Part 13 (1/2)

I have fully stated in my _The Erotic Motive in Literature_ the psychoa.n.a.lytical view of poetry which regards it as the poet's creation of a world in accordance with his fancy to compensate himself for his repressions. Thus the poet relieves himself of emotions that were bursting within him and cures himself of incipient neurosis. I have shown that the view was not wholly originated by Freud, but stated by various English critics like Samuel Johnson, Hazlitt, Lamb and Kingsley.

There are several other Englishmen who held the view, namely Shakespeare and Bacon. Havelock Ellis, however, was the first writer in England to develop the idea that artistic creation is a sublimation of s.e.x repression. (See his essay on Casanova in _Affirmations_, published before Freud's book on dreams.)

Poets like Burns, Byron, Sh.e.l.ley, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Goethe and Ibsen have told us that they wrote to relieve themselves of their pent up pa.s.sions. Further, Coleridge, Sh.e.l.ley, Emerson, Daudet, Holmes, Lowell, Poe and Hearn have left us written evidence of their belief that poetry emanates from the unconscious. It remained, however, for Freud to have the courage to identify the unconscious chiefly with s.e.x repression and symbolic speech.

The first English poet who claimed to allow his unconscious self deliberately to dictate his poems, was James John Garth Wilkinson.

Havelock Ellis has recently called attention to him. In his _Improvisations from the Spirit_ (1857) Wilkinson wrote down in rhymed verse the first impressions of a chosen theme. He depended chiefly on inspiration. His book was praised by Dante G. Rossetti, and forms the subject of an essay by the poet James Thomson, called ”A Strange Book”

in _Biographical and Critical Studies_. Emerson had also praised this physician, who was an authority on Blake and Swedenborg. Wilkinson claims to have written in what we would call the Freudian method of drawing on his unconscious. He considers reason and will secondary powers in the process. The poems resemble Blake's (even in their obscurity). Thomson rightly distinguishes Wilkinson from fraudulent spiritualists.

Wilkinson's poems, however, do not make good the claim to be absolutely unconscious art. If he had not told us that he improvised we would never have doubted that these poems were composed like all other poems, with some labor. We cannot believe that Wilkinson did not have to seek rhymes. He may have taken the first rhyme that came to his head but he had also to consider his metre. Again, no art dispenses altogether with the poet's use of artistic judgment, no matter how much an improvisation that art is. I do not believe that even Coleridge's famous _Kubla Khan_ was actually composed in a dream, but that it was merely suggested by a dream.[187:A] He fas.h.i.+oned the form consciously, that is the rhyme and metre. The substance of the poem is, however, always from the unconscious. Thomson considers Wilkinson's belief in the divine inspiration of his poem a delusion. Wilkinson's art is not utterly unconscious, for there is no uncensored idea therein, which is bound to be occasionally, in some dreams out of many, of the most virtuous man.

This commendable feature shows Wilkinson exercised judgment, and this was a conscious artistic process.

Improvisation is one of the features that characterized Persian and Arabic poetry. It is easier there than in English because of the facility for rhyme in these languages, and because the improvisers usually composed in rhymed prose and were not hampered by metre. The test of the great poet often was his ability to compose a poem on the spur of the moment. Seemingly fabulous, yet apparently true stories of improvisation feats by Arabic poets are numerous. When they improvised in different metres, the Arabic poets in compet.i.tion would compose alternately verse by verse as a rule. Sometimes the poet would improvise a short poem on the basis of any opening verse given to him. We remember the story of Harun al Ras.h.i.+d who recited a line to Abu Nuwas who composed a poem for him. The _Arabian Nights_ is full of improvised poems. Arabic critics always dealt with improvisation as a feature of verse making, and this is an argument to those who maintain that Arabic poetry was conscious art and artificial. It was the ecstasy that unconsciously incited the poet to utter his inner thought.

I would like, however, to make special reference to two Englishmen, John Keble and E. S. Dallas, both now very little read, who left critical works expounding poetry from a psychoa.n.a.lytic point of view. Keble was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and the author of a most widely read Christian poem. He delivered lectures on poetry in the eighteen-thirties, in Latin. These were published in 1844 under the t.i.tle of _De Poeticae vi Medica_. They were translated into English for the first time a few years ago. They have been praised by Cardinal Newman, Justice Coleridge, Gladstone and Saintsbury. Dean Church called them the most original and memorable lectures on poetry that had ever been delivered at Oxford.

Keble defined poetry as ”a kind of medicine divinely bestowed upon man, which gives healing relief to secret mental emotions, and yet without detriment to modest reserve, and yet, while giving scope to enthusiasm, rules it with order and due control.” He traces the origin of poetry to the desire for personal relief of pent up emotions in the individual and argues that this is the natural conclusion from his definition. He divided poets into two cla.s.ses--primary and secondary. In the first cla.s.s he put those who, moved by impulse, resort to composition for relief and solace of a hindered or overwrought mind. In the second cla.s.s he put imitators of the first and all others. He had been meditating over these views for some time, and they also appear in some of the essays which were collected after his death under the t.i.tle of _Occasional Papers and Reviews_. In fact, in one of these essays he used the Freudian word ”repression,” in referring to the creation of poetry.

Keble's views are so sound and clear that one marvels they were not taken up before Freud. It is true one will find much that is obsolete in his lectures; one will be amused by his Toryism, his over-emphasis on the religious side of poetry, his academic and cla.s.sic standards. He however recognized that poetry was a sublimation of the poet's surcharged emotions and that the poet healed himself, therapeutically treating himself by writing. He was really developing at length Aristotle's famous definition of tragedy as purging the audience of pity and fear. Aristotle was referring however to the aesthetic purgation of the feelings of the audience; Keble, like Freud later, had in mind the poet's relief to himself. Poetry ministers however to the overburdened mind both of the poet and the reader. Both are relieved in finding expression for ideas and emotions that are troubling them.

It was no doubt Keble's religious nature that made him perceive this important fact. He noted that the psalmists in the Bible sang to relieve themselves of their griefs and he saw that prayer had a psychoa.n.a.lytic effect on people. Poetry is then the emotional expression of an overcharged heart. But this does not necessarily mean overcharged with grief. For it expresses people who are overflowing with joy or any emotion. It covers what Nietzsche called ecstasy, and especially the ecstasy of love or s.e.xual excitement. It covers the desire for beauty which, as Nietzsche again saw, possessed a s.e.xual contagion in it. The happy poet in love desires to give vent to his emotions by some form of expression, whether his love is satisfied or not. And those who seek the origin of poetry in religion must remember the close affiliations that anthropologists have found between love and religion.

Keble perceived that the greatness of poetry lay in its genuineness and seriousness, and that it was not merely a metrical plaything. He perceived that it revealed the poet himself and that its mission was high.

One must also admire his broadmindedness in treating Lucretius, whom, in spite of his atheistic views, Keble places among the primary poets. The modern reader might resent the placing of Sophocles and Theocritus among the secondary poets; nor does every personal poet belong to the primary cla.s.s, for minor poets are often personal. Poets must, to be in the first cla.s.s, voice a very compelling emotion based on a very profound idea. Burns and Heine, Sh.e.l.ley and Byron, Goethe and Ibsen, Balzac and Tolstoy are primary poets, not only because they are personal but because they are intellectual.

Keble antic.i.p.ated the greatest of modern theories about the nature of art, poetry and literature. He saw that art was not play, as Schiller and Spenser believed, but an expression necessary to relieve both poet and reader. Its origin is not in play but in the desire to heal oneself and create a reality out of a dream. Poetry is an attempt to unburden oneself and adjust oneself to reality, which it does by complaint or by building a dream castle.

But its sources are always repressions of emotions, which in many cases have become unconscious. The best exposition of the imagination from this point of view is by E. S. Dallas, who published _The Gay Science_, in two volumes, in 1866. He was a successful book reviewer and had also written a book on _Poetics_, which David Ma.s.son reviewed. In chapters in his greater book, on ”The Imagination,” ”The Hidden Soul,” ”The Play of Thought” and ”The Secrecy of Art,” he antic.i.p.ated many of the modern discoveries of art in connection with the unconscious. He saw that man leads a hidden inner life of which he is unaware and that this life appears in his art. You will find more on the nature of imagination and poetry in Dallas's book than in many of the works on taste that have survived. He carried Keble's ideas to much further conclusions and saw that man unburdens not only his conscious emotions, but even those of which he is unconscious.

Dallas's four chapters at the end of his first volume form one of the most striking contributions to the nature of poetry and imagination that have ever been penned in English. He finds imagination but another name for the automatic action of the mind or any of its faculties. It is unconscious memory, its logic is the logic of the hidden soul, it is pa.s.sion that works out of sight. Imagination is the unconscious. It suggests not only the power of figuring to ourselves the shows of sense, but also that of imagery or the comparison of shows. It does not differ from reason, but shows the process of reason working automatically. It is play of thought, it is hidden soul. It combines sensibility to images, wandering of the mind, and finding of comparisons. Its function is not different from reason, memory or feeling, but its peculiarity is that its work is done in secret automatically or unconsciously.

Imagination not only builds images, but it creates types, it utters ideas, it speaks a natural language, it voices emotions.

Even the old critic who separated verse poetry from prose literature as a distinct branch of writing was always suspicious that he was in error, for he knew both were the products of creative imagination. Of the ancients, it was only Aristotle who, defining poetry as imitation, saw that he must include prose that ”imitated” in his definition of poetry.

The thing that counted was the imitation or imagination in determining poetry and not metre.

As imagination creates the literature of ecstasy, the real subject of this book has been the function of the imagination, but as the term, like poetry, has been so much abused and misunderstood, the nature of them both is studied by using other terms, like ”ecstasy” and the ”unconscious.”

I suppose that no word has been more used in connection with poetry than the word imagination. And probably no word has been more vaguely and diversely employed. Every one agrees that literature in general must be the function of the imagination. Many people when they speak of imagination really mean nothing more than the introduction of numerous figures of speech; others confuse it with the sportive play of the author with supernatural machinery in his work. To others imagination suggests something that is opposed to the convictions of the intellect and to the moral faculty. Even to-day many people do not know that Aristotle used the term ”imitation” and Bacon the word ”feigning” where we use the word ”imagination.” These older terms, in the course of evolution in meaning which words undergo, are used by us no longer to represent poetic creation, or imaginative work.

Every one quotes the famous lines of Shakespeare in the fifth act of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_, and many fail to see the exact meaning of the master who had a true conception of the function of his art. First he recognizes that the poet is ”imagination all compact,” and compares him to the lunatic and the lover. Next he uses the word frenzy in speaking of the poet's eye which rolls about and glances over the universe, showing that he had the conception of the ecstatic element in the poet's make-up and work. The poet gives shape to the forms of unknown things bodied forth by imagination, he gives a local habitation and a name to airy nothing. Shakespeare recognizes the fact that imagination is related to the dream when he says that one of the tricks of imagination is that if it apprehends a joy, it comprehends the bringer of that joy, that is, it builds a dream castle where that joy is realized. His use of the words ”unknown things” in addition, as the substance of imagination, shows that he understood that the realm of the unconscious was the province of the imagination. Hazlitt and Lowell among modern critics correctly understood Shakespeare's meaning of imagination as identical with ecstasy.[193:A]

People to-day give vent to their emotions in prose conversation or in writing prose letters to friends or relatives. Here we have the process that led to the creation of poetry in earliest times. Poetry is the result of ecstasy, the outpouring of the imagination, the expression of the unconscious. If instead of having confused it with song and dancing the critics would have taken it in its real significance as excited speech, we would have had less misunderstanding about its nature. The lover of to-day who tells his emotions to his love, or confides them to a friend, the bereaved person who relates his grief at the death of a loved one and tells of the virtues of the departed, are rude poets expressing themselves in conversation in prose. When they take the pen in hand and write a letter or keep a diary, they become poets no less than the versifier who puts his feelings down in patterned speech.

The greatness of the letter or diary as a poem depends not only on the craftsmans.h.i.+p, but on the substance, on the vividness or beauty or power with which the emotion is depicted, on the degree of its capability of moving others, and on the depth of the ideas therein. Similarly, the person who is moved to prayer spontaneously by some religious experience or private pa.s.sion and utters his words in a natural manner or reduces them to writing, is creating poetry. The writers to-day of letters and diaries in prose are going through the same mechanism as all the earliest poets. When they use patterns they are already becoming artificial and are imitating other verse writers and obeying rules that they studied.

We have long been familiar with the saying that every man is a poet, though he does not write what is known as poetry. There is no psychical difference between the average man and the great poet. They both are subject to emotions, have imagination, and both express their emotions in some manner. The only difference between the average man and the poet is that the poet takes the average man's speech, elaborates it, and puts it into shape so that it moves others.

Poetry is born in man's soul when his emotions are aroused, and no emotions are aroused unless they are expressed in some way. Hence Croce's view is correct that poetry is expression, if he means by expression emotional and imaginative expression. People have too long been under the impression that the poet was a different creature from the rest of mankind, subject to a livelier imagination, or intenser emotions. He is no different; on the contrary, there are many people who never wrote a line who are more emotional and imaginative than many poets. The process of the lover writing a letter involves the same imaginative function as of the poet penning a love poem. The prose expression of emotion is also poetry, but we have hitherto given the name ”poetry” only to the verse literary composition.

There is great unanimity of opinion as to the connection of literary poetry in its origin with dance, music and song, an opinion that is wrong nevertheless. In fact, most phases of poetry neither have nor ever had anything in common with dancing or music or song.