Some years ago, in an interview with Bill Moyers, the poet Gary Snyder compared a vital aspect of writing to getting dressed in the morning. You're roaming around in the "landscape of your mind," Snyder said, "looking" and "solving problems" in much the same way you find your socks -- you pull out the drawer and see what's there. Moyers seems to have been somewhat nonplussed. "And that's how you write poetry?" he asked. "Rummaging in the socks?" (1)
The exchange, short as it was, spoke volumes about how poets and writers think. By analogy the poet implied that the direct experience of opening a drawer of clothes had its counterpart in the imaginative consideration of ideas, things and processes not immediately present. Experience was comprised of visual, tactile, perhaps even olfactory sensations; imagination of visual images, bodily feelings, aural rhythms and kinesthetic patterns. And imagination gave first birth to his poetry. In response, the interviewer implied doubt that poetry could have origin anywhere but in language itself.
Who got it right? Do writers think in words, or do they craft in words what they think in sensory images and bodily feelings?
For many people, writers are obviously and predominantly verbal thinkers. In his book Creating Minds (Basic Books, 1993) Howard Gardner has us consider T. S. Eliot as the quintessential wordsmith. Gardner, like many academics, focuses on Eliot's astounding familiarity with English and other languages, his command of literary traditions, his success as poet, playwright and literary critic. Pick up almost any biography of Eliot and you find very similar accounts of his early and exceptional boyhood writing, his voracious appetite for philosophy as a young adult, and his uncanny ability to assimilate the expressive idioms of the poets he deeply admired. According to Peter Ackroyd, author of T. S. Eliot, A Life, "this ability to grow by the acquisition of another man's language is, of course, the sign of a highly refined literary sensibility, which finds meaning in words and words only." (2)
Such intellectual response to Eliot is typical. After all, his best known poem,
The Waste Land, was first published in book form with notes on its multitude of recondite references and borrowed lines. The problem is that Eliot himself tells us repeatedly that he did not think in words, though he expressed himself in the verbal medium. For all his careful articulation of language, Eliot realized that the emotions, inspirations, and ideas that fueled his work were first perceived and manipulated in wordless forms. As he once told poet Donald Hall, his poetry never began with conscious intent. Rather, he said, "one wants to get something off one's chest. One doesn't know quite what it is that one want to get off the chest until one's got if off..." (3)
Elsewhere Eliot wrote that "the poet does many things upon instinct..." (4) In his own experience, which he did not think "peculiar to myself," vague emotional impulses first coalesced in a musical "feeling for syllable and rhythm." Such bodily feelings and sensations "...bring to birth the idea and the image..." which is "the germ of a poem." All this occurs, Eliot wrote in ‘The Music of Poetry,' "before it [the poem] reaches expression in words..." (5) In just such a manner, the poet found "words for the inarticulate, ... capture[d] those feelings which people can hardly even feel, because they have no words for them..." (6) As Eliot told Hall, "With a poem you can say, ‘I got my feeling into words for myself. I now have the equivalent in words for that much of what I have felt." (7)
For Eliot, the problematic search for words rather undercut any innate facility with language he may have had. In his early poetry especially, he confessed to "having more to say than one knew how to say, and having something one wanted to put into words and rhythm which one didn't have the command of words and rhythm to put in a way immediately apprehensible." (8) This made The Waste Land, as a case in point, difficult to read. But it did not necessarily make it a showcase of the verbal intellect.
In fact, Eliot insisted that his ideal audience "could neither read nor write" and that the ‘seasoned' reader "does not bother about understanding; not, at least, at first." (9) The first encounter with a poem should be entirely emotional and sensual - for the reader as it is for the writer. While working on The Waste Land, Eliot himself "wasn't even bothering whether I understood what I was saying." (10) Poetry is not a precise language, whose meaning may be pinned down in scholarly notes. Nor can a poem be fully "paraphrased" in prose. "The poet," Eliot concluded, "is occupied with frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though meanings still exist." (11)
Other poets have said much the same about the emotional and sensual nature of their imagination. Robert Frost, for instance, observed that "a poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a love sickness. It is never a thought to begin with." (12, underlining ours). Writers of fiction also agree that writing begins in a land without language. For Virginia Woolf, "a sight, an emotion creates this wave [a rhythm] in the mind ... then, as [the wave] breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it." (13)
Indeed, there is a paradox at the heart of writing, says Ursula LeGuin. "The artist deals with what cannot be said in words [...?] The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words." (14) Writers express themselves in words, they compose in words, but they don't imagine the feelings, the dramatic conflicts, the narratives they write about in the signs and symbols of formal vocabulary. As Snyder put it to Moyers, they don't reel out words and sentences while looking for their socks. They see, hear, smell, taste and feel, within the mind, in stunning moments of awareness, dreams, directed reveries, visions, and flashes of inspiration.
Consequently, they face the paradox of "converting" or "translating" into words what LeGuin says cannot be said in words. They work long and hard to find, as Eliot put it, an "objective correlative" which embodies original experience. Gary Snyder understood this when he told Bill Moyers, "I never find words right away. Poems for me always begin with images and rhythms, shapes, feelings, forms and dances in the back of my mind...My imagination is pre-linguistic, preverbal." Composing the words is a "further exercise." The verbal skills associated with writing are not primary to the creative process, but belong to a secondary process of formal translation and expression. "Language," Snyder said, "comes after imagination." (15)
[Extract: Writing and the Exercise of Universal Creative Imagination. To be continued!]
© 2011 Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein
