Work and have patience. … Draw your whole life into this circle,” he quotes Rodin as saying. Rilke’s emphasis on “experience,” on living one’s life with attention, is always balanced by an equal emphasis on the doing of one’s art work, a zeal for the doing of it, not for the amateur’s wish to have done it; an appetite for process.

  Rilke’s intense joy in the visual (whether in art or nature) recapitulated for me a direction towards which my mother had faced my attention very early in my life. “I love inseeing” he wrote in what I’ve always found a delightfully comic passage about really looking (for which “insight” has become too abstract a term):

  Can you imagine with me how glorious it is to insee, for example, a dog as one passes by —insee (I don’t mean in-spect, which is only a kind of human gymnastic, by means of which one immediately comes out again on the other side of the dog, regarding it merely, so to speak, as a window upon the humanity lying behind it—not that)—but to let oneself precisely into the dog’s very center, the point where it begins to be dog, the place in it where God, as it were, would have sat down for a moment when the dog was finished, in order to watch it under the influence of its first embarrassments and inspirations, and to know that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it could not have been better made…. Laugh though you will, dear confidant, if I am to tell you where my all-greatest feeling, my world-feeling, my earthly bliss was to be found, I must confess to you: it was to be found time and again … in such inseeing, in the indescribably swift, deep, timeless moments of this divine inseeing.

  There is joy in so much of Rilke’s letters, despite the early bouts of soulfulness and the later times of torment when (quickly recovering from his brief fall into collective pro-war hysteria in 1914) he perceived the frightfulness of WWI and intuited that it presaged the further horrors that we are witnessing (and the worse horrors we fear). It was not that he had any ordinary political astuteness; but his sensitivity to subsurface tremors, to ominous shadows (and also to the delicate counter-rhythm, the stir of seeds struggling into light) was acute. As a nonparticipant he did not undergo the daily bestiality of the war; but this peculiar sensitivity gives his overview a special kind of validity. And considering that that faculty made him highly vulnerable, it is remarkable that his sense of wonder and delight survive, so that, regaining Paris after “those terrible years,” he is able to feel again “the continuity of [his] life”: on October 20, 1920, he wrote, “here, here —la mmêmme plénitude de vie, la mêm intensité, la même justesse dans le mal: apart from political muddle and pother, everything has remained great, everything strives, surges, glows, shimmers—October days—you know them…. One hour here, the first, would have been enough. And yet I have had hundreds, days, nights—and each step was an arrival.” The joy he found in his last years, in the Valais, in the little Chateau de Muzot where his wanderings came to rest, is not simple confrontation of an appreciative sensibility with the world’s beauty, but the profounder joy of a struggle won, the life
long struggle to transform “the visible into the invisible,” that is, to internalize experience—and to use “the strings of lamentation” to play “the whole paean of praise which wells up behind all heaviness, anguish and suffering” (“später auch den ganzen Jubel zu spielen”). “Our conflicts,” he says, “have always been a part of our riches”—and one feels he had earned the right to say that, for out of much inner conflict he had made works that give off energy and joy to others. In this way he provides an example for poets who follow him, just as a Cézanne or a Rodin, through their dedication and the work that resulted, provided examples for him. An example of persistence and of realism. He faced up to anguish and kept on creating: he could see both “Cézanne, the old man, [who] when one told him of what was going on … could break out in the quiet streets of Aix and shriek at his companion: ‘Le monde, c’est terrible …’’ and the Cézanne who “during almost forty years … remained uninterruptedly within his work, in the innermost center of it … the incredible freshness and purity of his pictures is due to this obstinacy….”

  This kind of influence, first on a young beginner, and then throughout the life of a working artist, represents one of the most deeply useful kinds of mutual aid. It is an influence not on style, not on technique, but on the attitude towards one’s work that must underlie style and craft: it is out of that basic stance, a sense of aesthetic ethics, that they must develop (in whatever measure accords with the individual’s innate and indispensible gifts). If the underlying attitude is shaky, the movements of style will be shaky too—desperate gestures made to maintain balance or hide the fear of falling. Rilke presents to any young poet an example of basic attitude that can remain relevant throughout a lifetime because it is reverent, passionate, and comprehensive. His reverence for “the savor of creation,” as he calls it in a diary excerpt, leads him to concrete and sensuous images. His passion for “inseeing” leads him to delight, terror, transformation, and the internalization (or absorption) of experience. And his comprehensiveness, which makes no distinction between meeting art and meeting life, shows the poet a way to bridge the gap between the conduct of living and the conduct of art. Because he articulated a view of the poet’s role that has not lost its significance as I have read and reread Rilke’s prose for almost four decades, he remains a mentor for me now as he was when I was a young girl. No reiteration can wear thin such words as these:

  … to those who have not, perhaps, worked their way fully into their tasks … I wish that they may keep joyfully to the road of long learning until that deep, hidden self-awareness comes, assuring them (without their having to seek confirmation of others) of that pure necessity, by which I mean a sense of inevitability and finality in their work. To keep our inward conscience clear and to know whether we can take responsibility for our creative experiences just as they stand in all their truthfulness and absoluteness: that is the basis of every work of art….

  Adapted and revised, 1981, from a lecture given at a conference on religion in Chicago c. 1975.

  A Poet’s View

  (1984)

  THE BASIC QUESTIONS I have been asked to answer are, as I understand them: what is the relation between my religious and my intellectual position; is it satisfactory to me; and are whatever answers I can provide to these enquiries likely to be of use to others who may be searching to define their own condition? In order to respond I must first attempt to define what my beliefs are, and how they affect my work and other aspects of my life; as to the third question, it is probably answerable only by such other persons.

  As a prelude to making an attempt at defining and summarizing my stance, it is necessary to point out that though I have a healthy respect for my own intelligence I am not—nor is any artist—specifically an intellectual. All the arts, and especially literature, have of necessity an intellectual component; and an honest artist is, and needs to be, conscious of having a point of view, a philosophy or a constellation of opinions and beliefs, which inform his or her work in some degree. But intellect and a conscious stance are not the mainspring of art work, which, as everyone knows (but sometimes forgets), draws upon a wider range of intelligence—sensory, intuitive, emotional—than the term intellect connotes. I must also emphasize that the subject of our enquiry appears to me to be a process, not a fixed quantity. For myself, at least, I feel I am focussing on an artificially isolated moment in a slow and continuing personal evolution. What I might write five years from now could be as different from what I say now as that is from what I might have written five years ago, although the direction of my development has, I believe, been consistent.

  What, however, do I, an artist, consciously take as my intellectual stance, or as Myron Bloy has worded it, intellectual commitment? My intellectual creed, when I formulate it, turns out to be an aesthetic one, as befits an artist. I believe:

  in inspiration, to which intelligent craft serves as midwife; that the primarly impulse of the artist is to make autonomous thing from the materials of a particular art; and in the obligation of the artist to adhere to vision, to the inspired experience, and not make merely cosmetic “improvements.” I believe in the obligation to work from within.

  It will readily be seen that though I have called these commitments aesthetic, they merge, especially in the third instance, with the ethical; artistic quality appears to me to be bound up with artistic integrity. Furthermore, I believe:

  that artists, particularly writers, have social responsibilities, at least of a negative kind, i.e., even if incapable of undertaking social actions related to the implications of their productions, they should refrain, at least, from betraying such implications.

  To conclude this list, I would add my belief that:

  creative gifts confer on those who possess them the obligation to nurture them in a degree proportionate to the strength and demands of the gift (which, paradoxically, cannot be determined unless the opportunity for its development be provided, which may mean sacrifices and imbalances in other areas of life).

  I have designated these beliefs and opinions as “intellectual commitments” because they are consciously held and are conclusions arrived at by reflection. Because they concern aesthetic practice and the concept of artistic integrity—and I consider the latter to be linked to plain, common or garden, integrity—they clearly do not form a barrier to religious belief; that is, these intellectual commitments are not a system of dogmatic reasoning into which the a-rational nature of faith could not fit. To believe, as an artist, in inspiration or the intuitive, to know that without Imagination (and I give it the initial capital in conscious allusion to Keats’s famous dictum) no amount of acquired craft or scholarship or of brilliant reasoning will suffice, is to live with a door of one’s life open to the transcendent, the numinous. Not every artist, clearly, acknowledges that fact—yet all, in the creative act, experience mystery. The concept of “inspiration” presupposes a power which enters the individual and is not a personal attribute; and it is linked to a view of the artist’s life as one of obedience to a vocation. David Jones wrote in one of his essays of the artist’s impulse to gratuitously set up altars to the unknown god; and I alluded to the passage from what was then an agnostic stand-point. Later, that unknown began to be defined for me as God, and further, as God revealed in the Incarnation. Again, the rejection of merely cosmetic revisions in favor of the attempt to reach back and down to the origins of each image has to do with artistic morality, the ethics of the aesthetic, a platonic idea of integrity certainly not inconsistent with Christian (or other) religious belief, though not of course dependent on it.

  I am more reluctant to define my own religious beliefs than I have been to list my convictions concerning “aesthetic ethics.” The latter were formulated long ago, have long been a matter of record in my essays and other prose statements, and have not changed essentially, although in my teaching work I keep trying to refine them. In the matter of religion, however, I have moved in the last few years from a regretful skepti
cism which sought relief in some measure of pantheism (while it acknowledged both the ethical and emotional influence of my Jewish Christian roots and early education) to a position of Christian belief. Had I undergone a sudden dramatic conversion, I would probably find it easier to speak of this. But the movement has been gradual; indeed, I see how very gradual and continuous only when I look back at my own poems, my private notebooks, and the many moments throughout the decades when I stepped up to the threshold of faith only to turn away unable to pass over. Were the barriers I encountered emotional or intellectual? I think they were not emotional, for by temperament I was disposed to assent; and the experience, as a poet, of being at times a channel for something beyond my own limitations was, as I have suggested, an open door to specifically religious experience. Yet it seems somewhat exaggerated to call “intellectual” either my previous doubts (entertained since childhood, along with a sense of embarrassment at adult religious behavior) or my more recent sense of their irrelevance. I have not solved by a reasoning process the problems which had always stood in my way. Instead, I began to see these stumbling blocks as absurd. Why, when the very fact of life itself, of the existence of anything at all, is so astounding, why—I asked myself—should I withhold my belief in God or in the claims of Christianity until I am able to explain to myself the discrepancy between the suffering of the innocent, on the one hand, and the assertions that God is just and merciful on the other? Why should I for one moment suppose that I or any other human mind can comprehend paradoxes too vast to fit our mental capacities and, thus, never perceived in their entirety? Wasn’t it as if I were scolding the Almighty, refusing my acknowledgement until provided with guarantees? What if I began to act as if I did believe, without waiting for intellectual clarity—that is, what if I prayed, worshipped, participated in the rituals of the Church? Might not faith follow? And with it some way to deal intellectually with the troublesome mysteries and paradoxes? These suppositions were accompanied by a strong, persistently occurring sense of awe and gratitude concerning the undercurrents of my own destiny—of a force I was conscious of at least by the early ’60s, as a poem called The Thread testifies, and probably much earlier, although unable to name it.