End of footnote.
iii
So if we are a part of the natural world (as our cellular makeup suggests), if the animate is an aspect of the inanimate, then chance pertaining to a maker pertains to matter. Perhaps Webster's "ability to create" is nothing more (or less) than matter's attempts to articulate itself. Since a maker (and with him the whole human species) is an infinitesimal speck of matter, the latter's attempts at articulation must be few and far between. Their infrequency is proportionate to the availability of adequate mouthpieces, whose adequacy, i.e., the readiness to perceive an unhuman truth, is known in our parlance as genius. This infrequency is thus the mother of chance.
Now, matter, I believe, comes to articulate itself through human science or human art presumably only under some kind of duress. This may sound like an anthropomorphic fantasy, but our cellular makeup entitles us to this sort of indulgence. Matter's fatigue, its thinning out, or its oversaturation with time are, among a host of other less and more fathomable processes, what further enunciates chance and what is registered by the lab's instruments or by the no less sensitive pen of the lyric poet. In either case, what you get is the ripple effect.
In this sense, the ability to make is a passive ability: a grain of sand's response to the horizon. For it is the sense of an opened horizon that impresses us in a work of art or a scientific breakthrough, isn't it? Anything less than that qualifies not for the unique but for the familiar. The ability to make, in other words, depends on the horizon and not on one's resolve, ambition, or training. To analyze this ability only from our end of the story is therefore erroneous and not terribly rewarding.
"Creativity" is what a vast beach remarks when a grain of sand is swept away by the ocean. If this sounds too tragic or too grand for you, it means only that you are too far back in the dunes. An artist's or a scientist's notion of luck or chance reflects essentially his proximity to the water or, if you will, to matter.
One can increase one's proximity to it in principle by will; in reality, though, it happens nearly always inadvertently. No amount ofresearch or ofcaffeine, calories, alcohol, or tobacco consumed can position that grain of sand sufficiently close to the breakers. It all depends on the breakers themselves, i.e., on matter's own timing, which is solely responsible for the erosion of its so-called beach. Hence all this loose talk about divine intervention, breakthroughs, and so forth. Whose breakthrough?
If poetry fares somewhat better in this context, it is because language is, in a manner ofspeaking, the inanimate's first line of information about itself released to the animate. To put it perhaps less polemically, language is a diluted aspect of matter. By manipulating it into a harmony or, for that matter, disharmony, a poet—by and large unwittingly —negotiates himself into the domain of pure matter—or, if you will, of pure time—faster than can be done in any other line ofwork. A poem—and above all a poem with a recurrent stanzaic design—almost inevitably develops a centrifugal force whose ever-widening radius lands the poet far beyond his initial destination.
It is precisely the unpredictability of the place of one's arrival, as well perhaps as one's eventual gratitude, that makes a poet regard his ability "to make" as a passive ability. The vastness of what lies ahead rules out the possibility of any other attitude toward one's regular or irregular procedure; it certainly rules out the notion of creativity. There is no creativity vis-a-vis that which instills terror.
Wooing the Inanimate
Four Poems by Thomas^ Hardy
I
A decade or so ago, a prominent English critic, reviewing in an American magazine a collection of poems by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, remarked that that poet's popularity in Britain, in its academic circles particularly, is indicative of the English public's stolid reading tastes, and that for all the prolonged physical presence of Messieurs Eliot and Pound on British soil, modernism never took root in England. The latter part ofhis remark (certainly not the former, since in that country—not to mention that milieu—where everyone wishes the other worse off, malice amounts to an insurance policy) got me interested, for it sounded both wistful and convincing.
Shortly afterward, I had the opportunity to meet that critic in person, and although one shouldn't talk shop at the dinner table, I asked him why he thinks modernism fared so poorly in his country. He replied that the generation ofpoets which could have wrought the decisive change was wiped out
Delivered to the students enrolled in "Subject Matter in Modern Lyric Poetry" at Mount Holyoke College, fall 1994.
in the Great War. I found this answer a bit too mechanistic, considering the nature of the medium, too Marxist, if you will—subordinating literature too much to history. But then the man was a critic, and that's what critics do.
I thought that there must have been another explanation—if not for the fate of modernism on that side of the Atlantic, then for the apparent viability of formal verse there at the present time. Surely there are plenty of reasons for that, obvious enough to discard the issue altogether. The sheer pleasure of writing or reading a memorable line would be one; the purely linguistic logic of, and need for, meter and rhyme is another. But nowadays one's mind is conditioned to operate circuitously, and at the time, I thought only that a good rhyme is what in the end saves poetry from becoming a demographic phenomenon. At the time, my thoughts went to Thomas Hardy.
Perhaps I wasn't thinking so circuitously, after all, or at least not yet. Perhaps the expression "Great War" triggered something in my memory, and I remembered Thomas Hardy's "After two thousand years of Mass / We got as far as poison gas." In that case, my thinking was still straight. Or was it perhaps the term "modernism" that triggered those thoughts. In that case ... A citizen of a democracy shouldn't be alarmed, of course, to find himselfbelonging to a minority; though he might get irritable. If a century can be compared to a political system, a significant portion of this one's cultural climate could well qualify as a tyranny: that of modernism. Or, to put it more accurately, of what sailed under that pennant. And perhaps my thoughts went to Hardy because at about that time—a decade ago—he habitually began to be billed as a "pre-modernist."
As definitions go, "pre-modernist" is a reasonably flattering one, since it implies that the so defined has paved the road to our just and happy—stylistically speaking—times. The drawback, though, is that it pensions an author off squarely into the past, offering all the fringe benefits of scholarly interest, of course, but robbing him in effect of relevance. The past tense is his equivalent of a silver watch.
No orthodoxy, especially not a new one, is capable of honest hindsight, and modernism is no exception. While modernism itself presumably benefits from applying this epithet to Thomas Hardy, he, I am afraid, does not. In either case, this definition misleads, for Hardy's poetic output, I daresay, has not so much foreshadowed as overshot, and by an awfully wide margin at that, the development of modern poetry. Had T. S. Eliot, for instance, at the time he read Laforgue, read Thomas Hardy instead (as I believe Robert Frost did), the history of poetry in English in this century, or to say the least its present, might be somewhat more absorbing. For one thing, where Eliot needs a handful of dust to perceive terror, for Hardy, as he shows in "Shelley's Skylark," a pinch is enough.
II
All this no doubt sounds to you a touch too polemical. On top of that, you may wonder whom it is that the man in front ofyou is arguing with. True, the literature on Thomas Hardy the poet is fairly negligible. There are two or three full- length studies; they are essentially doctoral-dissertations- turned-books. There are also two or three biographies of the man, including one he penned himself, though it bears his wife's name on the cover. They are worth reading, especially the last if you believe—as I expect you do—that the artist's life holds the key for the understanding of his work. If you believe the opposite, you won't lose much by giving them a miss, since we are here to address his work.