Poets are born not made. As Socrates said what they compose they compose not by wisdom, but by nature and because they are inspired. The purest creative moments of their vision have filled literature with magic and pure ecstasy. The ways of the Muse visiting the poets, however, are diverse. Sometimes the Muse flashes at the tender age of thirteen, as was the case with Robert Cowley whose first volume of poems was printed in his thirteenth year. Tennyson and Christina Rossetti’s poetry too came early. Tennyson first appeared in public as a poet at the early age of eighteen .He won Chancellor’s gold medal for his poem on Timbuktu while in university and his first collection of verse POEMS BY TWO BROTHERS having joined in it by his brother Charles was published even before going to university. Sometimes the Muse visits at a mature age. Robert Frost’s first volume of collected poems came out at the age of thirteen nine. It is interesting to see how once having captured these flashes of the vision of Muse they got them down. It was not enough to remain receptive but they had also to be like magnet to attract the visions. Or like dreamcatchers in Ojibwa culture they must act in a way that allows only luscious visions to filter through and come out in art form. They must discover the situation or time when they can experience and respond to the creative urge. Some found themselves easy at a particular time, others with a particular pen or the color of paper. Some poets used the same old coat as if picking up the same coat set their creative mood. Shelly said he always wrote best when in the open air, on a boat, under a tree, or near a pond. Wordsworth’s love for nature is well known. Milton found dawn the best time to compose and dictated in the day sitting in an elbow chair, with his legs resting over its arms. Robert Burns preferred the twilight. Coleridge received his finest inspiration in trances and dreams. A.E.Houseman found afternoons “ the least intellectual portions of my life” and during his walks there would flow into his mind “with sudden and unaccountable emotions, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once.”
The new writers too, surrender themselves to these divine moments sent by the old Muse. Sylvia Plath in her last years was visited by an almost compulsive creative spirit. In an unpublished typescript she says, these poems “were all written about four in the morning, that still, blue almost eternal hour before cockcrow, before the baby’s cry, before the glassy music of the milkman, settling his bottles.”
Novelists like poets also have their own ways to grab the fleeting divine inspiration. Ernest Hemingway once told his biographer, “I like to start early before I can be distracted by peoples and events. I’ve seen every sunrise of my life.” He had another peculiar way:” I like to write standing up … because you have more vitality on your feet. Whoever wants 10 rounds sitting on his ass? I write description in long-hand because that’s hardest for me and you are closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.” It is the wonderful combination of these styles of working that distinguishes him from his innumerable imitators.
Women poets make a very interesting study when it comes to the modus operandi. Their poems reveal not only their joy and difficulty of being a woman poet but also their struggle with matching the perfect time for their visiting dreams of loveliness with housekeeping. Mona Van Duyn, the first woman to be appointed poet laureate of United States Of America, confesses, “ I find my richest hunting ground for poems in that place where the undomesticated feelings, snapping and snarling run around the domestic ring. I find myself most interested in the self –definitions which occur in the home-base from which we go out into work, war, politics and conquest of nature and to which we inevitably and constantly return.” Adrienne Rich tells of a similar experience with her celebrated poem SNAPSHOTS OF A DAUGHTER-IN-LAW which took her two years to complete: “ The poem was jotted in fragments during children’s naps, brief hours in a library, or at 3.00 AM after rising with a wakeful child. I despaired of doing any continuous work at this time.” For Erica Jong cooking, copulating and creating go hand in hand:
“Salt the metaphors. Set them breast up over the vegetables & baste them with the juice in the casserole. Lay a piece of aluminum foil over the poem, cover the casserole & heat it on the top of the stove until you hear the images sizzling. Then place the poem in the middle rack in the pre-heated oven.”
“Once the penis has been introduced into the poem, the poet lets herself down until she is sitting on the muse with her legs outside him. He need not make any motions at all. The poet sits upright & raises & lowers her body rhythmically until the last line is attained…
This method yields exceptionally acute images & is, indeed often recommended as yielding the summit of aesthetic enjoyment.” Not only has she completed the household chores in a creative trance but has also derived utmost aesthetic pleasure no less enjoyable than the sexual pleasure.
Oscillating between dreams and reality, female poetry reveals a difficult blending of harsh reality of their existence with the divine flashes.
There are some poets, however, who are never inspired at all. The poet laureate John
Betjeman’s case is one such. He informs us that the urge to write poetry came when he was seven years of age but without the corresponding talent. Moments of great anxiety and helplessness are reported to have been experienced when poets found the Muse evasive and elusive. In his last days Nobel laureate Hemingway had been terribly depressed about his inability to write .He rang up his biographer “I can’t finish the bloody book. I’ve got it all and I know what I want it to be but I can’t get it down…. I had been at this goddamn work table all day.” Unable to write, his world was shrinking fast and eventually he killed himself. William Blake in a strange poem WILLIAM BOND writes about his life-long conflict between the fairies who represent the free impulses of the creative Muse and the angels of Providence who represent the stifling constraints of the mundane world:
He went to Church in a May morning
Attended by Fairies, one, two and three;
But the Angels of Providence drove them away,
And he return’d home in misery.
Kafka’s dairies tell us of similar pain and self-reproaches at his inability to write as freely as he wished.“ Only occasionally did he manage to write successfully and without conscious effort. The greatest such occasion was the night of September 22-23, 1912, when from 10p.m. to 6 a.m. he sat at his desk writing THE JUDGMENT in a single sitting.” The next day, he wrote in his diary “That is the only way to write, only with such coherence, and with such complete opening of body and soul.” In most cases writers find writing an intensely pleasurable experience. Sometimes this activity is therapeutic in nature as it cuts them off from the painful circumstances of their lives.
Poets are unique persons; unique is their world and unique their ways of working.
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