A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry (ereader with android TXT) 📖

“The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by producing

something unexpected, surprises and delights.”

SAMUEL JOHNSON

“The singers do not beget, only the Poet begets.”

WALT WHITMAN

We must not at the outset insist too strongly upon the radical distinction between “the poet”—as we have called him for convenience—and other men. The common sense of mankind asserts that this distinction exists, yet it also asserts that all children are poets after a certain fashion, and that the vast majority of adult persons are, at some moment or other, susceptible to poetic feeling. A small girl, the other day, spoke of a telegraph wire as “that message-vine.” Her father and mother smiled at this naive renaming of the world of fact. It was a child’s instinctive “poetizing” imagination, but the father and mother, while no longer capable, perhaps, of such daring verbal magic, were conscious that they had too often played with the world of fact, and, for the instant at least, remoulded it into something nearer the heart’s desire. That is to say, they could still feel “poetically,” though their wonderful chance of making up new names for everything had gone as soon as the gates were shut upon the Paradise of childhood.

All readers of poetry agree that it originates somehow in feeling, and that if it be true poetry, it stimulates feeling in the hearer. And all readers agree likewise that feeling is transmitted from the maker of poetry to the enjoyer of poetry by means of the imagination. But the moment we pass beyond these accepted truisms, difficulties begin.

1. Feeling and Imagination

What is feeling, and exactly how is it bound up with the imagination? The psychology of feeling remains obscure, even after the labors of generations of specialists; and it is obvious that the general theories about the nature of imagination have shifted greatly, even within the memory of living men. Nevertheless there are some facts, in this constantly contested territory, which now seem indisputable. One of them, and of peculiar significance to students of poetry, is this: in the stream of objects immediately present to consciousness there are no images of feeling itself. [Footnote: This point has been elaborated with great care in Professor A. H. R. Fairchild’s Making of Poetry. Putnam’s, 1912.]

“If I am asked to call up an image of a rose, of a tree, of a cloud, or of a skylark, I can readily do it; but if I am asked to feel loneliness or sorrow, to feel hatred or jealousy, or to feel joy on the return of spring, I cannot readily do it. And the reason why I cannot do it is because I can call up no image of any one of these feelings. For everything I come to know through my senses, for everything in connection with what I do or feel I can call up some kind of mental image; but for no kind of feeling itself can I ever possibly have a direct image. The only effective way of arousing any particular feeling that is more than mere bodily feeling is to call up the images that are naturally connected with that feeling.” [Footnote: Fairchild, pp. 24, 25.]

If then, “the raw material of poetry,” as Professor Fairchild insists, is “the mental image,” we must try to see how these images are presented to the mind of the poet and in turn communicated to us. Instead of asserting, as our grandfathers did, that the imagination is a “faculty” of the mind, like “judgment,” or accepting the theory of our fathers that imagination “is the whole mind thrown into the process of imagining,” the present generation has been taught by psychologists like Charcot, James and Ribot that we are chiefly concerned with “imaginations,” that is, a series of visual, auditory, motor or tactile images flooding in upon the mind, and that it is safer to talk about these “imaginations” than about “the Imagination.” Literary critics will continue to use this last expression—as we are doing in the present chapter—because it is too convenient to be given up. But they mean by it something fairly definite: namely, the images swarming in the stream of consciousness, and their integration into wholes that satisfy the human desire for beauty. It is in its ultimate aim rather than in its immediate processes that the “artistic” imagination differs from the inventor’s or scientist’s or philosopher’s imagination. We no longer assert, as did Stopford Brooke some forty years ago, that “the highest scientific intellect is a joke compared with the power displayed by a Shakespeare, a Homer, a Dante.” We are inclined rather to believe that in its highest exercise of power the scientific mind is attempting much the same feat as the highest type of poetic mind, and that in both cases it is a feat of imaginative energy.

2. Creative and Artistic Imagination

The reader who has hitherto allowed himself to think of a poet as a sort of freak of nature, abnormal in the very constitution of his mind, and achieving his results by methods so obscure that “inspiration” is our helpless name for indicating them, cannot do better than master such a book as Ribot’s Essay on the Creative Imagination. [Footnote: Th. Ribot, Essai sur l’Imagination cr�atrice. Paris, 1900. English translation by Open Court Co., Chicago, 1906.] This famous psychologist, starting with the conception that the raw material for the creative imagination is images, and that its basis lies in a motor impulse, examines first the emotional factor involved in every act of the creative imagination. Then he passes to the unconscious factor, the involuntary “coming” of the idea, that “moment of genius,” as Buffon called it, which often marks the end of an unconscious elaboration of the idea or the beginning of conscious elaboration. [Footnote: See the quotation from Sir William Rowan Hamilton, the mathematician, in the “Notes and Illustrations” for this chapter.] Ribot points out that certain organic changes, as in blood circulation— the familiar rush of blood to the head—accompany imaginative activity. Then he discusses the inventor’s and artist’s “fixed idea,” their “will that it shall be so,” “the motor tendency of images engendering the ideal.” Ribot’s distinction between the animal’s revival of images and the true creative combination of images in the mental life of children and of primitive man bears directly upon poetry, but even more suggestive to us is his diagram of the successive stages by which inventions come into being. There are two types of this process, and three stages of each: (A) the “idea,” the “discovery” or invention, and then the verification or application; or else (B) the unconscious preparation, followed by the “idea” or “inspiration,” and then by the “development” or construction. Whether a man is inventing a safety-pin or a sonnet, the series of imaginative processes seems to be much the same. There is of course a typical difference between the “plastic” imagination, dealing with clear images, objective relations, and seen at its best in the arts of form like sculpture and architecture, and that “diffluent” imagination which prefers vaguely outlined images, which is markedly subjective and emotional, and of which modern music like Debussy’s is a good example. But whatever may be the specific type of imagination involved, we find alike in inventor, scientist and artist the same general sequence of “germ, incubation, flowering and completion,” and the same fundamental motor impulse as the driving power.

Holding in mind these general characteristics of the creative imagination, as traced by Ribot, let us now test our conception of the distinctively artistic imagination. Countless are the attempts to define or describe it, and it would be unwise for the student, at this point, to rest satisfied with any single formulation of its functions. But it may be helpful to quote a paragraph from Hartley B. Alexander’s brilliant and subtle book, Poetry and the Individual: [Footnote: Putnam’s, 1906.]

“The energy of the mind or of the soul—for it welds all psychical

activities—which is the agent of our world-winnings and the

procreator of our growing life, we term imagination. It is

distinguished from perception by its relative freedom from the

dictation of sense; it is distinguished from memory by its power to

acquire—memory only retains; it is distinguished from emotion in

being a force rather than a motive; from the understanding in being

an assimilator rather than the mere weigher of what is set before it;

from the will, because the will is but the wielder of the reins—the

will is but the charioteer, the imagination is the Pharaoh in

command. It is distinguished from all these, yet it includes them

all, for it is the full functioning of the whole mind and in the

total activity drives all mental faculties to its one supreme

end—the widening of the world wherein we dwell. Through beauty the

world grows, and it is the business of the imagination to create the

beautiful. The imagination synthesises, humanises, personalises,

illumines reality with the soul’s most intimate moods, and so exalts

with spiritual understandings.”

The value of such a description, presented without any context, will vary with the training of the individual reader, but its quickening power will be recognized even by those who are incapable of grasping all the intellectual distinctions involved.

3. Poetic Imagination in Particular

We are now ready, after this consideration of the creative and artistic imagination, to look more closely at some of the qualities of the poetic imagination in particular. The specific formal features of that imagination lie, as we have seen, in its use of verbal imagery, and in the combination of verbal images into rhythmical patterns. But are there not functions of the poet’s mind preceding the formation of verbal images? The psychology of language is still unsettled, and whether a man can think without the use of words is often doubted. But a painter can certainly “think” in terms of color, as an architect or mathematician can “think” in terms of form and space, or a musician in terms of sound, without employing verbal symbols at all. And are there not characteristic activities of the poetic imagination which antedate the fixation and expression of images in words? Apparently there are.

The reader will find, in the “Notes and Illustrations” for this chapter, a quotation from Mr. Lascelles-Abercrombie, in which he refers to the “region where the outward radiations of man’s nature combine with the irradiations of the world.” That is to say, the inward-sweeping stream of consciousness is instantly met by an outward-moving activity of the brain which recognizes relationships between the objects proffered to the senses and the personality itself. The “I” projects itself into these objects, claims them, appropriates them as a part of its own nature. Professor Fairchild, who calls this self-projecting process by the somewhat ambiguous name of “personalizing,” rightly