Sentinel Poetry (Online) #38 The International Journal of Poetry &
Graphics Monthly ISSN 1479-425X
Editorial
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Poet
In deference to readers’ past
comments both on – and offline, in listserves and by
email, it becomes necessary to revisit the idea of truth in poetry. Here the
intention is to address a seeming programmatic call for the poet to be the
embodiment of truth, the flawless creature, a powerhouse of vision, forever
dissecting a corrupt objective world through his poetry. In such a formulaic reception
of the editorial, ‘Truth and Poetry’, the poet would be above all
the vagaries of human ‘nature’ to which all other mortals are
susceptible; he would be beaten out of gold within his “tenement of
clay”; far from the reality!
As a matter of fact, the poet is more
likely than others to war with competing passions in his or her character since
he or she is a sensualist mostly; he or she is ruled more than other people by the
senses – of sight, hearing or touch and so on; the seat of his or her being
is the imagination. In his or her demeanour he or she can be master of that
imagination or slave to it. This depends on how much his or her moral rather
than aesthetic vision has moved beyond and above Plato’s allegorical cave,
inside which shadows present themselves as the very limit and semblance of
objective truth or values; depends on if he or she has risen with the
sun’s harsh re-ordering of things to see clearly into his or her own- and
thus- his or her society’s character, intellect and soul.
Intellect is indeed a necessary corollary
to imagination – in the poet’s work, and especially with respect to
how both faculties shape his or her personality, which in turn might shape his
or her work to a largely edifying extent or not. Both qualities –
intellect and imagination, may be corrupted by the very world the poet is
supposed to hold brief for in the court of the conscience. Again to use
Plato’s allegorical example in The
Republic, as the dialogue progresses, he paints the picture of the clever
rogue, whose intellect is rotten from abuse and serves evil ends. In the same
way the poet’s intelligence and imagination, if not disciplined or if it
is warped by nature and wrong nurture, might actually depart from truth in the
‘idealistic’ sense of “Truth and Poetry” or simply hover
around it publicly, giving in to private excesses.
Sometimes the poet might simply be
plagued by the weaknesses common to general humanity – greed, lust,
pettiness, gluttony, jealousy arrogance, inordinate ambition or such abstracter
as ‘happiness’ or ‘freedom’. Happiness is necessarily
illusory, where, in its place, contentment is the measure of wisdom; and man is
always a slave to the senses in most cases – the poet who is undisciplined
as a man or woman even more so due to his or her wayward dependence on the
senses in his or her personality rather than in the work itself, even if this
faculty does emotively inform the work. Many
a poet does, indeed, ‘cave’ in, in this matter of the sensuous, to
whims, caprices, habits, weaknesses, in short, to human frailty, under the
guise of ‘eccentricity’ or a poetic ‘licentiousness’ of
behaviour rather than ‘poetic licence’ in his work; and he expects
the society to overlook or forgive his or her indulgences; he or she is, after
all, ‘The Poet’!, the artistic genius. Dryden opines, “Great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions
do their bounds divide.”
It is this madness, loosely
speaking, and that divide, which the poet who will celebrate the spirit of truth
and beauty need to consciously negotiate by reigning in the senses, such that
his or her intellect and imagination shines through his or her work without its
excess or corruption fragmenting his or her person or vision; otherwise the
mirror cracks. A degeneration of the poet’s sight might cause society- gazing
on his or her supposedly redemptive figure- and the poet to see a monster in
the social mirror, which the poet is supposed to reflect and burnish. The
metaphor of the mirror is apt. The poet is a mirror reflecting the society, the
society in turn is a mirror reflecting the poet since he or she is a measure of
the best comportment; furthermore, the poet is a self-reflecting mirror since
he is also a member of society. In this world of mirrors then, monsters can
proliferate if the poet is a monster. What moral authority would a Rimbaud have
had to chastise a fellow slave trader? His
words would have met derision and large guffaws! Which would not necessarily
make him a bad poet as far as craft goes. It is just that moral conviction departs
his work at the point and beyond the moment when human frailty took over his personality
and besides, the moral authority of his oeuvre is
compromised by that one derailment of intellect, imagination and good judgment.
He is the only one very large and visible negative example we know of in the
history of poetics. But monsters do abound, whom, if we have missed, have
only managed simply to hide away just
like Mr Hyde, who hides away-pun intended- in the genteel, civil façade of Dr.
Jekyll.
In as much as a work maybe appreciated
and admired-for its craft or aesthetic conception – in isolation of the
personality and life of the poet, there is a symbiotic relationship still in
terms of moral examples since poets are “the unacknowledged legislators
of the world”, according to Percy Shelly (1792-1822) in his essay
“In Defence of Poesy”. Perhaps the statement is slightly
exaggerated and an epitome of the romantic idea but nevertheless true.
It is for this reason that poets get
their grants and support from patronage structures within society; so that they
can continue to tell it profound and untrammelled truths; this is why ‘writer-rights’
organisations like PEN International, the International Parliament of Writers or
other affiliates like the International Freedom of Expression Exchange and
Index on Censorship fight for them and other writers in defence of freedom of
expression. Of course there is that kind
of poetry which is supposed to entertain and tickle, say for example, a
limerick or the merely ornamental. Nevertheless most poetry which survives the
onset of time both entertains in its deployment of arresting language while
being profound in the way it makes us pause and reflect. It is when such
reflection is dulled by the antics of poet or poem that it becomes the source
of blinding light to the reason and a blight to the
conscience. Perhaps this is the kind of poet whom Plato wanted to expel from
the republic because he or she becomes, through his or her emotive sway over
the imagination, a plague to the senses and a corruption to the body-politic.
Nevertheless we do need the poet – just as we need the priesthood, not
for any immediately obvious material value to society’s well-being but
rather for a more immeasurable moral and spiritual equilibrium; this by way of
aiding the intellect and the imagination’s apprehension of self and thus
bring clarity to vision. This is why Plato, despite his exclusionary edict
concerning the poet, nevertheless behaves like one in deploying the language of
poetics in his cave allegory, which sought to nudge the imagination and
intellect of his society of students towards knowledge, light and wisdom. Paul
Hamilton notes the irony in his New
Historicism.
Plato made use of the image; he was
sensuous!; even if in a noble manner. It is his
resistance to the ‘image’ which confounds since this is the unit of
dreams, and we do all dream – or have nightmares, depending on what those
dreams consists of! The example of his helplessness in the grip of the image
suggests that we cannot bind the imagination or intellect; it is the purpose to
which we put them that needs mid-wifing. The poet who
is successful in his calling is also a good midwife of images and thus of his
intellect and imagination. But when the images are garish there remains a
kaleidoscopic admixture of dreams and nightmares, of shifting lights and
shadows as represented in the contradictions between brilliant work and dull
personal character; then enter Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Poet!
The schizophrenic figure presented
in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde can be apprehended in
the poet as ‘schizophrene’. That clinical
term is used loosely and does not necessarily suggest a mental warp or a
necessarily neurotic condition. Nevertheless it does signify a fragmented
imagination and a complex personality, which dissolves in a proliferation of the
disciplined intellect, the corrupt imagination, the diseased worldview, all a sulphuric
porridge eating away at the poet’s navel. Sometimes discipline might have
the larger sway or other dross and impurities might posses, such that the result
is a split between the character of poet and the example of his or her work. It
happens to those who, on a good day, are the noblest of men or women. Does nobility not carry savagery in its
being? Is this, perhaps, the message of Stevenson’s Novel as a warning to
the roaming imagination? For it was Dr. Jekyll’s ceaseless chemical experiments which gave
birth to his alter ego – the monster, Hyde. The poet is also human as we
have noted before and susceptible to the psychosis that holds most of humanity
in its grip – albeit unconsciously, sometimes.
Since the poet’s intellect and
imagination is highly developed – presumable, then he or she might, even
consciously, like Plato’s crafty rogue, create an alter ego that
confounds in its antics. In this case the schizo-frenetic
variance in his character in relation to his or her work is deliberate or due
to a sly underlying tendency and is a hallmark of the contrived split between
public appearance and private devilry. Like the cunning tortoise of Yoruba
folktales, whose crafty exploits are a warning to the wayward child, he or she appears,
in all intent, to be well-meaning and honourable. Or sometimes he or she might
revel in mischief or moral turpitude in his or her personal life due to a
perverted fascination for the dark part of the imagination. Sometimes the poet
is, due to a heightened sense impression, frail or fragile a psyche and may be
easily unhinged by certain deeply-buried lived experiences. Jean Genet comes
easily to mind. He was not necessarily a poet but shares the poet’s
deeply sensuous nature to an extreme; an over-sensitive, disturbed imagination,
who wrote and also stole! His personal demon was kleptomania. Jean-Paul Sartre
and the French intellectual circle were forced to intercede on his behalf and
tell the French Government to ‘leave the thief alone’ and got him
out of prison, where he only penned the next brilliant play, anyway. In a
manner of speaking they were saying, ‘he is an armless but disturbed
writer only’.
A restlessness of spirit and an excess of imagination
can lead in all kind of directions. Christopher Okigbo, a poet’s poet, was
restless and dissatisfied with the treatment of the Igbo in 1960s Nigerian
polity after warning in vain and ceaselessly, “for the far-removed there
is wailing”! He was pushed to take up arms and die on the battle-field. He was the priest entering the synagogue of
the wicked to whip them in his rage. He lost his head for it. This
self-immolation, was it the right course of action? Something in his
personality made him do it; it was his one sin against his brilliant imagination.
But as he himself noted in one of his memorable poems, “life without
sin”, is life “without life”. The poet can be as much a
sinner as the other man or woman; he or she is as complex as anyone else
– if not more so due to his or her over-sensitiveness. So it is sometimes necessary to separate the
man or woman and the work. The ideas in “Truth and Poetry” is just
that – idealistic. It is an ideal worth pursuing for the poet; how far he
or she succeeds depends on how well he or she can keep his or her intellect,
imagination and visions within the bounds of a conscious self-apprehension,
which unifies all those qualities in him or her towards a greater general good.
In such a case he or she is true to the epitaph on Gabriela Mistral’s
tombstone, which reads: “What the soul is to the body, so is the artist
to his people”. Otherwise the poet is just another disturbed imagination,
an idiot, a schizoid and madman or madwoman!
Amatoritsero Ede
Editor
