Sarah 's Bookmarks tagged poetry →  View Popular

Anyone devoted to poetry is likely to have experienced the vertiginous feeling of encountering a poem or a passage or a phrase which by means of originality or compression exceeds what it has hitherto seemed possible to say. Some poets are lucky enough to feel a whole imaginative circuit surge into life without deliberate intent. These are mysterious experiences - but not, surely, otherworldly ones. Craft, alertness, long thought, timing, reading, good fortune - all play their part, and Mystery is what apprentices seek to be trained in.

Where Williams seems to have sought to subordinate ideas (for which read abstractions) to the dramatizing power of a poetry rooted in speech, Rilke moved to abolish the distinction between concrete and abstract by dint of imaginative inclusiveness (which sounds a little like Eliot's myth of the unified sensibility, a gift apparently lost by the time of the English Civil War).

The lyric power of the piece depends on a lifetime of intelligence applied to making poems.

Vocation is hardly a strong enough word for this commitment.

The challenge for critics is to find language which is neither posthumous Mandarin, nor a sealed tunnel of ideological anxiety, nor the fleeting chatter of the times. In the case of Rilke this involves, clearly, a strong sense of the dramatic, of the poem as a process whose gaze is often in large part directed to the future.

Rilke's contention, though, is at bottom wholly serious, and in fact very close to Paterson's: the work of art, the poem, has its own imaginative life. To approach it as merely a version of something that already exists - for example, as a highly decorated or elaborated commonplace - is to lose the chance of contact with it.

Rilke's insistence that poetry is not something other than poetry

Rilke also privileges the interior life, which has a powerful appeal in a time of widespread political exhaustion and despair, when many people fear that the democratic state may either have run its course or be facing extinction at the hands of those elected to sustain it. To some this must seem like an evasion. To others it will be essential to try to take the measure of life in terms subtler than those allowed by the widespread impoverishment of language and argument which seems to accompany the gradual closing of the circle of state control: after all, what are we claiming to be civilized about? Rilke (who himself seems to have lacked any power of sustained political attention) insists that there is more to life than what we see or directly experience, and that what appears negative - in particular, death itself - needs to be grasped as part of a larger whole.

Rilke, a lapsed Catholic whose religious views were predictably idiosyncratic, is perhaps felt to meet a spiritual need or aspiration without requiring adherence to an explicit dogma.

reactionary evasiveness