Eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard.
—JOHN STUART MILL, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties”
In 1981, Sarah Arvio, a twenty-six-year-old poetry student in Columbia University’s graduate writing program, went to hear James Merrill speak. Merrill was then one of the most celebrated poets in the country. He had already published most of the work that would be collected the following year in The Changing Light at Sandover, an epic trilogy that many consider Merrill’s greatest artistic achievement and some place among the greatest works of twentieth-century literature. Yet even before its full publication, Sandover had gained the bulk of its attention less for its poetic quality than for its unusual genesis. For more than twenty years, Merrill claimed, he and his lover, the writer and artist David Jackson, had used a homemade Ouija board and, as a marker, a teacup to communicate with spirits from beyond the grave. Merrill had turned these allegedly supernatural dispatches—from Jesus, Muhammad, W. H. Auden, Maria Callas, a first-century Greek Jew named Ephraim, and so on—into the core of his masterwork, around and through which he wove his own elegant verse.
Arvio had undergone similar experiences. Seven years before, her twin sister had grasped her hand and directed a pencil across a sheet of blank paper. After her sister let go, Arvio was amazed to find that, when she used no effort of her own, the pencil continued to write in her hand, making “letters and sweeps and curls” on the page. Since that time, Arvio had practiced this method of so-called automatic writing, and over the years the markings had become more articulate. Eventually they’d begun to dispense predictions and advice. She’d filled notebook after notebook with these jottings.
After Merrill’s reading, Arvio approached him and revealed her own method of receiving spiritual messages. “I do it, too,” she said. “I use a pen.”
“Oh, I envy you,” Merrill responded warmly. “A cup is so cumbersome.”
“But all mine talk to me about is love.”
“That’s as it should be,” he said. “You’re young. Love is the subject of the young. Later, they’ll talk about other things.”
He was only half right. Arvio’s “visitors,” as she has come to call them, still talk primarily about love, but they have branched out in other ways. More than a decade after meeting Merrill, Arvio was out walking in Manhattan, where she lives and works as a translator for the United Nations, when she heard a voice speaking what seemed to be lines of poetry. She stopped, took out a pen and a pad of paper, and began to write down what she heard. The words came quickly, with “swirls and flourishes,” and when they had finished, to her surprise, Arvio had almost the full text of a poem. She titled it “Floating.”
I said some nonsense or other to them
and they mocked back, “but we’re your one design,”
or “you’re our one design”—which was it?
The pen slipped and capered on the page,
escorted by ripplings in the atmosphere
like breeze with nothing to blow against.
“We wear no form or figure of our own
—a wisp, a thread, a twig, a shred of smoke
—to tell us from the motions of the air.
We’d love to live in even a bubble,
to wrap around its glossy diaphanous,
reaching and rounding, as slinkily real
as a morning stretch or a dance in a field.
But we know only this air, and memory,
once, or several times, removed and turned,
the pang of a once-had, a maybe-again,
that shifting half-light, our home and habitat,
those hours, soft-toned, windless, that favor passage,
the usual relay of twilights. And,
how often a century? The sun eclipsed,
that ‘created’ half-light, not dusk or dawn:
us glowing through, our light, our element,
in which we show best, glow best, what we are.
Yesterday some snowflakes slipped through us,
refreshing kisses passing through our heat.
Ah, we wanted to say. If we could have,
we’d have laughed right out from sheer surprise.”
And what else? “We’ve got you to stand for us.”
And I have you, I said, to float for me.1
It was the first of many poems that would come to Arvio with great speed and force in the following months. They came to her on airplanes and on trains, in bathtubs and in restaurants, at home and at work. Sometimes they came out whole, and she had to rush to record them. Other times they came out in fragments, and she had to fill in the remaining lines herself. Sometimes they did not come at all; for two years Arvio received not a single word. But after six years of waiting, listening, recording, and editing, she finally had enough poems to put together her first book. Visits from the Seventh, a cycle of forty-nine poems in two “rounds,” was published in 2002.
Visits from the Seventh was a remarkable debut. After a long apprenticeship—she was forty-seven when Visits was published—Arvio delivered a work that was allusive, playful, idiosyncratic, controlled, and deeply moving. The critics received it well. And as with Sandover, in the company of which it has been placed, they were quick to note the unusual manner in which the book was composed. They were fascinated by her ethereal voices, which served double duty as the book’s impetus and its central object of inquiry. The poet Mark Strand commented that they “drop in and out like a beautiful quixotic chorus.” Edward Hirsch wrote that Arvio “has been channeling voices, splitting herself off and listening to her inner musings, carrying on dialogues with the dead. She has turned herself into a poet of two minds, a spiritual apprentice to those ‘abstracted from humanness on the physical plane.’” (The quotation is Arvio’s.)
But Arvio’s visitors were not so easy to understand as Merrill’s glamorous ghosts. For one, they spoke in so many different tones of voice that they were less like a chorus than a cacophony. In the book there are visitors who attempt to comfort the narrator of the poems (“Haven’t we sat with you for hour on hour?”); those who admonish her (“But how could you tell him? Never ever / have we allowed—have we intimated—/ you should share our visits with anyone”); those who mock her attempts to explain their existence (“The sixth [sense] is sex, silly. The seventh is / our sense, the one we sometimes share with you”); even those who try to deceive her (“There are ones out there as false as any / [a 42nd Street of the Heavens]”). The drama in Arvio’s book emerges from her attempts to make sense of these disparate and often difficult voices—to separate the useful from the useless, the healthful from the harmful, the illuminating from the obscuring.
Another reason it is difficult to encapsulate Arvio’s visitors is that although she herself often refers to them as “voices,” they appear to have no clear sensory bearing. It was a point she took pains to make clear to me in a long, carefully worded e-mail written in 2004 from Rome, where she was working on her second book, Sono.
I want to explain that I don’t “hear” voices. Or rather, I don’t have auditory hallucinations. These are voices that separate themselves from the other voices of my thoughts; a sudden, somewhat different voice comes forward, and, recognizing what it is, I begin to write. They aren’t voices outside myself; they don’t resemble a voice in a room, for instance.
Indeed, her visitors’ lack of physical substance makes it difficult for Arvio to say exactly what her visitors do resemble.
I actually don’t know how I could know where mine come from, how I have managed to sort the good from the bad, whether I am dabbling in the occult at all. Whether my voices are figments of my imagination, or whether they come from elsewhere. What could tell me? On the other hand, I’m surprised by what I write. I find a kind of web of connections that I can’t imagine creating on my own. I tap into a source of knowledge I don’t think I have, or perhaps might barely have. Sometimes I think I must be accessing some sort of collective information source, like Jung’s collective unconscious. I’m fascinated, enriched, and baffled.
For all the uncertainty that they possess and even have bred, however, Arvio insists that she has learned a specific artistic lesson from her visitors, one that James Merrill seems to have learned as well. “I have learned,” she wrote, “never to force my hand, never to apply my will. My best poems are the ones that came to me with no effort.”
In the early nineteenth century, toward the end of his life, William Blake was looking through a sketchbook owned by the painter John Constable when he came across a drawing Constable had made of an avenue of fir trees on London’s Hampstead Heath. “Why, this is not drawing, but inspiration!” Blake exclaimed. “I never knew it before,” Constable replied, “I meant it for drawing.”2
When this brief exchange took place—the only conversation recorded between the two men—the phenomenon to which Blake was referring was at a low historical point, as Constable’s bewildered response suggests. The Enlightenment was in its full rationalist bloom, and the mainstream of poetry and the visual arts was dominated by the ideal of reason, dedicated to the careful explication and imitation of nature. Constable’s work would influence the more imaginative Romantics who followed, but it was well suited to his times. His paintings, highly detailed scenes of English rural life, reflect a meticulous sensibility. Still, he undoubtedly understood Blake’s comment. The word inspiration might have been rarely used in the period, but it still carried the meaning Blake intended.
Today, we can’t be so certain he would be understood correctly. When Blake died, in 1827, inspiration carried only two meanings: the act of drawing air into the lungs, which is its etymological meaning, and a related religious one—the infusion of ideas into the mind by God or gods. As the nineteenth century progressed, however, a third meaning—one more suggestive of a heightening of everyday feeling—began to creep into use and supplant the old. Late in the century one can find the word inspiration used in this new way in sermons, poems, and essays. By the early twentieth century the new meaning had overtaken one of its predecessors; Webster’s 1913 dictionary places it second behind “the act…of breathing.” By the turn of the millennium, it had triumphed even over respiration. The fourth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, published in 2000, defines inspiration first as the “stimulation of the mind or emotions to a high level of feeling or activity,” as in, “Our teacher was an inspiration to us all.”
More than two centuries removed, can we possibly understand what Blake was trying to say? Is the old meaning alive in the way it was for Blake, who attributed to it some of his greatest works: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Milton, Visions of the Daughters of Albion? Writing in 1888, Friedrich Nietzsche already thought it necessary to spell out the experience to readers who were unaccustomed to hearing about it. “Can anyone at the end of this nineteenth century have any distinct notion of what poets of a more vigorous period meant by inspiration?” he asked in Ecce Homo.
If not, I should like to describe it. Provided one has the slightest remnant of superstition left, one can hardly reject completely the idea that one is the mere incarnation, or mouthpiece, or medium of some almighty power. The notion of revelation describes the condition quite simply; by which I mean that something profoundly convulsive and disturbing suddenly becomes visible and audible with indescribable definiteness and exactness. One hears—one does not seek; one takes—one does not ask who gives: a thought flashes out like lightning, inevitably without hesitation—I never had any choice.3
One hundred twenty years later this description would seem to be, on the surface of things, less pertinent to the act of artistic creation than it ever was before. Critics today tend to treat those artists who claim external sources for their work as outliers at best, and at worst, charlatans. A common explanation for Merrill’s Ouija board experiments, for example, is that he was creating an artistic role for his less productive lover. And yet if we don’t live in a “vigorous period,” as Nietzsche called those times in which artistic inspiration was openly declared, or in a time in which artistic creation is experienced in revelatory terms, that doesn’t mean the core of the phenomenon—that temporary erasure of the will that Nietzsche described—is irrelevant. When we look beneath the surface, it becomes obvious that artists continue to experience inspiration intuitively as a natural conduit of their art. And those who do so most routinely—and in a manner that can tell us the most about the development and essence of the phenomenon—are poets.
Theodore Roethke once revealed in a lecture how his poem “The Dance” came about. It was 1952, and he was living alone in a large house in Edmonds, Washington. He was forty-four years old and teaching poetry at the University of Washington, in Seattle. For weeks Roethke had been teaching his students the five-beat line and reading exemplars of that form: Walter Raleigh and John Davies. For months, however, he had been unable to write anything of worth himself, and he had come to consider himself a fraud. Then, one evening, Roethke was sitting at home when “The Dance” suddenly came to him. It came quickly and with great strength, and in less than an hour he was done:
I felt, I knew, that 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…. He, they—the poets dead—were with me.4
This anecdote is an example of what we might call “modern” inspiration. It exhibits two complementary mechanisms. First, there is a conscious attentiveness to craft, as exemplified by Roethke’s weeks-long studying and teaching of the five-beat line. Second, there is the unconscious activity of the creative faculty, as exemplified by the subconscious composition and miraculous-seeming arrival of the poem—which, indeed, carried the same meter as the poems Roethke had slowly been working into his bones:
Is that dance slowing in the mind of man
That made him think the universe could hum?
The great wheel turns its axle when it can….5
Reception and revision: These are the two essential ingredients in the composition of poetry, and authors have naturally altered the measurements of the recipe to suit their tastes. Percy Bysshe Shelley relied almost exclusively on inspiration and could not write without it. “Poetry is not like reasoning,” he argued, “a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, ‘I will compose poetry.’”6 As a consequence he left behind mostly fragments and fell into despair when inspiration was absent. Rilke spent years waiting for many of his poems to arrive, which they sometimes did with unaccountable force. Of his Sonnets to Orpheus, he wrote, “They are perhaps the most mysterious, even to me, in their way of arising and imposing themselves on me, the most enigmatical dictation I have ever sustained and achieved.” But he also composed when inspiration was dim and fickle.7 He wrote to his wife that his New Poems was the result of “work, the transition from inspiration that comes to that which is summoned and seized.”8 Pushkin combined inspiration and revision into an apparently seamless whole, writing in a heady rush of enthusiasm and afterward, in a like-minded state, blotting out up to three-quarters of what he had set down. A.E. Housman’s verse would often “bubble up” from some unseen place, but later it needed to be “taken in hand and completed by the brain, which was apt to be a matter of trouble and anxiety, involving trial and disappointment, and sometimes ending in failure.”9
If poets have differed greatly in the level of emphasis they placed on inspiration, however (as well, of course, as in the artistic success they have been able to draw from it), they have not differed greatly in the quality of the experience itself. There are a few examples of poems that have come to their authors with physical force, but modern inspiration has almost always been asensory in nature—psychological rather than physical, silent rather than vocal, a metaphorical rather than an actual voice. This is a notable historical development. Poetic inspiration was not always of the mind alone. It was once also of the body and of the ear. This fact represents the most substantial gulf between the composition of ancient poetry and that of modern poetry.
The best example of ancient inspiration is the poet Hesiod’s eighth-century BCETheogony, the earliest known genealogy of the Greek gods and one of the canonical texts of classical Greece. The Theogony begins, as many poems in ancient times did, with an invocation of the Muses of Olympia. Hesiod was a shepherd, and he writes that the Muses came and spoke to him as he was tending his flock on Mount Helicon. “You shepherds of the wilderness,” they said, “poor fools, nothing but bellies,
we know how to say many false things
that seem like true sayings,
but we also know how to speak the truth
when we wish to.” when we wish to.”
So they spoke, these mistresses of words,
daughters of great Zeus,
and they broke off and handed me a staff
of strong-growing
olive shoot, a wonderful thing;
they breathed a voice into me,
and power to sing the story of things
of the future, and things past.10
As with the gods in the Homeric epics, critics have interpreted the role of the Muses in Hesiod in various ways—as a traditional representation of the arts and sciences, as a symbol of religious piety, even as an early example of literary self-aggrandizement. But unlike with the Homeric gods, who serve an obvious narrative function, few critics have been able to dismiss completely the physical force of the Muses. In the Iliad, the gods are characters in the poem. In the Theogony, they seem to write the poem itself.
That said, the exact extent to which Hesiod meant his Muses to be taken literally—did they really speak to him?—is a matter of conjecture. Until the mid-nineteenth century, when references to them all but petered out, poets employed the Muses almost as a matter of routine, either as a metaphor for poetic rapture or as formal shorthand for the entire classical tradition. This allegorical usage, which has become an inexorable part of the European literary lexicon, has made it difficult to see the Muses for what they might originally have been—a physical experience of literary inspiration.
The most convincing piece of evidence that the Muses were physically heard can be found in the classicist E. R. Dodds’s 1951 landmark study The Greeks and the Irrational. Considering the possibility that Hesiod actually heard the Muses speaking to him, Dodds noted that the poet’s experience took place on a remote mountaintop. The phenomenon of hearing voices and seeing things in solitary and extreme settings, Dodds observed, is known even in modern times. For example, on an arduous trek across a remote Antarctic island, in 1915, the explorer Ernest Shackleton hallucinated an additional hiker. He described the experience in his famous memoir, South:
I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia [Island] it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, “Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.” Crean confessed to the same idea. One feels “the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech” in trying to describe things intangible….11
A more recent example of hallucinations occurring in extremities of fatigue and silence appears in Storms of Silence, a book by the British adventurer Joe Simpson, who is well known from the movie Touching the Void. In a chapter titled “Ghost Stories,” Simpson describes voices he heard while ascending Huascarán, Peru’s highest mountain:
For a moment, in the silence after the shouted conversation, I thought the voices had gone but then I heard them again far back on the edge of my hearing. They had plagued me ever since we had left the high camp at the Garganta col at two in the morning. At first I thought I might have left my Walkman on with the volume turned down. On checking, I found it switched off and carefully wrapped in a scarf in the top packet of my sack. I pulled back the balaclava exposing my ears to the icy wind, thinking that it might be the rubbing sounds of the fabric. The voices were still there…. When they surged loudly there was something oddly familiar about them. I dredged my memory, trying to think what it was. Although muted and distant, the noise was instantly recognizable as human voices and laughter. It had the same cadences, the rising and falling sounds of murmured conversation, and every now and then the high-pitched shriek of a child’s laughter at play. Child’s laughter. That was it! I could hear children playing in a schoolyard.12
Shortly afterward, Simpson learned that he was at the site of an avalanche that had killed more than eighteen thousand people in a nearby village twenty years before.
These modern examples are easier to grasp than historical evidence that bases Hesiod’s inspiration in the peculiar consciousness of the ancient mind. For instance, the psychologist Julian Jaynes has shown that the inhabitants of ancient civilizations often heard aloud the voices of idols and figurines, which they produced in great numbers for religious purposes. One example of this is a passage from an Assyrian letter dating from the first millennium BCE:
I have taken note of the portents…. I had them recited in order before Shamash…the [statue] of Akkad brought up visions before me and cried out: “What pernicious portent have you tolerated in the royal image?” Again it spoke:…it made inquiry concerning Ningal-Iddina, Shamash-Ibni, and Na’id-Marduk. Concerning the rebellion in the land it said: “Take the wall cities one after the other, that a cursed one will not be able to stand before the Gardener.”13
The Old Testament also contains evidence that the inhabitants of ancient civilizations heard religious statues speaking. In the book of Ezekiel, the king of Babylon consults with several teraphim, or idols, in order to learn how he should behave: “For the king of Babylon has halted at the fork where these two roads diverge, to take the omens. He has shaken the arrows, questioned the household gods, inspected the liver.”14
The Old Testament is also a good place to turn because it contains the accounts of Hesiod’s contemporaries the Hebrew prophets, all eighteen of whom claimed to have heard and to have obeyed the voice of Yahweh. Like Hesiod, Amos lived during the eighth century BCE, and like Hesiod, he was a shepherd who heard a voice while tending his flock in the fields. Predictably, he protested and was overcome: “I am not a prophet…nor do I belong to a prophetic brotherhood. I am merely a herdsman and dresser of sycamore-figs. But Yahweh took me as I followed the flock, and Yahweh said to me, ‘Go and prophesy to my people Israel.’”15 The opening passage of the Amos book suggests that he received his call to prophesy audibly:
Yahweh roars from Zion,
and makes himself heard from Jerusalem;
the shepherds’ pastures mourn,
and the crown of Carmel dries up.16
To be sure, even if Amos and the rest of the prophets heard the voice of Yahweh audibly, this doesn’t prove that Hesiod heard the voices of the Muses in the same way. It doesn’t even prove that he intended for his readers to believe that he did. Yet the sources we have do cohere in a historical picture of a time in which metaphor had not yet infiltrated the marrow of experience—in which the hearing of a voice was still in possession of a physical vitality that was intimately associated with highly valued callings, be they religious or literary. This may not serve as proof that the ancients heard voices, but it does spur the question: What was it that caused that vitality to recede into silence?
As mentioned earlier, the central theme of Julian Jaynes’s controversial book is that over the course of centuries there occurred a profound shift in the neurological structure of the human mind. To Jaynes, the precursor to internalized consciousness as we know it today was a tendency toward unbidden auditory hallucinations caused by a physical split between the hemispheres of the brain. It is a speculative theory, but it is built on firm ground. The record of how man has conceived of the agency of his own experiences altered demonstrably during the time we have been able to observe it.
Poetic inspiration provides us with one of the better examples of the mutability of human consciousness. By comparing Hesiod with Theodore Roethke, or Hesiod with any of the recent poets who have emphasized the work of the unconscious mind in the act of poetic creation—W. B. Yeats, A. E. Housman, Allen Ginsberg—we are able to witness two modes of artistic creation, the first “primitive” and willless, the second “modern” and contingent on the intellect. But the question of what caused this shift from pole to pole cannot be answered without first identifying the quality that altered between them. This preliminary question can be answered in reference to the poets’ relationship to language. To Hesiod and the ancients, language was by its nature something to be heard; it had physical immediacy. To Roethke and the moderns, language is something to be thought; it has psychological immediacy. What has occurred between the two modes of creation seems to be the death of the aurality of language.
There are many, of course, who would take exception to the proposition that language is no longer audible at its core. To an extent these dissenters have a point. There are today significant pockets of the culture in which aurality is considered language’s defining characteristic. Many of these pockets are religious, as in the case of those branches of Christianity that place a premium on ecstatic spiritualism. Some, however, are poetic. For instance, in 1950 the poet Charles Olson published a manifesto, Projective Verse, that called for a poetry based on the breath of the poet rather than on logic or meter. That call has since been answered by many poets. One of these, Peter Davidson, states his intention in the foreword to his collection Breathing Room, to attend closely to the sensory basis of poetry:
The breath is the most intimate aspect of our existence. It connects us to the biosphere. Breath makes our voice operate. It enables oxygen to penetrate our bodies. Breath lends us rhyme and meter, the means by which poetry came into existence. Time may be able to teach us new ways of using our minds, but I very much doubt whether it can teach us anything new about ways of breathing—or even about what happens to our being when we can no longer breathe. Poetry began, I think, as a mnemonic device to enable an illiterate populace to remember prayers, to recite the order of worship, or, in a more secular use, to recount the inventories of warehouses in ancient Babylon. That’s why we wrote in rhyme and meter, so that we could remember what we thought we had compiled; hence the connection of words to breath to sense to mind to memory to rhythm to emotion to memory.17
What is expressed here is an aspect of poetic creation that hasn’t changed in nearly three thousand years. Language can never be separated from the lungs and from the breath. It was first spoken; in its original state, language is audible speech. Yet as Davison admits, inadvertently or not, to place an emphasis on the aurality of language in the modern world smacks of nostalgia. In the middle of an encomium for breath, he lapses into the past tense, as if he is making what he knows to be a conservative plea for a return to a purer time, a time in which body and language were more intimately related.
This sense of nostalgia reflects an important truth about the history of voice-hearing. As shown, the mournfulness that is sometimes expressed by religious thinkers about the loss of the culture’s ability to truly hear, whatever values are woven into that act, is misplaced. At the same time, hearing has lost something vital, so that it is often necessary to speak of it as if it were in quotation marks—as something internal rather than external, as “hearing.”
This shift from literal to metaphorical auditory experience is often overlooked, and one consequence has been that the reports of voice-hearers have frequently been misinterpreted. William Blake is a case in point. During his lifetime, Blake frequently claimed that his art came from external, divine sources. About his epic poem Milton, he wrote to one of his patrons: “I have written this poem from immediate Dictation twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time without Premeditation & even against my Will. [The] Time it has taken in writing was thus renderd Non Existent…& an immense Poem Exists which seems to be the Labour of a long Life all producd without Labour or Study.”18 And later: “I may praise [the poem] since I dare not pretend to be any other than the Secretary the Authors are in Eternity.”19 To another patron Blake wrote that he preferred the countryside to the city because there the “voices of Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard & their forms more distinctly seen.”20
In exchange for these confessions, Blake was often accused of insanity—which was no light matter considering that several of his contemporaries, such as William Cowper and Christopher Smart, were for a time incarcerated in asylums. One reviewer, commenting on Blake’s illustrations, described them as “the offspring of morbid fancy,” and of Blake’s poetry wrote, “Should he again essay to climb the Parnassian heights, his friends would do well to restrain his wanderings by the strait waistcoat.”21 Others, though less harsh, were no less dismissive. Late in life Blake was walking down a London street when a young girl asked her father who he was. “He is a strange man,” her father replied. “He thinks he sees spirits.”22 What these critics missed was that Blake was not speaking literally. He was describing an internal, psychological experience in archaically external terms—and self-consciously so. There is evidence for this in the way Blake describes the experiences of the Hebrew prophets in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spake to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.
Isaiah answer’d. I saw no God nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in everything, and as I was then perswaded & remain confirm’d; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote.
Then I asked: does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so?
He replied. All Poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of anything.”23 [Italics added.]
There is further evidence in the way Blake spoke about his voice-hearing in informal social settings. The biographer Peter Ackroyd reports that Blake “once declared that ghosts appeared only to unimaginative people, which suggests that he believed his visions to be in part shaped by the powers of his own imagination. They were ‘mental,’ without the physical presence of ghosts; when he described one of them to an inquisitive lady he tapped his forehead to reveal its source. He understood that they came from ‘Here, madam.’”24
Of course, Blake could have heard voices both internally and externally. As with Richard K., varied auditory experiences are possible and probably more common than we think. But it seems more plausible that Blake’s voice-hearing was nothing more than an attempt to describe a tendency toward modern inspiration in easily comprehensible physical terms, and that historical developments had created a sensory atmosphere in which “metaphorical” auditory experiences were the vastly dominant form in which voice-hearing took place.
Poets themselves have made this argument, both explicitly, in Nietzschean laments, and implicitly, in works that have portrayed the downfall of ancient aurality as the impetus for modernity. More often than not they have celebrated that transformation as a victory for the human mind and for the Christian faith. A time-honored theme of Western literature is that the birth of Christ silenced the cacophony of the pagan world forever. Hence, John Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”:
The Oracles are dumb;
No voice or hideous hum
Runs through the archèd roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance, or breathèd spell,
Inspires the pale-eyed Priest from the prophetic cell.25
And A. E. Housman’s “The Oracles”:
’Tis mute, the word they went to hear on high Dodona mountain When winds were in the oakenshaws and all the cauldrons tolled,
And mute’s the midland navel-stone beside the singing fountain, And echoes list to silence now where gods told lies of old.26
Aurality did not die such an abrupt death, of course. Paganism and Christianity coexisted for centuries before the latter’s strength grew dominant, and before it did, even the oracles, those convenient symbols of pagan credulity, continued to speak. Yet these dramatically partisan imaginings reflect an undeniable and long-standing historical truth about the Christian attitude toward the pagan world, particularly as it relates to poetic inspiration. Christ made the restructuring of the sensory order a theological imperative when he declared, in the Gospel of Luke, that the “old oracles of error are to be replaced by a new oracle of truth,” and Christian poets responded early on by attempting to dismantle the pagan tradition. The main way they did this was by expressly rejecting the Muses in favor of quieter, more soulful, more internalized forms of inspiration. “Hearts dedicated to Christ are closed to the Muses and Apollo,” wrote Saint Paulinus of Nola in the early fifth century, and poets echoed this sentiment throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, mainly through the act of locating Christian replacements for the Muses. In the thirteenth century, Dante invoked the Word of God. In the fourteenth, Boccaccio invoked the Virgin Mary. In the seventeenth, Milton invoked the Holy Spirit.27 Finally, in the eighteenth century, Blake closed the door completely with a lament addressed “To the Muses”:
Whether on Ida’s shady brow,
Or in the chamber of the East,
The chambers of the sun, that now
From antient melody have ceas’d;
Whether in Heav’n ye wander fair,
Or the green corners of the earth,
Or the blue regions of the air,
Where the melodious winds have birth;
Whether on chrystal rocks ye rove,
Beneath the bosom of the sea
Wand’ring in many a coral grove,
Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry!
How have you left the antient love
That bards of old enjoy’d in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move!
The sound is forc’d, the notes are few!28
These redefinitions of the terms of poetic inspiration reflected not only what had become religiously permissible and impermissible in a Christianized world, but also what had become psychologically necessary. Sensory experience is as contextual as anything else, and the context of Christianity is the eternal soul. On this new ground an attendance to the audible Muses would not only have been apostasy, it would have been impossible. Physical inspiration would not have fit into the Christian worldview. Hearing could no longer pertain to poetry.
Still we shouldn’t overestimate the role of Christianity in silencing the Muses. Even messianic religions have their causes, and the poetic invocation of the silent soul precedes the birth of Christ by so many years that it can only have a different and deeper source. The spiritual invocation first occurs, it seems, in the work of Pindar, who in the fifth century BCE called upon his soul—in Greek, psyche—to lead him into a state in which he could compose his odes. It makes an even more prominent appearance in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, written in the first year of the first Christian millennium. In the opening line Ovid speaks of his soul urging him to write.
Where did this new invocation come from, and what does it mean? The word soul, as E. R. Dodds has shown, had been well known to the Greeks for centuries. But Pindar and Ovid use it differently from their predecessors. To someone in Hesiod’s day, the soul was treated as little more than a synonym for the body. The two were divisible only in death, when the life force of the soul left the deceased. Pindar speaks of the soul as if it were the divine dwelling within him. It is a separate substance to him, one that has superhuman powers to which he can appeal. The soul, it appears, had become the pagan gods, condensed and internalized.