Forbidden Water: A Thought on the Nature of Poet

Since the topic of our conference is “nature,” I mean to spill a few loose comments about the nature of the poet, if there is such a uniform and definable thing. I want to start by saying that I’ve always believed in the power and the necessity of myth, and in my thirty years of teaching poetry writing at the college level, I’ve tried to emphasize the role that myth plays in the creative processes of both the individual and the culture. As you might guess, I’m a huge fan of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the writings of these thinkers but only mean to say that few writers have opened up so deeply for my students the workings of the inner life, a life that many of them have been taught to ignore. A great number of works by Jung and Campbell are useful to writers, but for me one little book by Campbell stands out as the most accessible and relevant to the student poet. It’s called An Open Life. It’s not a book of essays, however, or lectures, but a very short little book of interviews conducted by the journalist Michael Toms. At one point in these interviews, Campbell begins to discuss myth and our search for the ever-illusive “meaning of life.” However, he quickly says point-blank that there is no meaning of life, but that there are many different meanings and that each of us must find his or her own (Maher and Briggs 110). In a like manner, I suppose, one might say that there is no one nature of the poet but a great many different natures. Something in me, however, finds that slightly unsatisfying, and what I want to suggest today is the notion that all serious poets share in their natures at least one common denominator. That common characteristic seems to be the quality of being a seeker after significance, a seeker of consequence. This, of course, is an optimistic assessment. There are poets who prefer to see the glass as half-empty, but even these seem to be seekers of a sort, if only seekers who have given up the search, and in this respect I side with the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz who writes in his poem “Against the Poetry of Philip Larkin”:

I learned to live with my despair,And suddenly Philip Larkin’s thereExplaining why all life is hatefulI don’t see why I should be grateful.It’s hard enough to draw a breathWithout his hectoring about nothingness.

(1–6)

Admittedly, in my glass-is-half-full approach to poetry, I have little to go on outside of my own experience as a would-be poet. This is simply to say that I am concerned mainly here with my own attempted practice of poetry, although I have discovered a few touchstones in my reading and in my conversations with fellow writers.

One of my favorite American poets, as you might guess, is Robert Penn Warren. In 1977, the editor and critic Peter Stitt conducted a fascinating interview with Warren. When the topic turned to religion, Warren said, “I am a creature of this world, but I am also a yearner” (243). Though he had no theology, Warren went on to explain, the world seemed to him infused with hidden spiritual significance, and he yearned for verification of this. Poetry was for him a method of exploration, a method of search. One of my favorite Warren poems is that slightly surrealistic poem called “I Am Dreaming of a White Christmas: The Natural History of a Vision.” Most of this long piece is a memory, a dream-vision of Warren’s old “home place” and a description of his dead parents, their living room with its denuded Christmas tree, a vision of the past that leads the reader toward important questions about the nature of identity and time. At the end of the poem, however, Warren gives us a few lines that might be taken...