The American Scene; #271

I'm going to have to get fired, I'm going to have to get fired, I'm going to have to get fired. I don't know, I could step on it help. I could use one right this way. You cover it and you're muckling it. I'm going

to have to get fired, I'm going to have to get fired, I'm going to have to get fired.

Good morning. This is Howard Vincent viewing the arts for the American Scene and for Illinois Institute of Technology. The art today is the art of poetry. This is a crusade that teaches of literature, carry on, sometimes they feel hopelessly, I hope not helplessly, year after year after year after year and I'm taking this opportunity for a wide audience to carry on the crusade in Chicago. There is more misunderstanding of poetry and the nature of poetry than almost any subject except perhaps the nature of art and since poetry is an art that's understandable parallel. The other day or some time ago we had a discussion of Chicago in poetry or poetry in Chicago but we were talking then not so much about poetry, the art of poetry as the writing of poetry, the interest in poetry in Chicago.

At that time I had with me Dr. Samuel Workman to discuss this problem but at the time I suggested the perhaps you might come back and talk about the poetry itself so that Dr. Workman who is the professor of English at Illinois Institute of Technology and proud to say one of my colleagues is here today to discuss this problem again and we have this titled Sam the Basis of Poetry. Why did we select that? What was the reason? I suppose so we could start from the bottom and work up that I'm not sure where the bottom is or how far, how high you can go either, it's a bold topic. Oh yes. Lots of theories about what the basis of poetry is, how great many people don't want to theorize about it at all. All right let's have it clear at the beginning that we're not going to present any new theories, nothing absolutely dazzlingly original which will unlock the secret of mystery but we're going to explore this in a

general way and try to make clear to people who are listening for how we view poetry and the essential nature of it and it's not something pretty, something accidental but something basic and basic in experience. All right is that right? Sure, that's just it and I think as far as theory goes there's no use talking about it in the abstract and its theory. The way to get at it is to get down to the particulars of what goes on inside the typical poem, the characteristic poem, though of course the way a person picks out things like that and describes the poem is going to, in the end it's going to be decided in his mind by what notions, what theories he has of what poetry is like in general. I think it's the same way with people when you try to describe even a friend it'll turn out that the way you describe him is determined by your notions of what people are like and how the what

sides of the typical person that's very picking out in him. Very perceptive because it's true isn't it that you, you hear somebody describe a person and you go see that person and oh my what a difference it is because your own concept of people is so different. That's right and yet I'd be bold enough to suggest certain typical ways of looking at a poem or as I wouldn't be bold enough to suggest typical ways of looking at people. We could do that but our title helps us do this, doesn't it? The basis. Let's get down the basis. And what would be the first thing? The image? Well, I think the image is whatever it is it is a very frequently recurring thing in poetry. It isn't the very basis of poetry but it makes a good place to start with and especially since poets more often than not I think frame what's on their minds or rather what's in the total bottom of their intense state of

feeling they tend to frame that or rather I think their state of feeling leads them to think of the physical things and actions of the familiar experience around them. A strange thing that happens there is to see how often quite different poets seem to think of very similar things from their familiar world around them. Water is one of those snow as another animals or another eating as another. Yes, anything. There is a psychological theory of poetry that says that these are basic rather that the associations we make with certain things are reflections of our basic nature and that there is that about those things which makes it more than accidental it makes it rather natural

that a person in a certain state of feeling would dream of snow or dream of flying or dream of being a float on water or of about being about to dive in somewhere even of drinking. All right, but the fact is a fact is a fact and well I shouldn't have gone that far there. A fact, there is snow out here regardless of your attitude towards it in mind. There is a tree, there is water. Nevertheless, there is your attitude towards it, there's mind listening to the poet. And that's what is meant by a fact is a fact is a fact. Well, the fact isn't a fact, all right, and that's it. That's it. That's what the thing that the physicist might isolate in the external environment, let's say snow, crystalline formations of H2O at a certain temperature, that wouldn't address the poet at all. Well, Dr. Mr. Gradgrind, a horse. All right, a horse, that's not, you have a physical chemical definition of a horse, but the factual nature

of snow, we nowadays describe in physical chemical terms, crystalline formations and stuff. Which completely misses it. Almost always completely misses it, though I have known poets in a state of mind where they were inclined to think of the world that way and they talk of in physical chemical terms for a while and that can be poetry too. Because what determines the, what the fact seems to be to the person on whose mind the fact gets, it seems to come, what determines what the fact, what the snow is like is the way he's feeling. Just as much as you could say that the way he's feeling determines why he happens to think of snow or be interested in it. And a man will write a snow poem in a hot July day, and not because he's wishing for snow, but because he's in a state of feeling that has nothing to do with the weather outside, but that in his day dreaming, or it might have come out of a night dream, makes him think of snow. And

the snow he thinks of can have anyone of different characters, and you couldn't say any one of them is factual. All it takes is not writing a weather report. Let me, one of my favorite, as you know, is London Snow. When men were all asleep, the snow came flying, falling on the sit, oh, I knew it. So I remember that goes flying and soft, white flakes falling on the city brown thing goes. And you might notice that there's this notion of a sleep in there. Oh, yeah. So what that has to do with snow won't appear right away, perhaps you're not even meant to think about it, though we props and critics are always thinking about it. But suppose he'd written the flow, the snow came flying in soft, white flakes. He could have thought of snow. He could have dreamed up this snow as shooting in small, hard pellets, or he could have thought of it. And it could have been the same snow, too, as this one that was flying in soft, white flakes. It could have been

plopping in slushy blobs. And which would have had it all the time. All right. Two people watching the same snow. One might say, look at it flying in those soft, white flakes, and the other one would say, it's plopping in slushy blobs. And they never could get together because each one feels differently, perhaps at the moment or perhaps characteristically in most of the time. Each one feels differently to certain elements in the environment that they make their own associations with. And that's not to say that each line of association isn't equally valid or couldn't be brought up into poetical expression. All right. Now each poet sees this snow, whether it's a blob or a puff or a soft, white down or whatever he sees it. He sees it different from the other one. This is mean that the poem is itself completely, each poem is completely atomistic and nobody can identify with a poem

because it's a poet's final experience. No. Since we launched into this psychology, it would seem to me that the variety of basic experiences among different people isn't very wide and that quite likely all people have the same inner possibilities of feeling and of ways of feeling about such a given physical fact as a body of snow. But in one person, one side will be prevailing for reasons that we don't win too much. In other words, snow, you can't talk about brittle or sharp or harsh. That's right. So it's limited by if it's physical factualness. That's right. All right. Let's take this same soft snow in large snow. Well, look, this may cool people off hearing it. We'll try to keep it flying here. But a man who fears being engulfed by that sort of thing or who senses that his attraction to it is a childish one and children

are characteristically enthused by snow. But he might fear that this is an escape desire operating in him. And he would tend to resist that by thinking he would without knowing what he was doing. Think of the snow as messy undesirable stuff that one does well to keep in shelter from. The other man seeing it in these flying and these soft, white flakes wants to be carried away by it. He welcomes this sense of softness, of dimming out the sharp, dimming of the world, the sharp, strident sounds of things. A protective blanket. That's right. In which he can lose himself. Yes. And let's assume that this escape desire is latent in everybody, but that most of us, most of the time, keep it covered. And quite possibly you could say that one of the things a poet does is give expression in a safe kind of way. It's only on the printed

page. He gives expression to a side of experience that we do all wish to be carried away by now on that, but our mature enough to know could never really be lived out in real life. And that is a lightning rod sometimes. That's right. I was sort of carrying off the dangerous charges that we have inside of us. Well, isn't there an example of that? And that's a sharp story of a conradic and silenced snow secret snow? Yes, that's a curious story, partly because it is about a boy who was all mixed up as the, he was sick as the dear new phrase goes. And he fell to dreaming of snow. He actually thought it was snow. He got so bad he thought it was snowing when it wasn't snowing. And he can mix him a case. We're drawing a family really into a complete burial. That's right. But that's a story about a fellow who goes through that unhappy experience. But you can read snow

poems without literally living out with draw. You simply form one minute to five minutes since an intense expression of this sort of thing. And I further, safe cushion about it is that even though you may be drawn into it into this poem and feel, you'll simply say, gee, that was good. I like that. But you won't know why. It doesn't even have to occur to you that the underlying appeal of it was this. But we started out to talk about how you make these things out, how you come to understand perhaps you can even say how to look at it, how to read it, what the underlying appeal is. And let's get this clear that the actual reason why it's appealing is not that it gives what you might call a pretty snow scene

or that it makes a report on the weather in Boston, on Christmassy, 1892, or whenever the poem might happen to be laid. I think too much is made of that. Too much? Well, yes, of course. And this is the false idea of poetry. I'm dreaming of a white Christmas sort of thing. That is awful. And this is what people associate with. This is not the basis though. They tend to think of it as you might almost a newspaper report as being interesting for the particular things that are named by the words that make the flow as it goes along. So it was snowing in London. And it seems to me that a normally white awake realistic person would say so what? So the fellow saw this snow. You justified it. That's all a poem. That's right. And I think a great deal of the rejection of poems by our somewhat scientific -minded public these days comes from they're not realizing that that is, is only, you might say, a manner of speaking. Those are the terms

in which the man finds reflected the sort of thing he feels inside himself, the state of feeling that he's undergoing. Again, he may not know that. It may just seem to him terribly interesting to talk about snow. But a good poet will somehow make that seem interesting also to a person who will give it a moment. Who just likes snow. No. All right. If he just likes snow, but again, we get back to our subject who says, so what snow? All right. That's right. Let it snow. I've got a pool game to play or something like that. Not realizing that the snow, if you will look at it rightly, is only one frame of reference for inner feelings. As for instance, this sleep business, you know, it's two little lines we took off from here. It seems to have, there's an underlying relationship to the flying and soft, white flakes that this fellow

obviously desires. And you can tell him that way too. Oh, there are snow poems which speak of a wilderness of snow or be knighted snow or will express loneliness and most painful loneliness by saying it's snowing all around makes them feel isolated, carried away into a nothingness as if they were whipped off in a spaceship and never get back. Well, here we are saying it's not what does a poem mean is a nonsensical question or it's a question which should be much less used. And the important thing is how a poem means as John Charity recently is. Yes, that's a good phrase it has. And how it means is that these surface things that seem to experience people to be what it means. Those are really part of the pal it is making its meaning. And

once you see the characteristics or the nature of the snow as for instance between softness or wetness and coldness, desired or undesired, if the man desires it, the nature of it will seem one way and if he fears it, it will seem another way. Once you see that, then you can see that inside there is perhaps a conflict even, both a desire and a fear operating that comes out so indirectly like dreams perhaps through these terms and the snow or the water if he takes that or the animal, those in the end are only how he is expressing the foot that lies down inside and very often is inexpressible any other way. Yes, all right now though we so far in talking about the basis of poetry, we have

talked about really the word, just the word, the image of the image word and alone isolated. Now an image that make a poem or a bit an attitude towards an image makes a poem, begins to make a poem. But a poem is a structure and that's right, that's right and it seems to me that what they are building every time is a process of inner conflict and the importance of having a sense of form and structure on that so that you feel he began here and he moved through this as if almost he knew where he was going and he ended just right that the importance of that is to show that it reflects in the end of the man's, you could say mastery over the disturbance or conflict that's inside of him and it's interesting to see how the different forms, if you like, the use of rhyme or rhythm or the absence of any rhyme

or set regular rhythm can be varied to indicate how much mastery he has. When they have a great deal to the point where you feel like it almost analyze themselves in scientific psychological terms, they are thinking people primarily and yet intense people too, you will find, oh the characteristic way of those people to cast things as in pairs of rhymes with about the same beat or rhythm in each line and it all comes out some people hate it, it comes out like clockwork, very precise, yet underneath they may be talking about the very same thing that let's say Whitman or the free verse boys or people who mix the rhymes all up and vary the beat a great deal, talking about the same conflict but there is a mastery

over it in the tight case. Now you've said the mastery and the understanding of the image is a part of a mastery with basis but the second thing is this rhythm, the rhythm we are talking about and in the chief characteristic of a work of art, I don't care what the work of art, a rhythm, I mean one of the chiefs and this goes in visual things and in music obviously, but take the two lines we had when when we're all asleep the snow came flying, falling, I forget it now in the case, but anyhow, one reason you forget that is that the rhythm does vary strangely in there so that it's hard to remember and the reason I remember, I memorized this easily, it's just a TV but what about those two lines? So the rhythm there has an effect which is part of the meaning, part of the meaning, yes, but I don't think we can carry too far this notion that people once tried to

formulate, well, 250 years ago some fellow said the sound should seem an echo to the sense and that's too literal. Sure, that's having sound effects. Right, exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, like having birds twitter on a piece of music, it's nonsense. That's right, the way the rhythm and sound play does add to the meaning to put it most broadly and they're all sorts of smaller variations, but most broadly it indicates the degree of disturbance or perhaps the degree to which the man dares of the side of himself that he fears and he'll get irregular and seem to halt and yet recover the rhythm and go on. Modern music does this a great deal but they didn't invent the notion of poets were doing this characteristically 300 years ago, great deal. You know what we should have done, we should have made up six of the same, the same, those two put those two sentences in four different rhythms and show you how completely different they are. It would have

been a good ston. Yes, I saw the snow, I saw it go, you know how different that is from when married men were all asleep, the snow came flying, the flyingness of those lines. All right, in a show how it can be done badly with all respects to your American heroes, no sky above, no earth below, a wilderness of sky of what is it? When, now you're exactly what who said these lines? Who wrote these lines? Don't even put it here. Well, all right, all right. That's out of the window on us knowing what I mean is that the rhythm there is almost meaningless. The rhythm there just exists. It doesn't operate effectively so that makes it inferior as a poor. It takes the Christmas card rhythms, the easy rhythms, he didn't work on it, he didn't as it were ask himself or he didn't for some reason or other was unable to make all the turns possible in the use of words express what was really going on inside the man that made him interested in

it. He didn't respect his instrument. That's one way you tell a good poem from a badman how overly obvious they get and of course that's one reason why the good ones aren't so often read, they do require more scrutiny. Just the difference between a property pop music and complicated jazz or classical music comes in one's awareness of the subtle use of all the possibilities in order to deepen what's being read. But as an intelligent person you can listen to a good poem, I mean read it or listen to a good piece of music 70 times and an inferior poem which attracts right away because it's easy fades on you. Oh well. Sometimes you remember too many of them but they slip out of mind and the ones that you well certain ones that you are attracted to and do memorize somehow stick there and they they'll come up on sometimes the most inappropriate seeming occasions you suddenly think of a few lines this and

then ask yourself and you will find out I've tried this it's dangerous self -analysis but I've tried it and I've seems to me I have discovered what was really in my mind that I've brought this up this is warmed over Freud and yeah. Dishing here I suppose but I feel what it actually might say pragmatically scientifically works out that way. Well what about with rhythm and the word what about metaphor which is part of the word of course but what about metaphor the in this a key to the poetic poetic discourse. All right now we're getting into I'll get very abstract for a minute into another angle of looking at this another basis that some people feel is the real one not psychological conflict they say in the end even that well such a thing may be expressed that doesn't matter anymore than I was saying the snow ultimately matters they say what's wonderful about poetry is something the same thing that's wonderful about music simply the

capacity to do these things that for some reason are intent and produce intense response you know it's said that Helen Keller is the prime example of what a what a miraculous seeming what a thrilling experience it was to her when she first realized that symbol words noises though she couldn't even hear him but that P 11 in her mouth that these stood for things like water and that by using different tone on it you could somehow communicate how you felt about the water. All right the notion is that they further that's and human beings have the possibility of very wide and complex extensions of just the power of using words to express complex things the very use of that power. It's supposed to be almost an end in itself

and looked at that way metaphor where you use one thing instead of another thing and in using that bring in all kinds of associations with the first thing cats come to our mind my how cats have been used in 20th century writing poetry and fiction both and constantly bringing into association on the one hand a kind of of animalism operating in human beings which may be gloryed in or may be feared as the man talks about his lions or his jaguars or his leopards or his cats or his fog or cat the fog or little cat feet there's a real mixture for you. There is the the coins scratching thang animal reduced to but not in his clang thang that's right but he's he's not the chief image is the cat is stealth soft as a stealth right and Elliott uses it the same way to prove rock identical same way only

better yes but he also talks about tigers and well associate religious experience with tigers in the capacity to carry away well we're back at our original well always are metaphors and perhaps the interest of them simply comes in our if you get a little seasoning in it ability to recognize how much how much as expressed through this strange compressed way of using words yeah I don't agree with that but I the metaphor itself exists everywhere yes I mean most of our talk is metaphor even the word talk if we traced it back was originally a metaphor well it's certainly it well since it is and it's in poetry and but the exploitation of it it's a poetic act that's right well we haven't certainly covered poetry forever and for all time but with the basis is here I mean and we've touched on them and that's all you can do in the but let's let's carry this on again because this is this is good talk and a

good subject it hope people will be awake to poetry and that it's not something superficial but essential in their experience of life thanks very much is to work with the grad