A statement made at a Northwestern University panel on “Identity” in February 1963.
I REMEMBER THE LATE E.E. Cummings once answered a questionnaire—from New Verse, the English magazine of the thirties: answered it by quotations from his own work. At the time, being a fierce, youngish man, I thought this a bit exhibitionistic: but now I’m beginning to see the point. One has said a thing as best one can in the poem—in usually a dramatic context: why debase it or water it down to a didactic prose for a lazy modern audience. But this is not a lazy audience, but a young, idealistic, and deeply serious audience: I can judge by its letters, its questions, indeed, I have been astonished at the pertinence, the relevance of the general subjects; and even more astonished by the fact that, I judge from Mr. Payson Wilde’s letter, all this has official credence and sanction. It would seem you have administrators who read—even books.
I take it that we are faced with at least four principal themes: (1) The multiplicity, the chaos of modern life; (2) The way, the means of establishing a personal identity, a self in the face of that chaos; (3) The nature of creation, that faculty for producing order out of disorder in the arts, particularly in poetry; and (4) The nature of God Himself.
I take it as the poet, the intuitive man, I am entitled to, am expected to, throw out what suggestions, what hints I can from my own work, from my own life. I think of this life as an instrument, as an example; and I am perfectly willing to appear ridiculous, absurd, if a real point can be established, a real dent can be made.
I had reason to be delighted with Mr. Bracken’s letter: after all he quoted from my work four times. An all-time record. “Nice young man,” I thought; “either going to go far, or go entirely mad.” Besides, his prose was better than mine. I felt that, in Kierkegaardian terms, we had reached the true state of education in one bound: the student was teaching the teacher. Behind his letter and the various statements I received, one could sense a real hunger for a reality more than the immediate: a desire not only for a finality, for a consciousness beyond the mundane but a desire for quietude, a desire for joy. Now this desire is what the drunkard, the saint, the mystic hankers for in varying ways:—a purity, a final innocence—the phrase is Mr. Spender’s. I think we Americans are very wistful about it. Yet we continue to make a fetish of “thing-hood,” we surround ourselves with junk, ugly objects endlessly repeated in an economy dedicated to waste. Hence the possible relevance of my quotation from “Dolor,” which I repeat in part:
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight,
…
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film of nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate gray standard faces.
This poem is an exposition of one of the modern hells: the institution that overwhelms the individual man. The “order,” the trivia of the institution, is, in human terms, a disorder, and as such, must be resisted. It’s truly a sign of psychic health that the young are already aware of this. How far-reaching all this is, how subtle its ramifications, how disastrous to the human psyche—to worship bigness, the firm, the university; numbers, even, let me say, the organized team effort.
The human problem is to find out what one really is: whether one exists, whether existence is possible. But how? “Am I but nothing, leaning toward a thing?” I think of what I wrote and felt nearly thirty years ago in a period of ill-health and economic terror—the first poem in my first book. The middle stanza says:
My truths are all foreknown,
This anguish self-revealed.
With nakedness my shield.
Myself is what I wear:
I keep the spirit spare.
The last stanza was personally prophetic:
The anger will endure,
The deed will speak the truth
In language strict and pure.
I stop the lying mouth:
Rage warps my clearest cry
To witless agony.
All this has been said before, in Thoreau, in Rilke.
I was going through, though I didn’t realize it at the time, a stage that all contemplative men must go through. This poem is a clumsy, innocent, desperate asseveration. I am not speaking of the empirical self, the flesh-bound ego; it’s a single word: myself, the aggregate of the several selves, if you will. The spirit or soul—should we say the self, once perceived, becomes the soul?—this I was keeping “spare” in my desire for the essential. But the spirit need not be spare: it can grow gracefully and beautifully like a tendril, like a flower. I did not know this at the time. This sense I tried later to describe, metaphorically, many times:
The spirit moves,
Yet stays:
Stirs as a blossom stirs,
Still wet from its bud-sheath,
Slowly unfolding,
Turning in the light with its tendrils;
Plays as a minnow plays,
Tet hered to a limp weed, swinging,
Tail around, nosing in and out of the current,
Its shadows loose, a watery finger;
Moves, like the snail,
Still inward,
Taking and embracing its surroundings,
Never wishing itself away,
Unafraid of what it is,
A small thing,
Singing.
Nor need this final self, or spirit, be a foulness, a disgusting thing from which we should be delivered. A stanza from Stanley Kunitz says:
Father, the darkness of the self goes out
And spreads contagion on the flowing air.
I walk obscurely in a cloud of dark:
Yea, when I kneeled, the dark kneeled down with me.
Touch me: my folds and my defenses fall;
I stand within myself, myself my shield.
This is far more complex than my little stanza, with a great line: “Yea, when I kneeled, the dark kneeled down with me.” But this sense of contamination, the “my taste was me,” is not a necessity: we need not be guilt-ridden—if we are pure in heart. It may, of course, as in the Kunitz stanza, be a prelude to a real psychic purgation.
But the young often do have an acute sense of defilement, a hatred of the body. Thus I remember marking this feeling in a violent little poem:
I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood’s obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost.
Hyperbole, of course, but behind it is still the same desire for a reality of the spirit. Again I was wrong. For the body should be cherished: a temple of God, some Christians say.2
In any quest for identity today—or any day—we run up inevitably against this problem: What to do with our ancestors? I mean it as an ambiguity: both the literal or blood, and the spiritual ancestors. Both, as we know, can overwhelm us. The devouring mother, the furious papa. And if we’re trying to write, the Supreme Masters. In this same harried period, I wrote, in a not very good poem:
Corruption reaps the young; you dread
The menace of ancestral eyes;
Recoiling from the serpent head
Of fate, you blubber in surprise.
And so on… in the last stanza,
You meditate upon the nerves,
Inflame with hate. This ancient feud
Is seldom won. The spirit starves
Until the dead have been subdued.
I remember the late John Peale Bishop, that fine neglected poet, reading this and saying, “You’re impassioned, but wrong. The dead can help us.” And he was right; but it took me some years to learn that.
Let me say boldly, now, that the extent to which the great dead can be evoked, or can come to us, can be eerie, and astonishing. Let me, at the risk of seeming odd, recite a personal incident.
I was in that particular hell of a poet: a longish dry period. It was 1952, I was 44, and I thought I was done. I was living alone in a biggish house in Edmonds, Washington. I had been reading—and rereading—not Yeats, but Ralegh and Sir John Davies. I had been teaching the five-beat line for weeks—I knew quite a bit about it, but write it myself?—no: so I felt myself a fraud.
Suddenly, in the early evening, the poem “The Dance” started, and finished itself in a very short time—say thirty minutes, maybe in the greater part of an hour, it was all done. I felt, I knew, I had hit it. I walked around, and I wept; and I knelt down—I always do after I’ve written what I know is a good piece. But at the same time I had, as God is my witness, the actual sense of a Presence—as if Yeats himself were in that room. The experience was in a way terrifying, for it lasted at least half an hour. That house, I repeat, was charged with a psychic presence: the very walls seemed to shimmer. I wept for joy. At last I was somebody again. He, they—the poets dead—were with me.
Now I know there are any number of cynical explanations for this phenomenon: auto-suggestion, the unconscious playing an elaborate trick, and so on, but I accept none of them. It was one of the most profound experiences of my life.
If the dead can come to our aid in a quest for identity, so can the living—and I mean all living things, including the subhuman. This is not so much a naïve as a primitive attitude: animistic, maybe. Why not? Everything that lives is holy: I call upon these holy forms of life. One could even put this theologically: St. Thomas says, “God is above all things by the excellence of His nature; nevertheless, He is in all things as causing the being of all things.” Therefore, in calling upon the snail, I am calling, in a sense, upon God:
Snail, snail, glister me forward,
Bird, soft-sigh me home.
Worm, be with me.
This is my hard time.
Or again, in a passage Mr. Bracken mentions:
I could watch! I could watch!
I saw the separateness of all things!
My heart lifted up with the great grasses;
The weeds believed me, and the nesting birds.
It is paradoxical that a very sharp sense of the being, the identity of some other being—and in some instances, even an inanimate thing—brings a corresponding heightening and awareness of one’s own self, and, even more mysteriously, in some instances, a feeling of the oneness of the universe. Both feelings are not always present, I’m aware, but either can be an occasion for gratitude. And both can be induced. The first simply by intensity in the seeing. To look at a thing so long that you are a part of it and it is a part of you—Rilke gazing at his tiger for eight hours, for instance. If you can effect this, then you are by way of getting somewhere: knowing you will break from self-involvement, from I to Otherwise, or maybe even to Thee.
True, I’m speaking in these lines of a heightened consciousness. In the early part of that poem, nature was “dead,” ambiguous, ominous. But the “angel,” an emissary of the “other,” was invoked; there was some kind of ritualistic, even penitential, act: “Was it dust I was kissing?… Alone, I kissed the skin of a stone… .”—the inanimate itself becomes alive before the final euphoria of this piece.
The second part of this feeling, the “oneness,” is, of course, the first stage in mystical illumination, an experience many men have had, and still have: the sense that all is one and one is all. This is inevitably accompanied by a loss of the “I,” the purely human ego, to another center, a sense of the absurdity of death, a return to a state of innocency.
This experience has come to me so many times, in so many varying circumstances, that I cannot suspect its validity: it is not one of the devil’s traps, a hallucination, a voice, a snare. I can’t claim that the soul, my soul, was absorbed in God. No, God for me still remains someone to be confronted, to be dueled with: that is perhaps my error, my sin of pride. But the oneness, Yes!
But let us return to the more homely but related form of exaltation: creativity itself. Can we say this: that the self can be found in love, in human, mutual love, in work that one loves—not in Arbeit in the German sense? Think of what happened to them and is still happening. The novel, that secondary form, can teach us how to act; the poem, and music, how to feel: and the feeling is vastly more important. And the “creativity” may be vicarious. Once we feel deeply, to paraphrase Marianne Moore, we begin to behave.
And of all the instruments for verbal creativity close at hand today, the supreme example seems to me the short lyric.
When I was young, to make something in language, a poem that was all of a piece, a poem that could stand for what I was at the time—that seemed to be the most miraculous thing in the world. Most scholarship seemed irrelevant rubbish; most teachers seemed lacking in wisdom, in knowledge they had proved on their pulses. Certain writers called out to me: I believed them implicitly. I still do.
“We think by feeling. What is there to know?” This, in its essence, is a description of the metaphysical poet who thinks with his body: an idea for him can be as real as the smell of a flower or a blow on the head. And those so lucky as to bring their whole sensory equipment to bear on the process of thought grow faster, jump more frequently from one plateau to another more often.
And it is one of the ways man at least approaches the divine—in this comprehensive human act, the really good poem.
For there is a God, and He’s here, immediate, accessible. I don’t hold with those thinkers who believe in this time He is farther away—that in the Middle Ages, for instance, He was closer. He is equally accessible now, not only in works of art or in the glories of a particular religious service, or in the light, the aftermath that follows the dark night of the soul, but in the lowest forms of life, He moves and has His being. Nobody has killed off the snails. Is this a new thought? Hardly. But it needs some practicing in Western society. Could Reinhold Niebuhr love a worm? I doubt it. But I—we—can.
_____
2. Roethke marked this paragraph “Omit” in his typescript.