Poetry and Creativeness: With Notes on the Role of Psychedelic Agents

POETRY AND CREATIVENESS WITH NOTES ON THE ROLE OF PSYCHEDELIC AGENTS ERWIN DI CYAN, Ph.D.* Poetry is, first, an emotional experience. By convention it is also a literary form. Its practitioners fall into poetry as into one of the rites of passage common to the puberty rites among aborigines. While the poet does not whirl like a dervish in his practice ofpoetry, he nonetheless seeks a divine afflatus, an exaltation, or a revelation. Some wish to stimulate the divine afflatus or to sustain its presence longer. Others seek to make it appear in soil hitherto sterile. Through the use ofalcohol, absinthe, opium, and other drugs—and, more recently, psychotropic agents—some have escaped into a psychotic state in order to receive the poetic stimulus. Others have attempted to enter into "other consciousness," to use the words ofWilliam James, or into "other categories," to use Ouspensky's. Much attention has been given to the person ofthe poet in the attempt better to understand what fulmination occurs in him preceding the creation ofa poem, or what precipitates the emotional experience a poem may represent. The study of the lives of the poets goes offat times, however, on a biographical or biological tangent rather than on an exploration of the realm of poetry. Keats may have expressed the difficulty: "A poet is the most unpoetical ofanything in existence because he has no identity— he is continually in, for, and filling some other body—sun, moon, sea." And poetry has been ill-served by many—even by its own devotees. For example, rhyme is one ofpoetry's greatest assets, but rhyme has also done poetry a disservice by creating two anomalous streams. One, poetryrhyme has by inversion become rhyme-poetry, where even execrable verse is called poetry as long as it rhymes; and, two, reaction against enslavement to rhyme has produced literary abortions that emerge limbless and lawless, without beauty or purpose except, perhaps, to shout out their * Address: 22 East 40th Street, New York, New York 10016. 639 liberation from traditional forms. This reaction is not a matter of an abomination ofform alone; many ofthose reformers have nothing to say in the first place. While we espouse the beliefthat poetry is an emotional experience before it is a literary form, we do not believe that contortions for the sake ofan avant-garde form create poetry. It is difficult to give the impression ofincandescence when there is no light. The question ofrhymepoetry is in fact an old one. Thomas Campion (i567-1620) attacked rhyme as ahallmark ofpoetry. Apparently this became a cause célebre, for Samuel Daniel (1562-1619) wrote his "Defence of Ryme" as an apologia for rhyme. That poetry is basically substance rather than a prescribed form is demonstrated in that God-haunted book, the Bible, which has no rhyme or prescribed lines but whose poetic nature is evident even to those who do not regard it as God-inspired. While poetry is born of or can call forth strong emotional reactions, it must nevertheless be carefully and lovingly refined so that the finalproduct will reflect its poetic quality. What poetry is not: an oracular expression that cannot be altered once it has been verbalized. It is not commonly an intellectual exercise, but it can be likened to music through its cadence or rhythm. Beauty of language and lofty thoughts are, by and large, subjective notions; hence, what may appear to be beautiful and lofty to one may not appear so to others. People seek various qualities in poetry. For some it must have sheer, simple, unalloyed beauty in expression; for others it must carry a message; for still others it must be laden with emotion. Also, there are those who demand form irrespective of substance and others who seek substance and are only mildly concerned with form. Each of these may be right, in part, in what is regarded as poetry. But whether purpose, image, or message is considered the hallmark of poetry, poetry must have, above all, a rhythm, a cadence. This rhythm, or cadence, has a powerful influence on the emotions which poetry elicits. A musical analogy here is the march, to the strong rhythm ofwhich the hearer...