1 December 2018
The age-old discussion of talent hasn’t made great advances, as far as I know. It’s just as it was in the ancient world: there are some who say that poets are born, not made; and there are some who claim that a natural inclination is useful but not sufficient—that if you want to achieve something good, it has to be cultivated.
I belong to the ranks of those who adhere to the second notion, which is as old as Cicero and Quintilian. Talent is insufficient: if it’s not cultivated, it ends up, in the best cases, inventing the wheel, only to discover that this has been done already. Those who feel they have an artistic vocation have an obligation not to squander it by being content with what pours from their heart. The heart is fine; but in order not to waste one’s creativity, it’s even better to learn from tradition, to appropriate techniques developed over time; not to go where the wind blows, but to choose models, a proper poetic genealogy from which to draw energy and ambition.
Does this mean that anyone who has a little talent and a degree from some school or academy attesting to a good education is bound for great things? I’m afraid not. It means only that a person who feels an urgent need to give adequate form to his own experience has the right and the duty to do so—if possible, without becoming the bore who tugged on Horace’s tunic, begging him to read his poems.
Great artists are not born and probably not made. There is something more mysterious that intervenes without warning and acts on talent, whether raw or cultivated, in an always surprising way. This is luck. The poet, unfortunately, has to have not only the gift of talent, not only the privilege and the culture of being able to nurture and refine it. The poet also has to be lucky.
He has to have the kind of luck with which we tend to justify someone else’s success, when we can’t find some more demeaning explanation. But in what sense? We can work all our lives with discipline and intelligence and skill to give shape to our world, and never make a significant breakthrough. Luck is that breakthrough—the stunning moment when our own very individual and yet very limited work is transformed: let’s say, from a journey to the other world to the Divine Comedy, from a seafaring adventure to Moby-Dick.
Unfortunately, nothing can assure us—not criticism, not success, not even ourselves—that that sudden breakthrough was really there or permanent. The future of any work is even more obscure than our own. We have to resign ourselves to that fact and work with stubborn dedication all our lives, without asking for anything more.