Poetry'
POETRY, despite the almost magical powers of the greatest poets, is a human labour, and what humanity most desperately needs is not the creation of new worlds but the recreation, in terms of human comprehension, of the world we have, and it is to this task that all the arts are committed .... The Creation, we are informed by the Christian Bible, was accomplished in seven days with Sunday off, but the re-creation will never be accomplished because it is always to be accomplished anew for each new generation of living men. To hold the vast, whirling, humming, buzzing, boggling confusion of the Greek world still long enough to see it is not to hold the vast, whirling, humming, buzzing, boggling confusion of our world still. New charms are necessary, new spells, new artifices. Whether they know it or not, the young men forgather in Paris in one generation, in San Francisco in another, because the world goes round, the light changes, and the old jugs will not carry living water. New jugs must be devised which the generation past will reject as monstrosities and the generation to come will, when it arrives, reject for other reasons: as banalities and bores. But the essential point is that this labour does not differ in kind from the continuing labour of generations of journalists and historians who also face a new and turning world and who must also find new ways to speak of it. The materials of poetry, whatever the miracles accomplished with them, are gathered where the materials of history, present and past, are gathered, in what Keats called the arable field of events. Poetry transforms these materials by a faculty the use of which is discouraged in journalism, the faculty of imagination, but the product of the metamorphosis is not an opposite thing from the product of the process known in journalism as reporting. It is not what our grandfathers used to say it was: a "fancy" as opposed to the sober "facts" of practical men .... The constructions of the imagination are not fancies and never were.
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The re-creations of the imaginatiou do correspond to the experience of the real physical world. Poetry may take liberties with the materials of that experience which history and journalism are not free to take. It may translate them into unexpected and even improbable forms. But it neither will nor can disguise their origins in experience, for the moment it did so it would cease to be an art. It would become a sorcery, a magic. Those Grecian centaurs, half man, half horse, those Oriental mother goddesses all arms and breasts-these derive from nature. It is only the arrangement of the parts which is unnatural! The parts themselves-the horse, the man, the arms, the breasts-have been discovered in the world the senses know. Even what we call "abstraction" in the art of our own day is not new creation in the sense in which the world of Genesis is new. Vision reduced to line, balance, colour, proportion is still vision and still belongs in a world in which line, balance, colour, and proportion exist. Indeed, this dependence of poetry, of all art, on human experience of the actual world is only made the more obvious by the attempts of art, which have been frequent in our time, to escape from the actual world. Poems, for example, which derive from the subconscious mind as the poems of the early Surrealists did, or purported to do, are still poems of experience and still poems composed by a process of selection from among the moments of experience. The only difference is that the selecting sieve is set up somewhere outside the conscious mind. But the poem does not become, in consequence, a parentless, pristine creation. On the contrary, it is even more obviously and immediately derived from the common human reality than a poem made, as the Greeks made poems, under the selective direction of a conscious intelligence. The proof lies in the experiments of those contemporary psychiatrists who have attempted to work their way back through completed poems to their roots in experience. They have made very little of the poems of, say, John Donne, but they have had a harvest home with the works of the Surrealists. A Surrealist poem is a direct recording of the experiencing mind on the tape of speech, arid all that need be done to make one's way to the unhappy childhood or the illicit
History Mr. MacLeish has at various times been soldier, lawyer, Librarian of Congress, Assistant Secretary of State, university professor, a founder of U.N.E.S.C.O. But first of all, he is a poet. His verse drama J.B., published in 1958, became a best seller and, as a successful Broadway production, won him his third Pulitzer Prize.
love is to play the recording back. John Donne is another matter. The conscious act of art is there to make a mechanical playback impossible. But one need not go to the Surrealists or their successors to make the point. The most apparently fanciful of all familiar poems will testify, if you will truly read them, that their fancies are no less substantial, no less true, no less real-at least no less authenticated by experience-than the most substantial facts .... I am not suggesting that the facts of journalism are insubstantial. I am merely suggesting that there is no such difference between the facts of journalism and the fancies of poetry as we assume when we turn them into each other's opposites. You can prove it to yourself in either way: by reading poems or by reading newspapers. What do you remember about the recent revolution in a Middle East country-in some ways the most important news story of that year? What I remember is the account of the assassination of the old Premier, the most powerful man in the valley of the two rivers, who was shot in the dress of an old woman. Why do I remember that? Because the fact becomes something more than fact in that telling. Because I understand something of the man-and of those who killed him. Because the political event becomes a human event and casts a shadow far beyond the valley, far beyond the desert, far beyond the Middle East. It is only when the scattered and illegible fragments in which we pick up our experience of the world are recomposed in such a way that they make sense as human experience that great journalism can result. And the same thing is true in the same words of poetry. What poetry composes of its fragments is more lasting than what journalism composes. It is larger. It goes deeper. It is more meaningful. It has beauty. But it is not contrary in kind. Poetry and journalism-to put it in more inclusive terms, poetry and historyare not opposites and cannot be opposites, and the notion that they are is a delusion .•