Pound vs. Eliot

[jdeirmend]

If, by "knowing" the author through her work you are increasing your understanding we are left with 2 options:

1. The author deliberately included this requirement suggesting poor writing and egocetricism.

2. The author accidentally included it suggesting poor writing through lack of control.

Ohhhhh please.

I guess the palpable poet's anxiety in Milton's "When I Consider" shows us his terrible lack of control, or that he was an egotist? Maybe both?

It's not even that what you're saying isn't true, in some sense, Milo, that gives me reason for scorn. It's that it is so narrow and unsympathetic a way of looking at things.

But I also think that "suggests" is as strong of a conclusion you can arrive at, and "may suggest" is a more modest and appropriate one. With that in mind, here's a counter-example, where the issue is far, far more complicated than this simple bifurcation you're presenting. Go ahead and read Steppenwolf or Journey to the East or Demian, and tell me that the Nobel Prize winning Hesse was 1) lacking in authorial control or 2) any more egocentric than anyone else. Each of these works were autobiographies of a sort, shot through with the redeeming rays of the imagination, but they all conveyed different stages of life and aspects of the manifold that was the personality of Herman Hesse.

Now, to shift gears briefly: let's grant that every single writer is a narcissist of some sort, as is every single human being, though I think writers are typically worse than your average person. (Let's face it. If we didn't all desire recognition more than your average person who doesn't write, none of us would be doing this).

This would not at all be to say that an individual's desire to stockpile the narcissitic storehouse is the sole motivation for literary writing in general. And yet, to say that it's not a primary one, in each instance, is to paradoxically dehumanize literary writing. We're not writing technical manuals, after all. We are writing things that are meant to be sublime and/or beautiful, and which were meant to be appreciated as such.

Hesse himself struggled with the question of whether or not his imaginative-fictive autobioraphies were really true-to-art, too, and even extensively parodied himself in his novels. And yet, there was something profoundly healthy, as far as I'm concerned, about him doing all of this. As much as there has been something profoundly therapeutic and inspiring about reading his novels, for me.

This is all possible, I'm convinced, because Hesse's own struggle was something he knew how to use as a signpost for truths that transcended poor little old him. He was reflective and committed to the visionary's life, with its terrible lows and indescribably ecstatic highs. And yet, it was only through tracing the contours of his struggle that was able to arrive at these truths. Writing was not only a vehicle for him to accomplish this by. It arguably was the vehicle. "The creations of the poets are more real than the poets themselves," he claimed. This is the same ideal I aspire to in my writing: getting over myself. That I fail, in some predictable way and perhaps in every instance, is only human and to be expected.

You really do seem to expect next to impossible things of the writer, Milo. In a sense, that is good. Not even good, it is excellent, and I can't sing praise enough to it. Here is a man who believes in an ideal! But that ideal can never be achieved, in full, and in time. So although there is a discipline you aspire to that is both rare and admirable, even you cannot avoid letting yourself slip through the cracks in your own writing. What's more, if you didn't, strangely enough, I dare say your writing wouldn't be nearly as good as it is.

Even if the only thing a poem you write conveys is a mood that is somehow universal, if that same mood motivated your writing, you've done what you seem to be saying is a no-no. But that's what a great writer does. He takes his own feelings, experiences, heartbreaks, traumas, ecstasies, and so forth, and lets his imagination play with them, until he has articulated something that anyone with any sense at all can relate to. Maybe he does this by denuding the experience of all the markers that would indicate it as his sole possession. Maybe he does this, on the contrary, by passionately insisting on revealing "his actual self", which is always going to be a farce and a fiction (this is the difference between a whiny confessionalist and a guy like Hesse. The latter was reflective enough to realize that his own thinking about himself was hopelessly lopsided). The best writers, I'm convinced, are simply people who have learned how to alternately and artfully conceal and reveal different aspects of their own selves, their own reflections, their own thoughts and experiences, in writing.

This is why "observe and report" just won't do. That's what a mall cop or an investigative reporter does, and even then, they have their own biases to contend with. But "observe and report" is just a profoundly misleading way to conceive of the work of a literary writer. Writers, after all, feel and think things. Ugly, scary, noble, beautiful, true, false, bad, strange things. Not only that, we feel and think them deeply. And if we are any good, the inner turmoils, the terrible conflicts, the vague and ambiguous, anxious and indecisive fits we fall into - all this heavy lead, this existential manure we carry with is - is alchemically transmuted. It becomes baptised by the imagination, and confirmed by the symbol. Somehow, then, through writing, we learn to dress our own being-towards-death up into splendors, whose brightness shines to where the agonizing inevitability of death can be forgotten.