POETICKS

In my little-selling Of Manywhere-at-Once, Keats was one of the six canonized poets I wrote a chapter about.  Yeats, Pound, Stevens, Cummings and Roethke were the others.  I suddenly realize that Stevens was the last of them to become a hero in poetry of mine–around 35 years ago.  None since.  Nor, that I can think of, any literary heroes of any kind since then.  Heroes of verosophy?  Perhaps.  More likely, no: because I don’t think I have any genuine verosophical heroes.  The one who comes closest is Nietzsche, but I consider him a literary hero.    I’ve greatly admired a lot of verosophers–Archimedes, Aristotle, Darwin, Newton, Dalton, Faraday, to mention a few–but not the way I’ve idolized and drenched myself in the works and lives of writers like Keats.  And a number of visimagists like Cezanne and Klee.  But no composers.  I guess the reason for this is obvious: I’ve become a writer, and (to a degree) a visimagist, but not a composer.  I consider myself a verosopher, but one unlike any I’m familiar with, except–possibly–Pierce.

It may be that I’ve had no cultural heroes since my thirties due to some flaw of mine, but I suspect one grows . . . not beyond, but off to the sides, of hero-worship.  Into too much of one’s own work toward becoming a cultural hero oneself to have as much time new ones.  One also will eventually have a number of contemporaries to take the place of heroes, albeit differently–as co-heroes rather than as worship-worthies.

In any case, in my chapter about Keats, I spent over four pages on his sonnet to Chapman’s Homer, which was one of the few poems I’d memorized by then (around the age of 18)–and, for that matter, one of the few I have ever memorized.  I wish I’d memorized many more, but I also wish I knew more than one language.  I tend to think I’ve stored all the data I’ve been capable of (as has everyone), so it doesn’t bother me inordinately.  Just a little wishfulness that a few things were not impossible.  Except when I’m in my null zone and realize that nothing really good is possible.

I only memorized one other poem by Keats (also at around the age of 18):

               When I have fears that I may cease to be                 Before my pen hath glean'd my teeming brain,                 Before high-piled books, in charactry,                 Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;                 When I behold upon the night's starr'd face,                  Hugh cloudy symbols of a high romance,                 And think that I may never live to trace                 Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;                 And when I fear, fair creature of an hour,                 That I may never look upon thee more,                 Never have relish in the faery power                 Of unreflecting love!--then on the shore                 Of this wide world I stand alone and think                 Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

Note Keats’s glorification of “high-piled books” here and another poet’s accomplishment in the Chapman poem–his raw young poetic ambitions as a young man obvious, so just the thing to capture me at 18–besides the level of the writing.  Although poetry was never at the center of my writing ambitions until the past decade or so, by default.

(Aside: after going through my edition of Keats’s poems to make sure I remember the poem above correctly–actually to fix parts I knew I hadn’t–the level of his writing bothered me: in less than 26 years he composed more effective poems than I have in almost 75.  This is not false humility.  But I feel I have added to the poet’s tool-kit, which he did not, and ranged beyond poetry into a theory pf psychology, which he did not, and which I think beyond doubt an accomplishment of sorts.  Yes, competitiveness is an enduring part of my character.  I still consider more a virtue than not.)

Okay, back to my dictum about reading poetry to the extent that you devour everything you can of the life and work of at least one of them as I devoured Keats.  This resulted in several (but not a flood) of defective poems until I wrote the following in my twenties:

            I yearn to run madly into the brush              till a wild complexity of chance-created life              has cut me off from mortals' petty strife               I long to be where swift winds fill              with the joyful fundamental music of woods              & a gloriously unsymmetrified uproar              of grass and violets and weeds and rocks              covers every open field and curving hill.              I long to stand at the sweet dense core              of nature studying the clouds' slow schemes              till the regulated world              has blurred into nothingness              & I am in leagues with dreams..

This is a fair derivative poem, I now think, but indicative only that when I wrote it, I had reached the basement of the poet’s vocation–thanks to all the reading I did.  I’m afraid I have to admit that this lesson of mine isn’t much of a lesson, for if you need someone urging you to read poems and writings about poets before you’ll do it, all the reading you do will be a waste of time for you.  I did the reading I did because I had to.  and I had made a hero of Keats I had to find out as much as possible about, because of my genes, which made me search for a hero, then in effect become a sort of apprentice of his.  The real lesson is that you should save time by dropping the idea of becoming a poet if you aren’t already automatically doing this.   I suppose a minor implicit value of the lesson is to confirm you in your vocation if you have found your Keats–and encourage you to keep going if you have not, but are deeply involved with some kind of poetry.

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