CHAPTER 3

Belief and Poetry (1940)

But what I wish is to come away from these dissections with you, for you to see why I am so angry at all the lack, all the hesitation and loss.1 It is again the spectacle of the history books, and at every page the countless faces of the anonymous going down; the search through country after country for greatness, for great women—to take an example—when one may be sure that, as far as women are concerned, the great ones are all anonymous; the drives in art that have pushed through to set the great ones at the top, great rush of energy and spirit, laughter, darkness, and the marvelous knowledge; and so many wishes gone down in hesitation and despair and decoration. It will never be form that connects people or works of art; it will not be schools; you may be sure of that. The schools will be blasted to pieces; there will be nothing but a corkscrew of twisted steel where they thought the structure was. No school, no effort of the will, is going to keep anything alive; an effort of the will is not enough. The insistence there is like the insistence of those starved and rigorous people who go around calling for honesty, saying, “All I ask is honesty.” That is like asking that nobody die of starvation in the midst of plenty. It is all right to ask that out loud once in your life, and then to keep it handy in your mind; but it is nothing to repeat, it is not a stopping-place or even a place where you may rest for a moment.

The ones who cry for honesty are selling out. That is not the price; and yet it is a terrible thing how much crying for that there must be, how little there is. I remember when I was an oblivious child, and had no hint that there was an outside world; there was a track between home and school, and there were newspapers, until one day I read in the newspaper that a man had been found dead of starvation. He had been the nightwatchman of a storage warehouse. The warehouse was full of food, and he had died outside the door. It is one of the deaths of our time. One of those deaths is died when people cry for honesty. Let them go ahead and take their honesty; there is enough for all.

Belief is another such—a price, almost, a compromise if you call for it. Just as it is, belief. Honesty toward what? Belief toward what? These forces do not live in emptiness. They will not live in the dry test tube. It is the laboratory problem. You can isolate, you can make slides, but this is not living tissue you see, you are not examining mortal substance, there is not the shimmer, you have lost a clew.2

You are given the dead and rattling vines. When I speak of process, all I can show you is the vine. You will be right to tear it away at all of this; what is behind the linkage, what is behind the collision? Linkage of what; collision of what?

What can possibly make for flow? What will produce impact? How can we reach an end that can be shared? It is very well to talk about communication. But by what grace is the gift given?

Belief becomes a clew to form. It is along this line that linkage grows; or against it that the impact of images shocks. The acute immediate mind, glad to find a track set or waiting for the shock. Those two structures, those two forms, depend on awareness and belief. They depend on the mind in what might be defined as aggressive and receptive states; supply the involved but easily traceable flow of images that may be followed, actively pursued; or the fixed point of departure, after which the world of that poem is brought in color by color and shock by shock to play upon the receptive and waiting imagination. And then the higher type, the more complicated activity, when the burden is shared, when variety becomes so potent and attractive that the motion itself becomes a conversation, and the reader enters it, assuming the play of mind of the voices in the poem, meeting and following and breaking, being urged along, and flashing upon its meanings.

There is a real pursuit, and the hunt itself is in the name of belief. But it is treacherous, even when all the rules are accepted, a legendary hunt.

As if an archaic huntsman left in the morning, gay and confident and well-equipped, and followed all the heroic day until he was torn and exhausted and hoped only for the beast to be as tired, and for the beast to turn and wait; and forgot what beast there was, but begged in the growing darkness for one thing only, that the beast be brought to bay and turn and wait; until finally all he could remember was his own ache and hard breathing and the darkness, and it was then that he looked up and saw the beast turned indeed and waiting, but with all the morning ferocity and wildness not to be caught that could be feared.

But it is a mythic and savage beast if we do not say its name. Or, to come closer to ourselves, it is that underground river that has recently been searched for by a blind inventor.3 There is, in Ohio, a river that suddenly dives and is lost. Scientists have poured dyes into the water where it comes to the surface, and hoped to see the color at a distant surface, and they have thrown instruments into the river. A little while ago, a blind inventor—who would certainly be the most fit to trace the path of an underground river—set afloat in it a ball containing radio equipment, and followed it above ground with a radio divining-rod, going farther along its course than anyone had before.

That is the change, from simple to complex. From the hunt, the traditional activity that can be understood by child and primitive man, by city-liver and farmhand—to this deliberate tracing by an invented instrument of a subterranean devious course. And, if we carry the analogy into art, even the descriptions change. For what we have here is the passage from unity to multiplicity, from a simple faith into a complicated belief in possibility. The passage from the map to the symbol. And all we can say of both of them is that the structure, in each case, is to remind us of another structure. It is a different emphasis, also, in a change from form to belief—as if we traced a poem through in one way after another—as if we traced Moby Dick’s line of development through twice, once as the hunt for the whale, plotting the ship’s route on a globe, explaining all the terms, all the failures and successes and the final climax, and then went through the book once more to trace the deep storm in Ahab, the conflict in him for which the white whale was an outer image, a reminder that suddenly took a fierce and unanswerable shape. The difference is simple enough in the story of the inventor and the river. In the one case, we have the map of the river as far as we know it, and then possibly an arrow for the unknown course. On the other hand, we have the face with its blind eyes.

What we are looking for in poetry, however, is not the opinion or pompousness of dogma, although it is always easy enough to find. Always: we always will have models to parallel “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.”4 The distinction must be a question of taste here, I think; it must be arbitrary to that extent. And it has nothing to do with the importance of poems, trees, or the more priggish standards, but the more subtle shades of what each one of us finds important. What are we looking for? What are we waiting to hear? What ranges elude us? Pavlov’s dogs were trained to associate food with the darker of two shades of gray, the more intensely black. When they went to that sample, they would be given food; and they humbled a good many people by distinguishing differences that the human eye could not perceive. They could classify fifty different shades of darkness at the end of the experiment. And the darker of the two took on a bias, a “significant aspect” based on the first association.5

D. L. Watson, in his illuminating book, Scientists Are Human, speaks of all experience, all classification, as “biased abstraction,” and I think there is an index in that term to the kind of belief that is most effective in poetry, that is deepest in the definitions of poetic perception.6 And thinking of the term—the conjunction of terms—raised to the most creative level, I think we may find here the double process that is to be hoped for and that the wish for any single virtue—honesty, for example—does not meet. “Biased abstraction” combines two kinds of selection: the belief and selection according to belief that offers the “bias,” and the ability to classify and apply and create according to a structure that provides “abstraction.”

That definition is at rock-bottom for the creative process. As Watson uses it, it is a formula for all experience—all recognition. You look at a shape moving down the path toward you, and place it as a friend; you see a furry and smooth-lined creature of a breed you do not know, and place it immediately as cat; or Rilke speaks of constellations and we figure the sky with them as he wills, although these stars were never seen.7 The term “biased abstraction” carries a double warning, even for simple recognition—you are advised that it is you who are intruding with the whole load of your life to reach whatever bias you will. You are advised that it is you who are jumping to a conclusion, that the abstraction is your own. And if you carry that process and warning all down the line, you see what you are doing, and with what warnings, when you reach a belief, or paint a picture.

From the map, with the same warnings, to the symbol itself, the process of recognition goes, and should stagger under its threats. But even when it is burdened with models and comparisons, its speed is very great. And models, if they are thrown away in time, are of the first order of usefulness, in poetry as in science. If one takes up a model to use toward an end, and becomes fascinated by the object itself, the whole experiment—of whatever nature—will be corrupted. Physicists have been thrown off the track again and again by having a concrete example—and image—before them, and trusting it. Lord Kelvin, who would not allow himself to be convinced by anything unless he could make a model of it, was one of the authoritative voices raised to say that airplanes were impossible—that nothing heavier than air could fly.8 But the model is a stinging reality, and the most effective ally when there is need for concrete “fact.” The art is to know when to throw your model away. What is necessary is an imagery appropriate to a line of emotion or belief. When the line is involved, the point-by-point development is much clearer if the points are marked. To carry your example all the way to the end is a little like following a road and gathering the signposts to take along as you go. That is not an argument against signposts.

Two kinds of models have their uses as signposts. Each is, in its way, an index to belief; one, the document, the more concrete and rigid, to supply reinforcement along the way, to prove and argue; the other and more flexible and inclusive, the myth, lies as a point of reference at the beginning, to cut through complexities and impose its unity. These two instruments of conviction are powerful weapons in the hands of masters. The distinction at the end is likely to be that between unity and complexity; the myth, the parable, setting the form and level at the very beginning and forcing the new material back to its outline from time to time; the document adding complexity, fresh material, opinion and color and variety, at every turn.9 To accept either of these forms is to acknowledge a central faith, and to declare oneself and one’s central position, as well as a choice for complexity or unity. Recent examples are Ezra Pound’s Cantos, with their heavily documented scenes, and Kafka’s novels, The Trial and The Castle, both based on parable, a simple motion, which refers back at each new development, until the meaning of the original motion is revealed in its full moment. It would be possible to draw an analogy between the use of the two processes: linkage and collision—and the two indicators: myth and document.10

Two extremely interesting examples of modern belief in art, and the methods under discussion, are Eliot’s Waste Land, in which lack of faith is objectified and described as the characteristic of our time, by a series of dramatic and tortured scenes; and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, in which a myth of perfect faith is told and analyzed and woven into a confession of lack of faith that is one of the most perfect and searching treatments of the nostalgia for faith, the wish for it and sense of loss without it, that has ever been written.11 The power of this material—and I think in the case of “In Praise of Abraham” its poetic power must be referred to immediately—is not a more simple result than the effect of The Waste Land, although at first glance the components seem simpler.12 There are the same elements: the nostalgia for faith, the illustration, the subjective generalization.

(Infinitely different nervous reaction—tone—net effect.

Threat to the compartmented mind each of these is. Threat that belief is.

Threat that poetry is. Attacks of this year. Dollard’s attack.)13

One answer is the answer of Carossa, about whom I spoke last night, and whom I see constantly, on a platform, very quiet, very gentle, reading his poems to a great uniformed crowd of the Hitler Youth.14 His is an oblique answer. What he is saying is, “I am alive. There is something in the world besides what you have been taught.” That is all that he is saying, the rest is muffled, completely muffled. It is the first embryonic gesture, before protest, before conclusive faith, before any kind of organized emotion. It is to protest what John Brown is to civil war, the first premonition. But it is impossible, in either case, I believe, that the generalization should fail to follow.

One of the functions of poetry is to take a stand at that point. It is likely to be an untenable point; that is a good enough reason why poetry belongs there. It is playing angel on a pinpoint, at the most priggish and self-conscious; if you add optimism, Emerson has the words. “For poetry is faith. To the poet the world is virgin soil; all is practicable; the men are ready for virtue; it is always time to do right.”15

The hope is for communication on a level of belief. Carossa, in the story, is not making that communication. He is gesturing towards it; there is a shadowy indication; at the most, he says it exists. There is abject humility in the situation; the choice is death or exile, or that almost colorless and passive indication that is the highest expression possible of the whole world that stands against what power, in his case, signifies. All he can hope to do is say: Look at me. There is another world.

It is very different with us. We are in that other world, and we have our sovereignty there. We breathe the air of possibility, we find it necessary to believe in possibility—actually, what I have been pointing out as a duty all through this is just that: our obligation at this point is to hold fast, with all the faith and imagination we have, to possibility, and to whatever tradition we learn there is for us. But all the keenness and pride and incision are for us, all the chances of communication and liberty, actual creation, are there, and the traditions are strong. They have to do with the churches built on stones put up to regicides, with the fierce and contradictory migrations, in one spirit after another, from Europe to the Atlantic shore, from the shore across the country, accompanied by religion and slavery and poetry and hardheaded oppression and blasphemous laughter—the breaking of tradition, and the search for a native tradition that is seen in this letter of courage and genius:

Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne—Pittsfield, March 1851

(Dealing with The House of the Seven Gables)

. . . There is a certain tragic phase of humanity which, in our opinion, was never more powerfully embodied than by Hawthorne. We mean the tragedies of human thought in its own unbiassed, native, and profounder workings. We think that into no recorded mind has the intense feeling of the usable truth ever entered more deeply than into this man’s. By usable truth, we mean the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things as they strike the eye of the man who fears them not, though they do their worst to him,—the man who, like Russia or the British Empire, declares himself a sovereign nature (in himself) amid the powers of heaven, hell, and earth. He may perish; but so long as he exists he insists upon treating with all Powers upon an equal basis. If any of those other Powers choose to withhold certain secrets, let them; that does not impair my sovereignty in myself; that does not make me tributary. And perhaps, after all, there is no secret. We incline to think that the Problem of the Universe is like the Freemason’s mighty secret, so terrible to all children. It turns out, at last, to consist in a triangle, a mallet, and an apron—nothing more! We incline to think that God cannot explain His own secrets, and that He would like a little information upon certain points Himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He us. But it is this Being of the matter; there lies the knot with which we choke ourselves. As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon you jump off from your stool and hang from the beam. Yes, that word is the hangman. Take God out of the dictionary, and you would have Him in the street . . .16

That kind of pride is deep in our meaning. That is tradition, too. And there is fundamental communication here—no need to learn meaning, no need to consult references when God is in the street.

That form of belief is the belief of a free man, who seems to have achieved faith, to be moving securely within it, and is interested only in practicalities. Once in that territory, as Kierkegaard points out, that is where his concerns lie. And there is a startling difference between that, and Eliot, and Kierkegaard. They are talking about the same thing, and that is even more startling than the differences between them.

Belief has its structures, and its symbols change, its tradition changes, all the relationships within the structures are interdependent. We look at the symbols, we hope to read them, we hope for communication. Sometimes it is there at once, we find it before the words arrive, as in the communication of great actors, whose gesture and attitude tell us before their speech elaborates; sometimes it is as fanciful as skywriting, and there we do care about the technique first. Tremendous acrobatics over cities, and hardly anything said, and all our interest in the process itself. All these rhythms in space, motion in the air, in the body, motion communicating motion, belief communicating belief, until the thing is printed on us bodily, until a poem becomes a fossil of perception, a belief becomes an image recognized in the blood, the image of a pattern. . . . But not so set, not that kind of rigidity there. There is too much inequality still. That is why the Melville lets fresh air into the room. The poet does live the life of his people: in times of great perversity, sometimes it is the life inverted; but on the level of belief, we still have it, the life of the tribe. In subjugated peoples, you will find the poet as witch doctor, as politician, as an evasive voice. I think of the Indian tribes of California, who after their last subjugation in 1870, turned to dream-singing, sang their hopes that the ghosts of the warriors would return and fight the battles again and have the victory; and soon lost that, and dreamed and sang of how they would rise and fight; and, losing that, dreamed and sang and fused their wishful dreams into their religion.17 I think of Carossa and his gentle voice; of all these wishes for a faith and wholeness; and of that strong voice speaking of the present, its absolute conditions, and the usable truth. That is our tradition; it is there; and “usable” sets the obligation on us; it is there to be used; and deep among our truth is the symbol of it in poetry.

(Unpublished, 1940)