Since there are errors and since a calling is a very important matter, since one is called during the formative and decisive years of existence, there is much doubt and hesitation about the fact of having a calling, and a period of trial is prescribed in some vocations, while one of the reasons for going to school, after a certain point, is to determine if one has a true vocation, if one has truly been called; and it is in some kind of school that we prepare ourselves to be adequate to our vocation.
In poetry, it is particularly true that many are called and few are chosen. And to be a poet in the modern world means a certain important renunciation which does not hold of all vocations: it means that there is little hope or none of being able to earn a living directly by the writing of poetry; and this has been true in the past, although in other ways, as well as in the modern life; for example, Dryden speaks of “not having the vocation of poverty to scribble.” In the modern world, it is hard to think of any poet who has had from the start any real economic support for the writing of poetry. There are prizes, grants, patrons, and poetry is honored by much generosity and much prestige. Unfortunately, these are provided after the poet has established himself — and not always then — but during the first and perhaps most difficult years of being a poet, the best a poet can do is to get some other job to support his effort to be a poet. In recent years, the job of teaching English has provided a good many positions which help the poet during his first years, but it is not entirely clear that this is a good thing. For to have a vocation means that one must respond with the whole of one’s being; but teaching should be a vocation too, and not a job, and when the poet takes teaching as a job, he may injure or weaken himself as a poet, or he may not be adequate to all that the task of teaching requires. All the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil combine to lure the poet to success as a teacher and to the rewards of successful academic ambition. At the same time that the poet resists these temptations, he must resign himself to the likelihood that a genuine poetic reputation can be achieved only among others who are poets — for it is mostly poets who read any poetry except what is to be found in anthologies — and the kind of fame (that last infirmity of noble mind, as Milton said) which he would like will come to him, if it comes at all, only in middle age.
What I have just said should distinguish roughly the difference between being a poet in the modern world from what it may have been in other historical periods. If we turn again to the wisdom, tried and inherited for so many years, to be found in the origins of words, we remember that to be a poet is to be a maker, to be the maker of something new, to make something new by putting things and words together. The distinguishing mark of the poet, that aptitude which more than any other skill of the mind makes him a poet, is metaphor, according to Aristotle. Now metaphor is literally a bearing-across, or a bringing-together of things by means of words. And composition, which is what the poet accomplishes by all the elements of his poem when they are brought together in a unity, structural, formal, intuitive, and musical — composition means putting things together, bringing them together into a unity which is original, interesting and fruitful. Thus the poet at any time may be said to be engaged in bringing things together, in making new things, in uniting the old and the new, all by the inexhaustible means which words provide for him. In this way, the poet as creator, and metaphor-maker, and presiding bringer of unity is a kind of priest. He unites things, meanings, attitudes, feelings, through the power, prowess and benediction of words, and in this way he is a priest who performs a ceremony of marriage each time he composes a poem. Unfortunately, not all marriages are happy.
In the modern world, the poet who has been truly called cannot respond as poets did in idyllic and primitive periods when merely the naming of things, as Adam named the animals, was enough to bring poems into existence. On the contrary, he must resist the innumerable ways in which words are spoiled, misused, commercialized, deformed, mispronounced, and in general degraded. We can see clearly how much this resistance is part of the vocation of the poet if we consider the recurrent references to language itself in the poems of that truly modern poet, T. S. Eliot. These references occur in his poems from the very start, continue in each volume he has published, and culminate in a passage in his most recent book of poems, Four Quartets:
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres—
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.
Elsewhere in his work there is a sensitivity to colloquial speech — and a kind of horror or anguish about it — which arises from the fact that for a modern poet, as for any poet, words are the keys to what he wants.
Eliot’s play in verse, “Sweeney Agonistes,” is the best example of this aspect of his feeling about language, which is used to express a profound anguish about human beings and human existence. When language is degraded in speech, then the basis in community life for the art of poetry is diseased; and it is appropriate and perhaps inevitable that the great modern poet who should have felt this fact with as much acuteness as any other poet should at the same time be an author who acquired an English accent after arriving at the age of reason. Nevertheless, just as certain kinds of disease make for a greater sensitivity to experience or a more precise observation of reality (the blind know more about how things sound and how they feel to the touch than those who have normal vision), so, too, the disease which degrades language in the modern world may help to bring about the remarkable and often multilingual sensitivity of the modern poet to the language which is the matrix from which he draws his poems.
Degradation and disease are strong words of condemnation, and a great claim is also made when one says that the degradation and disease to which poetry is subjected in the modern world are also one of the fruitful and necessary conditions of genuine poetry and of a genuine vocation for the art of poetry. For the sake of justifying these claims, let us examine small and convenient examples. The word, intrigue, is a noun which has four legitimate meanings. It means something which is intricate; it means “a plot, or a plotting intended to affect some purpose by secret artifice”; thirdly, it is “the plot of a play or romance”; fourthly, it is “a secret and illicit love affair; an amour; a liason” (this fourth meaning probably derives from the third). And the synonyms of intrigue are plot, scheme, machination, and conspiracy. Notice that there is no sense in which the word means something overwhelmingly attractive and fascinating, unless one thinks of secret and illicit love affairs as overpowering in their fascination. However, at present, the use of the word as a noun has fallen into decay. Although there are still references to schemers who engage in conspiracies and intrigues, the noun has become a verb in popular usage: anyone who is said to be intriguing is said to be very attractive, in fact, fascinating like a Hollywood star, or like the spy Mata Hari. An intrigue was something unpleasant, dishonorable, underhand, and immoral. But now to be intriguing is to be wonderfully desirable or interesting and has no unfavorable or dishonorable association. The sense of the same word has thus been turned upside down; it has changed, in popular usage, from signifying something unscrupulous to representing in a vague but unmistakeable way something which is extremely interesting, desirable, or beautiful, and has no immediate connotations of moral disrepute.