The selves constructed in poems needn’t have original ideas (in fact, few of them do), but they must have imagination — and the imagination of the reader of the poem must somehow (by art) be drawn into the imagination of the speaker. The word “imagination” covers almost anything unusual and nonfactual in the way the self conveys thought. Often something said “imaginatively” is logically absurd, as in this couplet from William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”:
If the Sun and Moon should doubt,
They’d immediately go out.
This is an imaginative way of saying that life lives on faith, and that skepticism is corrosive to radiant living. Here is another example, this time from W. H. Auden’s ballad “As I Walked Out One Evening”:
The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the teacup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
Such imaginativeness in the poetic self asks you to free-associate: even in the cupboard of the food supply, a coming Ice Age is making itself heard; even in the midst of lovemaking, aridity appears; a small flaw in a cup suggests the great Flaw in life, that we are not immortal.
Why — as the question is often put — do the poets (or their constructed poetic selves) say what they mean in “other” words? No poet would agree with putting the question this way. Poets tell us that in poems they say exactly what they mean in words chosen precisely to mean what they (the words) say. “Bed-desert-sigh” is an exact transcription, in Auden’s speaker’s mind, of what he felt in bed; “crack-lane-death,” he thinks when he takes that teacup out of the cupboard; and even though he may close the door of the cupboard, a freezing-hidden-thing, the rigor mortis of the human relations in the house, makes its knocking heard behind the silent wood.
John Ashbery, in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” calls the surface of a poem its “visible core.” The emotional core of Auden’s poem, which we infer from the appearance on its surface of the glacier and the desert, is the inner feeling of dread that Auden’s speaker feels even in the midst of the “safest” surroundings — his kitchen, his bed. And the dread seems to be lodged not in him but in his very cups and cupboards; they seem uneasy, disturbed, flawed. Psychologists call this reaction “projection” — when we “project” our inner emotion upon the world so that outside things seem uncanny or threatening. It would not be accurate, in this case, for the poet to say, “I feel dread and aridity” — that would be a generalizing summary, not a transcription of how concretely he feels a threat in every object at home. And poets wish to give accurate transcripts of feeling, as well as accurate transcripts of the structures of reality.
“How would I be feeling if I said exactly this?” is the question readers must ask as they read the words about the doubting sun uttered by the self that Blake constructs. And the answer is something like, “I’d be feeling that if the sun suddenly went out, it would be like my starting to doubt my belief in God — everything would go black.” The animism by which the sun and moon become doubters like us, or by which a desert can sigh in a bed, is part of imagination’s capacity to make the whole world alive. A credible self in poetry is one who can make us feel as he or she does. The poet shows; the poet does not simply tell. The poet transmits things “on the pulses,” as Keats said; the senses are reproduced in words.
Words like “dread,” “suspicion,” “skepticism,” and “faith” are words from the discourses of psychology and theology, rather than words from the senses or feelings. The senses and the feelings are poetry’s stock-in-trade; words like “cup” and “desert” and “sun” and “moon” never age in the way intellectual discourse does.
It is easy to describe, when reading striking excerpts like the ones from Blake and Auden, how the poet is using language “imaginatively” and creating a “flesh-and-blood self.” But what about poems that seem factually written, without the odd personal deflections of language that characterize an idiosyncratic self? Here is a passage from Tennyson’s “Mariana” that may seem largely like straightforward natural description, a passage transcribed by a camera rather than uttered by a defined self:
About a stone-cast from the wall
A sluice with blacken’d waters slept,
And o’er it many, round and small,
The cluster’d marish-mosses crept.
Hard by a poplar shook alway,
All silver-green with gnarlèd bark:
For leagues no other tree did mark
The level waste, the rounding gray.
There are in the stanza two relatively inconspicuous metaphors: the sluice sleeps, the mosses creep. Sleeping waters and creeping vegetation are not in themselves notably imaginative. Everything else — the wall, the sluice-channel, the round small marsh-grasses, the single shaking silver-green poplar with its gnarled bark, the level waste of land meeting the rounding gray of the horizon — seems factual, transcribed, uninfected by imagination. Of course, the passage is highly decorative in terms of sound, but where is the imagination, or the imagining self?
It is only when we see the whole of “Mariana” — which contains seven of these stanzas — that we realize what the imagination is contributing to the poem. Tennyson is representing in “Mariana” the stream of consciousness of a girl waiting, with increasing hopelessness, for her lover to come. Because she has nothing else to occupy her mind, she notes, minutely and exhaustedly, every item in her surroundings, every small change of atmosphere during the long hours as they pass. It is in the accumulation of seven stanzas’ worth of mounting ennui, apprehension, and loathing that we see Tennyson’s imagination at work creating the imagination of Mariana. He gives each stanza its own peculiar atmosphere. We have already seen the unpromising “blacken’d waters” and “level waste” outside; here is a stanza in which Mariana perceives the inside atmosphere, as the day wears on without the arrival of her lover:
All day within the dreary house
The doors upon their hinges creak’d;
The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse
Behind the moldering wainscot shriek’d.
The buzz of the fly, the shriek of the mouse, the creak of the hinges — by these details we understand the hope within hopelessness with which Mariana listens for the slightest sound of an arrival, and is rewarded only by these tiny interruptions of the deathly silence.
Where a poem offers such “facts” as the blackened waters or the creaking hinges, they are always facts seen through the lens of a particular feeling, which has been imagined by the poet, and ascribed to the imagination of the speaker. It is the successive feelings enacted by the poem that will lead you to see how the imagination is at work, even in the most “factual” lines. There is not a very great distance between Tennyson’s “factual” mouse squeaking behind the wainscot and Auden’s glacier knocking in the cupboard. Both of them serve chiefly as transcripts of the believable feelings of the constructed self rather than as a record of actual things.
Another way poets often show imagination operating in their fictive selves is to take a conventional timeline — birth, youth, maturity, old age, death (for example), or spring, summer, autumn, winter — and place the poem in a spot on the timeline that no one else has used. Dickinson (remembering Tennyson’s “Mariana” where “the blue fly sung in the pane”) inserts her (posthumous) speaker, who is recalling her own death, into the time line of life at its very last gasp, the moment when she actually died. It is imaginative to employ a speaker speaking posthumously, but that had been done before — for instance, by George Herbert in “Love (III).” Dickinson’s speaker takes the old tradition of “holy dying” and revises it blasphemously:
I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm –
The Eyes around – had wrung them dry –
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset – when the King
Be witnessed – in the Room –
I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable – and then it was
There interposed a Fly –
With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz –
Between the light and me –
And then the Windows failed – and then
I could not see to see –
Dickinson is perfectly aware that the death of a Christian ought to take place when God, the “King,” comes to take the soul to heaven, and she shows the mourners waiting precisely for “that last Onset.” But instead of Christ’s “Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise,” the speaker reports a “Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz,” and dies. In inventing this sacrilegious rendering of the conventional “happy death” of the Christian believer, Dickinson has found a way for imagination to re-represent death, this time in wholly bodily and nihilistic form. Dickinson in this instance has inserted her fictive (and credibly blasphemous) self into the human time line at the very last second.
Other poets, using the seasonal time line, will also make their fictive selves speak from a new place. Wallace Stevens does not say, “At the beginning of spring” (a cliché), but rather, “At the earliest ending of winter” (“Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself”); he does not say, “The leaves have all fallen” (a cliché for autumn), but rather, “The last leaf that was going to fall had fallen” (“An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”). The poet can likewise choose an unusual moment in a time line by referring to the hours of the day: “There’s a certain Slant of light,” says Dickinson — the first time in literature that a writer has alluded to the light on late winter afternoons. These imaginative perceptions make a poetic self-arresting, as well as believable.
Another strategy of the poetic imagination is to insert into a genre — say, the sonnet — where the reader might expect a conventional topic (love or death), a new topic, such as prayer (Herbert) or the massacre of “heretics” (Milton) or a car junkyard (Dave Smith). This “turn” of the speaker surprises the reader and refreshes the genre; the expectations of the sonnet form become roomier, deeper, riskier. Or the imagination can borrow a form from another literature and write a poem in that form in English, as Edward FitzGerald borrowed the Persian Rubáiyát and Allen Ginsberg borrowed the sutra (a Buddhist treatise form) in his “Sunflower Sutra.” Or a poet’s imagination can flout the moral expectations of society: Thomas Hardy’s “ruined maid” is quite happy in her new circumstances — “‘One’s pretty lively when ruined,’ said she.”
An imaginative self can range freely through space and time and can ask startling questions like, “What if this present were the world’s last night?” (Donne). It can draw unusual comparisons, as when the birches bent by the weight of vanished snow seem to Frost “like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair / Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.” It matters less how the imaginative self renews feeling — through a surreal phrase like Auden’s “glacier . . . in the cupboard,” through an old image like Pan revived as Cummings’s balloonMan, through a genre-violation like Milton’s sonnet of “slaughtered saints,” or through blasphemy, as when Dickinson substitutes a fly for Christ in the deathroom — than that it renews feeling through a reconceiving of familiar circumstance.
The real appeal of the imagination, when it appears in a poetic speaker, is that one never knows what it will do next. Tonight the Last Judgment? Doubt eclipsing the sun and the moon? A speaker addressing us from beyond the grave? For every self you meet speaking in poetry, the first question — and the last question — to ask is: “Where in these words do I see the imagination at work?” Without imagination, the noblest idea is empty of poetic interest, and the most heartfelt confession merely a twice-told tale. With imagination, the world is made new, and seen sharply, clearly, at an angle. We go to poetry, as to fiction, for the shock of the newly seen. “Things seen,” says Stevens, “are things as seen.” It is in the “as” of a credible speaker that the imagination lives.