The Thinking Corner

A Poet's Sincerity

"All writing of poetry," says AE, "should be preceded by a passionate desire for truth and when the poet is writing he should continually ask himself, 'Do I really believe this? Is this truly what I feel?'" AE was himself a poet — but I am afraid his dictum must not be taken at its face-value.

We must not ignore the fact that a dramatist can be a poet. A dramatist speaks through a multitude of characters. No doubt, he often packs them with responses he has personally made to the world, yet nowhere does he write an accurate story of his own attitudes, and he writes great poetry through his villains no less than his heroes. Surely he cannot be believing all that his figures utter or even sympathising with all their feelings. If AE's dictum is correct, a dramatist like Shakespeare should never have penned quite a number of celebrated speeches such as Iago's or Lady Macbeth's, for he could never have answered satisfactorily to AE's "posers". We have to recognise that a poet's function essentially is not to transcribe his own convictions and experiences but to put himself into all sorts of minds and hearts and get with imaginative intensity what one might express if one held certain convictions and underwent certain experiences. This "if" is at the root of the poetic process. The poet is fundamentally a dramatist, and when he writes about personal things the man in him is merely one of the various parts he has the capacity to play! It may be argued that such cannot be the case, since he is already identified with the beliefs and feelings of the man in him whereas he has to attempt identifying himself with those not his own. But to produce poetry from the former he has to face them anew as if he were not already identified with them: the same searching pressure and penetration he gives the latter is required here also. Both are treated as material to be worked upon: what poeticises both is an aesthetically dramatic gesture of imaginative intensity. That is why few poems

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record exactly what the man has believed and felt: there is an exploring, in more or less measure, of what the "tones" of consciousness can be - deep within, far around, high above his actual state. The actual state is subjected to an imaginative transformation.

Wordsworth's famous Immortality Ode tells of the soul's existence before birth, and tells of it so sincerely and splendidly that one cannot help thinking Wordsworth actually held the belief if not had also a mystical and psychical memory of prenatal existence. Wordsworth was far from anything of the sort: on being questioned, he clearly disclaimed it: he had only an experience in childhood of a glory everywhere, in Nature and himself, a light and laughter of the Divine. The Ode as originally composed was much shorter and bore no passages about the soul's existence before birth. The profound psychical passages came later and were a further imaginative plumbing of the life-substance he had already plumbed imaginatively - his thoughts and emotions when a child. He was mystically dramatising. And yet he conveyed the impression of a splendid sincerity, as though he had put to himself AE's queries and after having been able to return an emphatic "Yes" composed the poem. A poem's sincerity, therefore, cannot be restricted to AE's all-too-simple formula of a passionate desire for truth.

How then are we to account for it? Can we say that to be imaginatively intense is to ring authentic? Not quite, for though our explanation is correct it does not say enough. It does not bring out the inevitability, the finality and the absoluteness of form we intuit in a poem. The ancients hit the nail on the head when they spoke of the poet, in the act of creating flawless art-form, as an instrument of hidden divine powers. We too preserve the ancient idea in the term we often employ in treating art: inspiration. But we burke its full contents. As long as we fail to accept with open eyes the miraculous working by which perfect beauty shines out in a poem, we shall never explain why a poem rings authentic without our needing to ask the poet, "Do you really believe

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this? Is this truly what you feel?" The sincerity of a poem has, at bottom, nothing to do with personal beliefs and feelings: it is a touch from behind the veil.

That AE should have overlooked this touch is rather curious: if ever a man could give evidence for inspiration, it was he. Song, he records somewhere, came to him spontaneously, without any conscious mental effort: it fountained from inner depths, whole and perfect. There is here indicated a play of forces that are beyond the poet's personality and though their nature is, as a rule, adapted to the bent and colour of that personality they are something greater than he and have a direction of their own. No sooner do we bring them in than the man's beliefs and feelings stop occupying the centre of the stage. Images dawn on him, significances flash across his thought, emotion-charged words fly through his consciousness, leaving his own beliefs and feelings far short of them. Not out of his own personal life but from some superlife behind, whose channel he is, the poetry takes birth, and it is quite possible that at times it is born not just suddenly and with a range beyond him but even in contradiction to what he really believes and truly feels!

The "divine afflatus" is the master-key to our understanding the poetic process. We do not need to put it aside because all poets do not act as if they were helpless reeds through which a mysterious wind blows its music. For the "divine afflatus" is always there in genuine poems: only the way of receiving it is not the same. AE had no travail to go through in getting his lyrics - they magically floated out to him. The one poet who in our time was as haunted and as much made a mouthpiece by unseen presences as AE, though in a different style and from a different plane, was Yeats; yet Yeats was the very opposite in method of composition. His rhythmic enchantments from "dove-grey fairylands" and from the "odorous twilight" of the Celtic Gods were created bit by bit, by patient brooding over single phrases or lines, writing and erasing and rewriting, deliberate self-critical endeavour. His habitual way of receiving

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inspiration after the first impact from within was by acute concentration and a massing of the energies of the consciousness to break open block after block the passage of the inner to the outer. The laborious method resulted in the secret spontaneity of inspiration, the "divine afflatus", bursting forth with a perfect grace equal to AE's and sounding in all places the note of sincerity.

A desire for that secret spontaneity and not for truth as envisaged by AE should precede song. Of course it is generally granted that poetry must not be valued according to philosophical, religious or scientific standards of truth, just as it must not be valued according as it edifies us morally. Beauty is what the poet is after and it was to uphold his freedom from allegiance to anything except beauty that the slogan of "Art for art's sake" was raised. Unfortunately, with the raising of this slogan beauty came to be improperly understood, and art's independence grew a justification of empty glitter, decadent decorativeness. Perhaps in a reaction against the misuse into which the slogan fell people like AE insist on beauty being not enough. Their real meaning is that art must be vital and deep. Yes, art must be vital and deep; but that solely implies that the artist must not capriciously and cleverly make up things: there must be a serious turning towards inspiration so that his work may have a godlike stamp. It is an inaccurate narrowing down of the godlike in art to fasten on it the ordinary connotations of truth or goodness, even as it is a superficialising of it to deem art a mere beautifying applied from without. It is also an illegitimate viewing of art to set up actual beliefs and feelings as an indispensable condition.

The right questions a poet should put himself while writing are: "Am I true to the visionary urge of inspiration entering my mind? Is my expression of feeling moulded by a sense of irreproachable beauty seizing like a godhead my heart?"

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