A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry

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Holding in mind these general characteristics of the creative imagination,
as traced by Ribot, let us now test our conception of the distinctively
artistic imagination. Countless are the attempts to define or describe it,
and it would be unwise for the student, at this point, to rest satisfied
with any single formulation of its functions. But it may be helpful to
quote a paragraph from Hartley B. Alexander's brilliant and subtle book,
_Poetry and the Individual_:
[Footnote: Putnam's, 1906.]

"The energy of the mind or of the soul--for it welds all psychical
activities--which is the agent of our world-winnings and the
procreator of our growing life, we term imagination. It is
distinguished from perception by its relative freedom from the
dictation of sense; it is distinguished from memory by its power to
acquire--memory only retains; it is distinguished from emotion in
being a force rather than a motive; from the understanding in being
an assimilator rather than the mere weigher of what is set before it;
from the will, because the will is but the wielder of the reins--the
will is but the charioteer, the imagination is the Pharaoh in
command. It is distinguished from all these, yet it includes them
all, for it is the full functioning of the whole mind and in the
total activity drives all mental faculties to its one supreme
end--the widening of the world wherein we dwell. Through beauty the
world grows, and it is the business of the imagination to create the
beautiful. The imagination synthesises, humanises, personalises,
illumines reality with the soul's most intimate moods, and so exalts
with spiritual understandings."

The value of such a description, presented without any context, will vary
with the training of the individual reader, but its quickening power will
be recognized even by those who are incapable of grasping all the
intellectual distinctions involved.

_3. Poetic Imagination in Particular_

We are now ready, after this consideration of the creative and artistic
imagination, to look more closely at some of the qualities of the poetic
imagination in particular. The specific formal features of that
imagination lie, as we have seen, in its use of verbal imagery, and in the
combination of verbal images into rhythmical patterns. But are there not
functions of the poet's mind preceding the formation of verbal images? The
psychology of language is still unsettled, and whether a man can think
without the use of words is often doubted. But a painter can certainly
"think" in terms of color, as an architect or mathematician can "think" in
terms of form and space, or a musician in terms of sound, without
employing verbal symbols at all. And are there not characteristic
activities of the poetic imagination which antedate the fixation and
expression of images in words? Apparently there are.

The reader will find, in the "Notes and Illustrations" for this chapter, a
quotation from Mr. Lascelles-Abercrombie, in which he refers to the
"region where the outward radiations of man's nature combine with the
irradiations of the world." That is to say, the inward-sweeping stream of
consciousness is instantly met by an outward-moving activity of the brain
which recognizes relationships between the objects proffered to the senses
and the personality itself. The "I" projects itself into these objects,
claims them, appropriates them as a part of its own nature. Professor
Fairchild, who calls this self-projecting process by the somewhat
ambiguous name of "personalizing," rightly insists, I believe, that poets
make a more distinctive use of this activity than other men. He quotes
some of the classic confidences of poets themselves: Keats's "If a sparrow
come before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the
gravel"; and Goethe on the sheep pictured by the artist Roos, "I always
feel uneasy when I look at these beasts. Their state, so limited, dull,
gaping, and dreaming, excites in me such sympathy that I fear I shall
become a sheep, and almost think the artist must have been one." I can
match this Goethe story with the prayer of little Larry H., son of an
eminent Harvard biologist. Larry, at the age of six, was taken by his
mother to the top of a Vermont hill-pasture, where, for the first time in
his life, he saw a herd of cows and was thrilled by their glorious bigness
and nearness and novelty. When he said his prayers that night, he was
enough of a poet to change his usual formula into this:

"Jesus, tender Shepherd, hear me,
Bless thy little _cow_ to-night"--

_Larry being the cow._

"There was a child went forth every day,"

records Walt Whitman,

"And the first object he look'd upon that object
he became."

Professor Fairchild quotes these lines from Whitman, and a few of the many
passages of the same purport from Coleridge and Wordsworth. They are all
summed up in Coleridge's heart-broken

"Oh, Lady, we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live."

This "animism," or identifying imagination, by means of which the child or
the primitive man or the poet transfers his own life into the unorganic or
organic world, is one of the oldest and surest indications of poetic
faculty, and as far as we can see, it is antecedent to the use of verbal
images or symbols.

Another characteristic of the poetic temperament, allied with the
preceding, likewise seems to belong in the region where words are not as
yet emerging above the threshold of consciousness. I mean the strange
feeling, witnessed to by many poets, of the fluidity, fusibility,
transparency--the infinitely changing and interchangeable aspects--of the
world as it appears to the senses. It is evident that poets are not
looking--at least when in this mood--at our "logical" world of hard, clear
fact and law. They are gazing rather at what Whitman called "the eternal
float of solution," the "flowing of all things" of the Greeks, the
"river within the river" of Emerson. This tendency is peculiarly marked,
of course, in artists possessing the "diffluent" type of imagination, and
Romantic poets and critics have had much to say about it. The imagination,
said Wordsworth, "recoils from everything but the plastic, the pliant, the
indefinite."
[Footnote: Preface to 1815 edition of his _Poems_.]
"Shakespeare, too," says Carlye,
[Footnote: Essay on Goethe's Works.]
"does not look _at_ a thing, but into it, through it; so that he
constructively comprehends it, can take it asunder and put it together
again; _the thing melts as it were, into light under his eye, and anew
creates itself before him_. That is to say, he is a Poet. For Goethe, as
for Shakespeare, _the world lies all translucent, all fusible_ we might
call it, encircled with _Wonder_; the Natural in reality the Supernatural,
for to the seer's eyes both become one."

In his essay on Tieck Carlyle remarks again upon this characteristic of
the mind of the typical poet: "He is no mere observer and compiler;
rendering back to us, with additions or subtractions, the Beauty which
existing things have of themselves presented to him; but a true Maker, to
whom the actual and external is but the excitement for ideal creations
representing and ennobling its effects."

Coleridge's formula is briefer still; the imagination "dissolves,
diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create."
[Footnote: _Biographia Literaria_.]

Such passages help us to understand the mystical moments which many poets
have recorded, in which their feeling of "diffusion" has led them to doubt
the existence of the external world. Wordsworth grasping "at a wall or
tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality," and
Tennyson's "weird seizures" which he transferred from his own experience
to his imaginary Prince in _The Princess_, are familiar examples of this
type of mysticism. But the sense of the infinite fusibility and change in
the objective world is deeper than that revealed in any one type of
diffluent imagination. It is a profound characteristic of the poetic
mind as such. Yet it should be remembered that the philosopher and
the scientist likewise assert that ours is a vital, ever-flowing,
onward-urging world, in the process of "becoming" rather than merely
"being." "We are far from the noon of man" sang Tennyson, in a
late-Victorian and evolutionary version of St. John's "It doth not
yet appear what we shall be." "The primary imagination," asserted
Coleridge, "is a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of
creation in the infinite _I am_."
[Footnote: _Biographia Literaria_, chap. 13.]
Here, evidently, unless the "God-intoxicated" Coleridge is talking
nonsense, we are in the presence of powers that do not need as yet any use
of verbal symbols.

_4. Verbal Images_

The plasticity of the world as it appears to the mind of the poet is
clearly evidenced by the swarm of images which present themselves to the
poet's consciousness. In the re-presentation of these pictures to us the
poet is forced, of course, to use verbal images. The precise point at
which he becomes conscious of employing words no doubt varies with the
individual, and depends upon the relative balance of auditory, visual or
tactile images in his mind. Swinburne often impresses us as working
primarily with the "stuff" of word-sounds, as Browning with the stuff of
sharp-cut tactile or motor images, and Victor Hugo with the stuff of
visual impressions. But in each case the poet's sole medium of _expression
to us_ is through verbal symbols, and it is hard to get behind these into
the real workshop of the brain where each poet is busily minting his own
peculiar raw material into the current coin of human speech.

Nevertheless, many poets have been sufficiently conscious of what is going
on within their workshop to tell us something about it. Professor
Fairchild has made an interesting collection
[Footnote: _The Making of Poetry_, pp. 78, 79.]
of testimony relating to the tumultuous crowding of images, each
clamoring, as it were, for recognition and crying "take me!" He instances,
as other critics have done, the extraordinary succession of images by
which Shelley strives to portray the spirit of the skylark. The similes
actually chosen by Shelley seem to have been merely the lucky candidates
selected from an infinitely greater number. In Francis Thompson's
captivating description of Shelley as a glorious child the reader is
conscious of the same initial rush of images, although the medium of
expression here is heightened prose instead of verse:
[Footnote: _Dublin Review_, July, 1908.]

"Coming to Shelley's poetry, we peep over the wild mask of
revolutionary metaphysics, and we see the winsome face of the child.
Perhaps none of his poems is more purely and typically Shelleian than
The Cloud, and it is interesting to note how essentially it springs
from the faculty of make-believe. The same thing is conspicuous,
though less purely conspicuous, throughout his singing; it is the
child's faculty of make-believe raised to the nth power. He is still
at play, save only that his play is such as manhood stops to watch,
and his playthings are those which the gods give their children. The
universe is his box of toys. He dabbles his fingers in the day-fall.
He is gold-dusty with tumbling amidst the stars. He makes bright
mischief with the moon. The meteors nuzzle their noses in his hand.
He teases into growling the kennelled thunder, and laughs at the
shaking of its fiery chain. He dances in and out of the gates of
heaven: its floor is littered with his broken fancies. He runs wild
over the fields of ether. He chases the rolling world. He gets
between the feet of the horses of the sun. He stands in the lap of
patient Nature, and twines her loosened tresses after a hundred
wilful fashions, to see how she will look nicest in his song."

_5. The Selection and Control of Images_

It is easier, no doubt, to realize something of the swarming of images in
the stream of consciousness than it is to understand how these images are
selected, combined and controlled. Some principle of association, some law
governing the synthesis, there must be; and English criticism has long
treasured some of the clairvoyant words of Coleridge and Wordsworth upon
this matter. The essential problem is suggested by Wordsworth's phrase
"the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement." Is the
"excitement," then, the chief factor in the selection and combination of
images, and do the "feelings," as if with delicate tentacles,
instinctively choose and reject and integrate such images as blend with
the poet's mood?

Coleridge, with his subtle builder's instinct, uses his favorite word
"synthesis" not merely as applied to images as such, but to all the
faculties of the soul:

"The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man
into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other
according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and a
spirit of unity, that blends, and as it were fuses, each into each, by
that synthetic and magical power to which I would exclusively appropriate
the name of Imagination." "Synthetic and magical power," indeed, with a
Coleridge as Master of the Mysteries! But the perplexed student of poetry
may well wish a more exact description of what really takes place.

An American critic, after much searching in recent psychological
explanations of artistic creation, attempts to describe the genesis of a
poem in these words:
[Footnote: Lewis E. Gates, _Studies and Appreciations_, p. 215. Macmillan,
1900.]

"The poet concentrates his thought on some concrete piece of life, on
some incident, character, or bit of personal experience; because of
his emotional temperament, this concentration of interest stirs in
him a quick play of feeling and prompts the swift concurrence of many
images. Under the incitement of these feelings, and in accordance
with laws of association that may at least in part be described,
these images grow bright and clear, take definite shapes, fall into
significant groupings, branch and ramify, and break into sparkling
mimicry of the actual world of the senses--all the time delicately
controlled by the poet's conscious purpose and so growing
intellectually significant, but all the time, if the work of art is
to be vital, impelled also in their alert weaving of patterns by the
moods of the poet, by his fine instinctive sense of the emotional
expressiveness of this or that image that lurks in the background of
his consciousness. For this intricate web of images, tinged with his
most intimate moods, the poet through his intuitive command of words
finds an apt series of sound-symbols and records them with written
characters. And so a poem arises through an exquisite distillation of
personal moods into imagery and into language, and is ready to offer
to all future generations its undiminishing store of spiritual joy
and strength."

A better description than this we are not likely to find, although some
critics would question the phrase, "all the time delicately controlled by
the poet's conscious purpose."
[Footnote: "Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according
to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, 'I will compose
poetry.'. . . It is not subject to the control of the active powers of the
mind. ... Its birth and recurrence have no necessary connection with the
consciousness or will." Shelley, _A Defense of Poetry_.]

For sometimes, assuredly, the synthesis of images seems to take place
without the volition of the poet. The hypnotic trance, the narcotic dream
or revery, and even our experience of ordinary dreams, provide abundant
examples. One dreams, for instance, of a tidal river, flowing in with a
gentle full current which bends in one direction all the water-weeds and
the long grasses trailing from the banks; then somehow the tide seems to
change, and all the water and the weeds and grasses, even the fishes in
the stream, turn slowly and flow out to sea. The current synthesizes,
harmonizes, moves onward like music,--and we are aware that it is all a
dream. Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," composed in a deep opium slumber, moves
like that, one train of images melting into another like the interwoven
figures of a dance led by the "damsel with a dulcimer." There is no
"conscious purpose" whatever, and no "meaning" in the ordinary
interpretation of that word. Nevertheless it is perfect integration of
imagery, pure beauty to the senses. Something of this rapture in the sheer
release of control must have been in Charles Lamb's mind when he wrote to
Coleridge about the "pure happiness" of being insane. "Dream not,
Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till
you have gone mad! All now seems to me vapid, comparatively so." (June 10,
1796.)

If "Kubla Khan" represents one extreme, Poe's account of how he wrote "The
Raven"
[Footnote: _The Philosophy of Composition_.]
--incredible as the story appears to most of us--may serve to illustrate
the other, namely, a cool, conscious, workmanlike control of every element
in the selection and combination of imagery. Wordsworth's naive
explanation of the task performed by the imagination in his "Cuckoo" and
"Leech-Gatherer"
[Footnote: Preface to poems of 1815-1845.]
occupies a middle ground. We are at least certain of his entire
honesty--and incidentally of his total lack of humor!

"'Shall I call thee Bird,
Or but a wandering Voice?'

"This concise interrogation characterizes the seeming ubiquity of the
voice of the cuckoo, and dispossesses the creature almost of a corporeal
existence; the Imagination being tempted to this exertion of her power by
a consciousness in the memory that the cuckoo is almost perpetually heard
throughout the season of spring, but seldom becomes an object of sight....

"'As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie
Couched on the bald top of an eminence,
Wonder to all who do the same espy
By what means it could thither come, and whence,
So that it seems a thing endued with sense,
Like a sea-beast crawled forth, which on a shelf
Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun himself.

Such seemed this Man; not all alive or dead.
Nor all asleep, in his extreme old age.
* * * * *
Motionless as a cloud the old Man stood,
That heareth not the loud winds when they call,
And moveth altogether if it move at all.'

"In these images, the conferring, the abstracting, and the modifying
powers of the Imagination, immediately and mediately acting, are all
brought into conjunction. The stone is endowed with something of the power
of life to approximate it to the sea-beast; and the sea-beast stripped of
some of its vital qualities to assimilate it to the stone; which
intermediate image is thus treated for the purpose of bringing the
original image, that of the stone, to a nearer resemblance to the figure
and condition of the aged man; who is divested of so much of the
indications of life and motion as to bring him to the point
where the two objects unite and coalesce in just comparison."

Wordsworth's analysis of the processes of his own imagination, like Poe's
story of the composition of "The Raven," is an analysis made after the
imagination had functioned. There can be no absolute proof of its
correctness in every detail. It is evident that we have to deal with an
infinite variety of normal and abnormal minds. Some of these defy
classification; others fall into easily recognized types, such as "the
lunatic, the lover and the poet," as sketched by Theseus, Duke of Athens.
How modern, after all, is the Duke's little lecture on the psychology of
imagination!

"The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact;
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!"
[Footnote: _Midsummer Night's Dream_, v, i, 7-22.]

Shakspere, it will be observed, does not hesitate to use that dangerous
term "the poet!" Yet as students of poetry we must constantly bring
ourselves back to the recorded experience of individual men, and from
these make our comparisons and generalizations. It may even happen that
some readers will get a clearer conception of the selection and synthesis
of images if they turn for the moment away from poetry and endeavor to
realize something of the same processes as they take place in imaginative
prose. In Hawthorne's _Scarlet Letter_, for example, the dominant image,
which becomes the symbol of his entire theme, is the piece of scarlet
cloth which originally caught his attention. This physical object
becomes, after long brooding, subtly changed into a moral symbol of sin
and its concealment. It permeates the book, it is borne openly upon the
breast of one sufferer, it is written terribly in the flesh of another, it
flames at last in the very sky. All the lesser images and symbols of the
romance are mastered by it, subordinated to it; it becomes the dominant
note in the composition. The romance of _The Scarlet Letter_ is, as we say
of any great poem or drama, an "ideal synthesis"; i.e. a putting together
of images in accordance with some central idea. The more significant the
idea or theme or master image, the richer and fuller are the possibilities
of beauty in detail. Apply this familiar law of complexity to a poet's
conscious or unconscious choice of images. In the essay which we have
already quoted
[Footnote: _Studies and Appreciations_, p. 216.]
Lewis Gates remarks:

"In every artist there is a definite mental bias, a definite spiritual
organization and play of instincts, which results in large measure from
the common life of his day and generation, and which represents this
life--makes it potent--within the individuality of the artist. This
so-called 'acquired constitution of the life of the soul'--it has been
described by Professor Dilthey with noteworthy acuteness and
thoroughness--determines in some measure the contents of the artist's
mind, for it determines his interests, and therefore the sensations and
perceptions that he captures and automatically stores up. It guides him in
his judgments of worth, in his instinctive likes and dislikes as regards
conduct and character, and controls in large measure the play of his
imagination as he shapes the action of his drama or epic and the destinies
of his heroes. Its prejudices interfiltrate throughout the molecules of
his entire moral and mental life, and give to each image and idea some
slight shade of attractiveness or repulsiveness, so that when the artist's
spirit is at work under the stress of feeling, weaving into the fabric of
a poem the competing images and ideas in his consciousness, certain ideas
and images come more readily and others lag behind, and the resulting work
of art gets a colour and an emotional tone and suggestions of value that
subtly reflect the genius of the age."

_6. "Imagist" Verse_

Such a conception of the association of images as reflecting not only this
"acquired constitution of the soul" of the poet but also the genius of the
age is in marked contrast to some of the theories held by contemporary
"imagists." As we have already noted, in Chapter II, they stress the
individual reaction to phenomena, at some tense moment. They discard, as
far as possible, the long "loop-line" of previous experience. As for
diction, they have, like all true artists, a horror of the _cliche_--the
rubber-stamp word, blurred by use. As for rhythm, they fear any
conventionality of pattern. In subsequent chapters we must look more
closely at these matters of diction and of rhythm, but they are both
involved in any statement of the principles of Imagist verse. Richard
Aldington sums up his article on "The Imagists"
[Footnote: "Greenwich Village," July 15, 1915.]
in these words:

"Let me resume the cardinal points of the Imagist style:
1. Direct treatment of the subject. 2. A hardness and economy of speech.
3. Individuality of rhythm; vers libre. 4. The exact word. The Imagists
would like to possess 'le mot qui fait image, l'adjectif inattendu et
precis qui dessine de pied en cap et donne la senteur de la chose qu'il
est charge de rendre, la touche juste, la couleur qui chatoie et vibre.'"

In the preface to _Imagist Poets_ (1915), and in Miss Amy Lowell's
_Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_ (1917) the tenets of imagism are
stated briefly and clearly. Imagism, we are told, aims to use always the
language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the
nearly-exact nor the merely decorative word; to create new rhythms--as the
expression of new moods--and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo
old moods; to allow absolute freedom in the choice of a subject; to
present an image, rendering particulars exactly; to produce poetry that is
hard and clear, never blurred or indefinite; to secure condensation.

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