The Literature of Ecstasy Part 13

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 fashioned 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 Rashid 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 craftsmanship, 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.

Poetry such as we find in the great English verse or prose poets of the nineteenth century has little relation to dancing, music or singing.

Take the Shakespearean plays, the tragedies of _Hamlet_ or _King Lear_, where we have philosophizing and descriptions of painful crises which are great poetry. A poet does not have to sing a great idea, nor dance to it, nor put it to music. Ibsen and Balzac are poets and yet they are far away from dancing, singing or music. Though most good singers are poets, one does not have to be a singer to be a poet. Then take great impa.s.sioned oratory or beautiful emotional word painting in prose or verse, or any idea bathed in feeling. They may all be poetry and need not be--in fact, by their nature, are not--related to dance, music and song.

An autobiographical verse poem like Wordsworth's _Prelude_, or a series of impa.s.sioned ideas like Lucretius's _Nature of Things_, or a novel in verse like _Aurora Leigh_ is not related to song, yet it is poetry in parts. (This does not mean that poetry is not the soul of music or dancing.)

There is nothing more amusing than to read the innumerable and contradictory theories about the origin of poetry. Many believe that the first poetry was pastoral poetry, since the shepherd's life was, after hunting, the first occupation appropriate and conducive to composing poetry. Scaliger, Fontenelle and Pope endorsed this view. Others believe that the original poetry was written to express man's religious emotions; his prayers and hymns to his G.o.ds are considered by many the first poetry. Again the communistic needs of the clans are supposed to have invited the poet to write. Celebration of tribal victories, praise of heroes, incitement to martial courage and revenge, the virtues of the clan, were supposed to be the first function of the poets. Epics and ballads are cited in proof of this. Again, satires and invectives are thought to be the first forms as they were used by the bards, who were also magicians and hurled them as potent forces against the enemy.

Thomas Peac.o.c.k believed eulogies const.i.tuted the first poetry of the human race. Then the proverb and parable have their devotees, as the first imaginative representation of the common thinking of the earliest people, and as the readiest to lend themselves to the use of verse patterns. One could go on naming various theories that have been advanced as to what kind of poetry is earliest; there is the poem which designates the awakening of a moral conscience; there is the mythical tale reciting the dream desires of the tribe; the song chanted at various labors and toilings of the common people; the chorus which served as an accompaniment to holiday celebrations and nature worship; the chanting of the first cantors or priests and the responses of the congregation; there are the ecstatic utterances of the earliest prophets, soothsayers and magicians; the admonitions of counselors and legislators; the personal grievances and complaints recited by those seeking redress before the a.s.sembly or chief; marriage hymns, love poems and elegies; all of these are separately cited as the original springs from which later poetry developed.

The critics a.s.sume that man was originally possessed of one emotion only, which he celebrated, or that only one feeling predominated to which he gave vent. Now, as a matter of fact, early man was subject to multifarious emotions just as we are to-day, and he voiced them all, in speech, later writing them down in prose and finally in some verse pattern. Some of these emotions were originally written down with rhythm and repet.i.tion. There really was no state when poetry first began, for the first spoken poetry is as early as human speech which has always been used to express emotions.

Written poetry is merely the mechanical transmission of spoken poetry.

We cannot ignore the poetry of nations which has been handed down by tradition and never been reduced to writing.

The mental process of composing poetry to-day is no different from what it ever was. Different people express verbally the ranges of all the emotions and several individuals give us the written expression of these moods in good form, so as to evoke sympathy in the hearer or reader. It is true, in early times the religious and martial emotions were much expressed, but this does not prove that religious or warlike feelings alone gave rise to the art of poetry. Every emotion man felt gave rise to the art of poetry. Poetry is the expression of all the emotions and is born with speech and hence is universal expression and the most ancient art we possess.

Poetry is, however, so often the expression of a personal complaint, the expression of a repression, that we may say that its real origin to-day, and at all times, is the prose elegy. The person who pours out his griefs is psychologically the poet in action. Attempts have been made by Greek scholars to show that both the epic and the drama had their origin at public funerals where elegies were recited instead of at the Dionysian rites. This is very plausible. The pang of death was one of the causes that led to the creation of poetry, especially since early man was carried off too frequently by wars, plagues and wild animals.

One should add that the pangs of the loss of one's mate, the grief resulting from being worsted in the battle for the female, were other contributing causes of the creation of poetry. In short, the origin of poetry was personal, and much ancient poetry dealt with a lament of some kind. This has been the characteristic of poetry ever since. Grief is the source of poetry. Note the number of wailing poems in Irish and Scotch literature where the death of a husband in war, or the loss of love, plays a part. Much Anglo-Saxon poetry is elegiac. The earliest poems from Egypt, China, j.a.pan contain laments. Savage literature is full of them. The hymn is really a lament in the form of a plea. The dirge, the threnody, the elegy, these const.i.tute the bulk of much poetry, ancient and modern. Burns's poems are chiefly dirges of some kind. The dirge is most human and appealing to us. Some of the most effective poetry in the Bible are the cries of David in the _Psalms_ and the dirges in _Lamentations_.

The modern elegy whether in prose or verse, whether it laments death or lost love, is the direct offspring of the earliest savage cry of grief.

The savage wailed in public as the poet does. Our novelists still do unavoidably the same thing, often covertly. When Tolstoy wrote of the death of Levin's brother in _Anna Karenina_ or _Ivan Ilyitch_, he was actually bemoaning his own brother, whose death made a lasting impression upon him.

Gummere thinks that the early poetry of man was communal and that modern personal lyric poetry is a development from communal poetry. Surely Professor Gummere was aware that among the religious and communal poetry of the Anglo-Saxons, for instance, we have such a fine elegy as _The Wanderer_ and such a beautiful dream poem as _The Phnix_. It is a great mistake to think that personal poetry is of modern growth, dating from Villon. It has been more developed in modern times. And then there is much of the personal element in this so-called communal poetry. The man who sang for his tribe in ancient times felt with his tribe, and hence was both communal and personal.

The research into the origins of poetry can be made in the soul of any writer to-day. The same psychological mechanisms that are at work in the composition of his poem were at work in the production of the most crude savage verbal outpourings. It is a personal repression leading to the utterance of a complaint or the building of a dream-world. Keble was one of the few critics who considered the personal complaint the chief origin of poetry.

Schopenhauer defined poetry as one of the arts whose mission was to reveal an idea in the Platonic sense, that is, the permanent essential forms of the world and all its phenomena; art to him was a way of looking at things independent of the principle of sufficient reason. In accordance with his philosophy he regards ideas as the objectivity of the thing in itself, the will. He looks upon the different grades of the objectivation of the will as fixed. The result is that he considers the peculiar end of all the fine arts "to elucidate the objectivation of will at the lowest grades of its visibility, in which it shows itself as the dumb unconscious tendency of the ma.s.s in accordance with laws, and yet already reveals a breach of the unity of will with itself in a conflict between gravity and rigidity," while tragedy "presents to us at the highest grades of the objectivation of will this very conflict with itself in terrible magnitude and distinctness." (_World as Will and Idea_, V. 1, p. 330.)

All this is saying in philosophical terms what we know has been the mission of art, the portrayal of man defeated in his blind and impotent desires. No one denies that poetry must and always will portray man in such circ.u.mstances. Freud has restated the problem when he showed that poets deal with their own repressions.

One cannot accept Schopenhauer's views that the aim of art is to annihilate the will to live. He failed to see that much of this tragic literature acts as a relief to us and makes us want to live all the more.

Dr. Arthur H. Fairchild deserves credit for a.s.signing high importance to poetry when he says that it is a means of self-realization and is a biological necessity. In his _The Making of Poetry_ he expresses what is really the psychoa.n.a.lytical theory which sees in poetry a means of freeing oneself of complexes, a way of restoring oneself to a better state of mind, a cure for incipient neurosis. When we are sad, the reading of sad poetry relieves us. As Emerson said, "Poetry is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition." The toiler reads of other toilers in literature, say in Zola's _Germinal_ or Hauptmann's _Weavers_, or Sinclair's _Jungle_, and his emotions are discharged. It is true he may be driven to action, but the poet has nothing to do with that. The lover, unhappy in his love, finds help in hearing a poet express his own surcharged feelings resulting from love troubles. The reader may by reading be prevented from going mad. The great public which does not read good literature finds relief in plays, moving pictures, magazine stories or newspapers, all of which, while it is not generally good poetry, may have the effect of a catharsis on the public's rudely developed aesthetic sense.

Mankind hungers for poetry. Those who are unable to appreciate it in higher form, resort to imitations and subst.i.tutes, which express their emotions and relieve them. He who can read and enjoy the great masters of prose and verse, or appreciate good music and painting, does not have to resort to the political meeting or religious revivals to have his emotions played on. Athletic contests like baseball, football and prize fights usually help people to express and relieve surcharged emotions.

The love for cheap forms of movies and card games has its origin in a desire for emotional discharge. Man resorts to every measure to give his emotions play. He reads newspapers and trashy magazines, he likes to hear melodramas and ranting orators, often because he has a love for emotional excitement which he cannot satisfy by literature of the best kind. He cannot concentrate, he cannot think clearly, he is ignorant of the simplest principles of literary art; he cannot read poetry, yet he hungers for it. His dormant instincts will even seek satisfaction in condemnation and persecution to satisfy such emotions which he cannot express by reading.

The creation and reading of poetry in prose or verse is an achievement common to man alone of the animals. He is not separated from them by moral or intellectual faculties, for animals have these, but by his faculty to create art and make others share enjoyment of them. It may be that the spider and the bee derive aesthetic satisfaction from contemplating the web or the hive they build, or the bird gets artistic pleasure from the song it sings or hears, or any animal may win sympathy from another by some mute act, but man alone puts his emotions and ideas in words in an endurable work of art so as to relieve himself and move others. What separates man from animals is not then religion--is not the religion of a dog centered in his master as Anatole France has so quaintly shown--but the ability to create and enjoy poetry, by which I mean literature in its highest prose or verse form, music, painting and sculpture.

And a life devoted to poetry is the best life we can seek. Let a man have his necessities satisfied, and there is no higher form of life than to enjoy and if possible to create poetry. Poetry makes us want to live and gives us zest in life. Life exists for sensations and we get our sensations out of poetry. Life exists for the enjoyment and creation of poetry. The unlettered savage has his craving for poetry satisfied in his dancing, and war cries, in religion and tribal customs. The child has it satisfied in his toys and games. Adult man appeases his hunger for poetry in diverse ways. Literature, art and music are so far the highest forms of poetry we know, and in literature I include philosophy or thought, in prose as well as verse.

Poetry acts as a necessary relief to us for emotions and ideas that seek expression, and is hence more real than any other form of life.

Our views of poetry from a psychoa.n.a.lytic point of view finds confirmation even in the Bible. One of the leading prophets and the leading psalmists has each told us in scorching words how he felt before he created. Jeremiah says of G.o.d, "His word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay," Ch. 20, v. 9. David also said, "My heart was hot within me, while I was musing the fire burned: then spake I with my tongue,"

Psalms, Ch. 39, v. 3. Both of these poets had made resolutions to keep silent, but could not; their choked emotions burned like fire. Their disturbed souls sought relief by expression. Thus the great prophecies and psalms had a subjective origin and a homeopathic effect upon their authors, and they have this effect on us to-day.

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