Christianity, of course, hasn't failed to capitalize on this. Yet what really binds a religious mystic to a pagan sensualist, Gerard Manley Hopkins to Sextus Propertius, is emotional absolutism. The intensity of that emotional absolutism is such that at times it overshoots anything that lies near, and often one's very target. As a rule, the nagging, idiosyncratic, self- referential, persistent voice of the Muse takes a poet beyond imperfect and perfect unions alike, beyond utter disasters and paroxysms ofhappiness—at the expense of reality, with or without a real, reciprocating girl in it. In other words, the pitch gets higher for its own sake, as if the language propels a poet, especially a romantic, whence it came, where in the beginning there was a word, or a discernible sound. Hence many a broken marriage, hence many a lengthy poem, hence poetry's metaphysical affinities, for every word wants to return to where it came from, if only as an echo, which is the mother of rhyme. Hence, too, the reputation of the poet as a rake.
v
Among the many agents of the public's spiritual debilitation, it is the voyeuristic genre of biography that takes the cake. That there are far more ruined maidens than immortal lyrics seems to give pause to nobody. The last bastion of realism, biography is based on the breathtaking premise that art can be explained by life. To follow this logic, The Song of Roland should have been penned by Bluebeard (well, by Gilles de Rais, at least) and Faust by Frederick of Prussia—or, if you like him better, Humboldt.
What a poet has in common with his less articulate fellows is that his life is hostage to his metier, not the other way around. And it is not just that he gets paid for his words (seldom and meagerly): the point is that he also pays for them (often horrifically). It is the latter that creates confusion and spawns biographies, because this payment takes the form not only of indifi'erence; ostracism, imprisonment, exile, oblivion, self-disgust, uncertainty, remorse, madness; a variety of addictions is also acceptable currency. These things are obviously describable. They are, however, not the cause of one's penmanship but its effect. To put it crassly, in order to make his work sell, as well as to avoid cliche, our poet continually has to get where nobody has ever been before —mentally, psychologically, or lexically. Once he gets there, he discovers that indeed there's nobody about, save perhaps the word's original meaning or that initial discernible sound.
This takes its toll. The longer he is at it—at uttering something hitherto unutterable—the more idiosyncratic his conduct becomes. Revelations and insights obtained by him in the process may lead him either to an upsurge of hubris or—more likely—to a deepening of his humility before the force that he surmises behind those insights and revelations. He may also be afflicted by a belief that, older and more viable than anything, language imparts to him, its mouthpiece, its wisdom and the knowledge of the future alike. No matter how gregarious or humble he is by nature, this sort of thing boxes him even further out of the social context, which desperately tries to reclaim him by running its common denominator through his groin.
VI
This is done on account of the Muse's alleged femininity (even when the poet happens to be a woman). The real reason, though, is that art survives life, and this unpalatable realization lies behind the lumpen desire to subordinate the former to the latter. The finite always mistakes the permanent for the infinite and nurtures designs upon it. That, of course, is the permanent's own fault, for it cannot help at times behaving like the finite. Even the most misogynistic or misanthropic poet produces a spate of love lyrics, if only as a token of allegiance to the guild, or as an exercise. This is enough to occasion research, textual exegesis, psychoanalytical interpretation, and whatnot. The general scheme goes like this: the femininity of the Muse presupposes the masculinity of the poet. The masculinity of the poet presupposes the femininity of the lover. Ergo: the lover is the Muse, or could be called that. Another ergo: a poem is the sublimation of the author's erotic urges and should be treated as such. Simple.
That Homer must have been fairly frail by the time he wrote the Odyssey and that Goethe, when he got to the second part of Faust, definitely was, is of no consequence.
What, on the whole, should we do with epic poets? And how can one sublimating so much remain a rake? Since we seem to be saddled with the term, perhaps it would be civilized to assume that both artistic and erotic activities are expressions of one's creative energy, that both are a sublimation. As for the Muse, that angel oflanguage, that "'older woman," it would be best ifbiographers and the public left her alone, and if they can't they should at least remember that she is older than any lover or mother, and that her voice is more implacable than the mother tongue. She's going to dictate to a poet no matter where, how, or when he lives, and if not to this poet, then to the next one—partly because living and writing are different occupations (that's what the two different verbs are for) and to equate them is more absurd than to separate them, for literature has a richer past than any individual, whatever his pedigree.
VII
"To a man, a girl's visage is of course a visage of his soul," wrote a Russian poet, and that's what lies behind the exploits ofTheseus or St. George, the quests of Orpheus and Dante. The sheer cumbersomeness of those undertakings bespeaks a motive other than lust alone. In other words, love is a metaphysical affair whose goal is either accomplishing or liberating one's souclass="underline" winnowing it from the chaff of existence. That is and always has been the core of lyric poetry.
A maiden, in short, is one's soul's stand-in, and one zeroes in on her precisely because one is not given an alternative, save perhaps in a mirror. In the era we call modern, both a poet and his public have grown accustomed to short takes. Still, even in this century there have been enough exceptions whose thoroughness in treating the subject rivals that of Petrarch. One can cite Akhmatova, one can
88 I J О s E PH B R О D s K Y
cite Montale, one can cite the "dark pastorals" of Robert Frost or Thomas Hardy. These are quests for the soul, in the form of lyric poetry. Hence the singularity of the addressee and the stability of the manner, or style. Often the career of a poet, ifhe lives long enough, emerges as a genre variation on a single theme, helping us to distinguish the dancer from the dance—in this case, a love poem from love as such. If a poet dies young, the dancer and the dance tend to merge. This leads to an awful terminological confusion and bad press for the participants, not to mention their purpose.
VIII
Ifonly because a love poem is more often than not an applied art (i.e., it's written to get the girl), it takes an author to an emotional and, quite likely, a linguistic extreme. As a result, he emerges from such a poem knowing himself—his psychological and stylistic parameters—better than before, which explains the popularity of the genre among its practitioners. Also, sometimes the author gets the girl.
Practical application notwithstanding, what makes love lyrics abound is simply that they are a product ofsentimental necessity. Triggered by a particular addressee, this necessity may stay proportionate to that addressee, or develop an autonomous dynamic and volume, prompted by the centrifugal nature of language. The consequence of the latter may be either a cycle of love poems addressed to the same person or a number of poems fanning out, as it were, in different directions. The choice here—if one can speak of choice where necessity is at work—is not so much moral or spiritual as stylistic, and depends on a poet's longevity. And here's where a stylistic choice—if one can speak of choice where chance and the passage of time are at play—starts to smell of spiritual consequences. For ultimately a love lyric, by necessity, is a narcissistic affair. It is a statement, however imaginative, of the author's own feeling, and as such it amounts to a self-portrait rather than to one of his beloved or her world. Were it not for sketches, oils, miniatures, or snapshots, having read a poem, we often wouldn't have known what—or more to the point, whom—it was all about. Even provided with them, we don't learn much about the beauties they depict, save that they looked different from their bards and that not all of them qualify in our eyes as beauties. But then a picture seldom complements words, or vice versa. Besides, images of souls and magazine covers are bound to have different standards. For Dante, at least, the notion of beauty was contingent on the beholder's ability to discern in the human face's ovaljust seven letters comprising the term Homo Dei.