Dana Wilde

The Muse and the Contemporary Classic

In his bizarre book The White Goddess, Robert Graves explains in no uncertain terms that "a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse" and is recognizable by the effect described by A.E. Housman: a true poem "makes the hairs of one's chin bristle if one repeats it silently while shaving." Graves assigns the authenticity of the invocation to the poem's faithfulness to the "single poetic theme of life and death" (The White Goddess, p. 24). For Graves language carries a kind of magical property which comes in force when certain imagery associated with the theme is effectively conveyed.

Graves says quite specifically that true poetry, as well its creation, is of a supernatural order. In the age of psychology, neutrinos and electron microscopes, the notion of a "supernatural" seems at furthest, ridiculous, and at nearest, a matter of semantics. With regard to poetry, merely antique. We understand, for example, that emotions result from spurts of chemicals in glands, and that external events such as the return of a loved one or a striking rhythm or image in a group of words induce spurts.

It follows from this logic that groups of words can be constructed to induce different kinds and qualities of spurts. Beginning with the rational poetics of Edgar Allan Poe, and travelling forward through Baudelaire, Mallarm6, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot (Pound's poetry is a "well-oiled fire engine") into the 1980s and 90s. This mechanistic approach to writing poems has gained great favor. An American incarnation is Stephen Dobyns. whose poems seem particularly representative because, in an age of tightly made, poems, his poems are exceptionally tightly-made. The notion that there is a literal Muse has disappeared, or been replaced by the notion that the "Muse" is a metaphor for some poorly understood process occurring deep in the human psyche.

The word "psyche," perhaps, is key to understanding our current notions of how poetry operates. In a brief lecture Dobyns referred to a poem, for example, as "a verbal box which conveys feeling." This suggests that the effect of poetry is almost mechanical: a poet builds a box out of words, and the box conveys something to or affects a reader. Dobyns went on to say that the reader's task is to re-create the emotion out of the poem, and this means that a poem is about neither itself nor its subject, but about the reader him or her self. In other words the reader subtly identifies his or her own possible responses in an enclosed range of verbal utterances, and creates emotional meaning out of that identification. The poem is like an object, or a machine, or the blow of a fist, which the reader perceives and reacts to and turns into an emblem or expression of his or her own psyche.

The poet in this situation is a crafter of boxes. And Dobyns, like most contemporary poets, emphasizes the care which must be taken in writing poetry, like a computer chip technician or a stitcher; it's necessary to revise a great deal in order to be as precise as possible. In his talk he defined revision as the process of "becoming conscious of intuition." In other words, the poet carefully watches the intuitive ideas, emotions and images arising from the deeper parts of the psyche, and focuses on them, and painstakingly builds groups of words which convey those particular psychological figures, after the fashion of Poe or Joyce.

Any number of devices can be helpful in the construction of such poetry, not the least of which are the sonic and syntactic properties of language, as well as the possibilities for comparison. In Dobyns' poetry all of these elements are very tightly and skillfully controlled. Almost any passage from any poem can illustrate the care he takes with language. "How Sweet and Proper It Is" begins:

Color of silver, surrounded by barbed wire, 
the tower rises from the hill like a thumb 
from a fist.
                    (Heat Death, p. 6)

The opening phrase "Color of silver" disturbs our conventional expectations, because there is as yet no word representing something that can be silver, either literally or syntactically. It is just a phrase, floating as disconnected to anything as the color it invokes. But the next phrase, "surrounded by barbed wire," cleverly mitigates this disturbance by enforcing it: now two phrases fraternally modify no other word or phrase. We are now in a state of meaningful uncertainty but syntactic comfort. This state flowers beautifully when we drop our eyes to the next line and find the word "tower," along with the gratification of encountering that which has been being modified in the first line. Carefully and precisely, the tower is instantly active: it "rises," and we are placed with great economy, and unique utterance, in a dramatic situation typical of Dobyns' poetry. The precision of these lines is no accident, and we feel throughout all of Heat Death that we are in the presence of a writer who has virtually complete control of words and their relationships to each other.

This sense of control is modified and deliberately undermined by poetry's various possibilities for comparison. While the words of Dobyns' box enclose a particular emotion, the figures of the poem, particularly its similes, are meant to release the emotion to the reader's recreational processes. In the above example, "the tower rises fromthe hill like athumb/ from a fist." The strangeness of this simile is compelling, and the words "thumb" and "fist" evoke a sense of knotted force that prefigures a mildly bruising event a few lines later. This simile is so unusual that it undercuts the control of the language; we are in the presence of great control of words, but also of great uncertainty of imagery, as if the world of the poem is itself as uncertain as our initial response to the phrase "Color of silver."

Dobyns broadens this tendency toward unusual individual similes to create unusual, often dreamlike imagery in general. "How Sweet and Proper It Is," for example, is an inconclusive dream-naffative about a man climbing a tower, encountering a woman, and failing to ask himself what Freudian meaning is inherent in these events; the poem then dissolves to several other precisely-described but vaguely-real, dreamlike figures. Dream sequences like this are characteristic of Dobyns' poetry. Lifelike descriptions of objects and events of everyday life frequently are revealed to be as shifty as dreams: "Lying beside you, I ease my cousin's coffin/ through the chapel door" explains the speaker in the last section of "The Wine Glass," ameditation on his drowned cousin. The imagery is disturbing while its verbal box is precise.

In all these poems we are in the vicinity of a sort of poetic psychological scrutiny. The events of dreams can be interpreted psychologically for clues about activity in the unconscious; Dobyns' poems are the expression of this activity and interpretation. Poems, in words from his lecture, "chart the world in which [they are] being written." That world is partly real and partly fantastic, and the prevalent dream imagery suggests that the inner psyche is a world of its own, where almost anything can happen, as in a dream or fairy tale.

The literal events in several poems from Heat Death give a sense of Dobyns' feel for the fantastic psychological nature of poetic activity. In the first p@ of "The Poem As Actor In Three Parts For Michael Ryan," a poem sits on a bench reading a book, oblivious to its audience. In the second part, an inflatable doll made of three poems by W.B. Yeats explodes and sends Michael Ryan sailing happily out a window. In the third part, a poem goes harpooning on the Bering Sea for audiences.

In another poem, "Pablo Neruda," the speaker of the poem, out walking with his creative writing class, spots Neruda (the influential Chilean poet who died in 1973) on a streetcomer. The speaker begins to cannibalize Neruda piece by piece, and his students follow his example. Finally the speaker is disgusted by the students' subsequent desire to be eaten themselves, though in the end revealing that his goal, too, is to be cannibalized. We understand from this that something is seriously amiss in the motives of some poets.

"Song of thewrong Response" addresses a reader who has encountered a poem shadow boxing in the street and has called the police after the poem punched him (or her) in the chest. The speaker explains to the reader that "Tbis, I say, is a poem about love and/the difficulties of friendship," and concludes by admonishing the reader that he or she will continue to remember the incident with the shadowboxing poem yet continue to act afraid. The wrong response to poetry, presumably, is to fear it.

In all these poems the dreamlike quality of the events and characters is striking. Clearly their images are intended to represent activities of the psyche with respect to the reading and writing of poetry. Similes, which in other poems broaden into dreams, in these poems become almost allegorical figures for attitudes, emotional responses, and possible misconceptions about poetry. Although the imagery is dreamlike, the tightly controlled language of every poem gives the sense that the individual figures and events are themselves under tight control, despite their fantastic appearance. The poet seizes his own dreams and imagined figures, and utilizes them with great care and precision as comparisons to carefully scrutinized emotions and sensibilities.

This is a way of saying that Stephen Dobyns has learned the lessons of Poe and Mallarm6 exceptionally well. He has a workmanlike appreciation and understanding of the technical difficulties of language and the comparative possibilities of imagery. But despite careful similes, dream figures, close attention to structures of rhythm, sound and syntax, this poetry does not rise above its contemporaries; in fact it is more like a model of its kind than masterwork of its kind. Something is missing. The hair does not bristle.

The thing missing in Dobyns is also missing in most if not all American poetry of the last fifty years: a hair-raising sense of palpable commerce with the supernatural. Graves explains this kind of poetry, with which Dobyns has a classical affiliation:

 Despite the deep sensory satisfaction to
 be derived from Classical poetry, it
 never makes the hair rise and the heart
 leap, except where it fails to maintain
 decorous composure; and this is because
 of the difference between the attitudes
 of the Classical poet, and of the true
 poet, to the White Goddess ... The
 Classical poet, however gifted and
 industrious, fails to pass the test
 because he claims to be the Goddess's
 master - she is his mistress only in the
 derogatory sense of one who lives in
 coquettish ease under his protection. 
 Sometimes, indeed, he is her bawdmaster:
 he attempts to heighten the appeal of his
 lines by studding them with 'beauties'
 borrowed from true poems.  In Classical
 Arabic poetry there is a device known as
 'kindling' in which the poet induces the
 poetic atmosphere with a luscious prologue
 about groves, streams and nightingales,
 and then quickly, before it disperses,
 turns to the real business at hand - a
 flattering account, say, of the courage,
 piety and magnanimity of his patron or
 sage reflections on the shortness and
 uncertainty of human life.  In Classical
 English poetry the artificial kindling
 process is often protracted to the full
 length of the piece.
                 (The White Goddess, p. 25)

Dobyns always maintains decorous composure, however fantastic his dream imagery seems. The Goddess is kept in coquettish ease by his complete control over line and figure. He "kindles," not by borrowing or utilizing lush pastoral imagery, but by carefully contriving or adapting psychological dream imagery to imitate, rather than evoke, a supernatural quality. In Dobyns' poetry life and death is not "the single poetic theme," but is one possible theme among many. To use a common creative writing locution: he chooses the poem, rather than the poem choosing him.

Dobyns' poems are in other words models of contemporary classical poetry. But although models, they are not "great" poems, or in Graves's bombastic terms, "true poems." But are there any "great@, or "true" contemporary poets'?

In some contemporary evaluative lexicons, the idea of "great poetry" has no meaning; the greatness of a poem is relative to the interests and needs of different readerships. (This idea coincides with Dobyns' assertion that the reader creates the poem.) But on the other hand, there are poems which have profoundly affected nearly all readers, even in translation, for centuries: the Iliad and Odyssey, the Divine Comedy, the poems and dramas of Chaucer and Shakespeare. The common thread of all great poetry is in Graves's terms the force of its treatment of the single theme, and this treatment requires commerce with a Muse or Goddess which gives rise, through words, to a supernatural experience. Whatever we take the "Muse" to be, it is not a process of the brain, nor a metaphor for an activity of the individual psyche. The Muse is something beyond individual personality, whicfi might be the first clue to an acceptable definition of the supernatural.

The Muse's influence cannotbe mimicked or authentically approximated by mastering techniques and forms, which accounts for the lack of hairraising poetry in our time. The superior verbal boxmanship of our contemporary poets, relying as it does on the rational mind and the individual will, is an extreme form of rational classicism. Our poets "craft ' or "shape" poems, the way Stephen Dobyns does, rather than allow themselves to be guided by a Muse, the way Homer explicitly did.

If Graves is even close to being correct, then our disposition toward the supernatural is a serious problem to solve because the writing of poetry is a serious spiritual problem, both for individual poets and readers and for culture at large. Ezra Pound correctly pointed out that "It is essential that great poetry be written, it makes no jot of difference who writes it." This statement concerns the utilitarian notions that humanity's most powerful survival tool is its language, and that poetry is the prime inventor and reinventor of necessary languages. But it also concerns, in Graves's parlance, the theme of life and death that must be treated authentically by both individuals and cultures for all time. Something important is not being said, by Stephen Dobyns and most of his gifted classical contemporaries, about the fate of human souls.

Works Cited

Stephen Dobyns. Heat Death. New York: Atheneum, 1980.

_____.Private lecture given atBinghamtonUniversity, Binghamton, NY, March 1993.

Robert Graves. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of poetic Myth. New York: Faffar, Straus, and Giroux, 1966.

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