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tags:poetryinfluenceuniqueness
related Unique Thought
Introduction
“This short book offers a theory of poetry by way of a description of poetic influence, or the story of intra-poetic relationships. One aim of this theory is corrective: to de-idealize our accepted accounts of how one poet helps form another. Another aim, also corrective, is to try to provide a poetics that will foster a more adequate practical criticism.”
relates: Unique Thought
Oscar Wilde sublimely remarked that “all bad poetry is sincere.”
Doubtless it would be wrong to say that all great poetry is insincere, but of course almost all of it necessarily tells lies, fictions essential to literary art.
Authentic, high literature relies upon troping, a turning away not only from the literal but from prior tropes. Like criticism, great writing is always at work strongly, or weakly, misreading previous writing.
Thought
I’ve always wonder the degree which style emerges from our own misrendering of things in our environment. I can produce a cover to a song, to the best of my ability. I have the exact musical notation before me. But what occurs, at least for me, is that during the process of learning I’ll by nature impart “mistakes” which are almost an accent (accident?) of my own. This is then interpreted as a contribution to my style.
Further, have a flower in front of me. I am to draw it. I fail to do so, but what comes out is my style. It takes inordinate effort, or it is something I cannot physically do - to precisely mirror it.
In my novice state, I cannot render it truly. But, I also do not think an atomic level realistic representation would be the explicit goal.
Strong poems are always omens of resurrection. The The dead may or may not return but their voice comes alive, paradoxically never by mere imitation, but in the agonistic misprision performed upon powerful forerunners by only the most gifted of their successors.
We see the thing ourselves, and show it to others as we feel it to exist, and as, in spite of ourselves, we are compelled to think of it. The imagination, by thus embodying and turning them to shape, gives an obvious relief to the indistinct and inportunate cravings of the will — we do not wish the thing to be so; but we wish it to appear as such as it is. For knowledge is conscious power; and the mind is no longer, in this case, the dope, though it may be the victim of vice or folly.
Wilde:
“Influence is simply a transference of personality, a mode of giving away what is most precious to one’s self, and its exercise produces a sense, and, it may be, a reality of loss. Every disciple takes away something from his master.”
Thought
What if the creator doesn’t at all engage with other works? Can they still make what they desire?
The Picture of Dorian Gray, influence is immoral
Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.
Thought
Sometimes I’ll encounter someone who thinks so strongly, or controls the conversation in such a way that it becomes difficult to creatively participate with them, or even construct structure of my own independent thought. At times I am concerned that if I bring something so aggressively to the table, it will will have the opposite effect. There is also an “earworm-like” effect to certain people’s thoughts, which when brought up dominate the conversation or result with fixation.
Influence is natural and unavoidable.
I’m still reading… but I think a problem would be a forced influence. If influence or inspiration is willed by the creator, it is fine — and may create a flow of creation which, despite the first work being derivative — offer an untapped avenue for future developments.
What is the distinction between influence and inspiration?
What is the relationship with convergence of thought (independently, or by assembly of like thoughts) and original thought?
I have purposely held of reading highly mannered people like Eliot and Pound so that I should not absorb anything, even unconsciously. But there is a kind of critic who spends his time dissecting what he reads for echoes, imitations and influences, as if no one was ever simply himself but is always compounded of a lot of other people.
- Wilde
Thought
What if in order to create “original” creative work, you had to deprive yourself of your would be Favorite things, lest “suffer” their influence?
I am no scientific experiment, but it seems like being creative in that space would require original creative thought, in degrees, but also relies on a body of understanding that is fully the influence of preceding science.
But poetic influence need not make poets less original; as often it makes them more original, though not therefore necessarily better.
Thought
The desire for uniqueness, might partially come from a desire to be noticed. In the swarm of alikes, why should I pick out you? So if you want to be publicly a someone you have to be different.
For every poet begins (however “unconsciously”) by rebelling more strongly against the consciousness of death’s necessity than all other men and women do.
Thought
Terror Management Theory? Is this accurate?
This also scares me, the fervency of creation I feel. Even just archiving here. Please not be premonition.
“Questing for an impossible object” - this is such a cool way to think of creating something, even an insignificant and simple poem (even if this isn’t intended by the text).
You have quested and made something that really is impossible otherwise. You were the necessary element in its creation and through whatever you’ve done you’ve willed it be.
Revisionary Ratios
- Clinamen, which is poetic misreading or misprision proper; I take the word from Lucretius, where it means a swerve of atoms so as to make change possible in the universe. A poet swerves aware from his precursor, by so reading his precursor’s poem to execute a clinamen in relation to it. This appears as a corrective movement in his own poem, which implies that the precursor poem went accurately up to a certain point, but then should have swerved, precisely in the direction that the new poem moves.
- Tessera, which is completion and antithesis; I take the word not from mosaic-making, where it is stilled used, but from the ancient mystery cults, where it meant a token of recognition, the fragment say of a small pot which other fragments would reconstitute the vessel. A poetic antithetically completes his precursor, by so reading the parent poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough.
- Kenosis, which is a breaking device similar to the defense mechanisms our psyches employ against repetition convulsion; kenosis then is a movement towards discontinuity with the precursor. I take the word from St. Paul where it means the humbling or emptying out of Jesus by himself, when he accepts reduction from divine to human status. The later poet, apparently emptying himself of his own affaltus, his imaginative godhood, seems to humble himself as though he were ceasing to be a poet, but this ebbing is so performed in relation to a precursor’s poem of ebbing, that the precursor is emptied out also, and so the later poem of deflation is not as absolute as it seems.
- Daemonization, or a movement towards a personalized Counter-Sublime, in relation to the precursor’s Sublime; I take the term from Neo-Platonic usage, where an intermediary being, neither divine nor human, enters into the adept to aid him. The later poet opens himself to what he believes to be a power in the parent poem that doesn’t belong to the parent proper but to a range being just beyond the precursor. He does this, in this poem, by so stationing its relation to the parent poem as to generalize away the uniqueness of the earlier work.
- Askesis, or a movement of self purgation, which intends the attainment of a state of solitude; I take the term general as it is, particularly from the practice of pre-socratic shamans.
- Apophrades, or the return of the dead. I take the the word from the Athenian dismal or unlucky days upon which the dead return to reinhabit houses in which they had lived. The later poet in his own final phase already burdened by an imaginative solitude that is almost a solipsism, holds his own poem so open again to the precursor’s work that at first we might believe the wheel has come full circle, and that we are back in the later poet’s flooded apprenticeship, before his strength began to assert itself in the revisionary ratios. But the poem is now held open to the precursor, where once it was open and the uncanny effect is that the new poem’s achievement makes it seem to us, not as though the precursor were writing it but as though the later poet himself had written the precursor’s characteristic work.
… when you consider the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them, not flinching into disguise or darkening — A.R. Ammons
Clinamen
Shelley speculated that all great poets of all aged contributed to one Great Poem perpetually in progress. Borges remarks that poets create their precursors.
Thought
Maybe related to Unbroken song
Really strong poets can read only themselves.
Thought
I am repulsed by my own voice. I will re-read things I’ve written and can at times enjoy them. For the most part I am a mixture of embarrassed, and astonished.
Though: I would never sacrifice reading for writing. I would sacrifice my own song for the sounds of other songs. I would sacrifice my apotheosis of work, for even the glimmer of chance to encounter something made by someone else.
Milton:
I was God, I was Man (for to a poet they were the same), and I am falling, from myself.
The poet hits the floor of Hell,
I seem to have stopped falling; now I am fallen, consequently I lie here in Hell.
How is the poetic character incarnated? When the potential poet first discovers, or is discovered by the dialectic of influence, first discovers poetry as being both internal and external to himself, he begins a process that will end only when he does no more poetry within him, long after he has the power (or desire) to discover it outside himself again.
The poet is condemned to learn his profoundest yearnings through an awareness of other selves. The poem is within him, yet he experiences the shame and splendor of being found by poems - great poems — outside him. To lose freedom in this center is never to forgive, and to learn the dread of threatened autonomy forever.
Thoughts
Loss: to create, and then have that ability withheld. I have friends who were creatives and created and later became burdened by homes, and accumulations of stuff.
The yard requires maintenance and the poet is lost, tired by bags of grass.
A balance is necessary, of course, and poetry can be found in cutting grass as well - but I always think this tragic (leaving a poem trapped inside, too tired to form.)
Poetic influence - when it involves two strong, authentic poets, always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation. The history of fruitful poetic influence, which is to say the main tradition of Western poetry since Renaissance, is a history of anxiety and self-savoring caricature, of distortion, of perverse, wilful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist.
Lichtenberg: “Yes, I do like to admire great men, but only those whose works I do not understand.” Lichtenberg: “To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation, and the definition of imitation ought by rights to include both.”
Kierkegaard: “When two people fall in love, and begin to feel that they are made for one another, then it is time for them to break off, for by going on they have everything to lose and nothing to gain.”
Lucretius: “When the atoms are travelling straight down through empty space by the own weight, at quite so indeterminate times and places they swerve ever so little from their course, just so much that you can call it a change in direction. If it were not for this swerve, everything would fall downwards like rain-drops through the abyss of space. No collision would take place and no impact of atom on atom would be created. Thus nature would never have created anything.. but the fact that the mind itself has no internal necessity to determine its every act and compel it to suffer in helpless passivity — this is due to the slight swerve of the atoms at no determinate time or place.”
The strong poet indeed says, “I seem to have stopped falling; now I am fallen, consequently I lie here in Hell” but he is thinking as he says this “As I fell, I swerved, consequently I lie here in a Hell improved by my own making.”
Tessera or completion and antithesis
Nietzsche’s On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life
The most astonishing works may be created; the swarm of historical neuters will always be in their place, ready to consider the author through their long telescopes. The echo is heard at once, but always in the form of “criticism” though the critic never dreamed of the work’s possibility a moment before. It never comes to have an influence, but on a criticism; and the criticism itself has no influence but only breeds another criticism. And so we came to consider the fact of many critics as a mark of failure. Actually everything remains in the old condition, even the presence of such “influence”: men talk a little while of a new thing, and then some other new thing, and in the meantime they do what they have always done. The historical training of our critics prevents their having an influence in the true sense - an influence on life and action.
Nietzsche, as he always insisted, was the heir of Goethe in his strangely optimistic refusal to regard the poetical past as primarily an obstacle to fresh creation. “Influence,” to Nietzsche, meant vitalization.
Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols on genius
Great men, like great ages, are explosives in which a tremendous force is stored up; their precondition is always, historically and physiologically, that for a long time which has been gathered stored up, saved up and conserved for them --- that there has been no explosion for a long time. Once the tension in the mass has become too great, then the most accidental stimulus suffices to summon into the world the “genius” the “deed” the great destiny. What does the environment matter then, or the age, or the “spirit of the age” or “public opinion”
Anxiety
What justifies the radical analogue between human and poetic birth, between biological and creative anxiety?
Theories of poetic origins, there is no knowledge without creation.
Poets were properly called divine in the sense of diviners, from divinari, to divine or predict. Their science was called Muse, defined by Homer as the knowledge of good and evil, that is, divination… The Muse must thus have been properly at first the science of divining by auspices… . Urania, whose name is from ouranos, heaven, and signifies “she who contemplates the heavens” to take thence the aus-pices… She and the other Muses were held to be daugh-ters of Jove (for religion gave birth to all the arts of human-ity, of which Apollo, held to be principally the god of divi-nation, is the presiding deity), and they “sing” in the sense in which the Latin verbs camere and cantare mean “fore-tell.”
All criticisms that call themselves primary vacillate between tautology — in which the poem is and means itself — and reduction — in which the poem means something that is not itself a poem. Transmutation and Transformation
Antithetical criticism must deny both, asserting a poem can only be a poem, but another poem — a poem not itself.
Kenosis or Repetition and Discontinuity
The unheimlich or “unhomley” as the “uncanny” is perceived where we are reminded of our inner tendency to yield to obsessive patterns of action.
The god of poets is not Apollo, who lives in the rhythm of recurrence, but the bald gnome Error, who lives at the back of a cave; and skulks forth only at irregular intervals, to feast upon the mighty dead, in the dark of the moon. Error’s little cousins, Swerve and Completion, never come into his cave, but they harbor dim memories of having been born there, and they live in the half-apprehension that they will rest at last by coming home to the cave to die.
Interlude
When we say the meaning of a poem can only be another poem, we may mean a range of poems:
- The precursor poem or poems
- The poem we write as our reading
- A rival poem, son or grandson of the same precursor.
- A poem that never got written - that is a poem that should have been written by the poet in question. Unwritten
- A composite poem, made up of these in some combination.
Thought
The one that pulls me most is the poem that never gotten written.
Daemonization or the Counter-Sublime
Emerson “The Daemons lurk and are dumb.”
The strong poet’s Sublime cannot be the reader’s Sublime unless the reader’s life indeed is a Sublime Allegory also. The Counter-Sublime does not show forth as limitation to the imagination proving its capability.
Nietzsche:
If, in all that he does, he considers the final aimlessness of man, his own activity assume in his eyes the character of wastefulness. But to feel one’s self just as much wasted as humanity (and not only as an individual) we see the single blossom of nature wasted, is a feeling above all other feelings. But who is capable of it? Assuredly only a poet, and poets always know how to console themselves.
Emerson, the unsurpassable prophet of the American Sublime (which is always a Counter-Sublime) would protest beautifully against our sad murmur after all these is still the universe of death, our world “.. All that you call the world is the shadow of that substance which you are, the perpetual creation of powers of thought, of those you are dependent and those you that are independent of your will.. You think me a child of my circumstance: I make my circumstance.”
With loving respect the student must murmur back “You do, you do but if the circumstance is the poet’s stance, ringed about by the living circumference of the precursors, then the shadow of your substance meets and mingles with the greater Shadow”
And Shelley, with his characteristic English balance
.. one great poet is a masterpiece of nature which another not only ought to study but must study. He might as wisely and as easily determine that his mind should no longer be the mirror of all that is lovely in the visible universe, as exclude from his contemplation the beautiful which exists in the writings of a great contemporary. The pretense of doing it would be a presumption in any but the greatest; the effect, even in him, would be strained, unnatural and ineffectual. A poet is the combined product of such internal powers as modify the nature of others; and of such external influences as excite and sustain these powers; he is not one, but both. Every man’s mind is, in this respect modified by all the objects of nature and art; by every world and every suggestion which he ever admitted to act upon his consciousness; it is the mirror upon which all forms are reflected, and in which they compose one form. Poets, not otherwise, than philosophers, painters, sculptors and musicians, are in one sense, the creators and in another the creations of their age. From this subjection, the loftiest do not escape.
Paul de Man, speaks of “the imaginative possibility that of what could be called an upward fall” and the subjective descent, “the possibility of falling and of the despondency that follows such a moment of flight” or what I have called kenosis.
Imagination Verstiegenheit or (extravagance) relying on the root meaning of “wandering beyond limits” is spoken as a distinct imaginative danger; but falling upwards we can distinguish as the process, and Extravagance as the state ensuing.
Van Den Berg, essay on the significance of human movement locates three domains that yield significance.
- the landscape
- the inner self
- the glance of another rel:Eye Contact’
This is transposed into estrangement, solipsism and the imagined glance of another. The poet evades the glance of his precursor, the self is more inward that the precursor and becomes solipsistic.
Askesis or purgation and solipsism
Poetic sublimation is an askesis, a way of purgation intending a state of solitude as its proximate goal.
Apophrades or return of the dead
Empedocles held that our psyche at death returned to the fire whence it came.
The Man with the Blue Guitar by Wallace Stevens excerpt
Slowly the ivy on the stones Becomes the stones. Women become
The cities, children become the fields And men in waves become the sea.
It is the chord that falsifies The sea returns upon the men,
The fields entrap the children, brick Is a weed and all the flies are caught,
Wingless and withered, but living alive. The discord merely magnifies.
Deeper within the belly’s dark, Of time, time grows upon the rock.