Poetry and the numinous

Of all writing, poetry is most involved in the numinous, and the lives of poets are touched by secular kinds of faith and spirituality. This is to say, while not mystical in some woo woo, soft-focus way, the composition of poetry concerns mystery and the unknown. It is sometimes difficult to articulate how this dimension of poetry works, and unless I am imagining things, increasingly it is not much articulated or acknowledged. I am suspicious, though, of writers who are silent on this dimension of poetry: perhaps it is the case that what they are writing isn’t poetry, but instead something else?

The numinous in poetry is felt in that part of the poem which is least literal, or in what is unique to it as a poem, rather than what it could say by any other means. Broadly, this might be understood as its sound-effects or rhythms. As Mallarmé wrote, the ‘magic or charm of art is that it delivers up that volatile scattering which we call the Spirit, who cares for nothing save universal musicality’. This, in fact, does sound rather woo – but it only means that what matters in a poem is its form and not that conceptual bane of all writing in the last twenty-five years: ‘content’. And ‘form’ here doesn’t mean a pre-existing mould or template, but rather the fulfilment of a process of fleshing out the poem’s inner vision. My favourite account of this is by Robert Frost in his short essay ‘The Figure a Poem makes’. The composition of a poem is characterised by dynamism and flow:

It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

O.k. this also sounds woo – and the whole essay is very weird – but the best descriptions of inspiration are generally metaphorical, since the whole business runs contrary to logical communication. Frost’s homespun oddness is only meant to capture the process by which a poem is self-generating and outside a poet’s full control. The numinous, mysterious and surprising in a poem is first experienced by its author: ‘Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a petal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went’.

In speculating on the origins of the surprise prompts by which a poem starts up in a poet’s mind, and the rhythmic mode by which it carries on, poets have long suspected links with the unconscious of childhood. For Frost, a poem’s prioritised sound effects were an attempt to capture a dimension to language ‘previous to content and articulated meaning’. So said Seamus Heaney, who also used T.S. Eliot’s idea of ‘the auditory imagination’ to suggest a primitive or archaic dimension in poetry. His poetic language, Heaney thought, represents ‘older and deeper levels of energy’, an operation ‘penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling… sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to an origin and bringing something back’. Poetry was also a throw-back for Gerard Manley Hopkins: ‘… there is a music of words which is beyond speech’, he wrote, ‘it is an enduring echo of we know not what in the past and in the abyss’. Medbh McGuckian connected the self-delighting music of poetry specifically with the ‘abyss’ of maternal space – which was not some theoretical entity but the environment in which her own early work poured out, doubly displaced from a material, external world by her sustained inspiration and the fact that she was a new mother herself.

In short, most of the poets I love have had something to say about the mystery and wonder of composing a poem. Michael Longley used to say it was like listening to the voice of God. A genuine poem can’t be willed or forced from the desire to write alone, or from an intellectual idea about something. This generally means that there’s a lot of frustration, and extended periods of failure. Inspiration then arrives as a matter of form: the idea for a poem begins not with what it’s about, but how it might be about what it’s about. Prior to this, there is often the vaguest, yes, numinous, sense of the potential around some area for exploration or image or, particularly, a phrase. It is both exhilarating and weirdly humbling to find, after still further failure, a poem or sequence taking on a life of its own, words falling into place as structures invent themselves. I think that as we continue trying to write, though still lightning-flash unpredictable at the get-go, it’s possible to gain a greater sense of control of the manipulation of materials in the middle stages of composing long work. Nevertheless, it still is like being awake and asleep at the same time and can be painful as well as pleasurable. It changes you, and if you are on what Elizabeth Bishop called a writing ‘jag’ that lasts weeks or months, during which almost anything begins to fold into poetry, it can be painful to return to what we call ‘real life’.

‘Real life’ involves making a living, which writing poetry doesn’t provide – or doesn’t provide me. Trying to preserve a space in which poetry can come into focus at its own pace, while simultaneously working in a speeded-up work environment which prizes endless production, can feel like switching between two different time zones. A creative writing class will often involve the implicit assumption that poetry is simply in service to the social self, like everything else – and this runs directly contrary to the experience of writing. That is to say, there may be little or no discussion of a poet’s passivity, or of how we might actually need to live through certain experiences or ideas more fully before a poem can be written. A literalist or utilitarian idea of poetry can arise, in which poetry is reduced to the POV of its real-world author – or its importance is seen to lie in its subject matter. And a poem is assumed to be something that gets written in a ‘workshop’, rather than at some distance from life. If you are involved in university teaching, you can find ways to get round this by making ‘the numinous’ actually part of class discussion: pointing to Frank O’Hara’s insistence that you ‘go on your nerve’, or to the fact that Heaney himself prized the gut instinct and hunch of ‘technique’ over polished ‘craft’. Nevertheless, as more teachable, craft – rules, metres, set forms, prosody – is likely to dominate the discussion and understanding of how writing poetry works in a university context. Before the advent of AI poetry, then, this risked poetry being seen as a mere ‘verbal artefact’, and can lead both to narcissism and anxiety. It leads to narcissism as poems are thought to be just reflections of pre-existing poets – the poet is understood to be at the centre of his or her own story and their poetry is the expression of that story – and anxiety as readers sense something isn’t right here, but that no one is saying so. What they sense is the loss of that other element – the niggling, ineffable unknown bit that makes a poem different from other writing – that gives, or used to give, poetry its myth and glamour.

AI ‘poetry’ ups the stakes here, but only a little. That is, while workshop poetry can struggle with the relation between form and content – or how form is a structural necessity and content only meaningful as the material exactly appropriate to it – AI mostly assumes writing is content. Yes, you can have fun making chatbots play with form, but it’s a long way off seeing a poem as an act of the imagination, rather than an arrangement of words. This makes most of the debate about AI writing weirdly wide of the mark, and is also why in the long run AI will probably, paradoxically, increase the premium of actual art. It isn’t just because art involves a human response to life – that the feeling ‘finds the thought and the thought finds the words’, and so on – but that one of the reasons art is closer to religion than to a professional career lies in the valour of making it when it would be very much easier not to. That is, in persisting in trying to write it against the odds, poetry shows a commitment to an alternative system of values as well as an alternative system of meaning. These odds include its unprofitability, its small readership (and smaller sensitive readership) and now they also include, strangely, the fact that it is seemingly everywhere – a kind of death by saturation rather than invisibility. Nevertheless, writing it is an article of faith, sometimes a matter of life and death.

Increasingly I think of Philip Larkin – which is definitely a bad sign. In his introduction to Cyril Connolly’s essays The Condemned Playground, Philip Larkin wrote that ‘What strikes the reader most forcibly is his commitment to literature, to the notion that being a writer is the practice of a morality as well as an art.’ Larkin seems an unlikely candidate to speak for morality, but what he meant was that Connolly thought that art was man’s noblest attempt to ‘preserve imagination from time’ and it is the insistence on moulding enduring responses from ones perceptions that marks the artist off . Larkin believed so too – at least until he lapsed into reactionary mannerisms and a frankly not-very-brave attitude to death. I read his early work as a teenager, amazed at how that hot, vivid train journey in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ could be described so accurately – so novelistically – within the intricate rhythm and rhyme scheme of its blocky stanza. I think also of the various difficult corners Larkin backed himself into, over the course of a lifetime, to preserve the solitude in which he wrote poetry – which then ceased to arrive. And I think of the braver Sylvia Plath, producing whole, arrow-like forms under the most severe time pressures and in the harshest psychological conditions. Their poems thrilled me thirty years ago, and they thrill me still – there’s the mystery. Poems aren’t products or manufactured content, they’re responses to the joy and struggle of being alive.

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