CHAPTER 29

Poetry and the Unverifiable Fact (1968)

I’m glad to be here on an evening of poetry weather; somehow whenever there is a poetry reading it seems to rain.1 And the bounty and the discomfort and the people who come out in it and the reasons for their coming out, I think, have to do with what we are here for, in talking about poetry in relation to fact, verifiable and unverifiable.

It is a happiness to me to be here. The things I have heard and seen before coming here come together in a way I care very much about, the comings-together. I knew about the library, some of the stories of the publications, of the Stuart book, sent to me by Henriette Lehman, of Mark Curtis’s work on the history of Oxford which has that vibration in the present that to me is history.2 I belong to a society of historians, but I have had nothing to do with them since they defined history, a historic event, as an event which is finished, since it seems to me that these events, like the events in poetry, live in the present.3 And that is one of our few reasons for real interest, for coming out on a rainy night.

The third connection I make with this place is through Marjorie Downing, whom I liked in the very beginning in relation to poetry, particularly her feeling for Hopkins and the way she speaks about Hopkins, and again through liking her and her family, but in a new phase of friendship because of something she said to me once.4 I asked her, as I ask people, about her early wish, what she wanted to be. And she said, “A religious.”5 She looked at me and considered. Then with a marked special look, she said: “Well, really also a sea captain.” She said, “I like ships. I knew it wasn’t possible—but I wanted that.”

And I said, “These are difficult things to bring together.”

And she said, “Oh, no. It’s easy—dean of a women’s college!”

It is these comings-together that have to do with the extraordinary resonances, the parable that poetry actually is in our lives, the recurrences. People have asked me whether I use rhyme. Rhyme itself, as it has come down to us through European tradition, is one returning of sound. One return has never been enough for me. I wanted sound established and recurring many times, as the recurrences in our lives come many times; and that sequence of return seemed to me romantic, if you want to talk in those terms; fact, if you want to talk in those terms; poetry and the wish for form, the need for form.

I wonder very much about the needs for poetry—what brings us out to such an evening as this which is not compulsory. And I think “they” lie to us very much about these necessities and the nature of the thing itself. “They” tell us in every way possible, not only in classes and through books but in songs and in jokes, in the way people look, that poetry is a rare and curious and very peculiar thing in which to have interest, in which to engage, to which to be committed. They say it is peculiar. They say it is sexually questionable for a man to do it. They say it is sexually questionable for a woman to do it.

What is the nature of this lie? A company has made a fortune on the premise that everybody takes snapshots. And I wonder about this other thing. I wonder—all critical standards, all criteria aside—I would like to ask you something. How many of you here have ever—without any thought for critical standards—how many of you have ever in your lifetime written a poem? Would you put up your hands, please? Thank you.

I am always nervous when I ask this question. I ask now in rooms whether small or big, and generally there is a moment of panic before the hands begin to move, more slowly often than on this evening. Almost all the hands go up. There are three or four generally who do not put their hands up. If I wait afterwards, and with favorable winds, the three or four will come up and speak to me and say something like this: “I was fifteen. It was a love poem. It stank.”

But this is quite different in nature from what we are told. “They” say that this is something that people do not do; I think from the evidence this evening that it is actually something else, that it is actually a human activity. People do this, almost everybody writes a poem at some time in his lifetime. It is quite a different sort of thing from what we are told.

I speak of the writing of poetry as part of a deep indication of what the nature of our lives actually is—what the reverberations and recurrences are, what the facts, verifiable and unverifiable, are, and how we share these with each other. And it seems to me that this experience is the entrance into the present moment, which is the real—this moment, this moment which we share, this rainy hour that we share, that has never existed before. It is our actual living present with everything that we bring to it, and that as history enters this moment through us, if we are the means.

So what we call poetry, which also cannot be defined. I would be glad to try. I think of all the people who have defined it in all the ways we know—from the attempts to name the recurrences of the spirit, to the line about the hairs standing up, to Louis Untermeyer on the platform, who said when he was asked from the audience whether he could define poetry: “Certainly, I can. Poetry is—Poetry is—” and then said, “Can you define chocolate?”6

And that is simple compared to what we have to consider this evening. But this, about what enters the moment with us and on what terms we come to the moment in our own experience, unknown to each other, partly known. When I say unverifiable fact, it is that “partly known” that we each hold for every other person—the signs of the recognition in recurrence, in what is immediately recognizable to someone else, in what is recognizable across the world, across race and life story, and the nature of beliefs, and all that which is brought to the moment.

Poetry is a very good parable of the coming to experience. It holds to the rhythms of experience. It is the shortest of all the arts that live in time. You will find people who are really stopped before the quality of the bringing-together of thought and imagination, and the recurrence of the attempt to find, that come into poetry. The two stock answers of such stopped people will be: “I haven’t had anything to do with that since I was at least thirteen (or fourteen or fifteen),” or “I have no time for poetry.”

Now the first answer is a very interesting one that you should go behind if you can, because the ways in which people are stopped, stop themselves, have to do very often with early adolescence—very often with the moment, if there is a moment, of puberty, in which they worry and grieve about what they should be feeling: and I am speaking of the depths of the center, its poetry, and poetry can be of any lightness that you want, you know. It can be of any suspense. As a matter of fact, the thriller, which is a perfectly good image of poetry—in itself a suspense of images—offers us a term in which we can speak to people who will not talk directly about the poem.

But these two answers about stoppages in adolescence, or about not having the time for this art which is so quick and brief generally in time, should be gone behind. I think if you do go behind them, you will often find that the quarrel is between the person and his own belief, in his own experience; and that there is a relation with one’s own experience here that is a base for this attitude toward art and this attitude toward the world; because the necessity has to do with believing your own experience, with trust in your own experience and with the rhythms of experience. Certainly the things that are difficult have the relations of the rhythms of our own feeling, the bodily rhythms, in which breathing, for example, and the rhythms of the heart, will provide many kinds of base for music.

Now they will speak of music, the music of poetry, what the sound is. If you look at that, if you look at the very complicated preparation musically in a poem, you will find that the best, the tightest poems will prepare in every way for their own climaxes, prepare in thought, prepare in the way the feeling moves, and prepare in the way the meaning moves in sound. And that is the music, the movement of meaning itself. Very often the title itself is part of that preparation. But underneath that is a wish that is native to us, shared by all of us, a wish for the discovery of our own forms, of the form of our experience. And it seems to me that poetry has this to offer, as many of the other arts have, as music certainly has, without the verbal meaning; as movies have. The density of the texture of experience can be given in a poem as in a parable. The movement, the curve of emotion in a poem, is close to something deeply human; it is the finding; it probably has to be lived with without ever completely being defined.7

And that brings me to the second part of what I would like to talk about—which is really a relation with the unknown, with the partly known, with the uncertain, with the unverifiable. Now I care, and I know you care, very much—we live in a period of caring about the document, about the documented fact, the kind of fact that can be assimilated in memory, that can sometimes, if you like, be programmed into machines, that can be verified. And you can think of many of these today, things that happened today in your lives—things that can be verified.

But there are also other things, of which one is dreams, things that cannot be verified by anyone else, but which you can give, which you can share with other people, by this skill, by this way of discovering form, by this way of making an experience which is not simply memory, but which is making something new to which you and another person, the reader, can come wanting—in a way—the same state of being. This is the thing that Collingwood calls “the principle” in The Principles of Art, where he says, “We get from art a way of understanding what it feels like to be a person who thinks these things.”8

I think that statement brings the understanding, the feeling, and the thinking into the relationship that I would hope for. For these things are clusters. You have that here physically in the cluster colleges, which I think is the physical type of what is coming.9 And the fact that the cluster is made to center around the materials, the library, is life; it is that kind of life that does not exist in many colleges, and which is coming, it seems rather quickly in other places, but which, in a poem, cannot be diagrammed a-b-c-d, a movement going from one point to another to another, but rather as a constellation moves, as many lives in their movement, and related always with another constant, a constant which tends to be forgotten and neglected, often despised—which is the unknown, which is a constant in science, as it is in art and the uncertain.

I know President Curtis has spoken about the things I have been living in, the life of somebody in the past, part of a buried life. I thought of all the reasons why I came to this. He was kind enough not to tell you one of the reasons that I gave him—which was that I needed to read this book, and I went to person after person, saying, “You could do this. This needs to be written.” And as I talked, I came further into it, and finally the only way I could read it was to write it.10

And so one does these bringings-together of kinds of meanings that have been separated in many of the ways of thinking about education where separate fields are defined, lines are made between them. Now I do not think those lines exist in nature, as we say. I do not think that what they call the imagination of science and the imagination of poetry are distinct.11 And I think that the unifying work, the work that moves us towards the deepest imagination, is the work of which George Sarton spoke, saying that if there is progress, it is progress toward the unity of the imagination, the unity of people, the unity of the world.12

This has been called very naïve, oversimplified; and it can be seen as that: a chalking-in of very complicated relationships. The minute you have a piece of work, a work of art, a human being before you, then the terms make themselves useful as material, material to take hold of, experience; and one wants not only to take hold of it but to learn to trust it. And that trust of experience is, I think, needed in life as in art.

One of its beginnings is in breath itself, and this is what it is made out of; that is what is shared, also. In a child’s book the other day I saw the statement that “all of us are breathing air that Leonardo breathed.”13

In this timespan the breathing of Leonardo has been mixed with the air that hangs to the world. That is shared, curious breath, a relation to the past, a relation to something we all share. Very often students will deny the linkage. I think of a group of students with whom I have been working this past winter. These students in New York were reading Hart Crane, were reading The Bridge, and they started with great excitement; and this began to fall away. He was dead, in the first place. He was an older poet, of another time. They wanted their contemporaries. They wanted to read each other’s work. They very much wanted to read their own work to people. They came to a phrase like “fiery parcels.”14 They looked out at New York, where you can see those “fiery parcels” any evening as you can in any city today. They began to fall away completely from this work which they thought of as in the past.

At that point I had what I can recommend to anybody working with students: I had flu; and it’s very easy to have at this point, and if you don’t have it, it might be a good idea to say you have it, to stay away for a week, at the point at which people who are reading together come to this place in their lives. For what they did was to disregard the assignment given, disregard everything that had happened, start reading their own work to each other, and say to me when I came back the following week: “We learned. We established a rapport. We read our own poems, which is what we wanted to do”; and they went on believing in this rapport.

Now I’m going back on what I said; this is the other side of it. Because what had happened was that the four or five most articulate people in that room had established rapport with each other, but the people who were silent were not yet known, were not known in any way to each other. And these disclosures went on and on as they went on reading. And as they went further they came to an end of wanting their own work read and they brought in William Carlos Williams, they brought in Ezra Pound, they brought in the Russian poets, they brought in each what he had been reading, and the past came in with that vibration which is memory in a curious way, and which enters the presence with its resonance.15

A matter that comes to us in relation to poetry, certainly in relation to everything that hangs over and in the imagination of the people we know at this time, a time of war, is a matter of powerlessness—the powerlessness of the poet, the powerlessness of speaking about what seems to us the actual nature of the war and what it is doing to our people. The powerlessness is probably a constant. It has a power within it, and that, I think, is related to the kind of poetry we are talking about. I speak of a raining hour, a raining night, but there is that rain, too, and we know what that is, and we know what is happening to the people we speak to.16 And we see it in the people who, whatever their attitude about the war now, declare for their own imagination what is happening in their own lives. And it seems to me if that were taken fully into our selves, taken into action, it might be the end of all mechanism and mechanistic thinking.17 I think of all the people I speak to who say: “Why, yes, it was a mistake from the beginning, but what can be done now?”

One thinks of what powerlessness is and the powerlessness of poetry. It seems to me there is a power at the center of all of this—whatever people’s opinions may be here—and that this power is different in nature from the powers we are taught in many places, the powers that are spoken about, for example, in broadcasting and in the press—the enormous heavy, rather dead powers over us at this time. And that within that there is a power as small, perhaps, as powerless, perhaps, as the power of the infant; and that newborn, the infant, has been spoken of classically as powerlessness. “Infant” is given us as a weak word. I don’t think it is a weak word. I think it contains enormous strength—not only a strength of desire which is evident in the newborn, but this power, which is like the power of poetry, the power to evoke. What does the newborn evoke? What does that crying which is so irritating to so many people? What is that irritation? What power is in it?

I think of a passage from Jonathan Hanaghan, in a book called Society, Evolution, and Revelation, who quotes Fenichel as saying: “The human infant is born more helpless than other mammals. He cannot live if he is not cared for.”18 Hanaghan goes on to say:

[. . .]

The helpless cry of a human baby is not weak and ineffective and archaic. It is the most profound and powerful force in nature. [. . .] It is an utter cry for help and protection, a call first answered by the nipple’s tingle to give mother’s milk and by overflowing mother- and father-love passing into the infant spirit.

[. . .] And his self-preservation cry has created the beloved human community on earth, a prefiguring of the divine City of God on earth for it is to be especially noted that the infant has achieved self-preservation by self-abandonment to the answering beloved parents. Further, the infant’s self-preservation instinct has served his sexual instinct. His libido has been drawn forth from its narcissistic commitment.19

And I offer to you this as dealing with powerlessness, the powerlessness that has the power to evoke; and that is, I think, the weakness and strength of the art of poetry which is taken as so small a thing with so small an audience. We know the audience is small but we know the people come to it out of some necessity, and that this necessity draws the meaning deep into their lives. I do not compare it actually with the infant cry, about which I believe has the strength that Hanaghan is talking, but I think in all of these kinds of powerlessness that we know in life around us now, and that is deep in the imagination of this time so heavily assaulted with the description of the machine as human, with the power, and the seductive heavy power of these things, each in ourselves.

I wake very slowly in the morning, and this is why I think I do it: I think I am a very violent woman, and I think that every morning I try to be non-violent one day more.20 It’s rather like Alcoholics Anonymous saying, “Just one day more.”

And I think this thing of trying to be as human as one can be, making oneself aware daily, all the time, of the real commitment to each other, to the resonance in the world, to the world we breathe.

I think of what Bruno said—and Giordano Bruno comes very much into this work I am doing now—and particularly a late poem of his just before he was caught by going back to Venice and the Inquisition, a wonderful poem, read very little. It’s very hard to come by. It is called De immenso, and it has marvelous things all through it.21 I think of one line—and your people here will know seventeenth-century Latin much better than I will ever do. (It is one of the things I fall flat on my face about every three minutes!) But the line says: “Est animal sanctum, sacrum et venerabile, mundus.” And I think it means that the world is a living creature, an animal in the deep sense (seventeenth-century Latin)—sacred, holy, to be loved. And I think that these unifying things, and the security—the actual security that comes from dealing with them and dealing with them in change—as one goes through a poem and it changes, that this has something to do with human security, swimming in the world. And I think in everything I do of that poem of the newborn.22

You have heard a definition of the Humanities before. I thought of Jews and the Jewish people as not perhaps a thing you can say anything about, in a way, and I have been startled by something that has happened, not to me but to a poem of mine, this month. There’s been a revision, a new edition of the Jewish Prayer Book which was just published in London and which has just reached me. And they have used a sonnet of mine in this Prayer Book, and it is so strange to see this, you know, unsigned, assimilated, absorbed into the body of poetry, in a way. And it is what one hopes for in general for the best of anything one can do—that it simply be taken into the body of poetry.23

A great deal of the form, of the nature of form that I have spoken about, is not a static form, not form as we have sometimes heard about it, but form that casts forward, too, formed in terms of our lifetimes, that is, the kind of form that forms us for the next phase of our lives. We know it perfectly well in the formation of our own bodies, in the embryo forming not for childlife but for mature grown life.24

In this kind of form we take to ourselves every means possible. In the attempt of the young now to be finished with the hypocrisies of the grown, you can see everywhere the attempt to find different means of getting at the truth, true experience, whether it is classic means, drunkenness, drugs, art forms that break the forms—all the ways of doing it.25 And I think again and again these days of what to me is a central poem in our history of taking the means and letting go the means. It is a poem that I have never heard spoken of in this way or taught in this way. It is a poem that we all read for the first time in high school, that we all read again in college. It is by Keats. It is the “Ode to a Nightingale.”26 And I suggest this poem as something that is so deep in the present that it can be gone to again in a different way.

Again the title places the entire thing. Nightingale is a very hard word to use. “Nightingale” here is a bird that is named once and never again.27 He is called “bird” after this in the poem—and this the poem of the means, by a young man who knows all the means (he is a medical student), it begins with the drugging sensation, “as though of hemlock I had drunk.” And what is it, what does he give us as that? Is it happiness, is it the ecstasy itself? No, it is the very beginning, and he gives it to us as identification, of “being too happy in thine happiness.”

This is very curious. What is that to be “too happy”? People do not talk in that way now. But he gives it to us right in the beginning. (I’m referring to this poem assuming we all know it well.) This is really in the tradition. It can be spoken about almost, but not quite, as the main thing, as the main thing that we refer to each other. There is a play in New York called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.28 And it’s perfectly easy in that to assume all the action of the play of Hamlet going on in the back of the play, with the young, with the students Rosen-crantz and Guildenstern wishing that life would be coherent, wishing that life would not be just these little episodes, and we being able to feel all of Hamlet going on behind the scenes.

I give you the Keats poem in the same way. But go back and look at it, because after “dull opiate” is wine; after drugs it is wine, not strong wine here but wine, and wine mixed with water, with Hippocrene, with water from the spring of the muses.29 And from that, and each time taking it fully and letting go, that is what makes the stanza in the poem, taking the drugs, and the misery of “Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.”

And if you ask people: “Where is that? Where do men sit and hear each other groan?”, you will get several answers from your friends. But always among these answers will come hospital. That is where men sit and hear each other groan. And that is what Keats knew very well, and he knew the death of his brother besides, and he knew the death of his mother. The young poet, and after that it is poetry itself that he takes hold of for the most experience, for the ecstasy, and lets go of it. I read it once in California, and I came to the line: “Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,” and I said, “You know what pards are?” And they looked at me, very California, very affectionate, very kind, and said, “Oh, yes, it’s a western term. It means partners!”30

“But on the viewless wings of Poesy”—and this is the young poet, the most intense poet—we have no more intense, we have no more wonderful—and letting go of poetry and the coming to the senses, to the selves, to the verifiable facts of sense and crossing them out this way, saying, “I cannot see what flowers are at my feet”; and then giving us the flowers, not through sight but through smell, holding to the senses, holding to the keen verifiable senses. You can go and verify these things. This is not the unverifiable fact.

But he is the young realist. He is not the romantic poet they will give you, “half in love with easeful Death, as the romantic cry, as meaning in love with easeful Death.”31 But it is not that. This is the young poet of saying actually: “But here there is no light,” giving us the truth and giving it to us in monosyllables, which the fashion of his time said were not possible in poetry.32 “But here there is no light,” and he broke it again in one of the famous lines you had in school: “But where the dead leaf fell there did it rest.”33 “But here there is no light,” and giving us everything in the dark—everything that we feel and smell and hear; and everything that is then echoed through time, in a marvelous stanza which gives us three kinds of time, three kinds of history: king and clown, which is actual historic time; and Ruth amid “the alien corn,” which is Bible time, the time of parable, the inner time of dream and parable; and then the enchanted time and the word “forlorn.”34 And this is the young romantic poet, and a word the people don’t dare use at this point. Where have you heard “forlorn”? But he says “forlorn” and “forlorn” is the bell, and “forlorn” is the Zen stroke on the head. And what does it do? It calls him back to what? He says: “to my sole self.”35

And it is at this point that he lets go of the bird. Look at the poem. He lets go of all the means. The bird is “easeful summer.” The bird is “deep song.”36 The bird is his identification as a poet; and he lets go last of this; coming to the great question—and I ask it of you, and ask it of each other: “Do I wake or sleep?” That is the question that is asked when you get to the unverifiable fact.

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?37

I would like to ask you one by one. The answerers come up almost always with one answer: “Wake.” And it seems to me that is the answer one gets to, that one reaches when the verifiable fact and the unverifiable fact come together. That is the second question. Number One was, “How many of you have ever written a poem?”, and number Two is, “Do I wake or sleep?”

This brings us to the present as the “Ode to a Nightingale” brings us to the present moment, in which possibility is established again and the making of a relation with the unknown—a relation in which one can live, knowing the unknown to be a constant, not having to have the certainty again that we have been taught in many ways. I think of a story of William James, speaking in Boston and asking for questions at the end. A lady asked, “What does the world rest on?”

And he said, “I don’t know. What does the world rest on?”

She said, “A rock.”

He got interested and said, “What does that rock rest on?”

And she said, very straight-necked: “Another rock.”

And he said, “And that rock, what does it rest on?”

And the lady said, “Young man, let me make myself clear. It’s rocks, all the way!”38

That is the secure and the insecure. But at the depth, when one goes to the depths of the rhythms of experience, these recurrences, the discovery of form, that is true each for ourselves, and a relation with the unknown which can change and still be a constant. Then we come to a very curious depth in life, and we find at this depth that—I’ll do it in terms of poetry—that the poems that have been obscure, the poems that have been shallow, the poems that have not been possible to share with, however much opening we give them, however much we bring to them—these poems, whether we write them or read them, yield to poems at a further depth at which, curiously, all things can be shared. And there the things one hesitates to show, one thinks of as private (I think of many things I have written that I have not wanted to show at the beginning, poems other people have seemed most to want)—and I think of them in the art that I come to.39

(The Clark Lecture, 1968)