LITERATURE OF ECSTASY EMANATES FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS
Aristotle's best known contribution to literary criticism is his
statement that tragedy has the effect of a catharsis upon the reader and
helps him to discharge emotions of pity and fear that overburden him. We
have considerably amplified Aristotle's views, as we include under
tragedy the recording of any very painful event in prose or verse, in
dialogue or narrative. We believe that perusing literature in general
relieves the reader of all nerve-racking emotions and produces a
homeopathic effect upon him by the aesthetic voicing of his unconscious
feelings.
Professor J. E. Spingarn's book, _Literary Criticism in the
Renaissance_, gives us a good survey of several Italian commentators who
correctly interpreted Aristotle's view of the purgation of the emotions
of fear and pity as aesthetic, and not ethical. The first of these
critics was Robortelli (1548); Vettori and Castelvetro followed him,
while Maggi and Varchi applied the purgation to all emotions similar to
pity and fear, a more Freudian conception. Minturno likened the
purgation to the physician's method, while Speroni pointed out that pity
and fear, holding men in bondage, were properly to be expurgated. These
men anticipated the great work of Bernays in the nineteenth century, who
destroyed the centuries-old fallacy that Aristotle had in mind the moral
purification and reformation of the reader. Even Lessing erroneously
thought that this was Aristotle's meaning.
Moreover, Milton, who had traveled in Italy, must have read these
Italians when he gave us his correct interpretation of the passage in
the preface to _Samson Agonistes_. Milton properly understood
Aristotle's meaning of the function of tragedy. It was to "temper and
reduce them (the passions) to just measure with a kind of delight,
stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated."
We know now the true interpretation of Aristotle's view of the function
of tragedy from a passage in his _Politics_. He was thinking of the
relief the spectators' surcharged emotions obtained by witnessing
similar emotions expressed. His real meaning was perceived by Henri Weil
and Jacob Bernays, two great Jewish classical scholars of Germany.
Bernays states moreover in his work,[180:A] first published in 1857,
that any literary work telling of unhappy events has a homeopathic
effect on the reader. This is true, for even if we do not actually
suffer, the capacity and possibility of suffering are latent within us.
Though Bosanquet, commenting on Bernays in his _History of Aesthetics_,
believes tragedy or poetry must be written in verse, he is forced to
admit that even _Vanity Fair_ and _Cousin Bette_ would come within the
definition of tragedy developed by Bernays; for the reader finds his own
emotions expressed in these works no less than in Sophocles and obtains
relief when he reads them. Bosanquet further admits that any serious and
even formless portrayal of life may be placed within Bernays's theory
adding, "It may indeed be admitted to be a development inherent in
Aristotle's theory."
Aristotle perceived that the spectator of tragedy was putting himself in
the place of the characters, living their lives emotionally and
sympathizing with them. Since the novel or lyric poem depicts human
sorrow, and the reader is purged by reading these literary forms, just
like the spectator of tragedy, all literature has the effect of an
aesthetic catharsis upon the reader.
The novels of Thackeray and Balzac are poetry in parts and the emotional
influence in reading them is the same as in seeing a tragic verse-play
acted. Bosanquet, however, does not fully accept Aristotle's theory as
applied to tragic stories in prose because he regards poetical prose
rhetoric and not poetry. Would he exclude from the domain of tragedy the
entire episode in Hardy's _Return of the Native_, of the death of
Eustace's mother? Hardy's tragedy is as real as the tragedies of the
Greek playwrights. The novel fulfills all the requirements of poetic
tragedy in that the reader is purged and relieved of pity and fear and
kindred emotions. For tragedy is not to be found only in dialogues in
verse, but in narration and dialogue in prose, and its function is to
relieve us of any choking emotion, besides fear and pity.
Aristotle is the founder then of psychoanalytic interpretation of
literature and is a forerunner of Freud. He however refers only to the
catharsis upon the spectator, but not to that of the author's work upon
himself.
Every creator of tragedy in prose or verse, in fiction, essay or lyric
was first subject to repression and then ecstasy. We may say as
Nietzsche did, that tragic art is the reconciliation of Apollo and
Dionysius, of dreaming and emotional intoxication, and both these
conditions are, in Freud's words, due to repression.
But we have travelled far beyond Aristotle in our views of tragedy.
Freud has revolutionized the art of criticism and a disciple of his, F.
Wittels, in the _Tragische Motiv_, gave us an interpretation from the
psychoanalytic point of view of the nature and sufferings of tragic
characters. There is an abstract of the book by Dr. J. S. Van Teslaar
in the _American Journal of Psychology_ for April, 1912. Wittels shows
that the unconscious unethical desires break into consciousness and
cause tragedy. He points out that the Greeks were purified of pent up
emotions in the theater, and that they identified the demons of their
inner self in the actors. He also says that the Greek drama cannot any
longer talk as clearly to us as of old, for with our civilization we
have wandered away from the naïve Greek mind. The author emphasizes the
fact that unconscious causes make the writer compose his work, as well
as the fact that characters in history and literature acted from
unconscious causes. Thus suppressed erotic impulses influenced the
patriotism of Joan of Arc.
At all times, again, it was vaguely understood that dreams reveal the
unconscious, that poetry emanates from the dream state, that in fact
poems are even composed in dreams. Thus, the Bible itself is authority
for the fact that all the prophets received their messages in a dream or
vision. The Hebrew sages said that the dream was a fraction of prophecy,
the unripe fruit of prophecy.
One of the first critics who treated at length the question whether
poetry may actually be composed in dreams is the Hebrew poet and
critic Moses Ibn Ezra, who lived in Spain in the early part of the
twelfth century. The seventh chapter of his _Conversations and
Recollections_[182:A] deals with the subject. He was influenced by Arabs
who were absorbingly concerned with the interpretation of dreams. Ibn
Ezra thought that it was just in the sleeping state that the use of
thought and imagination was greatest, for then the soul loses
consciousness of things, the body and senses are at rest and only the
common sense, which the critic uses really as synonymous with the
unconscious, is active. He quotes a Hebrew philosopher to the effect
that the soul, when detached from the body, has finer perceptions than
when awake. This is in accordance with Aristotle who said that the soul
can discover hidden things when detached from the senses, when it is
pure. Ibn Ezra asserts that his Hebrew authority maintains that one may
compose verses in sleep, and he gives examples of his own.
Ibn Ezra believed that nightmares have some idea behind them, that an
interpreter of dreams whose reason is superior to that of the dreamer
can discover the idea, for dream interpretation is the science of hidden
things communicated by God. The poet also composes verses in dreams,
often because he does this in waking life, for many people carry on in
their dreams the occupations of their daily life. We all recall that we
read in our dreams, especially if we are lovers of reading. We do in our
dreams what we would like to do.
The Aristotelian medieval Hebrew philosophers, Isaac Israeli, Abraham
Ibn Daud, Moses Maimomides, and Levi ben Gerson also developed the idea
of the connection of prophecy with dreams.[183:A]
We know to-day that the poet creates a congenial surrounding for himself
out of his imagination. He is repelled by the sordidness of his
environment or the suffering he has had in life. He writes a poem like
_Epipsychidion_, to build himself a home where he has ideal love,
because he is not satisfied with his married life. He writes a prose
poem like _Dream Children_ where he sees himself wedded to his lost
love, with their children about him, because he is a bachelor who has
neither love nor children.
Poetry, like dreams, creates a state where unfulfilled unconscious
wishes are gratified. Poetry is the voice then of the unconscious. The
poem is usually a product of the day-dream, which is related to the
dream of sleep, for both species of dreams reveal the unconscious.
Poetry shows conflicts and makes adjustments to reality. Poetry is
aesthetic therapeutics.[184:A]
The dream poems of literature are so numerous that one is amazed that
the theory of poetry as a dream has not been more prominently discussed
by literary critics. In the middle ages many poems were cast in the form
of dreams. The allegory was generally a dream. Who can doubt that the
_Divine Comedy_ and _Pilgrim's Progress_, both in the form of dreams,
were attempts by the poets to adjust themselves to reality, to purge
themselves and relieve their unconscious?
Even those poets who are always hiding their souls and making inlays of
verbal mosaic reveal themselves. Their dabbling with trifles is
indicative of an inability or lack of courage to think and feel. They
thus make a disclosure more marked than if they had sung their private
thoughts openly.
Poetry is a psychological art rather than a plastic one. It deals with
the soul. Horace's statement that if the poet would make the reader weep
he must weep himself, is true. Yet we have often failed to recognize
that poetry is a genuine personal cry of a man who dreams. We have
confused poetry with prosody, instead of identifying it with the
unconscious.
The poem with the social message, the problem play for example, or the
novel with a purpose, also belongs to the literature of dreams. The poet
sees foul infections infiltrating society; he has often himself been a
victim of social abuses. He voices complaints about the unjust system
and its tyrannical sway. He shows himself and others suffering in its
coils. He dreams a vision of a more beautiful and just system of society
where neither he nor others are consumed in vexation. He states
ecstatically the ideas that come to him as he condemns; he entertains
and expresses views whose adoption would enable man to reconstruct
society on a better plan.
His intellect is colored by his inability to adjust himself socially.
His dreams give him ideas. He does not have to become a reformer, but he
recognizes social wrongs resulting from custom or stupidity or downright
wickedness. Personal repression and dreaming produce not only love
poems, but poems containing utopias of society, plans for improvement.
I have fully stated in my _The Erotic Motive in Literature_ the
psychoanalytical view of poetry which regards it as the poet's creation
of a world in accordance with his fancy to compensate himself for his
repressions. Thus the poet relieves himself of emotions that were
bursting within him and cures himself of incipient neurosis. I have
shown that the view was not wholly originated by Freud, but stated by
various English critics like Samuel Johnson, Hazlitt, Lamb and Kingsley.
There are several other Englishmen who held the view, namely Shakespeare
and Bacon. Havelock Ellis, however, was the first writer in England to
develop the idea that artistic creation is a sublimation of sex
repression. (See his essay on Casanova in _Affirmations_, published
before Freud's book on dreams.)
Poets like Burns, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Goethe and Ibsen
have told us that they wrote to relieve themselves of their pent up
passions. Further, Coleridge, Shelley, Emerson, Daudet, Holmes, Lowell,
Poe and Hearn have left us written evidence of their belief that poetry
emanates from the unconscious. It remained, however, for Freud to have
the courage to identify the unconscious chiefly with sex repression and
symbolic speech.
The first English poet who claimed to allow his unconscious self
deliberately to dictate his poems, was James John Garth Wilkinson.
Havelock Ellis has recently called attention to him. In his
_Improvisations from the Spirit_ (1857) Wilkinson wrote down in rhymed
verse the first impressions of a chosen theme. He depended chiefly on
inspiration. His book was praised by Dante G. Rossetti, and forms the
subject of an essay by the poet James Thomson, called "A Strange Book"
in _Biographical and Critical Studies_. Emerson had also praised this
physician, who was an authority on Blake and Swedenborg. Wilkinson
claims to have written in what we would call the Freudian method of
drawing on his unconscious. He considers reason and will secondary
powers in the process. The poems resemble Blake's (even in their
obscurity). Thomson rightly distinguishes Wilkinson from fraudulent
spiritualists.
Wilkinson's poems, however, do not make good the claim to be absolutely
unconscious art. If he had not told us that he improvised we would never
have doubted that these poems were composed like all other poems, with
some labor. We cannot believe that Wilkinson did not have to seek
rhymes. He may have taken the first rhyme that came to his head but he
had also to consider his metre. Again, no art dispenses altogether with
the poet's use of artistic judgment, no matter how much an improvisation
that art is. I do not believe that even Coleridge's famous _Kubla Khan_
was actually composed in a dream, but that it was merely suggested by a
dream.[187:A] He fashioned the form consciously, that is the rhyme and
metre. The substance of the poem is, however, always from the
unconscious. Thomson considers Wilkinson's belief in the divine
inspiration of his poem a delusion. Wilkinson's art is not utterly
unconscious, for there is no uncensored idea therein, which is bound to
be occasionally, in some dreams out of many, of the most virtuous man.
This commendable feature shows Wilkinson exercised judgment, and this
was a conscious artistic process.
Improvisation is one of the features that characterized Persian and
Arabic poetry. It is easier there than in English because of the
facility for rhyme in these languages, and because the improvisers
usually composed in rhymed prose and were not hampered by metre. The
test of the great poet often was his ability to compose a poem on the
spur of the moment. Seemingly fabulous, yet apparently true stories of
improvisation feats by Arabic poets are numerous. When they improvised
in different metres, the Arabic poets in competition would compose
alternately verse by verse as a rule. Sometimes the poet would improvise
a short poem on the basis of any opening verse given to him. We remember
the story of Harun al Rashid who recited a line to Abu Nuwas who
composed a poem for him. The _Arabian Nights_ is full of improvised
poems. Arabic critics always dealt with improvisation as a feature of
verse making, and this is an argument to those who maintain that Arabic
poetry was conscious art and artificial. It was the ecstasy that
unconsciously incited the poet to utter his inner thought.
I would like, however, to make special reference to two Englishmen, John
Keble and E. S. Dallas, both now very little read, who left critical
works expounding poetry from a psychoanalytic point of view. Keble was
Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and the author of a most widely read
Christian poem. He delivered lectures on poetry in the eighteen-thirties,
in Latin. These were published in 1844 under the title of _De Poeticae
vi Medica_. They were translated into English for the first time a few
years ago. They have been praised by Cardinal Newman, Justice Coleridge,
Gladstone and Saintsbury. Dean Church called them the most original and
memorable lectures on poetry that had ever been delivered at Oxford.
Keble defined poetry as "a kind of medicine divinely bestowed upon man,
which gives healing relief to secret mental emotions, and yet without
detriment to modest reserve, and yet, while giving scope to enthusiasm,
rules it with order and due control." He traces the origin of poetry to
the desire for personal relief of pent up emotions in the individual and
argues that this is the natural conclusion from his definition. He
divided poets into two classes--primary and secondary. In the first
class he put those who, moved by impulse, resort to composition for
relief and solace of a hindered or overwrought mind. In the second class
he put imitators of the first and all others. He had been meditating
over these views for some time, and they also appear in some of the
essays which were collected after his death under the title of
_Occasional Papers and Reviews_. In fact, in one of these essays he used
the Freudian word "repression," in referring to the creation of poetry.
Keble's views are so sound and clear that one marvels they were not
taken up before Freud. It is true one will find much that is obsolete in
his lectures; one will be amused by his Toryism, his over-emphasis on
the religious side of poetry, his academic and classic standards. He
however recognized that poetry was a sublimation of the poet's
surcharged emotions and that the poet healed himself, therapeutically
treating himself by writing. He was really developing at length
Aristotle's famous definition of tragedy as purging the audience of pity
and fear. Aristotle was referring however to the aesthetic purgation of
the feelings of the audience; Keble, like Freud later, had in mind the
poet's relief to himself. Poetry ministers however to the overburdened
mind both of the poet and the reader. Both are relieved in finding
expression for ideas and emotions that are troubling them.
It was no doubt Keble's religious nature that made him perceive this
important fact. He noted that the psalmists in the Bible sang to relieve
themselves of their griefs and he saw that prayer had a psychoanalytic
effect on people. Poetry is then the emotional expression of an
overcharged heart. But this does not necessarily mean overcharged with
grief. For it expresses people who are overflowing with joy or any
emotion. It covers what Nietzsche called ecstasy, and especially the
ecstasy of love or sexual excitement. It covers the desire for beauty
which, as Nietzsche again saw, possessed a sexual contagion in it. The
happy poet in love desires to give vent to his emotions by some form of
expression, whether his love is satisfied or not. And those who seek the
origin of poetry in religion must remember the close affiliations that
anthropologists have found between love and religion.
Keble perceived that the greatness of poetry lay in its genuineness and
seriousness, and that it was not merely a metrical plaything. He
perceived that it revealed the poet himself and that its mission was
high.
One must also admire his broadmindedness in treating Lucretius, whom, in
spite of his atheistic views, Keble places among the primary poets. The
modern reader might resent the placing of Sophocles and Theocritus
among the secondary poets; nor does every personal poet belong to the
primary class, for minor poets are often personal. Poets must, to be in
the first class, voice a very compelling emotion based on a very
profound idea. Burns and Heine, Shelley and Byron, Goethe and Ibsen,
Balzac and Tolstoy are primary poets, not only because they are personal
but because they are intellectual.
Keble anticipated the greatest of modern theories about the nature of
art, poetry and literature. He saw that art was not play, as Schiller
and Spenser believed, but an expression necessary to relieve both poet
and reader. Its origin is not in play but in the desire to heal oneself
and create a reality out of a dream. Poetry is an attempt to unburden
oneself and adjust oneself to reality, which it does by complaint or by
building a dream castle.
But its sources are always repressions of emotions, which in many cases
have become unconscious. The best exposition of the imagination from
this point of view is by E. S. Dallas, who published _The Gay Science_,
in two volumes, in 1866. He was a successful book reviewer and had also
written a book on _Poetics_, which David Masson reviewed. In chapters in
his greater book, on "The Imagination," "The Hidden Soul," "The Play of
Thought" and "The Secrecy of Art," he anticipated many of the modern
discoveries of art in connection with the unconscious. He saw that man
leads a hidden inner life of which he is unaware and that this life
appears in his art. You will find more on the nature of imagination and
poetry in Dallas's book than in many of the works on taste that have
survived. He carried Keble's ideas to much further conclusions and saw
that man unburdens not only his conscious emotions, but even those of
which he is unconscious.
Dallas's four chapters at the end of his first volume form one of the
most striking contributions to the nature of poetry and imagination that
have ever been penned in English. He finds imagination but another name
for the automatic action of the mind or any of its faculties. It is
unconscious memory, its logic is the logic of the hidden soul, it is
passion that works out of sight. Imagination is the unconscious. It
suggests not only the power of figuring to ourselves the shows of sense,
but also that of imagery or the comparison of shows. It does not differ
from reason, but shows the process of reason working automatically. It
is play of thought, it is hidden soul. It combines sensibility to
images, wandering of the mind, and finding of comparisons. Its function
is not different from reason, memory or feeling, but its peculiarity is
that its work is done in secret automatically or unconsciously.
Imagination not only builds images, but it creates types, it utters
ideas, it speaks a natural language, it voices emotions.
Even the old critic who separated verse poetry from prose literature as
a distinct branch of writing was always suspicious that he was in error,
for he knew both were the products of creative imagination. Of the
ancients, it was only Aristotle who, defining poetry as imitation, saw
that he must include prose that "imitated" in his definition of poetry.
The thing that counted was the imitation or imagination in determining
poetry and not metre.
As imagination creates the literature of ecstasy, the real subject of
this book has been the function of the imagination, but as the term,
like poetry, has been so much abused and misunderstood, the nature of
them both is studied by using other terms, like "ecstasy" and the
"unconscious."
I suppose that no word has been more used in connection with poetry
than the word imagination. And probably no word has been more vaguely
and diversely employed. Every one agrees that literature in general must
be the function of the imagination. Many people when they speak of
imagination really mean nothing more than the introduction of numerous
figures of speech; others confuse it with the sportive play of the
author with supernatural machinery in his work. To others imagination
suggests something that is opposed to the convictions of the intellect
and to the moral faculty. Even to-day many people do not know that
Aristotle used the term "imitation" and Bacon the word "feigning" where
we use the word "imagination." These older terms, in the course of
evolution in meaning which words undergo, are used by us no longer to
represent poetic creation, or imaginative work.
Every one quotes the famous lines of Shakespeare in the fifth act of the
_Midsummer Night's Dream_, and many fail to see the exact meaning of the
master who had a true conception of the function of his art. First he
recognizes that the poet is "imagination all compact," and compares him
to the lunatic and the lover. Next he uses the word frenzy in speaking
of the poet's eye which rolls about and glances over the universe,
showing that he had the conception of the ecstatic element in the poet's
make-up and work. The poet gives shape to the forms of unknown things
bodied forth by imagination, he gives a local habitation and a name to
airy nothing. Shakespeare recognizes the fact that imagination is
related to the dream when he says that one of the tricks of imagination
is that if it apprehends a joy, it comprehends the bringer of that joy,
that is, it builds a dream castle where that joy is realized. His use of
the words "unknown things" in addition, as the substance of imagination,
shows that he understood that the realm of the unconscious was the
province of the imagination. Hazlitt and Lowell among modern critics
correctly understood Shakespeare's meaning of imagination as identical
with ecstasy.[193:A]
People to-day give vent to their emotions in prose conversation or in
writing prose letters to friends or relatives. Here we have the process
that led to the creation of poetry in earliest times. Poetry is the
result of ecstasy, the outpouring of the imagination, the expression of
the unconscious. If instead of having confused it with song and dancing
the critics would have taken it in its real significance as excited
speech, we would have had less misunderstanding about its nature. The
lover of to-day who tells his emotions to his love, or confides them to
a friend, the bereaved person who relates his grief at the death of a
loved one and tells of the virtues of the departed, are rude poets
expressing themselves in conversation in prose. When they take the pen
in hand and write a letter or keep a diary, they become poets no less
than the versifier who puts his feelings down in patterned speech.
The greatness of the letter or diary as a poem depends not only on the
craftsmanship, but on the substance, on the vividness or beauty or power
with which the emotion is depicted, on the degree of its capability of
moving others, and on the depth of the ideas therein. Similarly, the
person who is moved to prayer spontaneously by some religious experience
or private passion and utters his words in a natural manner or reduces
them to writing, is creating poetry. The writers to-day of letters and
diaries in prose are going through the same mechanism as all the
earliest poets. When they use patterns they are already becoming
artificial and are imitating other verse writers and obeying rules that
they studied.
We have long been familiar with the saying that every man is a poet,
though he does not write what is known as poetry. There is no psychical
difference between the average man and the great poet. They both are
subject to emotions, have imagination, and both express their emotions
in some manner. The only difference between the average man and the poet
is that the poet takes the average man's speech, elaborates it, and puts
it into shape so that it moves others.
Poetry is born in man's soul when his emotions are aroused, and no
emotions are aroused unless they are expressed in some way. Hence
Croce's view is correct that poetry is expression, if he means by
expression emotional and imaginative expression. People have too long
been under the impression that the poet was a different creature from
the rest of mankind, subject to a livelier imagination, or intenser
emotions. He is no different; on the contrary, there are many people who
never wrote a line who are more emotional and imaginative than many
poets. The process of the lover writing a letter involves the same
imaginative function as of the poet penning a love poem. The prose
expression of emotion is also poetry, but we have hitherto given the
name "poetry" only to the verse literary composition.
There is great unanimity of opinion as to the connection of literary
poetry in its origin with dance, music and song, an opinion that is
wrong nevertheless. In fact, most phases of poetry neither have nor ever
had anything in common with dancing or music or song.
Poetry such as we find in the great English verse or prose poets of the
nineteenth century has little relation to dancing, music or singing.
Take the Shakespearean plays, the tragedies of _Hamlet_ or _King Lear_,
where we have philosophizing and descriptions of painful crises which
are great poetry. A poet does not have to sing a great idea, nor dance
to it, nor put it to music. Ibsen and Balzac are poets and yet they are
far away from dancing, singing or music. Though most good singers are
poets, one does not have to be a singer to be a poet. Then take great
impassioned oratory or beautiful emotional word painting in prose or
verse, or any idea bathed in feeling. They may all be poetry and need
not be--in fact, by their nature, are not--related to dance, music and
song.
An autobiographical verse poem like Wordsworth's _Prelude_, or a series
of impassioned ideas like Lucretius's _Nature of Things_, or a novel in
verse like _Aurora Leigh_ is not related to song, yet it is poetry in
parts. (This does not mean that poetry is not the soul of music or
dancing.)
There is nothing more amusing than to read the innumerable and
contradictory theories about the origin of poetry. Many believe that the
first poetry was pastoral poetry, since the shepherd's life was, after
hunting, the first occupation appropriate and conducive to composing
poetry. Scaliger, Fontenelle and Pope endorsed this view. Others believe
that the original poetry was written to express man's religious
emotions; his prayers and hymns to his gods are considered by many the
first poetry. Again the communistic needs of the clans are supposed to
have invited the poet to write. Celebration of tribal victories, praise
of heroes, incitement to martial courage and revenge, the virtues of the
clan, were supposed to be the first function of the poets. Epics and
ballads are cited in proof of this. Again, satires and invectives are
thought to be the first forms as they were used by the bards, who were
also magicians and hurled them as potent forces against the enemy.
Thomas Peacock believed eulogies constituted the first poetry of the
human race. Then the proverb and parable have their devotees, as the
first imaginative representation of the common thinking of the earliest
people, and as the readiest to lend themselves to the use of verse
patterns. One could go on naming various theories that have been
advanced as to what kind of poetry is earliest; there is the poem which
designates the awakening of a moral conscience; there is the mythical
tale reciting the dream desires of the tribe; the song chanted at
various labors and toilings of the common people; the chorus which
served as an accompaniment to holiday celebrations and nature worship;
the chanting of the first cantors or priests and the responses of the
congregation; there are the ecstatic utterances of the earliest
prophets, soothsayers and magicians; the admonitions of counselors and
legislators; the personal grievances and complaints recited by those
seeking redress before the assembly or chief; marriage hymns, love poems
and elegies; all of these are separately cited as the original springs
from which later poetry developed.
The critics assume that man was originally possessed of one emotion
only, which he celebrated, or that only one feeling predominated to
which he gave vent. Now, as a matter of fact, early man was subject to
multifarious emotions just as we are to-day, and he voiced them all, in
speech, later writing them down in prose and finally in some verse
pattern. Some of these emotions were originally written down with rhythm
and repetition. There really was no state when poetry first began, for
the first spoken poetry is as early as human speech which has always
been used to express emotions.
Written poetry is merely the mechanical transmission of spoken poetry.
We cannot ignore the poetry of nations which has been handed down by
tradition and never been reduced to writing.
The mental process of composing poetry to-day is no different from what
it ever was. Different people express verbally the ranges of all the
emotions and several individuals give us the written expression of these
moods in good form, so as to evoke sympathy in the hearer or reader. It
is true, in early times the religious and martial emotions were much
expressed, but this does not prove that religious or warlike feelings
alone gave rise to the art of poetry. Every emotion man felt gave rise
to the art of poetry. Poetry is the expression of all the emotions and
is born with speech and hence is universal expression and the most
ancient art we possess.
Poetry is, however, so often the expression of a personal complaint, the
expression of a repression, that we may say that its real origin to-day,
and at all times, is the prose elegy. The person who pours out his
griefs is psychologically the poet in action. Attempts have been made by
Greek scholars to show that both the epic and the drama had their origin
at public funerals where elegies were recited instead of at the
Dionysian rites. This is very plausible. The pang of death was one of
the causes that led to the creation of poetry, especially since early
man was carried off too frequently by wars, plagues and wild animals.
One should add that the pangs of the loss of one's mate, the grief
resulting from being worsted in the battle for the female, were other
contributing causes of the creation of poetry. In short, the origin of
poetry was personal, and much ancient poetry dealt with a lament of some
kind. This has been the characteristic of poetry ever since. Grief is
the source of poetry. Note the number of wailing poems in Irish and
Scotch literature where the death of a husband in war, or the loss of
love, plays a part. Much Anglo-Saxon poetry is elegiac. The earliest
poems from Egypt, China, Japan contain laments. Savage literature is
full of them. The hymn is really a lament in the form of a plea. The
dirge, the threnody, the elegy, these constitute the bulk of much
poetry, ancient and modern. Burns's poems are chiefly dirges of some
kind. The dirge is most human and appealing to us. Some of the most
effective poetry in the Bible are the cries of David in the _Psalms_ and
the dirges in _Lamentations_.
The modern elegy whether in prose or verse, whether it laments death or
lost love, is the direct offspring of the earliest savage cry of grief.
The savage wailed in public as the poet does. Our novelists still do
unavoidably the same thing, often covertly. When Tolstoy wrote of the
death of Levin's brother in _Anna Karenina_ or _Ivan Ilyitch_, he was
actually bemoaning his own brother, whose death made a lasting
impression upon him.
Gummere thinks that the early poetry of man was communal and that modern
personal lyric poetry is a development from communal poetry. Surely
Professor Gummere was aware that among the religious and communal poetry
of the Anglo-Saxons, for instance, we have such a fine elegy as _The
Wanderer_ and such a beautiful dream poem as _The Phoenix_. It is a
great mistake to think that personal poetry is of modern growth, dating
from Villon. It has been more developed in modern times. And then there
is much of the personal element in this so-called communal poetry. The
man who sang for his tribe in ancient times felt with his tribe, and
hence was both communal and personal.
The research into the origins of poetry can be made in the soul of any
writer to-day. The same psychological mechanisms that are at work in
the composition of his poem were at work in the production of the most
crude savage verbal outpourings. It is a personal repression leading to
the utterance of a complaint or the building of a dream-world. Keble was
one of the few critics who considered the personal complaint the chief
origin of poetry.
Schopenhauer defined poetry as one of the arts whose mission was to
reveal an idea in the Platonic sense, that is, the permanent essential
forms of the world and all its phenomena; art to him was a way of
looking at things independent of the principle of sufficient reason. In
accordance with his philosophy he regards ideas as the objectivity of
the thing in itself, the will. He looks upon the different grades of the
objectivation of the will as fixed. The result is that he considers the
peculiar end of all the fine arts "to elucidate the objectivation of
will at the lowest grades of its visibility, in which it shows itself as
the dumb unconscious tendency of the mass in accordance with laws, and
yet already reveals a breach of the unity of will with itself in a
conflict between gravity and rigidity," while tragedy "presents to us at
the highest grades of the objectivation of will this very conflict with
itself in terrible magnitude and distinctness." (_World as Will and
Idea_, V. 1, p. 330.)
All this is saying in philosophical terms what we know has been the
mission of art, the portrayal of man defeated in his blind and impotent
desires. No one denies that poetry must and always will portray man in
such circumstances. Freud has restated the problem when he showed that
poets deal with their own repressions.
One cannot accept Schopenhauer's views that the aim of art is to
annihilate the will to live. He failed to see that much of this tragic
literature acts as a relief to us and makes us want to live all the
more.
Dr. Arthur H. Fairchild deserves credit for assigning high importance to
poetry when he says that it is a means of self-realization and is a
biological necessity. In his _The Making of Poetry_ he expresses what is
really the psychoanalytical theory which sees in poetry a means of
freeing oneself of complexes, a way of restoring oneself to a better
state of mind, a cure for incipient neurosis. When we are sad, the
reading of sad poetry relieves us. As Emerson said, "Poetry is the
effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition." The
toiler reads of other toilers in literature, say in Zola's _Germinal_ or
Hauptmann's _Weavers_, or Sinclair's _Jungle_, and his emotions are
discharged. It is true he may be driven to action, but the poet has
nothing to do with that. The lover, unhappy in his love, finds help in
hearing a poet express his own surcharged feelings resulting from love
troubles. The reader may by reading be prevented from going mad. The
great public which does not read good literature finds relief in plays,
moving pictures, magazine stories or newspapers, all of which, while it
is not generally good poetry, may have the effect of a catharsis on the
public's rudely developed aesthetic sense.
Mankind hungers for poetry. Those who are unable to appreciate it in
higher form, resort to imitations and substitutes, which express their
emotions and relieve them. He who can read and enjoy the great masters
of prose and verse, or appreciate good music and painting, does not have
to resort to the political meeting or religious revivals to have his
emotions played on. Athletic contests like baseball, football and prize
fights usually help people to express and relieve surcharged emotions.
The love for cheap forms of movies and card games has its origin in a
desire for emotional discharge. Man resorts to every measure to give his
emotions play. He reads newspapers and trashy magazines, he likes to
hear melodramas and ranting orators, often because he has a love for
emotional excitement which he cannot satisfy by literature of the best
kind. He cannot concentrate, he cannot think clearly, he is ignorant of
the simplest principles of literary art; he cannot read poetry, yet he
hungers for it. His dormant instincts will even seek satisfaction in
condemnation and persecution to satisfy such emotions which he cannot
express by reading.
The creation and reading of poetry in prose or verse is an achievement
common to man alone of the animals. He is not separated from them by
moral or intellectual faculties, for animals have these, but by his
faculty to create art and make others share enjoyment of them. It may be
that the spider and the bee derive aesthetic satisfaction from
contemplating the web or the hive they build, or the bird gets artistic
pleasure from the song it sings or hears, or any animal may win sympathy
from another by some mute act, but man alone puts his emotions and ideas
in words in an endurable work of art so as to relieve himself and move
others. What separates man from animals is not then religion--is not the
religion of a dog centered in his master as Anatole France has so
quaintly shown--but the ability to create and enjoy poetry, by which I
mean literature in its highest prose or verse form, music, painting and
sculpture.
And a life devoted to poetry is the best life we can seek. Let a man
have his necessities satisfied, and there is no higher form of life than
to enjoy and if possible to create poetry. Poetry makes us want to live
and gives us zest in life. Life exists for sensations and we get our
sensations out of poetry. Life exists for the enjoyment and creation of
poetry. The unlettered savage has his craving for poetry satisfied in
his dancing, and war cries, in religion and tribal customs. The child
has it satisfied in his toys and games. Adult man appeases his hunger
for poetry in diverse ways. Literature, art and music are so far the
highest forms of poetry we know, and in literature I include philosophy
or thought, in prose as well as verse.
Poetry acts as a necessary relief to us for emotions and ideas that seek
expression, and is hence more real than any other form of life.
Our views of poetry from a psychoanalytic point of view finds
confirmation even in the Bible. One of the leading prophets and the
leading psalmists has each told us in scorching words how he felt before
he created. Jeremiah says of God, "His word was in mine heart as a
burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I
could not stay," Ch. 20, v. 9. David also said, "My heart was hot within
me, while I was musing the fire burned: then spake I with my tongue,"
Psalms, Ch. 39, v. 3. Both of these poets had made resolutions to keep
silent, but could not; their choked emotions burned like fire. Their
disturbed souls sought relief by expression. Thus the great prophecies
and psalms had a subjective origin and a homeopathic effect upon their
authors, and they have this effect on us to-day.
FOOTNOTES:
[180:A] _Zwei Abhandlungen uber d. Aristotleische Theorie d. Drama._
[182:A] This work has never been completely published. Dr. B. Halper, of
Dropsie College, Philadelphia, has promised us a complete translation
from the Arabic manuscript. There is a synopsis of it by Schreiner in
the _Revue des Etudes, Juives XXI, XXII_.
[183:A] See Isaac Husik's _Medieval Jewish Philosophy_.
[184:A] F. C. Prescott's _Dreams and Poetry_ is a magnificent essay on
the subject.
[187:A] I do not however agree with Bergson, who does not believe poetry
can be composed in dreams at all.
[193:A] "Poetry is the most emphatical language that can be found for
those creations of the mind 'which ecstasy is very cunning in.'" Hazlitt
_On Poetry_. "The imaginative faculty (has) the capabilities of ecstasy
and possession." Lowell, "The Imagination." _The Function of the Poet._