Posts Tagged ‘The Dyer’s Hand’
Quote of the Day
All those whose success in life depends neither upon a job which satisfies some specific and unchanging social need, like a farmer’s, nor, like a surgeon’s, upon some craft which he can be taught by others and improve by practice, but upon “inspiration,” the lucky hazard of ideas, live by their wits, a phrase which carries a slightly pejorative meaning. Every “original” genius, be he an artist or a scientist, has something a bit shady about him, like a gambler or madman.
The poet on the desert island
Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk, and dishonest.
The poet who writes “free” verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry, and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor—dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.
Why do poets make bad politicians?
Poets are, by the nature of their interests and the nature of artistic fabrication, singularly ill-equipped to understand politics or economics. Their natural interest is in singular individuals and personal relations, while politics and economics are concerned with large numbers of people, hence with the human average (the poet is bored to death by the idea of the Common Man) and with impersonal, to a great extent involuntary, relations. The poet cannot understand the function of money in modern society because for him there is no relation between subjective value and market value; he may be paid ten pounds for a poem which he believes is very good and took him months to write, and a hundred pounds for a piece of journalism which costs him but a day’s work…
All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.
In a war or a revolution, a poet may do very well as a guerrilla fighter or a spy, but it is unlikely that he will make a good regular soldier, or, in peace time, a conscientious member of a parliamentary committee.
Quote of the Day
[A poet] will never be able to say: “Tomorrow I will write a poem and, thanks to my training and experience, I already know I shall do a good job.” In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision of a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
Quote of the Day
“The unacknowledged legislators of the world” describes the secret police, not the poets.
Rossini’s moment of randomness
This week’s discussion of intentional randomness reminds me of a beautiful story, which I first read in W.H. Auden’s The Dyer’s Hand, about the composer Gioachino Rossini, best known for The Barber of Seville. Rossini was writing his opera Moses in Egypt when, he says, a charming friend kept him up all night. The following day, exhausted, he made a careless mistake:
When I was writing the chorus in G Minor, I suddenly dipped my pen into the medicine bottle instead of the ink; I made a blot, and when I dried it with sand (blotting paper had not been invented then) it took the form of a natural, which instantly gave me the idea of the effect which the change from G minor to G major would make, and to this blot all the effect—if any—is due.
Which is not so different from what John Gardner says in On Writers and Writing: “A typo of ‘murder’ for ‘mirror’ can change the whole plot of a novel.”
On Rossini’s story, Auden observes: “Such an act of judgment, distinguishing between Chance and Providence, deserves, surely, to be called inspiration.” The process of writing a novel, much like that of an opera, is full of such moments of providential chance. The writer’s task, along with much else, is to know what to do when they happen.
Alec Nevala-Lee 