A Study of Poetry Part 5

_7. Genius and Inspiration_

Whatever may be the value, for students, of trying to a.n.a.lyse the image-making and image-combining faculty, every one admits that it is a necessary element in the production of poetry. Let Coleridge have the final statement of this mystery of his art: "The power of reducing mult.i.tude into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by some one predominant thought or feeling, may be cultivated and improved, but can never be learnt. It is in this that _Poeta nascitur non fit_." We cannot avoid the difficulties of the question by attributing the poet's imagination to "genius." Whether genius is a neurosis, as some think, or whether it is sanity at perfection, makes little difference here.

Both a Poe and a Sophocles are equally capable of producing ideal syntheses. Nor does the old word "inspiration" help much either.

Whatever we mean by inspiration--a something not ourselves, supernatural or sub-liminal--a "vision" of Blake, the "voices" of Joan of Arc, the "G.o.d" that moved within the Corybantian revelers--it is an excitement of the image-making faculty, and not that faculty itself. Disordered "genius"

and inspiration undisciplined by reason are alike powerless to produce images that permanently satisfy the sense of beauty. Tolstoy's common- sense remark is surely sound: "One's writing is good only where the intelligence and the imagination are in equilibrium. As soon as one of them over-balances the other, it's all up."

[Footnote: Compare W. A. Neilson's chapter on "The Balance of Qualities"

in _Essentials of Poetry_. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1912.]

_8. A Summary_

Let us now endeavor to summarize this testimony which we have taken from poets and critics. Though they do not agree in all details, and though they often use words that are either too vague or too highly specialized, the general drift of the testimony is fairly clear. Poets and critics agree that the imagination is something different from the mere memory-image; that by a process of selection and combination and re-presentation of images something really new comes into being, and that we are therefore justified in using the term _constructive_, or _creative_ imagination. This imagination embodies, as we say, or "bodies forth," as Duke Theseus said, "the forms of things unknown." It ultimately becomes the poet's task to "shape" these forms with his "pen," that is to say, to suggest them through word-symbols, arranged in a certain fashion. The selection of these word-symbols will be discussed in Chapter IV, and their rhythmical arrangement in Chapter V. But we have tried in the present chapter to trace the functioning of the poetic imagination in those stages of its activity which precede the definite shaping of poems with the pen.

If we say, with Professor Fairchild, [Footnote: _Making of Poetry_, p. 34.]

that "the central processes or kinds of activity involved in the making of poetry are three: personalizing, combining and versifying," it is obvious that we have been dealing with the first two. If we prefer to use the famous terms employed by Ruskin in _Modern Painters_, we have been considering the penetrative, a.s.sociative and contemplative types of imagination. But these Ruskinian names, however brilliantly and suggestively employed by the master, are dangerous tools for the beginner in the study of poetry.

If the beginner desires to review, at this point, the chief matters brought to his attention in the present chapter, he may make a real test of their validity by opening his senses to the imagery of a few lines of poetry. Remember that poets are endeavoring to convey the "sense" of things rather than the knowledge of things. Disregard for the moment the precise words employed in the following lines, and concentrate the attention upon the images, as if the image were not made of words at all, but were mere naked sense-stimulus.

In this line the poet is trying to make us _see_ something ("visual"

image):

"The bride hath paced into the hall, _Red as a rose_ is she."

Can you see her?

In these lines the poet is trying to make us _hear_ something ("auditory"

image):

"A _noise like of a hidden brook_ In the leafy month of June That to the _sleeping woods all night Singeth a quiet tune_."

Do you hear the tune? Do you hear it as clearly as you can hear

"_The tambourines Jing-jing-jingled in the hands of Queens_"?

In these lines the poet is trying to make us feel certain bodily sensations ("tactile" image):

"I closed my lids and kept them close, _And the b.a.l.l.s like pulses beat_; For the sky and the sea and the sea and the sky, _Lay like a load on my weary eye_, And the dead were at my feet."

Do your eyes feel that pressure?

You are sitting quite motionless in your chair as you read these lines ("motor" image):

"I _sprang_ to the stirrup, and Joris, and he; I _galloped_, Dirck _galloped_, we _galloped_ all three!"

Are you instantly on horseback? If you are, the poet has put you there by conveying from his mind to yours, through the use of verbal imagery and rhythm, his "sense" of riding, which has now become _your_ sense of riding.

If the reader can meet this test of realizing simple images through his own body-and-mind reaction to their stimulus, the door of poetry is open to him. He can enter into its limitless enjoyments. If he wishes to a.n.a.lyse more closely the nature of the pleasure which poetry affords, he may select any lines he happens to like, and ask himself how the various functions of the imagination are ill.u.s.trated by them. Suppose the lines are Coleridge's description of the bridal procession, already quoted in part:

"The bride hath paced into the hall, Red as a rose is she; Nodding their heads before her goes The merry minstrelsy."

Here surely is imagination penetrative; the selection of some one characteristic trait of the object; that trait (the "redness" or the "nodding") re-presented to us, and emphasized by conferring, modifying or abstracting whatever elements the poet wishes to stress or to suppress.

The result is a combination of imagery which forms an idealized picture, presenting the shows of things as the mind would like to see them and thus satisfying our sense of beauty. For there is no question that the mind takes a supreme satisfaction in such an idealization of reality as Coleridge's picture of the swift tropical sunset,

"At one stride comes the dark,"

or Emerson's picture of the slow New England sunrise,

"O tenderly the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire."

Little has been said about beauty in this chapter, but no one doubts that a sense of beauty guides the "shaping spirit of imagination" in that dim region through which the poet feels his way before he comes to the conscious choice of expressive words and to the ordering of those words into beautiful rhythmical designs.

CHAPTER IV

THE POET'S WORDS

"Words are sensible signs necessary for communication."

JOHN LOCKE, _Human Understanding_, 3, 2, 1.

"As conceptions are the images of things to the mind within itself, so are words or names the marks of those conceptions to the minds of them we converse with."

SOUTH, quoted in Johnson's _Dictionary_.

"Word: a sound, or combination of sounds, used in any language as the sign of a conception, or of a conception together with its grammatical relations.... A word is a spoken sign that has arrived at its value as used in any language by a series of historical changes, and that holds its value by virtue of usage, being exposed to such further changes, of form and of meaning, as usage may prescribe...."

_Century Dictionary_.

"A word is not a crystal--transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought, and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circ.u.mstances and the time in which it is used."

Justice OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, _Towne vs. Eisner_.

"I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order;--poetry = the _best_ words in the best order."

COLERIDGE, _Table Talk_.

_1. The Eye and the Ear_

"Literary" language is commonly distinguished from the language of ordinary life by certain heightenings or suppressions. The novelist or essayist, let us say, fashions his language more or less in accordance with his own mood, with his immediate aim in writing, with the capacity of his expected readers. He is discoursing with a certain real or imaginary audience. He may put himself on paper, as Montaigne said, as if he were talking to the first man he happens to meet; or he may choose to address himself to the few chosen spirits of his generation and of succeeding generations. He trusts the arbitrary written or printed symbols of word-sounds to carry his thoughts safely into the minds of other men.

The "literary" user of language in modern times comes to depend upon the written or printed page; he tends to become more or less "eye-minded"; whereas the typical orator remains "ear-minded"--i.e. peculiarly sensitive to a series of sounds, and composing for the ear of listeners rather than for the eye of readers.

Now as compared with the typical novelist, the poet is surely, like the orator, "ear-minded." Tonal symbols of ideas and emotions, rather than visual symbols of ideas and emotions, are the primary stuff with which he is working, although as soon as the advancing civilization of his race brings an end to the primitive reciting of poetry and its transmission through oral repet.i.tion alone, it is obvious that he must depend, like other literary artists, or like the modern musicians, upon the written or printed signs for the sounds which he has composed. But so stubborn are the habits of our eyes that we tend always to confuse the look of the poet's words upon the printed page with the sound of those words as they are perceived by the ear. We are seldom guilty of this confusion in the case of the musician. His "music" is not identified with the arbitrary black marks which make up his printed score. For most of us there is no music until those marks are actually translated into terms of tone-- although it is true that the trained reader of music can easily translate to his inner ear without any audible rendering of the indicated sounds.

This distinction is essential to the understanding of poetry. A poem is not primarily a series of printed word-signs addressed to the eye; it is a series of sounds addressed to the ear, and the arbitrary symbols for these sounds do not convey the poem unless they are audibly rendered--except to those readers who, like the skilled readers of printed music, can instantly hear the indicated sounds without any actual rendition of them into physical tone. Many professed lovers of poetry have no real ear for it. They are hopelessly "eye-minded." They try to decide questions of metre and stanza, of free verse and of emotionally patterned prose by the appearance of the printed page instead of by the nerves of hearing. Poets like Mr. Vachel Lindsay--who recites or chants his own verses after the manner of the primitive bard--have rendered a true service by leading us away from the confusions wrought by typography, and back to that sheer delight in rhythmic oral utterance in which poetry originates.

_2. How Words convey Feeling_

For it must never be forgotten that poetry begins in excitement, in some body-and-mind experience; that it is capable, through its rhythmic utterance of words which suggest this experience, of transmitting emotion to the hearer; and that the nature of language allows the emotion to be embodied in more or less permanent form. Let us look more closely at some of the questions involved in the origin, the transmission and embodiment of poetic feeling, remembering that we are now trying to trace these processes in so far as they are revealed by the poet's use of words.

Rhythm will be discussed in the next chapter.