"The 'Unpremeditated Song'"
What is Poetry? Part two: Poetry is Involuntary' - but what does Involuntary mean?
This is a continuation of the previous post, ‘What is Poetry? Part One’. As I wrote in that post, I am asking this question with absolutely no intention of ever answering it definitively or giving any kind of once-for-all answer. These ‘What is Poetry?’ posts will be more like narrations of authors I’ve read/am reading and connections I make between them as I read and as I think about this question.
Poetry is Involuntary
Shelley says that, "Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man can not say it: 'I will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even can not say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness..."
Frye agrees. In The Educated Imagination, he writes, "...it isn't what you say but how it's said that's important [in literature]. The literary writer isn't giving information, either about a subject or about his state of mind: he's trying to let something take on it's own form, whether it's a poem or play or novel or whatever. That's why you can't produce literature voluntarily, in the way you'd write a letter or a report. That's also why it's no use telling the poet that he ought to write in a different way so you can understand him better. The writer of literature can only write out what takes shape in his mind."
Further on, he writes:
"If we are writing to convey information, or for any practical reason, our writing is an act of will and intention: we mean what we say, and the words we use represent that meaning directly. It's different in literature, not because the poet doesn't mean what he says too, but because his real effort is one of putting words together. What's important is not what he may have meant to say, but what the words themselves say when they get fitted together. With a novelist it's rather the incidents in the story he tells that get fitted together - as D.H. Lawrence says, don't trust the novelist; trust his story.1 That's why so much of a writer's best writing is or seems to be involuntary. It's involuntary because the forms of literature itself are taking control of it, and these forms are what are embodied in the conventions of literature. Conventions, we see, have the same role in literature that they have in life: they impose certain patterns of order and stability on the writer."
Folks like to dog on conventions, because we have this idea that what matters is being "original," but as Frye says about this elsewhere, "that's nonsense." There is no such thing as being original in the sense of something totally new and not at all influenced or derivative is being created. Derivative is not a dirty word. We need conventions in art and literature:
"It's quite wrong to think of the original writer as the opposite of the conventional one. All writers are conventional, because all writers have the same problem of transferring their language from direct speech to the imagination." The language of direct speech is "the language of practical skill or knowledge, which produces information, like science and history."
The language of imagination, or literature, is different. Both, Frye says, are valid forms of verbal address, but literature is not a language of direct address. This is why it's true that "Poetry is a disinterested use of words."2 We are used to thinking about poetry as primarily a self-expression of the poet and that our proper response to poetry is a reciprocated expression, to think about how it emotionally effects or relates to me. But these are incidental, accidental, and not the main thing. Poetry is about creating a dense, concrete image which contains and from which springs layers of meaning, some of which the poet himself is completely unaware. The verbal expression of poetry is the means by which the poet gets that image from his mind to the mind of the reader. Poetry is not a verbal confession of the poet's darkest feelings or inner-most thoughts. He can use those to create an image, but if it is only a sort of diary-entry, it's not poetry. It's a stilted, awkward trauma dump.
Auden, in his essay, Squares and Oblongs, talks about this process of the work of poetry itself taking over:
"A verbal system cannot be selected completely arbitrarily, nor can one say that any given system is absolutely necessary. The poet searches for the one which seems to him to impose the most just obligations on the feelings...
"The process of poetic composition is a work of civilizing. A barbaric horde of emotions which cannot rule themselves are transformed into a just, loving, and self-ruling polis. Unless, however, there is already present in the initial horde a nucleus of self-rule, an idea, a phrase, the poet has no point from which to start. The degree of justice and self-rule possible in a poem is very much higher than in any historical political society. Every good poem is very nearly a Utopia.
"In the earlier stages of composition, the poet has to act like a Greek tyrant; the decision to write this phrase rather than that must be largely his, for the demand of the poem are as yet inarticulate or contradictory. As composition proceeds, the poem begins to take over the job of ruling itself; the transient rule of the poet gets weaker and weaker until, in the final stages, he is like the elected representative of a democracy whose duty it is to listen to and execute the demands of the poem, which now knows exactly what it wishes to be. On completion, the poem rules itself immanently, and the poet is dismissed into private life."
I don't know how much more involuntary or disinterest you can get than being booted out by your own work. Tolkien talks about this at length in a letter to W.H. Auden3. He didn't know about several key parts of The Lord of the Ring trilogy until the story itself revealed them in the process of writing it down:
“Take the Ents, for instance. I did not consciously invent them at all. The chapter called ‘Treebeard’, from Treebeard’s first remark on p. 66, was written off more or less as it stands, with an effect on my self (except for labour pains) almost like reading someone else’s work. And I like Ents now because they do not seem to have anything to do with me. I daresay something had been going on in the ‘unconscious’ for some time, and that accounts for my feeling throughout, especially when stuck, that I was not inventing but reporting (imperfectly) and had at times to wait till ‘what really happened’ came through.”
This takes us back to Shelley, who in his essay points to Milton as the prime example of a poet who wrote involuntarily. "I appeal to the greatest poets of the present day, whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labor and study. The toil and the delay recommended by critics can be justly interpreted to mean no more than a careful observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial connection of the space between their suggestions by the intermixture of conventional expression: a necessity only imposed by the limitedness of the poetical faculty itself; for Milton conceived the 'Paradise Lost' as a whole before he executed it in portions. We have his own authority also for the muse having 'dictated' to him the 'unpremeditated song.'"
No doubt we would see a poet laboring over a line and say, there must be some meditation going on. Of course. And yet, the work as an image is already fully formed in his mind, and what the poet is doing is not so much creating it as giving it birth. There is labor involved, of course, but something like the labor of delivery. Any mother will tell you that while she worked and labored to deliver her baby, the process itself was involuntary, and the child was born fully formed. I think this is what Shelley and Frye mean by an involuntary process. If you go back and read their quotes, Shelley and Tolkien both use the language of conception and delivery to describe the artistic process. It is a process involving the poet and all his gifts, natural and trained, intimately, but also surpassing, overwhelming, coming upon the poet. It is less like Dr. Frankenstein piecing together his Creature and more like Homer invoking the Muse even as the Muse speaks through him. As Tolkien said, there was there is often no conscious invention (though of course there must and can be that), and it had “an effect on my self (except for labour pains) almost like reading someone else’s work.” Those who are called to “bring light and fire from those eternal regions” are often themselves warmed and cheered by it, as something originating outside of themselves, even while it is held in their hands. It’s like a gardener, proud of his roses and yet fully aware that all his labors only go so far. The rose itself must bloom as only a rose can.
“Mastered by desire Impulsive,
By a mighty inward urging,
I am ready now for singing,
Ready now for chanting…
In my mouth the words are melting,
From my lips the tones are gliding,
From my tongue they wish to hasten;
When my willing teeth are parted,
When my ready mouth is opened,
Songs of wit and ancient wisdom,
Hasten from me not unwilling.”
The Kalevala
“Poetry is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odor and the color of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendor of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship - what were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit - what were out consolations on this side of the grave - and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar?”
Shelley
This is why plot and not character is what we ought to focus on when we read. We obviously don't ignore character development and motivations, but they are secondary and incidental to the incidents, the action, of the story. It is the actions fitted together that make the story structure. The characters develop and change as a direct result of the actions of the story. This gives a story it's color and ornamentation. But the reason a story like a fairy tale or a myth works without all those details of character development and motivation (and even names, sometimes) is because the essential structure is still present and functional. That is the part that matters most.
Anatomy of Criticism
“I had very little particular, conscious, intellectual, intention in mind at any point.”
“…I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me. Tom Bombadil I knew already; but I had never been to Bree. Strider sitting in the corner at the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea who he was than had Frodo. The Mines of Moria had been a mere name; and of Lothlorien no word had reached my mortal ears till I came there. Far away I knew there were the Horse-lords on the confines of an ancient Kingdom fo Men, but fangorn Forest was an unforseen adventure. i had never heard of the House of Eorl nor of the Stewards of Gondor. Most disquieting of all, Saruman had never been revealed to me, and I was as mystified as Frodo at Gandalf’s failure to appear on September 22. I knew nothing of the Palantiri, though the moment the Orthanc-stone was cast from the window, I recognized it, and knew the meaning of the ‘rhyme of lore’ that had been running in my mind: seven stars and seven stones and one white tree. These rhymes and names will crop up; but they do not always explain themselves. I have yet to discover anything about the cats of Queen Beruthiel.”
From a letter to W. H. Auden on June 7, 1955