Poetry
and Pleasure
By
Douglas McGill
The golden
thread that runs through all thought on the poetic mode is
the idea
that poetry offers
a brief but essential insight which, by virtue
of its delivery into human consciousness via pure sounds
and rhythms, is experienced as the
ineffable enjoyment of a musical now.
To
engage this property of poetry requires a commitment
of the artistic imagination on the
part of both writer and reader. The essential creative
act of the poet is to
experience the
way things are now and to leave a
trail of symbols
that, when followed by the reader,
may lead her
to the same experience, or something
close to
it. Whether by sound,
rhyme, the simple meaning of the words, typography,
silly tricks, or most especially
by a "greater than the sum of the parts" fusing
of all the above, the essential quality
of poetry is how it awakens this
pleasure of
reenactment --
of re-creation -- in the reader.
Poetic pleasure sees unity in seeming chaos
and fortifies human consciousness against
the spiritually fragmenting influences
of science and technology; and
more recently against the distracting forces
of media bombardment, e-mail overload, internet
browsing and hyperlinked text.
The pleasures induced by the reading
or listening to a good poem, especially
a poem printed
on a page or displayed as unlinked text
a computer screen, may
be experienced as a chuckle or a laugh; or
as a subtly pleasing shimmer of the spirit;
or
as a snap or shudder of the soul; or
it may be so profound a pleasure
that it feels at first like anguish; like a
desperate panic; or like pain.
The pain to the soul that's sometimes
caused by poetry -- a state of woundedness
long recognized as an occupational
hazard for poets --
is in its positive manifestation
the
sort of
pain that accompanies healing
and is associated with
movement, understanding, and growth.
This is the "purging of pity and terror" kind of poetic pleasure that
Aristotle describes; the “felt change in consciousness” pleasure that Owen Barfield
describes; the “activity which repairs the decay of things” and the “reattachment
to nature and the whole” pleasures that Emerson describes. It is the “right” pain
felt as great fears are faced squarely; as hard truths are heard
clearly; as a broken bone is rebroken prior to
its setting; and it is the deep burning
itch of that reset bone as it heals straight
and strong.
A good poem realigns the soul to the immediate
conditions of its existence.
The soul is like a dreaming boy who plays
with sticks and mud while other boys
build forts and swings; and
this dreaming and dawdling boy lives inside
all of us; and so it is only human nature
that the
soul like the dawdling boy should fall
constantly out of touch
with the new life that’s always growing and being
built up around him; just as a city rises up
around a country village; or as appointments
and responsibilities
fill the calendar of a successful poet.
It is the blessing of poetry that in a fleeting
moment it reveals to the reader in its
fullness all the new connections -- the social,
the
spiritual, the inner
and the outer growth; of the built world and
the original worlds both -- that grew up
around
the dawdling boy while he was dreaming.
Poets and metaphysicians have used this
insight into the nature of poetic action
as a starting
point to explore how physical movement
(say the swing of an inner
tube swing), intellectual understanding (say
the architecture of the fort), and spiritual
growth (the poet awakening to the city
and
to the many new worlds that
have grown up around him) are all aspects of
a single reality.
The ultimate statement of this kind in
American poetry is Walt Whitman’s “Leaves
of Grass,” a book that sounded all these themes,
especially the embrace of a painful pleasure
at a moment of birth. In his prose introduction,
Whitman described
the poet’s role in America not as that young
country’s designated dreamer,
but rather as a person most fully alert and
aware of its every last village and ravine
and great river and small rivulet; who among
all its citizens was most
capable of fully describing the reality of
what had rapidly
risen up on that continent as its citizens
had been so busy dreaming and working they
were
only half-aware of where they had come from,
and where they were, or where they were going;
and thus were
only vaguely aware of their own glorious ancestry
and
their potential destiny:
“The greatest poet ... drags the dead
out of their
coffins and stands them again
on their feet ... he
says to the past, Rise and walk
before me that I
may realize you. He learns the
lesson ... he places
himself where the future becomes
the present.”
Whitman speaks always ecstatically but with
control; because he knows, with the same
casual confidence of an ironworker picking
up his tools, that the language
of ecstasy with all of its Ohs! and its exclamation
points and its ellipses is simply the
most appropriate sort of language to use
to celebrate
and to describe
and to attend to the miracles and the visions
of a birth, which is to say the birth of
the
world that occurs every moment and that,
for Whitman, was occurring
quite uniquely in history across the dazzlingly
vast historical and geographical scale
of the continent and the souls of the American
people.
By the application of his poetic imagination,
Whitman bound up all the paradoxes
and the distractions and the glorious
visions and the terrible
nightmares that America enjoyed and suffered
within
a single, comprehensive, ruthless and
yet also humane vision. It was a vision
that warmly
embraced the penetrative thrust of the
scientist into
the very secrets of nature (“Hurrah for positive science!
Long live exact demonstration!”); and for that matter the peerless skills of
the poet as warrior (“the most deadly force of war ... he can make every word
he speaks draw blood”). Whitman was America’s
ultimate poet of imaginative inclusion, of the
ecstatic acceptance
of the real; our greatest singer of the
pleasure of
all that is.
In Whitman’s voice -- the voice he insisted
of the common man -- we hear in perfect
pitch the song our hearts sing
(though usually in tones
so delicately muted, like water falling,
they are below
the threshold of our hearing) at every
moment of our lives. And in this song of
birth and growing
we
hear the melodies of furious physical
movement, of thrusting thought, and of
our spirits bursting outwards
-- mind, body and soul -- interweaving as one:
Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
Disorderly fleshly and sensual ... eating drinking
and breeding,
No sentimentalist ... no stander above men and women
or apart from them ... no more
modest than immodest.
Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
Whoever degrades another degrades me ... and whatever is
done or said returns at last
to me,
And whatever I do or say I also return.
Through me the afflatus surging and surging ... through
me the current and the index.
The evanescence of poetic insight is essential to its
nature; and is in fact to be desired; because what
happens in this moment is the crumbling and the
dissolution into death of old myths and stories. For
one moment,
the reader of the poem experiences
the ecstasy of complete freedom from the binding
dictates of the metaphors that normally guide her
life. Yet buried in that moment of total freedom lies
an
even
deeper urge to replace the old supporting structure
of myths and metaphors with a new one; and if a
new one is not forthcoming, a devastating plunge to
the
earth
may lie in store.
No poet in history has ever claimed to be
able to create, nor has one ever claimed
he has
read, a poem that put him
into a state of pleasure
that lasted more than at most a few minutes.
Normally
the time span of such pleasure, that
is of
the profound calm gained
from a glimpsing recognition of man’s safe
place even within this world of constantly
rising and
falling structures
physical and spiritual, is measured
in mere seconds. This is sometimes cited
as a distinguishing
characteristic
between prose and poetry: that prose, though
it treats of more mundane material than poetry,
casts
a spell that lasts longer in time,
while poetry casts a
deeper, but briefer spell,
a profound glimpse.
The most profound insight on the
subject of poetic pleasure
comes, to my mind, from W.H. Auden,
who in the essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging” suggests that
the power of poetry is based on a mistake that occurs in early childhood. Namely,
that while we are learning language we confuse words with the things themselves: “A
nurse, let us suppose, says to a child ‘Look at the moon!’ The child looks and
for him this is a sacred encounter. In his mind the word ‘moon’ is not a name
of a sacred object but one of its most important properties and, therefore, numinous
... The pure poem would be, I suppose, a celebration of the numinous-in-itself
-- a sort of sanctus, sanctus, sanctus.” During
early life, then, words are charged with all
the sensual
pleasures that things in themselves naturally
evoke; they
become numinous carriers of sacred meaning. When
we read poetry as adults, what we most profoundly
are
doing therefore
is re-enacting that time in our
lives
when we experienced the sacredness of the world
directly, sensually and holistically; that is,
before the time
when language with its nouns and its verbs, and
science and technology with their otherwise useful
focus on
subsystems, profanely split
up the world into separate ideas and oppositions.
It is in this sense that every poem attempts
to make the world whole again.
Pleasure is
the hub of the
wheel. It's the heart through which all
the crazily
disparate lines of the world intersect
through the human
being. That's why pleasure is not only
(if you will) pleasing, but instructive.
Because when
we feel
pleasure we understand with our whole
being that the world is one. We know
with our mind
and body that all the fascinating and
useful
and lifesaving but also distracting-as-hell
tidal wave of
definitions/distinctions/medical
wonders/new-websites-to-visit/newspaper
headlines/books
to read/& e-mails
are all comfortingly
(though oh so fleetingly!)
fused
into a satisfying
integrated whole.
It is the unique
ability and function
of poetry, among
all the arts,
to show the sacred
but
normally obscure
fact of the oneness
and the connectedness
of
things for just a brief second, yet with a
tangibility that
is entirely
convincing.
Samuel Johnson
explains: "The end of writing is to instruct; the end of
poetry is to instruct by pleasing." In his “Preface to Shakespeare,” Johnson
further describes how poetry achieves this, by
offering within the frame of a single poem all
the chaotic disparities
and oppositions of life. A poet like
Shakespeare will transcend cliched exaltations
of love as the supreme emotion by offering ineradicable
artistic
proof of the axiom of human complexity and
contradiction, of behaviors and hopes and motives
that move in opposite directions, yet simultaneously,
within
every person and community; which behaviors range
from expansive love to consuming hatred, from
sublime expression to slapstick farce, from moral
goodness
to depravity.
The pleasure comes in the reader’s sudden
apprehension of the acceptable (because it
is
inevitable and eternal), contradictory
wholeness of human nature. In this
sense, Shakespeare is an echo of Whitman and
vice versa.
The genius of Shakespeare, says Johnson,
lies in how he puts on exhibit “the
real state of sublunary nature, which partakes
of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled
with endless
variety of proportion and innumerable
modes of combination;
and expressing the course of the world, in which
the loss of one is the gain of another;
in which,
at the same time, the reveler is hasting
to his wine,
and the mourner burying his
friend; in which the malignity of one is
sometimes
defeated
by the frolic of another; and many mischiefs
and many benefits are done and hindered
without design.”
Many a modern writer relies on the
notion of "otherness," most often
as shorthand to signify the entire world that exists beyond the boundaries of
our individual brains and skins. It’s a simple idea and a fine word, and poetic
pleasure can be said to be the full if fleeting experience by the reader -- catalyzed
by poetry's particular set of verbal effects -- of connection to the “other." More
specifically, pleasure bestows a kind of knowing that doesn't draw distinctions
(the scientific way of knowing) but rather of likenesses (the artistic or poetic
way of knowing). Poetic knowledge as Wordsworth says is a whole-body knowledge
of "relationships and love."
The marvels and the stresses attending the
rise of science as a social force in
19th-century England put pressure on the
poets of the
age to define and defend
their role in society. What good was poetry
when new medicines, steam engines, and electricity
promised salvation to body and soul?
Samuel
Taylor Coleridge,
in the famous 14th chapter of the Biographia
Literaria, warned against the tendency of
science to
distract and fragment human consciousness.
He offered poetic pleasure,
that is to say the sudden apprehension of the
wider interconnected world, as an antidote:
“A poem is that species of composition,
which is
opposed to works of science, by proposing
for its
immediate object pleasure, not truth;
and from all
other species (having this object
in common with it)
it is discriminated by proposing to
itself such delight
from the whole, as is compatible with
a distinct
gratification from each component
part.”
In a distinctly rougher, more pragmatic,
and characteristically American voice,
the 18th-century
American poet and journalist,
William Cullen Bryant,
echoed Coleridge across the Atlantic: “The power of
poetry to refine our views of life and happiness
is more and
more
needed as society advances. It is needed
to withstand
the encroachments of heartless and artificial
manners which make civilization so tame and uninteresting.
It is needed to counteract the tendency of physical
science, which -- being now sought, not, as formerly,
for intellectual gratification, but for multiplying
bodily
comforts -- requires a new development of imagination,
taste, and poetry to preserve men from sinking
into
an earthly, material, epicurean
life.”
The use of words to trigger a fused, greater-than-the-sum-of-their-parts
experience of the human
senses into a grand pleasure is the great
theme
of all
of the major
poetics. Alexander Pope sums it up nicely: "Tis
not a Lip, or Eye, we Beauty call, But the joint
Force and full Result of all."
Ultimately, all poets throughout history
have laid it to the work of human imagination
-- first of the poet, and
then of the reader attempting
to
retrace the imaginative journey first
traveled by the poet -- to unite the
disparate facts
and sensations
of life into a fleeting, pleasurable knowledge
of a whole.
Teaching and learning the experience
of true poetic pleasure is one possible
antidote to the hijacking of human consciousness
by modern technologies
of
communication.
In a single poem, time travel and space travel
far
beyond the possibilities of a day’s worth
of netsurfing are possible:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window
or
just walking dully
along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately
waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did specially want it to happen,
skating
On a pond at the end of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its
course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and
the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
Poetry on the page is capable of bestowing a powerful
grace, a saving mercy, and a healing to the
human soul of the reader that a movie, a radio program,
or a hyperlinked text could never achieve.
But the healing power of poetry -- the balm,
not always pleasurable, of poetic
pleasure – requires
the active participation of the reader.
It requires an effort of imagination
of
the sort that any person
expends who goes to an art museum,
to a play, or
sits down to delve into a book to experience
it
deeply.
For a poem to work the full extent
of its healing power requires a concentration
equal to that of the poet when he forged his
words;
which means the reader may suffer
the agonies the poet suffered as
he created.
A reader may wish by the reading
of poems to reset or to cleanse the
inner
mechanisms
of her being, which she may
feel are broken or stained
or flawed.
But breaking precedes healing; things
get worse before they get better; and
new experiences,
especially deep sensual pleasurable ones such
as poetry may bring, can be frightening.
Most definitely, something may break inside
even as something
new is born; and poetry can be the
instrument
of this breaking. The
lines of a poem may themselves
shatter the myths and stories of a person’s past that yet continue to ossify
a person’s present:
Essential oils -- are wrung --
The Attar from the Rose
Be not expressed by Suns -- alone
--
It is the gift of Screws --
The breaking of the old world and the making of the new; the shattering of
the shell of an egg; the crumbling to dust of an old garment and the weaving
of a
bright new one from vital threads taken straight
from life -- from a cotton ball only last week plucked from the field;
from a silk worm only last week spinning its cocoon.
These are the results of a good poem. The struggle
of the reader of poetry, like the struggle of the poet, partakes of the
sweat and the panic and the desperate
energies of all these primal beginnings, that
is to say of all these passionate and determined thrusts into the life of the
world now.
If the past is a woman’s burden and her broken
heart, she risks, when she reads a
poem, in this way: she lets the
poet rebreak, in order to
restore, her heart.
A new world is always being born
around us as we dawdle
and dream. To notice and to celebrate this
world in all
its wondrous contradictions
and
it’s miraculous
particulars, even for a fleeting second, marks the beginning of poetic healing.
It’s up to us as readers, to make the quiet,
and to take the time that we need, to not only
listen to and
to read
poetry, but also then to notice the effects
it has had upon us. That is, to notice how we
have healed.
Last night, as I was sleeping
I dreamt -- marvelous
error! --
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.
Copyright
@ 2001 Douglas McGill