Gregory Orr | October/November 2014

It’s wonderful to have encouragement when you are starting out as any kind of artist, let’s say, a poet. To have someone there saying: “Bravo, this is interesting (or lovely, or beautiful, or surprising, or moving).” Parents, of course, are the logical candidates for such encouragement, but I can’t help feeling that it is important to have someone less invested give us that endorsement that subtly urges us to continue down the path of creativity. A teacher, someone from a world beyond the nuclear family—someone who might, with that encouragement, be ushering you into the social world, where your chosen art form is valued for larger, less personal reasons. For me, it was Mrs. Irving, the high school librarian in our small, upstate New York public school. Mrs. Irving who, for some unfathomable reason, decided to offer an unprecedented “Honors English Class” during my senior year. I was one of seven kids invited to skip our regular English class and meet in a small room off the library. In reality, it was a crash course in culture. We read all sorts of things, listened to operas, went the whole one hundred and twenty miles south to New York City to see an actual play performance, drove north thirty miles to Albany to see a ballet. She extended our horizons, actual and imaginative. And most of all, we read and we wrote. Wrote continuously and variously in our journals: vignettes, plays, short stories, haiku. And one day, I wrote a poem and in the process of writing it, felt the grip of the word-magic that I still believe is at the heart of lyric poetry—felt myself transported by the words into a world that the words were creating. You could argue that the same thing happens in prose, but I would answer: No, you don’t understand what I felt. I felt relief, release, ecstatic rising up out of myself. I felt the words conjuring another world (which I briefly inhabited) and that world was more radiant and intense (saturated as it was with my longing) than anything I saw in front of my eyes. You may have guessed by now that I was writing a seventeen-year old’s poem of escape: my own naïve version of the grown-up anguish revealed in the title of Baudelaire’s prose poem: “Anywhere Out of This World.” Yes, all this is true. But it makes no difference: the release from my anguish and entrapment in my self was also true and “real” and incredibly exciting. I don’t have any doubt that many poets start out with a similar sense of emotional release and relief when they first write. I don’t doubt that even people who won’t write another poem for the rest of their life probably wrote one once in which grief, or wonder, or passion poured out of them onto a page. I don’t have any doubt that they felt a thrill similar to what I felt writing my poem.

A second thrill awaited me. When my weekly journal was returned to me, Mrs. Irving had written in red ink next to the poem “you continue to astonish me!” How much it meant to me to be told that words I wrote could “astonish.” What hope that gave me; what pride. What purpose in the world, beyond the immediate pleasure/anguish of the poem-writing itself.

I would experiment with other life-purposes besides making poems. In 1965, at the age of eighteen, I went as a volunteer in the civil rights movement to work in the Deep South. As an experiment in social justice agitation, my excursion backfired. I spent most of my month in Mississippi in a makeshift jail on the county fairgrounds outside Jackson, where I and my incarcerated colleagues (men, women, old folks, children) were clubbed and terrorized and then left to swelter on the concrete floors of the barns for weeks on end. After my release from jail in Jackson, I decided to give up and head back north, but on my journey I was kidnapped by armed vigilantes outside Selma, Alabama. They didn’t make good on their promise to kill me and dump me in the swamp, but they did deliver me to a rural jail in Hayneville where I spent ten days in solitary confinement, charged with no crime, but jailed nevertheless. A month after my release, I would read in the papers that one of the men who’d kidnapped me had shotgunned to death another civil rights worker, who, like me had been held in jail and then suddenly released. Unlike me, this new victim had failed to get out of town quickly enough. I was too deeply disturbed and frightened by what I’d been through to continue as a political activist. It was clear that poetry was going to be the only meaningful path open to me.

But in my poetry path I wanted both things I had had from my first poem: I wanted the release of feeling that came in the writing of the poem, but I also wanted the social confirmation Mrs. Irving gave me—the confirmation that my poem-writing activity had a purpose that other people might also value, the pleasure of being “astonished.” Call me greedy, but there it was.

Imagine my surprise when, in a college “Ancient Civilization” class, I first came upon Plato’s ideas about poetry. I say “ideas about poetry,” but I should really say, attack on poetry and poets. And a vicious, lucid one at that. Plato announced that poets were liars and madmen. That they stirred up people’s emotions and made them irrational and unstable. They encouraged readers and listeners to identify with other people’s suffering, to feel what others were feeling, and this kind of empathy would make a person “weak and womanish” rather than manly and tough as men are supposed to be.

Not every great mind has to appreciate poetry—Freud didn’t care for lyric poetry at all. Never mind that Plato had himself written some beautiful love lyrics once, or that the strongest passages in his dialogues were parables—that is, extended imaginative narratives filled with symbols. According to Plato, there was “an ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy”—the two were locked in a struggle for the soul of Greek society and the city-state. “If you once let the honeyed muse into your city,” he warned, “then pleasure and pain will rule, not reason.” Pleasure and pain—the dynamics of the emotional life were dangerous: “And so, in regard to the emotions of sex and anger, and all the appetites and pains and pleasures of the soul which we say accompany all our actions, the effect of poetic imitation is the same.

For it (poetry) waters and fosters these feelings when what we ought to do is to dry them up, and it establishes them as our rulers when they ought to be ruled….”

Lest you think this “ancient quarrel” was a civilized and harmless debate, it’s good to recall Plato’s solution to the “problem” of poetry: banish the poets, send them out into homeless exile (dire fate in ancient Greece) and if they try to sneak back into the city—kill them. Granted, this “city” was only a proto-authoritarian utopia in Plato’s mind, but please note that he had a violent hatred of poets and poetry. Why should that matter? And why should that matter to us now? Well, for one thing, Plato is the rightly-revered source of so much of Western thinking and Western attitudes. His radical idealism, which separates body and soul and reason and passion, has had profound impact on our Western attitudes toward what it is to be a person—how we should go about the business of being human.

Still, I haven’t quite got to what I’m after with Plato’s attacks on poetry. It is that Plato is the first Western thinker and cultural sage to pronounce about the nature and purpose of poetry. He is at the source of all Western thinking about the nature and purpose of poetry. And instead of endorsing it and presenting a succinct, positive vision of poetry’s purpose in the human economies (both individual and social), he presents an entirely negative view. But affirmative “foundational documents” are invaluable to individual artists and to citizens in general. In fact, the importance of foundational documents can’t be exaggerated in whatever field of culture is being considered. Think how important the Declaration of Independence is to American culture—whenever we become confused about what we believe or value as a nation, we can revert to those words created and endorsed by our founding sages. What lyric poet could look back at Plato’s statements about poetry and find any endorsement or encouragement there? It’s impossible. We Western poets have at our source a negative foundational document, not the necessary and essential positive one.

You might say, but we have Aristotle’s Poetics as a corrective to Plato. Yes, we do—we have the defense mounted by Plato’s student Aristotle against his mentor. But it is a defense of tragedy and, to a certain extent, epic. It is not in any way pertinent to lyric poetry. The Poetics does endorse a positive view of drama, but this defense is built around the theory of imitation (mimesis)—which is an adequate foundation for narrative literary forms, but tells us nothing about lyric forms. Why, you ask, should lyric matter? For one thing, it is important to note that Plato’s attack was an attack that went to the heart of lyric: the role of emotion in poetry, the presence of passions in individuals, the fact that poetry’s power comes partly from sensory images and rhythms rather than abstract conceptual language. Plato attacked lyric; Aristotle defended narrative. When later Western artists/poets look back to the sources of their culture for the primordial endorsement and definition of their art, they find Plato: a hater of their art.

Other great cultures have not fared so poorly as the West in terms of foundational documents about the nature and purpose of poetry. China, Japan, India—all have originating statements that powerfully endorse lyric poetry and its social purpose. Persian and Arabic culture have a shared understanding about poetry’s nature and importance without a specific written document. What might it be like to write poetry with an awareness that your culture was on your side—that you could glance back through the centuries to the words of a founding sage and hear there the endorsement of your impulse to song? Considering those other foundational documents might give us Western poets a different perspective on our art. Might help us realize that the naïve pleasure of release and the naïve response of audience approval and astonishment I felt as a neophyte are closer to the true nature and role of poetry than Plato’s violent and treacherous logic.

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In China, that foundational document is known as the “Great Preface.” It’s a crucial, few paragraphs that precede the first poem in the Chinese Classic of Poetry (Shijing) sometimes known as “The Book of Songs,” an anthology compiled and written down in the 6th century BCE. The preface itself wasn’t written until the 1st century CE and the poem it introduced was an anonymous love song. Here’s the key passage from the “Great Preface:”

“Poetry is where the intent of the heart/mind (xin) goes. Lying in the heart, it is ‘intent’; when uttered in words, it is ‘poetry.’ When an emotion stirs inside one, one expresses it in words; finding this inadequate, one sighs over it; not content with this, one sings it in poetry; still not satisfied, one unconsciously dances with one’s hands and feet.

Emotions are emitted in sounds, and when sounds form a pattern, they are called tones. The tones of a well-governed world are peaceful and lead to joy, its government harmonious; the tones of a chaotic world are resentful and (angry), its government perverse; the tones of a defeated state are mournful to induce longing, its people in difficulty. Thus in regulating success and failure, moving heaven and earth, and causing spirits and gods to respond, nothing comes closer than poetry.”

Like Plato, the author of the “Great Preface” is not just concerned with the expression of emotion, but also with social and civic harmony (“the tones of a well-governed world”). Unlike Plato, he thinks poetry is both expressive of the social atmosphere and actually capable of influencing it positively—the songs of a well-governed world “lead to joy.” I’d add a last note: our Chinese sage suggests that the rhythmic nature of lyric extends beyond mere chant to include the whole body and especially the time-marking movements of hand and foot. We see none of Plato’s fear of the body here, but instead a belief that the microcosm of the individual human body can move in harmony with and influence the macrocosm of culture and cosmos that surrounds it.

The Japanese equivalent of the Chinese “Great Preface” was written by the poet and anthologist Tsurayuki as the preface to the Kokinshu, a 9th-century national anthology that contained 1,100 lyric poems composed by princes, emperors, aristocrats, women, merchants, and even peasants. Like much of Japanese culture, Tsurayuki’s notions are modeled on Chinese attitudes, but they take on peculiarly Japanese inflections with their fascination with the natural world and its flowers and frogs:

Poetry has its seeds in man’s heart… Man’s activities are various and whatever they see or hear touches their hearts and is expressed in poetry. When we hear the notes of the nightingale among the blossoms, when we hear the frog in the water, we know that every living being is capable of song. Poetry, without effort, can move heaven and earth, can touch the gods and spirits… it turns the hearts of man and woman to each other and it soothes the soul of the fierce warrior.

Both the Chinese and Japanese documents stress individual subjectivity—emotion—as the basis of poetry. In the “Great Preface,” emotion wells up inside us and must be expressed; in Tsurayuki’s preface, the poem’s origins are internal, but they need the stimulus of the environment: the need to “see” or “hear” something and then respond to it with a poem. Their poems, in turn, have an impact on their surrounding environment: along with the Chinese-related power to “move heaven and earth” and influence the spirit realm, Japanese poems also have a healing and efficacious effect on human lovers and warriors—promoting peace and harmony in social relations.

In India, the “rasa” theory, first articulated by Bharata Muni almost fifteen hundred years ago, dominates all thinking about the nature and purpose of art. According to this theory, the poet feels a strong, raw emotion (“bhava”) which he refines into “rasa” (“flavor” or “taste”). This rasa in turn permeates every word and rhythm on the page (or sung) and is thus transferred intact to the listener/reader who experiences the same rasa of purified emotion which the poet intended. These rasas or emotional flavors are, in turn, classified in a hierarchy of value. According to most Indian thinking, there are eight or nine rasas or emotional flavors. They are arranged in a hierarchy of aesthetic value, and Plato would be appalled to learn that the rasa of erotic love or desire was invariably placed at the top of this list.

All three of these documents—the Chinese, Japanese, and Indian—endorse poetry as emotion-based and expressive of individual feelings and experiences. All three present a positive, affirmative definition of lyric poetry. In all three cultures, the poets who come after these documents look back to them and honor them and orient their own writing in relation to them. These later poets may (as some did in China) quibble or even quarrel with the document, but they always used it as a reference point and endorsement for their art. They know it is there, like a loving parent saying: “Go ahead, write poems, they matter, and this is why. This is what poetry is—what human activity you are taking part in, and it is significant and valued.”

But Plato is the bad parent. His various statements and stances attack poetry at its heart. And ever since we Western poets have had, at our backs as it were, this confusion and negativity instead of an affirmative and orienting document. So, we in the West never got comfortable with lyric and its essential project of integrating individual emotion into our social being, into our lives as we experience them and as we experience them with others. Never got comfortable with honoring human expression of emotion.

Never, that is, until the very end of the 18th century, when the Romantic poets returned Western creativity to the lyric path. In the English-speaking world, we are particularly indebted to William Wordsworth for at last producing the sort of positive document about lyric purpose I have been speaking of. That document is his preface to the Lyrical Ballads, which he wrote in 1799. It’s a longish, odd document and the circumstances under which it was written are also odd, but I’ll focus on just three things from it that helped get Western poetry back in sync with the literary insights of other world cultures.

The first is that Wordsworth rescued Western poetry from its capture by the ruling classes. He returned it to ordinary people, understanding that anyone could and maybe should write poems or songs—that lyric poetry isn’t an elite art form, but is a human birthright. A birthright related to its essential function as a survival mode. All of us need poetry and song; all of us have the right to make up poems and songs. Wordsworth rescued lyric from elitism by saying that the language used in poems isn’t a special, flowery language reserved for special people or a special class of people. Instead, he insisted it was “a selection of the real language spoken by men” (and women). Poetry was just us, speaking a little more urgently, a little more intensely or rhythmically than we ordinarily speak, but not in some special language only available to a social or economic elite. Wordsworth’s return to speech as the model for poetry was a crucial insight, but we in the West are still struggling to take it in and accept its full, democratic implications.

The second, huge gift Wordsworth gave us concerns the definition of poetry. Or I should say the definitions, since he gives us two distinct and significant ones in his preface. Both definitions return us to the essentially emotive/expressive nature of lyric, but they stress different aspects of the human situation. His first definition is this: “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion.” That’s good. You can see how it relates to the Chinese and Japanese theories (though he knew nothing of them)—how it articulates the basic and “natural” human need to express feelings, get them outside us into words. You fall in love, deliriously and passionately, and you immediately have the impulse to write a poem about it, perhaps a poem praising the marvelous qualities of the beloved and how they make you feel. Or you suffer a loss and turn to the page to express what you feel, try to put it in words. Here is a brief passage from a Wordsworth poem that enacts this definition of “timely utterance” and its psychological/existential efficacy:

Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor’s sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong…

(“Ode: Intimations of Immortality”)

I felt sadness, then expressed that sadness and felt relief, release from the oppression of that feeling that was so out of harmony with the scene around me.

But a few pages later in his preface, Wordsworth gives a second definition of poetry, one that differs from his first. The difference highlights another way that lyric poetry addresses the mystery of our human condition. His second definition? Poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Here we have gone from spontaneous, in-the-moment poems to poems that go back by way of memory to an earlier, urgent experience. Here, Wordsworth is noting that we don’t always write our poem or song in the exact moment or immediate aftermath of our intense experience. I will go one step further: we can’t always write while something is happening, especially if that something is very intense or even traumatic. Why? Because in such situations we often shift into a “survival mode” in which we go numb, go on automatic pilot in order to not have our emotions interfere with our basic need to get through the situation. And such a tactic is not easily undone—the emotion suppressed often stays suppressed. Let me be clearer here by audaciously translating Wordsworth’s second definition into psychological language from our own historical moment—where Wordsworth says “emotion recollected in tranquility,” I would substitute “trauma remembered from a place of safety.” By a place of safety, I might mean a physical place, but also a later time, a post-crisis time. Wordsworth’s basic insight is invaluable and accurate: we circle back through time to deal with a traumatic event only when and if we feel safe enough to do so. And poetry is an excellent way to circle back and re-engage difficult life material.

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Wordsworth’s insights into the two expressive modes—the immediate and delayed—are invaluable for re-establishing the lyric’s centrality in the West. The delayed mode is especially suited to the way we humans live through something in survival mode, but survival (though essential) is not the same as redeeming an experience into the realm of meaning. Writing a poem or song is exactly that: redeeming experience, bringing it into the light of meaning.

I was once asked by a publisher to evaluate a poetry manuscript that had been submitted by an established poet. The whole manuscript concerned, in one way or another, the poet’s experiences as an American soldier in the Vietnam War. The poems were written a full twenty-five years after the war ended. In the interim, the poet had written three or four collections, none of which referenced his personal war experiences. This time lag of a quarter century is itself significant to my point about circling back, but there is a further detail. I thought the book was superb and important and urged publication. In my note to the publisher, I mentioned only two poems that didn’t seem as “real” and vivid as the rest of the book, and I even recommended deleting them. Another, older poet who also read and reported on the manuscript had the same enthusiastic response, and he also mentioned those two poems as expendable. Here’s the trick: those two “less real” poems were actually the only two written while the poet was there, in the midst of the war, in the midst of his traumatic experience. All the others were written two decades later as he circled back in memory, circled back from a place of safety. Circled back to live again that trauma and confusion, but this time to master it and redeem it for meaning. To integrate it into his life and his art.

My second instance of delayed expression concerns my own life experience and brings me back to my youth in upstate New York, where I began this essay. When I was a youngster of twelve, I was responsible for the death of a younger brother in a hunting accident—he died at my feet; I held the rifle that killed him. His death abolished meaning in my life at an early age. Although no one blamed me for his death, the entire event was met with silence by my devastated family and the rural community I lived in. I was left to cope with the experience as best I could. Two years later, when I was fourteen, my mother died overnight. She had been the one person I had someday hoped I would be able to speak to about my brother’s death, and her loss deepened my traumatic isolation from all around me. As I mentioned earlier in speaking about Mrs. Irving’s honors English class, at the age of seventeen, I became obsessed with poetry and wrote it furiously, desperately. A lot of my earliest gushing had to do with escaping my surroundings, but around the age of nineteen, I intuited that, if poetry was expressive (and I knew it was), then I would somehow have to write about my brother’s and mother’s deaths, since they were the source of so many of my most powerful feelings. But I dreaded such a prospect, saturated as I was with shame at my role in these two deaths (my role in relation to my mother’s death was totally imaginary, of course, but what we imagine is also real). It wasn’t until I was twenty-eight that I finally felt safe enough and skilled enough at ordering language to actually write a poem about my brother’s death—a lyric in seven parts entitled “Gathering the Bones Together.” I needed to write that poem for reasons that at the time were obscure yet absolute. As I nerved myself for the task, I knew Wordsworth would have been on my side—he, too, had struggled to make poems that absorbed powerful losses and still affirmed the value of living. And I knew Plato wasn’t on my side and would have mocked the psychological agony that gave birth to my sequence. Oddly enough, one of the pithiest encouragements I, or any poet of lyric anguish, might have received I didn’t find until many years later, in Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels. In the so-called Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, a 2nd-century document, we find this wise endorsement of the expressive lyric: “Jesus said: ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’”                

Gregory Orr’s most recent book is River Inside the River (W.W. Norton). He teaches at the University of Virginia where he founded and was first director of its MFA program.