Poetry and the Self

The notion of self is vitally central to conceptions of poetry. Poems are commonly described as self-expression — an expression of feeling (being an energy inherent to the self). And behind every poem, we identify an individual, the poet. Lyric poems may make a specific exhibition of, and indeed privilege, the life of the self.  

Yet the notion itself remains highly ambiguous, extensively variable. Everyone in love or who has been in love knows how porous the self is, how impossible it is to know its outer, confining limits. When the briefest look between lovers can communicate worlds of shared meaning, or a thought arises simultaneously in both, where does one set the contours, the parameters, of individuality? Do people in love have bounds?

Again, individuality is both fixture and process. Is a child truly an individual? At what point does the individual come into existence? The questions are of immense parental, social, legal, and ethical significance. The answers alter and are at variance.

We reasonably take adulthood as knowable individuality. Yet the knowable self, the adult individual, is engaged in areas of constant undoing and reconstruction. We know how the outlines and interiority of the individual may shift under personal, social and ideological pressures and magnetisms. Tastes alter, interests change, the admired author pales. A few friendships remain, others loosen. At greater depth, the father may wish to be female. Still deeper, the torturer may be a family man.

This said, our period of Western culture is characterized among other things by strident assertion of the primacy, the inarguable integrity, of the self — an assertion likely part of the inheritance and extension of Romanticism. In this sentiment, truth belongs to every individual’s definition of the self. The person’s lived experience and “individual truth” defines the world, and it may even be expected to define others’ worlds.  

As the self asserts its chosen tight identity, so it finds or experiences new affronts (from  micro-aggression to the termed danger or violence in question or dissent), but so too do further complexities come into focus. Doctrinaire concern with group identity equally attends and diminishes the strongly asserted self. Enigmas of meaning in gender in the self both drive and recoil from the re-sculpting of individual (child? adult?) physicality.

In any inquiring observation, the self exists in a Gordian knot of internal and external obviousness and imperspicuity, theory and practice, assertion and contradiction. Said Rimbaud, “Je est un autre” (I is another).

The term poetry shares these qualities of ambiguity and variability. The term itself (the notion of self, again, is inescapable) is an abstraction, a summary used to make comprehensible a thronged, multitudinous art. It is an umbrella opened above an undefined world of individual poems. The notion of individuality meets us again.

What then is a poem?  A poem is an experience made with words, as dance is an experience made with movement, music an experience made with sound, sculpture an experience made with materiality, a painting an experience made with marks on surfaces. The nature of the experience in a poem is as limitless or as limited as human possibility, but – and crucially – it is as limitless or as limited as the existence and functionality of words.

There are, however, certain experiences integral to works of art: aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, religious. Experiences that are thus, in total, social, cultural and, in the specific, individual. All such experiences in works of art rest on the allusive, on conundrum, mysteries of incertitude, the actual in the indeterminate, the indeterminate in the actual. The immanent meets or appears to meet the transcendent, being is or appears to be altered in ways (and in a medium) that we find difficult if not impossible to define.

Delacroix wrote, “a painting is a place where souls congregate.” Every word in this assertion is both exact and impossibly indefinite. May the description not be true of a poem? Works that, in Keats’s phrase, have “a palpable design upon us” exclude themselves from this essential, challenging yet inviting, apprehension.

A poem provides this experience via techniques of composition such as rhythmical linearity and heightened attention to available riches of vocabulary, grammar, articulation and expression: all this resting on the commonality of words. Where in these is the self? Words are not personal items. We inherit them, learn, borrow, use and discard them, bequeath them to others. Meanings emerge and decline, are subverted and rejuvenated. In such multivarious existence, words parallel the self. They are in a constant state of realized and unrealized potentiality, their reach and application being enforced, reinforced, countered or denied in every use of them.

It is just this uncertainty that is most challenging to those unwilling to countenance the complexities of being, whether in a word or in the self. Where selfhood is promoted at an extreme of pitch, attempts to control language are implacable, unforgiving, tyrannous.  Poetry, as an element of culture, suffers. It hardens, is constrained, beaten into message, argument, political instinct, apologetics, polemic. Words, we know, can be treated as cobbles, to be gouged out of life and thrown.  

Yet words, though so used, escape the fist. They elide into liberty, that of their nature. They share the indiscipline, the license, the characteristic imprecision of the so-called, yet ill-defined, individual. It is no accidental relationship. The word and the human are inseparably conjoined. In ancient Greek thought, to be human is to be “a language animal.” We and words are one. Their lives, their infancy, maturity and death (and the reverse and muddle of all these together) depend on our use of them, as we on them. As massively ambiguous and variable as they are, they depend on the equally massive ambiguity and variability in ourselves.

And these are the constituents of poetry. Words are its material, its pigments, its things. (This surely is the only fertile truth in the often quoted “no ideas but in things” from the poem of William Carlos Williams. This otherwise is one of the central statements of twentieth century materialism, the organizing principle of every advertising agency, of all consumerism.)

A certain phrase or combination of words, or certain words on their own (even, as in the preserved beginnings of a particular poem of W.B. Yeats, certain nascent participles, reverberant fractions of words), provide the start of a poem. Words at this moment are unengaged from daily use. They embody every possibility that the individual poet can ascertain and hold. They are both worn with use and fresh to new possibility. Historic meaning and contemporary slang circle each other. Listening to these with or via the self, the poet is not listening to the usual flow of semi-conscious, semi-articulate being, but acting as an unstable intermediary between words and the created experience to be made with these.

So where does the poet draw on and contribute individual internal life? As the intermediary between certain words and the as-yet unrevealed whole, the poet draws on ambiguously individual resources of language knowledge and fluency, items of ambiguously personal, social and cultural experience, certain tendencies of ambiguously individual character, and the ambiguities of individual thought and feeling, perception and rumination, in the peculiar intensities of these available to the poet. (“I hate and love,” wrote Catullus. And why? “I don’t know.”)   

The conjoined fixity and ambiguity highlighted in these resources, in the individual, in words themselves, is the decisive point. The potential for poetic creation and shared response rests on the co-existence of exactitude and inexactness. (Science itself – that word again – similarly human, similarly straddles the absolutes of certainty and doubt.)

The consideration is crucial. In one direction, that of fundamental irreducibility to certainty of meaning, there is mysticism. In the other, the fixed singularity of a theorem, a clannish chant or polemic position. Poetic existence and communication – the experience made with words – require simultaneous, inseparable, but managed, fixity and fluidity. An agreed certainty and a necessary instability. The protean, variegated quality – as inherently essential to words as to the individual – is of intrinsic necessity to the poem.

Yet here we meet the human desire for the stable, the certain. As in the self, so too in the work of art. And there is, in the fixed actuality of each poem, in every work of art, a certain arresting of possibility. The thing exists in its own finality, in a certain number and form of words, a certain use of colour and gesture in paint, etc.

In itself, every poem, every work of art, provides a shaped or momentary security and arrest to being and meaning, the out-there and the within, self and world, the immanent and the transcendent. This is the aesthetic, ethical, philosophical and religious effort.

It may be that particular poems, particular works of art, are determined to demonstrate the resolution of complexity, the overcoming of ambiguity. Ultimate success is impossibility. The thing we are and the tools we have are inadequate. Measured against this attempt, every poem represents an achievement that is also inevitably utter failure. It cannot be otherwise. The maker, the tools, the words, the medium, are insufficient.

It is the effort to deny this mobile, unfixable complexity, that demonstrates the impossibility of doing so. The attempt brings into focus what is unfixable. The greater the attempt to fix, to assert, the truth of the self, the greater the exhibition of the self’s ultimate unknowability. As in the self, so too in the poem.

These complexities may be stayed in certain crucial engagements, at pitches of energy (as in faith), at moments of surrender (as in a vow), in self-forgetting (as in love), and at certain intensities of reading and response (as in alert poetic apprehension). These are the points at which freedom and constraint, motion and stability, precision and obscurity, touch.

Do the greatest works of art, the greatest of poems, most demonstrate the ultimately ungraspable complexity of being?  Do they most invite such exploration?        

The words of the poem lie on the page: certain, immovable, obvious. Take what may be the most well-known line of poetry in English: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” It is as plain as being asked what size of coffee. Read it again. Words flicker in and out of precise, fixed denotation, are as lit matches at risk of going out.  

The poetic word shifts between something and nothing, nothing and something. Seeing this, feeling this, is to face the raw fact of being, any being, all being.  It is in the urgency of knowing this raw fact – that something can be nothing, and nothing become something, that being rests simultaneously on something and on nothing – that we fully face the poetic words, the worth of a poem, the nature of our selves, the condition of living.

Read it once more. Read the whole sonnet. Focus on the struck and wavering matchheads, their bright and fragile light. Presentation and response oscillate, tangle. What “summer’s day?” One out there? Imagined? Which? A kind of summary of summer’s days? But that’s abstraction, not a summer’s day. Will that do? A generalization? Made of what? Day-dreams? But a summer’s day is real. One long gone? What use is that? A perfect summer’s day? What on earth would that be? To you, to me, to another? One to come? A summer’s day that is always just about to be? But that can come into being right now? Is that the answer?

All is both substantial and abstract, concise and expansive, immediate and remote, fixed and fluid. Reading with the most fervent of intelligence, nakedly open-hearted, you are your own self and that of another, an individual and a multitude, one with the given world and the self-created, one with a moment and an eternity. Ambiguity and exactitude change places, merge, unite, cancel each other. The poetry and the self are one.

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