There is a story about a friendly debate between Kenneth Burke and Harold Bloom where Burke explained that the question he always asked about any literary work was “What was the writer trying to do for himself or herself as a person?” Bloom replied that the question should be modified to “What was the writer trying to do for himself or herself as a writer?” This presents an interesting difference of imagining the literary process. For Burke, the writer may have been trying to do something personally without ever knowing it or realizing its full intent. Bloom’s position on the other hand accepts that the writer may be simply trying to write a book, or a book that engages with a subject or tradition, but that leads us as readers to ask what doing something as a writer might mean to that person who is the writer. In other words, why write the book? These questions are not really opposed to one another; they go to the unknown qualities we encounter in the process of writing. They make us ask another question, “Do we know what we’re doing when we write?”
Plato’s replied to that question differently for poets than for philosophers. Philosophers were reasoning their way toward reality and wisdom, but poets were merely the unconscious vehicles of inspiration. However, Plato’s distinction misses quite a bit. We do not reason in a vacuous world. We work, even in reasoning, with understanding based on perceptions. Our minds are rich with all that is going on outside of them, or at least with what they take as going on outside of them. Poets are amazing creatures because of the degree to which they acknowledge and accept being the vehicles not just of a reasoning process, even one based on perception, but of forces they don’t entirely understand.
A poet may feel very strongly about a political cause and about the people who suffer because that cause has yet to prevail, but if the poet writes a poem to express that feeling and those sympathies, it’s likely to be a poem that will not move other people unless the above-mentioned chthonic forces are at work. We have all read well-intentioned poems written by ethical, kind people that lack this spark. After reading a few, we generally try to avoid them wherever possible. So, what is the spark? There isn’t a definitive answer. We only know some of the conditions that can bring it about. The most straightforward is an interior conflict. When we have mixed feelings about a situation or a cause, we can write more honestly about it, and readers tend to respond favorably to that honesty. Yeats’ “Easter, 1916” is a great poem of interior conflict. He is moved by the Quixotic courage of the rebels who attacked the Dublin post office, but he knows that it may be pointless sacrifice and that England may be ready to offer Ireland home rule. He also knows how such sacrifice can “make a stone of the heart.” These feelings do not cancel each other out. Rather, they are transcended by his understanding that “a terrible beauty is born.”
The poet may also write a good poem by using the language tools of poetry to create an experience of an emotion that feels true to the reader. The two barriers to overcome here are cliché and sentimentality. Cliché is the use of words worn down from repetition. Politicians love these phrases because people have heard them so often they accept them as true, without thinking about them. This can be avoided by using new expressions that reflect the poet’s own thoughts, not the thoughts of dead elders or living celebrities. Sentimentality is the assumption that if the poet feels an emotion in writing the poem, then the reader must feel it as well. It seeks to coerce the reader into an emotion and doesn’t acknowledge conflicting feelings or that the reader’s world may be different from the poet’s.
The poet begins to write a poem because . . . we don’t know why. Perhaps the first lines of the poem arrived in a dream, and when the poet woke up, she rushed to write them down and continue the poem. Perhaps the poet sat down with a blank sheet of wood-pulp paper or a blank digital screen in front of her, a white nothingness, and for an unknown reason a memory surfaced. She was walking alone at night along a medieval street in a European village. The poem follows her like a shadow cast by a streetlamp. She shapes words to express this vision and writes more to give it meaning, to convey to a reader what the cobblestones felt like under the soles of her new shoes and how her footsteps seemed to intrude, to come from somewhere outside of this world. A little while later, she realizes she has a poem. She is not sure what parts of herself went into it, what experiences of her own, and what parts of others’ experiences. She may not be sure of what she was trying to articulate. What she knows, intuitively, is that the poem has value. It feels like a true experience that readers can assimilate, that can become their own experience. The poem may, for example, express a feeling of aloneness that has always been common to human beings but that when we try to get it into words, we find ourselves left with just a handful of abstractions, useless as pebbles. What the poet has given her readers succeeds where those abstractions fail. The reader takes on her experience of aloneness as a reality that they can share and may make them feel less alone or make them value that aloneness.
Plato would say this poet was possessed by a god and that this private experience transmuted into words was a form of madness. The poet, though, does not perceive it as madness but as something larger than herself, something that she has brought into being but that feels to her as if it were always here waiting to be discovered. Whether she should be allowed into the city ruled by philosophy is beside the point. She is already a citizen of a larger, more tolerant city.
This leads us to ask the Burkean question, “What are we doing for ourselves when we read poems?” Or, perhaps we’ve already answered that question. We share the experiences that make a difference to people who are better able to articulate those experiences than we are. Poets are not bound to a logical reasoning process. Poems can proceed by association and move at the speed of perception. Plato assumed that the philosopher was reasoning toward a consistent, perfect world, a world of ideals. The movement of words and emotions in a poem has little to do with reasoning, although reasoning is often incorporated into the poem. A sonnet may turn at its volta and question, painfully, the basis of the feeling that brought it into existence. The dialectic of a poem, though, is not the dialectic of philosophy. Plato would declare that the reality of a poem is the imitation in words of a feeling or perception that is itself an imitation of an ideal form. Poetry rejects this reasoning, not because it is wrong on its own terms but because it does not reflect the experience of living in the world. The dialectic of poetry is the conversation going on within the poet and within the poem. It appears out of those areas of the self we can align ourselves with but not control. We can make the conditions right for poetry. The cup of coffee can wait next to the writing pad or laptop. The window can be open slightly so that we can hear a few birds and cars passing on the street. But, we cannot reason our way into the poem, and we can’t force our way in either.
What then is the poet doing for herself when she writes? To Professor Bloom, we would reply that she is establishing a world of her own making, much like the singer in “The Idea of Order at Key West.” And, like Wallace Stevens seeing the lights of the harbor, we receive her world as part of our own. This is ultimately not so different from the answer to Burke’s question as to what the writer is doing for herself as a person. She is affirming her membership in a community that reaches back to the beginning of poetry and forward to whatever comes next. As a human being she will cease to exist. Her poems, though, may become the lives of others.