2

The Creative Mask

Hitherto I have discussed mainly the formal aspects of poetry, and tried to establish some common ground for criticism; but the core of the matter I have hardly yet touched upon – the significance of a poem, that quality which governs all others, implicitly recognised by every critic, yet hard to grasp and harder to analyse. Like the seagod Proteus, it takes a thousand shapes – a forest fire, a bull, a serpent, a water-spout, a running river – and one has topage 163 grasp it through every change till it delivers up its identity. One can hardly speak of the significance of Poetry, only of the significance of an individual poem. Other qualities of a poem, such as clarity or metaphorical exactitude, though they depend in some measure on the subjective response of a reader, can be discussed in the abstract. But general statements about the significance of Poetry become philosophical or metaphysical statements about the nature of reality. Each poem’s significance is unique and particular. The abstract statement is dangerous ground for the critic; he may easily find that he is talking nonsense. Therefore I will confine myself as far as possible in the first part of this lecture to the discussion of individual texts, and of the process of making a poem as one knows it by introspection.

Poetry as an art form has special difficulties because its medium is words. In painting, a single line is not significant, or in music a single chord – they derive their significance from the intention of the artist, and in the final composition from their relation to other parts of a complete pattern. But each word has already a minimum significance in its own right: it has its dictionary meaning. Thus a poet may, without the impetus of a unique and real experience, so arrange his verbal symbols as to produce the appearance of a poem, as Ixion embraced a cloud mistaking it for Juno and so fathered the race of centaurs. For the sake of this argument I will now make a mock poem; not for the first time, but this time deliberately. Let the subject be Mount Egmont, because I know only that it is a mountain in Taranaki; and let the form be a Petrarchan sonnet, because in that form the metre is rigid and one rhyme can automatically generate another.

O giant! with thy coronet of snows. . . Egmont is, I believe, snow-covered; though why a giant should wear a coronet I cannot say.

And hanging woods about for mantle green. . . Egmont is also bush-covered. A mantle hangs and so the woods must also. It will not be hard to find three words to rhyme with green. What are the most obvious kinds of mountain scenery? Waterfalls, gorges, and what runs over or through them.

Clear-sounding cataract and dark ravine
Where night and day the turbulent torrent flows . . .

Clear-sounding, dark, and turbulent are stock adjectives supplied gratis by the poets of the past two hundred years. But the vein of mountain scenery has run out. We must go back to the top of Egmont.

Cloud-piercing sentinel! . . . If there are clouds in Taranaki it is likely that the top of Egmont will be near them; and anything upright can be called a sentinel. Now every mountain has a brow; but let us be bold and call it a forehead.

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Cloud-piercing sentinel! thy forehead knows
Both tempest-bearing cloud and sky serene . . .

A safe bet that it will be one or the other. Egmont rises out of a flat plain; and Taranaki is fertile.

And fair farmlands surround they wild demesne
Where now the bright December harvest grows . . .

The meaning of demesne I do not know, unless it is a place; but it is a good stock rhyming word. Now, what would grow on a Taranaki farm? Cows, perhaps; but they are not subjects for heroic verse. Or wheat? Harvest is a good blanket term. The New Zealand seasons are the reverse of the English – thus, December. The octave is now complete. The sestet will require some large remark about Maori legend. If I remember rightly, Egmont quarrelled with Ruapehu, Ngauruhoe, and Tongariro, and went away on her own; or it may have been some other domestic disagreement; but the reference is vague enough, it will do very well. And, as the Government Tourist Department reminds us, Tane is god of the bush.

Far to the East thy mountain brethren stand
But thou, long sundered from their company,
In solitude, since Tane’s forest grand
Stretched from thy bastion to the distant sea . . .

A bastion, I believe, is some kind of medieval fortification. Now for a loud noise to end with, in the words of Ezra Pound – ‘sonorous, like the farting of a goose’.

In state majestical thy realm hast scanned,
Thy snows a symbol of eternity.

In our end is our beginning; and a sonnet has been constructed out of no material but the natural possibilities of the English language and a few rudimentary twitchings of the sympathetic nervous system.

Sonnet to Mount Egmont

(Dedicated to the New Zealand Forestry Department)

O giant! in thy coronet of snows
And hanging woods about for mantle green,
Clear-sounding cataract and dark ravine
page 165 Where night and day the turbulent torrent flows –
Cloud-piercing sentinel! thy forehead knows
Both tempest-bearing cloud and sky serene;
And fair farmlands surround thy wild demesne
Where now the bright December harvest grows,
Far to the East thy mountain brethren stand
But though,long sundered from their company,
In solitude, since Tane’s forest grand
Stretched from thy bastion to the distant sea
In state majestical thy realm hast scanned,
Thy snows a symbol of eternity.

The most horrifying feature of such inflated trash is that it can often deceive the eye of a practised critic. The evocative force of the English language, in the hands of a writer accustomed to the use of assonance and alliteration, is enough to create an impression of depth, even though he has added no significance to that with which the language has presented him. Admittedly, there is in every poem a double level of significance – the rubbed and rounded unessential meaning of any verbal structure, and the new significance which a living core of experience dictates. But the characteristic struggle of poetic composition fluctuates between these two levels, now advancing towards truly significant statement, now retreating to the minimum statement of ordinary language. The unfamiliar image or word sequence, however, is no guarantee of genuine significance; in fact, much modern poetry can come under the same stigma as traditional. Here is another manufactured poem:

The unambitious swan
Lies in her lake of wings
My love whose eyes are roses
Beckons me from sleep.

Oedipus from his tower
Can hear the dreaming sigh
Of seven doves roosting under
The cold sycamore bough.

But her unbridled lightning
Upon a sky of silk
Writes for the world to see
Its burning signature.

The basis of composition is still the same: words generating ideas which generate words. At most the poem reflects a few erotic associations. But howpage 166 far are we to know the difference between a genuine symbolist or imagist poem and such verbal hash? In the long run the answer lies with the instinct and sensitivity of the critic. Let us examine a few lines by a genuine imagist poet, Laurie Lee:

November looses the tongue
like a leaf condemned,
and calls through the sharp blue air
a sad dance and a dread of winter .

. . .

I hear the branches snap their fingers
and solitary grasses crack,
I hear the forest open her dress
and the ravens rattle their icy wings.

I hear the girl beside me rock
the hammock of her blood
and breathe upon the bedroom walls
white dust of paper roses.

. . .

. . . she smiles with her warm mouth
in a dream of daisies,
and swings with the streaming birds
to chorus in the chimneys.

In this poem there are several features which guarantee its genuineness. The images, though joined like a string of beads, are fresh and apt – ‘the branches snap their fingers’; ‘the hammock of her blood’ – and carry an immediate physical reference. Also, the images form a clear contrasting pattern – the winter melancholy with which the poet identifies his own mood and the innocent sensual lightness of the girl’s; and further, on a close reading of the poem (which I quote only in part), one senses an inner core or matrix which governs the development of images – a real girl and a November in the mind.

The difference between statement and pseudo-statement in poetry should be apparent. The statement embodied in a true poem refers to a real occasion of illumination: it is the mirror of a spiritual event. In a pseudo-statement the true labour of composition has not occurred; there is no spiritual event in which the reader can participate. What shall we say, then, of the early poems of Edith Sitwell or the nonsense verse of Edward Lear? Have theypage 167 significance? If we answer in the negative, we ignore the subconscious elements which contribute to the meaning of a poem. Edith Sitwell’s highly sophisticated formal structures are like landscapes by a surrealist painter. They have their own logic derived from childhood fantasy. Similarly, the incongruity of Edward Lear’s poems follows definite patterns and reduces tragedy to the happy proportions of a game of Animal Grab played in a nursery. The imagination is changed by them; and that is all we require even of Keats.

It may be worth-while to coin a few definitions for use in examining the process of poetic composition. I do not hope to emulate the American New Critics and produce an entire new glossary – autoelic, aesthetic distance, rational coherence, concrete universal, designatum, denotatum, fallacy of expressive form. In the field of aesthetics, as in the field of ethics, one’s data are derived in the last analysis from introspection; and it is useless to attempt to reduce subjective criteria to an exact objective science. Beyond a certain point definition defeats its aim of clarifying, for the terms become more exact than the processes they describe. My definitions will be few and unscientific.

The world of Thou. Some such concept is necessary to express what lies at the heart of the making of a poem: that is, a heightened sense of reality. I borrow the term from Martin Buber: he uses it to denote the whole various world of relationship where being meets being, as distinguished from the world of It where use supplants relation. Without some such concept we are likely to fall into the fallacy of regarding an art form as a purely arbitrary structure. It may be said that I am bringing God in the back door; yet one does not have to believe in God to write a good poem. The concept is not a strictly theological one; it records a common spiritual experience rather than a dogma of revealed religion. It is enough to say that the work of most artists is convulsed about some mystery other than themselves, whether it be God, the natural world, or the life of their fellow-beings.

The Matrix of a poem. By this term I refer to the primal substance of a poem, non-verbal, which the verbal structure of a poem reflects; not its overt meaning, but its secret incandescence, its point of contact with the world of Thou.

The Form of a poem: that is the whole complex verbal pattern which the poet creates in his defining response to the matrix. It is a commonplace of the experience of artists that the form is always felt to be a highly inadequate reflection of the matrix.

Incubation. The period of gestation for a poem, during which the matrix is carried obscurely in the mind, waiting for its verbal definition. Gerard Manley Hopkins writes:

The fine delight that fathers thought, the strong
Spur live and lancing like the blowpipe flame
page 168 Breathes once, and quenched faster than it came
Leaves yet the mind a mother of immortal song.
Nine months she then, nay years, nine years she long
Within her wears, bears, cares and combs the same . . .

Hopkins’s analogy of feminine conception is a very apt one; but it does not make plain the masculine and energetic response which is embodied in the form of a poem.

Texture. In verse the use, distinctive to each poet, of rhythm and bare or rich vowel and consonant patterns, with their accompanying emotional associations and physical effect.

Time-Life. An important concept used by Allen Curnow in the Introduction to his Book of New Zealand Verse: the form of a poem regarded as a complex ‘living’ structure in time – for, as the form of a painting exists in a spatial context, so the form of a poem exists in time.

The critic who neglects the audible pattern of a poem may find its meaning impenetrable or superficial. Thus, in one of the few good poems of Adam Lindsay Gordon, ‘The Song of the Surf ’:

White steeds of the ocean that leap with a hollow and wearisome roar
On the band of the ironstone steep not a fathom’s length out from the shore . . .

The phrases Gordon uses are familiar coinage. But the audible pattern of the poem reflects closely the movement of surf on a rocky beach, and more, the poet’s underlying fatalism. The form does not exist solely in time; for the pattern of the words on the page, the long hexameters, contribute towards the same end. Even slight changes in the time-life of the poem have a marked effect:

Not far from this very place, on the sand and the shingle dry
He lay with his battered face upturned to the frowning sky . . .

When Gordon speaks of the drowned man, the poem’s tempo decreases, the strong stresses begin to outnumber the weak. When one has grown accustomed to the light anapaestic rhythm of galloping hooves which Gordon favoured, these changes have almost the effect of counterpoint in music: they create tension and introduce a different mood. It is most improbable that Gordon consciously contrived these effects; but he was for once inspired, and the time-life of the poem benefited

Inspiration. The traditional term used to describe the sense of heightened reality experienced in the making of a poem: literally a breathing-in of divine power, for originally a poet was regarded as one possessed by a god or demon.

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The concept of inspiration as entertained by the popular reader ignores the necessity of a conscious willed response on the part of the poet, regarding him rather as a kind of somnambulist medium. The citizens of Dunedin who set Burns’s statue on a steep lawn in the centre of the town with its back to the cathedral and its face to the Oban Hotel may have shown some unconscious humour; but the sculptor made clear their notion of the poet’s role. Burns could have been shown walking behind a plough or tapping barrels in the course of his excise duties. Instead, he is seated on a cleft stump, a scroll across his knees, and a quill pen in his hand. There is an expression of expectance on his face: he is waiting for the Muse to speak. Undoubtedly there is an element of truth in the picture. Every good poem is in some sense the product of inspiration; but a writer who has no gift may be inspired to write doggerel. Burns’s countryman, William McGonagall, wrote thus at the end of last century:

. . . I imagined that a pen was in my right hand, and a voice crying, ‘Write! Write!’ So I said to myself, ruminating, let me see; what shall I write? then all at once a bright idea struck me to write about my best friend, the late Reverend George Gilfillan; in my opinion I could not have chosen a better subject, therefore I immediately found paper, pen, and ink, and set myself down to immortalise the great preacher, poet, and orator. These are the lines I penned, which I dropped into the box of the Weekly News office surreptitiously, which appeared in that paper as follows:

Rev. George Gilfillan of Dundee,
There is none you can excell;
You have boldly rejected the Confession of Faith
And defended your cause right well.

The first time I heard him speak,
’Twas in the Kinnaird Hall,
Lecturing on the Garibaldi movement,
As loud as he could bawl.

. . .

My blessing on his noble form,
And on his lofty head,
May all good angels guard him while living,
And hereafter when he’s dead.

P.S. – This is the first poem that I composed while under the divine inspiration, and is true, as I have to give an account to God at the day of judgment for all sins I have committed.

This is the true Delphic utterance. With less than no talent, McGonagall has been visited by Apollo, and for the rest of his life is doomed to be the butt of drunken students and the terror of his friends. McGonagall shouldpage 170 be canonised as the patron saint of those poets who regard their work as too holy for criticism.

It is doubtful if any analysis of the non-verbal processes which accompany the making of a poem can ever be wholly satisfactory. Yet the attempt must be made; otherwise criticism becomes a mere filing of images and counting of stresses. In this country the critical work of M.H. Holcroft and Allen Curnow has been influential because, whatever their limitations of approach and insight, they have tried to grapple with the more massive problems of self and not-self, flesh and spirit, man and society, anxiety and inspiration. Holcroft writes of Eileen Duggan in one of the best passages of his trilogy:

If she turns questioningly towards the physical environment, feeling the primal urgency beyond the deceptive bareness of outline where the hills dwarf our dwelling places, it is to discover the loneliness of the artist . . . But when she turns in thought to the enigmas of experience, or feels a reminder of them in the southern stars, her ideas flow back to the symbols of her religion, and she is safe again from the unfamiliar wilderness.

And further, of Ursula Bethell:

There are traces in some of the poems of the spiritual aftermath of vigil – almost the dryness that comes when prayer seems to be defeated by the uncomprehending silence. It is this feeling of marginal experience which gives her work a genuine religious significance, for religion at its best can never be separated from struggle and aspiration. A poet who looks into the night and ponders the mysteries of life and death with a mind creatively disposed must find pain as well as reassurance. Poetry is a striving towards enlargement. The ceaseless attempt to fix thought and feeling into perfect imagery means that something beyond the actual scene or idea – the nimbus of association – must fill the mind and leave its colouring in the completed stanzas . . .

I have quoted at length from Holcroft because his work suffers when one considers phrases in isolation. It is easy to ridicule his method of broad statement; and many of his critics have done so. But he is here attempting to define the complex movements of the human spirit which in the case of two religious poets underlie their creative activity. In that sphere there is no ready-made terminology. With, as it were, hand-made tools Holcroft makes a clear distinction between the religious timbre of the poems of Eileen Duggan and those of Ursula Bethell – by no means a simple accomplishment. His criticism has the faults and virtues of the intuitive approach. A treatment of poems purely in terms of their form would be no adequate substitute.

One can say that the form of a poem embodies the poet’s response toward that event which I have called the matrix; a knowledge of the cultural and ethical background of Western civilisation. My own knowledge is highly limited; but there are two related problems which I intend to explorepage 171 tentatively, as they have a strong bearing on significance in poetry – that of total vision, and that of creative freedom. It may be possible to make plain what I mean by total vision by examining a few lines from a poem by St John of the Cross:

Deep-cellared is the cavern
Of my love’s heart, I drank of him alive:
Now, stumbling from the tavern
No thoughts of mine survive,
And I have lost the flock I used to drive . . .

Cease, then, you arctic gale,
And come, recalling love, wind of the South:
Within my garden-pale
The scent of flowers exhale
Which my Beloved browses with his mouth.

The central spiritual event to which St John responds is the Beatific Vision, the marriage of the soul to its Creator. Yet what constellation of images does he find to express this mystery? The image of a drunken herdsman who emerges from a roadside tavern to find his flock dispersed; and that of a woman in a walled garden awaiting the approach of her lover. Plainly this is the language of mysticism which must draw figures from every quarter to express an experience which ultimately cannot be formally expressed. But, though a psychological critic who was disposed to interpret the experience as erotic because the poet’s images are sensual would shoot absurdly wide of the mark, we need not therefore think that the imagery is a veil only, and that mathematical or geological images would have served as well. The poem is the response of the entire man, spirit and animal, conscious and subconscious. Thus the herdsman and disconsolate woman, appetite and feeling, are – let us not say sublimated – but gathered in to the creative response of the poet. In this sense it is as true and concrete a love poem as any written to a human lover. We touch, as it were, the poet’s work, and say: This is substantial man; not a mere ghost blown upon by Agape, but the hide, hair, and inward quality of the human creature. It may offend the conventional ear to be told that St John’s poem and Robert Burns’s ‘To a Haggis’ may be equal in quality; but in each case the creative response of the whole man, rather than the occasion which calls it forth, gives the poem its peculiar excellence.

A great disservice is done for poetry by those critics who wish to prune, purify, and make polite. Gerard Manley Hopkins, himself a critic with a strong ethical bias, wrote as follows in 1888, in a letter to Coventry Patmore:

There is an old Adam of barbarism, boyishness, wildness, rawness, rankness, the disreputable, the unrefined in the refined and educated. It is page 172 that I meant by tykishness (a tyke is a stray sly unowned dog) and said you had none of; and I did also think that you were without all sympathy for it and must survey it when you met with it wholly from without. Ancient Pistol is the typical tyke, and he and all his crew are tykes, and the tykish element undergoing dilution in Falstaff and Prince Hal appears to vanish, but of course really exists, in Henry V as king. I thought it as well to have ever so little of it . . .

Hopkins’s criticism is acute. This tykishness, the troubled energy of the natural man, gives Browning, Hardy, and even Meredith their superiority as poets over Patmore. Without it, poetry becomes a ghost of its proper self, a Testament of Beauty whose beauty is that of an ornamental duckpond. It is an essential part of the total vision which goes to make a poem; but the spiritualising tendency of modern progressive semi-Christian society is against it. There is always an element in Christian thought which is, in fact, Manichean – the old dream that human freedom is to be found by release from the body, rather than by acts of prayer and labour in a material world. It sets its face against the unity of flesh and spirit, and hence against the unity of an art form.

The problem of creative freedom has stimulated many quarrels between religious men and poets; for the individualism of artists and their stubborn adherence to the truth of a particular vision has seemed to many a Churchman indistinguishable from spiritual pride; and especially their demand for freedom in the handling of their medium, when that medium happens to be words. There may well be truth in the accusation of pride; but it is by no means the whole picture. In early centuries a St Jerome or St Augustine could exercise their creativity in the gigantic task of amalgamating pre-Christian cultural tradition with Christian theology. Jerome lived and breathed the classics; Augustine established study groups among the young men of his acquaintance, on the model of Plato’s Academy, in which they read Virgil daily, bathed and walked together, and discussed metaphysical problems. Yet both men were deeply disturbed by the sensuous power of pagan art, partly because it was associated with the vices of the theatre, but partly because the vision it embodied seemed incompatible with that of Christian moral order. Jerome in the desert dreamed that he was at the judgment seat and beaten by angels for preferring Greek and Latin authors to the Hebrew scriptures; and the story goes that he woke with the bruises of the beating still on his shoulders. Augustine wrote passionately in his Confessions of ‘that sea of custom which they scarcely escape who climb the Cross’. The moral vision of early Christian asceticism was gained at a loss – neglect of, and even contempt for created things, and a fear of natural animism. The Devil was credited with more than his due. A modern intellectual world can hardly realise how close the Fathers stood to the pagan animism against which they erected the dams of rational theology; but the fruit of their reaction is still with us,page 173 for good and for bad. Though the Church has understood and given scope to our ethical nature, she has left in the main our creativity unexplored and uncultivated; and this seems all the more unfortunate to those who believe (as I do) that the medieval conception of human nature is more real and stable than the Hellenic or the modern. The Church succeeded in part in its task of sanctifying the lives of men by the example of the saints and the closely knit order of Sacrament, hierarchy, and dogma. But human creative energy and those works which are not necessary to salvation yet are the product of free will and part of human destiny, remained on the whole outside its sphere, and emerged with the Renaissance as secular aesthetic humanism.

One can trace the development of narrative in prose and verse, from the moral fable that adds point to a sermon, to the fables of Boccaccio and Chaucer, which have no such didactic intention. Undoubtedly, the tension of Christian Catholic morality informed and gave depth to the work of those writers; but the meditation of artists was now diverted from the Four Last Things to the treasures of life possessed even by the corrupt and foolish. A cut- and-dried division between Christian and humanist tradition can scarcely be made; the development of each has been affected by the other, if at times only in reaction. But the narrower Christian apologists have inclined to regard much humanist literature as ‘the wisdom of the children of darkness’; and writers such as Nietzsche and Voltaire have opposed Christianity as much for its curbing of energetic free speculation as for its ethical preoccupations. No dichotomy of form and flux, of Apollonian and Dionysiac principles within modern humanism, is so great as the gulf between the battlements of the Church Militant and the stony ground below where men struggle often with the same basic problems under different names, yet fear to accept orthodoxy lest their present armour should be called intellectual arrogance and stripped from them.

Lacking a Christian humanism, people have turned to agnostic or atheistic humanism for an understanding of their problems. Maritain, von Hugel, and a few novelists excepted, there is hardly in modern literature a Christian humanism worth the name. Perhaps I speak in ignorance. But to have an effect on the course of modern secular thought a Christian apologist has to recognise that Karl Barth, or the Council of Trent, have not said the last word about human nature, and that Dostoyevsky or even Sartre may shed light on our problem. Modern man desires as much to be delivered from an uncreative society as from his sins.

But these are large matters, and somewhat beyond the scope of my argument; so I will return to the first problem – that of significance in poetry. In attempting to assess the significance of a poem, one must realise that nearly all poetry is dramatic in character. The catharsis which a reader experiences could not occur if he felt the self that the poem expresses to be entirely actual; rather, the self is a projection of complex associations in the poet’s mind, andpage 174 the poem enables the reader to make the same projection. The I of a poem may not exist. Thus, if one regarded the work of Burns as a poetic credo, one would have to conclude that he was either insincere or schizophrenic. His quiet nature lyrics rub shoulders with bludgeoning satires; the piety of ‘The Cottar’s Saturday Night’ with the iconoclastic wit of ‘The Jolly Beggars’; romantic love poetry with brutal cynicism. But the problem arises from a false conception of the poet’s role. If Burns had been permanently committed to any one attitude, he could not have attained the objectivity necessary to write at all.

In ordinary life each person plays many parts. We count a parson at fault who carries his pulpit self into the home; and what is good manners in the pub is not in the parlour. The self which a person unconsciously assumes in a given situation is a kind of tribal mask, for which the psychological term is persona. A New Zealand poet, Hubert Witheford, has written of inspiration as a rite which bestows on the poet a new self with the anonymity of a masked priest or dancer:

Dazed by the loud dementia of each sense,
Hounded towards the ritual he shuns,
The poet, drained of virtue, dons the mask;
On his blaspheming mouth and weeping eyes
He puts the crest of his celestial task . . .

I quote from the title poem of his book, The Falcon Mask. The kind of persona a poet may assume depends on many factors – the society in which he lives, his own frustrations, his religious and ideological background. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, for example, and in Goethe’s Faust, the poet becomes master magician; in the work of Rimbaud and Hart Crane, hobo and outcast, the scapegoat taking upon himself the burden of tribal guilt. Where tradition is strong, an Apollonian role is most probable. The poet tries to remain unmoved and subjugate his images to a formal order; as Yeats once asked the spirits at a séance why they had come, and got the polite answer, ‘To provide you with images for your poems’. Many poets, however, in the sterile order of modern civilisation take on a Dionysian persona and submerge themselves in the flux of sensation and primitive mysticism:

. . . sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in a floating flower . . .
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire.
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze towards paradise.

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So writes Hart Crane – who was accustomed to compose with a jug of wine on the table and a gramophone at full blast. He eventually stepped off the stern of a ship in the Caribbean Sea, thus affording a whole generation of critics with an opportunity for myth-making. The fate of an Apollonian poet is generally less spectacular: a job in the Army Intelligence Department. But either way, one thing is certain, that an art form is not as efficient a magical symbol as a dollar bill.

‘Whose is that head I see on my wall?’
Said John D.’s grandson Nelson.
‘Is it anyone’s head whom we know at all?’

‘I paint what I think,’ said Rivera.
‘I paint what I paint, I paint what I see.
I paint what I think,’ said Rivera.
‘And the thing that is dearest in life to me
In a bourgeois hall is Integrity;
However . . .
I’ ll take out a couple of people drinkin’
And put in a picture of Abraham Lincoln,
I could even give you McCormick’s reaper
And still not make my art much cheaper.
But the head of Lenin has got to stay
Or my friends will give me the bird today,
The bird, the bird forever.’

‘It’s not good taste in a man like me,’
Said John D’s grandson Nelson.
‘To question an artist’s integrity
Or mention a practical thing like a fee,
And though your art I dislike to hamper
I owe a little to God and to Gramper,
But I know what I like in a large degree . . .
For twenty-one thousand conservative bucks
You painted a radical. I say shucks . . .
And after all,
It’s my wall . . .’
‘We’ ll see if it is,’ said Rivera.

One can sympathise with Nelson, grandson of John D. Rockefeller. As a member of a society based on monetary values, he feels that those values are being affronted. Irritation with the artist’s demand for creative freedom is not peculiar to capitalist America. Here is a comment from the other side of thepage 176 Iron Curtain, the Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on Literature and Art, August, 1946:

What is the significance of the mistakes committed by the editors of Svedzda and Leningrad?

The leading workers of these journals, and above all their editors, Comrades Sayanov and Likharev, forgot the Leninist proposition that our journals, whether scientific or literary cannot be apolitical. They forgot that our journals are powerful media of the Soviet state in educating the Soviet people, and especially the youth . . . The task of Soviet literature is to help the state correctly to educate the youth . . .

This is the call of the bull elephant in the mating season, echoed from the towers of Manhattan, and in a weaker voice by our own Y.M.C.A.s, school committees, and other cultural bodies. Do not imagine that I am attacking Russian Communism, and so passing the buck. It would be an error to suppose that the Decision of the Central Committee was based on political rather than social prejudice. Though the original Bolshevik revolution in Russia drew most of its leaders from the ranks of the intellectual class, the stability of Soviet society is now maintained by the support of the great middle class which in every society looks upon art forms as saleable commodities and is bitterly intolerant of the artist’s demand for intellectual freedom. Naturally so; for society cannot be maintained without commonly accepted stereotypes of thought and action, and the self-imposed task of the artist is to break down these stereotypes and achieve an individual vision, a task which runs counter to the ordinary citizen’s very real horror of freedom. The deadweight of stereotyped thinking can hardly be gauged by those who have never attempted to move against it. For example, in this country poets and prose writers are likely to be engaged in broadcasting, teaching, or journalism, all occupations that demand some literary background and skill in the use of words. The words are directed to a social aim, often worthwhile in itself, but remote from the larger preoccupations of the writer. Half his energy is devoted to working the poison of dead symbols out of his system.

The rebellion of artists against the social patterns of their time and place is often cried down as childish and gratuitous; but it is the inevitable accompaniment of their growth towards maturity. The seedtime, as it were, of creativity occurs in adolescence, that time in the life of modern man when he moves furthest from the influence of social custom, propelled by the newly weakened force of his critical faculties, and the pressure of his sexual instinct. He recognises then for the first and often the last time that he is an individual, a free agent; for a child is unconscious of its freedom, an adult generally conscious only that he has somehow lost it. Adolescence is the cradle both of delinquency and of creativity. The secret joy in the act, say of smashing the windows of an empty house, and the joy in that act of choice which lies at the core of the creation of an art form, sprang frompage 177 the same root (though one act is fruitful and the other demonic) – It is I who choose to do this. By refusing to believe in the possibility of a fruitful freedom, a critic then relegates the creative impulse itself to the category of delinquency. In the experience of the adolescent, demonic and fruitful freedom are terribly linked, in his sexual knowledge and his acts of anger and rebellion against his home. About this spiritual crisis his struggles and his shames are bound:

The veils descend. The unknown figure
Is sheeted in the indecencies
Of shame and boils. The nose gets bigger.
The private parts, haired like a trigger,
Cock at a dream. The infant cries
Abandoned in its discarded larva,
Out of which steps with bloodshot eyes,
The man, the man, crying Ave, Ave!

Those who cannot remember that crisis are good forgetters. But too frequently the man never emerges, because the social stereotypes of thought and action smother his secret knowledge of freedom. Society fears the sexual crisis and belittles the spiritual one. The adolescent crisis in itself does not make an artist; but in an artist’s life it is invariably perpetuated in some way. Wallace Fowlie writes thus of Rimbaud:

Whereas the bohemian and the rascal oppose conventional living through some principle of reaction against the familiar, the voyou in Rimbaud (as well as in Villon, Apollinaire, and Hart Crane) opposed conventionality through a deep principle of changing his being . . .

For certain men it first is necessary to act, to explode, and to vituperate, before they can discover the reasons which prompted their deeds and explosions and vituperations.

The huge discovery of the adolescent, which brings with it a torment that most are glad to shrug off in conformity, consists in his knowledge that freedom is not an ideal to be attained but already a human condition, like a ruby in an old ring, that has been taken for a garnet. Significance in poetry depends largely on the poet’s capacity to make a free and entire response to the world in which he lives: a capacity of which he first becomes aware in adolescence. How to maintain creative freedom without its demonic counterpart is a problem of each person’s destiny – often a tragic one, for artists are generally less efficient in their lives than in their art.

One cannot ignore the part that tradition plays in generating creative freedom. Tradition is not fathered by that great incubus of the marshes, the master State, but by those people who have realised in part that freedom is a primary human condition, and have written their knowledge intopage 178 innumerable art forms and even into the custom of the society they inhabit. The concept of a nation as a community of free people, however much misused in the interests of State propaganda, can still waken the mind in a time of discredited gods and dreadful idols:

I thought of Britain in its cloud
Chained to the economic rocks
Dying behind me. I saw the flocks
Of great and grieving omens crowd
About the lion on the stone.
I saw Milton’s eagle mewing
Her dereliction in the ruin
Of a great nation, alone.

In these lines George Barker avails himself of a privilege which history has denied as yet to the New Zealand poet. He is able to refer to a Britain which is more than a geographical unit or a social structure built up by historical accident and the demands of commerce – rather a complex spiritual identity of people, time, and place, which his audience in some measure share. The lion of tradition and the armed eagle are at one level merely the insignia of a State organisation; but at another, they are still the totem beasts of the tribal unit. Where the texture of community life is sufficiently rich and complex, not only in idea but in fact, the poet can say We without surrendering his vision to the dead grip of a constricting stereotype. This unity in time and place of a complex group seems to have occurred in the Greek and Italian city-states, and in Elizabethan England. It removed in a great measure the burden of isolation from artists and provided them with a constant ground of inspiration. Why (one may ask) cannot a New Zealand poet say We as readily as I? There are many factors which prevent him; and chief among them the fact that the only language which our society speaks with understanding is the language of money and status. Perhaps on an Auckland beach or in the badlands of Central Otago a New Zealand poet may be able to say, ‘This is my country’. Our poems are largely landscape ones. The unofficial and real history of the country, its legend, remains uncreated. Not until a poet, walking up Queen Street or down Lambton Quay, can feel part of a complex spiritual identity, as Catullus did in Rome, Baudelaire in Paris, George Barker in London, can that legend begin to live. When poet and reader alike share the experience of having a history greater than their own lifespan, then full communication is possible. A society is itself the creation of its members; when it forbids their creative activity it has begun to fossilise. The pioneers wished to found in New Zealand an Athens of the South; but we are more likely to become a lesser Sparta, a community notable for its soldiers, its athletes, and its ignorance of the meaning of spiritual freedom. It is necessary for any artist to look clearlypage 179 at the country in which he lives. But a country is like a woman: if there is no love in the look, the response will always be negative. New Zealand has perhaps forgotten her poets because they have in some measure forgotten New Zealand. The subject-matter of literature lies always at one’s own backdoor; and, though the language of love is full of hard words and complaints, an active love is the only possible ground of creative freedom.

I have watched the poets also at their trade,
I have seen them burning with a wormwood brilliance.
Love was the one thing lacking on their page,
The crushed herbs of grief at another’s pain . . .

In this lecture, setting out to discover what makes a poem real, I have ended by discussing the problems of poets. This may not be so great a divergence from the original direction as appears at first sight; for the problems I have discussed are not the peculiar property of poets. The feeling of people, even unintellectual and unaesthetic people, that they share these problems of conflicting loyalties leads them to poetry. What is forged out between the hammer of individual striving and the anvil of group necessity enriches eventually the life of the group. The significance lies in the fact that the struggle is real.