“Every poem can be considered in
two ways—as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes. From the one point of view it is an expression of opinions and
emotions; from the other, it is an organization of words which exist to produce
a particular kind of patterned experience in the readers.”
C. S. Lewis was
the author of those sentences, and he happened to include them in a book he
wrote about John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. I like his remark and am pleased to have to
discovered it. But even though I, too, have published a book about Paradise
Lost, I didn’t come across Lewis’s book
until last week. In fact, I had no idea he’d ever written about the poem.
Many, many people
have written about Paradise Lost, and I
am probably the most ignorant of the bunch. I have read almost no Milton
scholarship. You might wonder how I had the gall to write a book about Paradise
Lost without paying any attention to what
the experts had to say about it. But my purposeful avoidance wasn’t an offshoot
of either laziness or arrogance. Rather, it was a way to circumvent my
tongue-tied humility.
How does a not
very religious American woman who lives in the woods and writes poems talk to a
seventeenth-century urban Puritan firebrand and canonized epic poet? My initial
reaction was to avoid talking to him at all. I had never really liked Paradise
Lost, and I had no confidence in my ability
to interact with it. Yet at the same time I was in need of a challenge. I
wanted to expand myself as a poet. I wanted to learn from difficult work, from
poems that made me uncomfortable, even angry.
Timidly I decided
to copy out a few pages of the poem. As I discuss in the introduction to this
book, copying out poems is the best way I know to get inside the head of
another poet, to undergo word for word, comma by comma, what the poet experienced
as he worked on the poem. But in this case my little copying experiment
snowballed, and I ended up transcribing every single word of Paradise Lost. In the afterword of my memoir of that project, I
talk about the strange, absorbing, unexpected task:
In early December
2007 I finished copying out the final lines of Paradise Lost. Accomplishing the job had occupied me for more than
two years. Some weeks I copied out page after page. Some weeks I managed only a
few lines. Some hours my fingers chased each other fluidly over the keyboard
like Rogers and Astaire sparkling in easy tandem across a spotlit stage. Some
hours I mangled every word, stuttering through typos and flawd punctuation,
misunderstood verbs and unanticipated line breaks—an epic chore narrowed to
“backspace and try again, backspace and try again.”
Copying
was a hard job, and not just because typing is dull and Milton is a mountain.
Living with myself as copyist was equivalently hard. When I undertook the task,
I thought of myself as a poet, not a memoirist. But I was anxious about my
worth as a poet: I needed to do something important, something improving.
Transcribing Milton’s masterpiece seemed to be a quick solution and a weighty
preoccupation, yet I couldn’t define why it might be improving or important.
Even though I saw the job as special, even glamorous, I couldn’t take myself
seriously. That I may have been the only person on the planet who imagined
copying out all of Paradise Lost to be
glamorous increased both my absurdity and my conceit. And once I began to write
about the project, my sense of inadequacy grew. As hard as I pressed myself
intellectually, I could not, in the end, truly understand Paradise
Lost. The poem was too large for me.
Although I say
“the poem was too large for me,” I don’t mean that I gained nothing from the
experience. The most important lesson was how vital it can be to build an
unmediated relationship with a work of art. My discoveries about Paradise
Lost may have been pedestrian, but they
were my discoveries. I had only
myself to depend on as I made my way through this immense and thorny poem. The
undertaking was vast and daunting, but I learned to think, to question, to
argue, to weigh my opinions, to change my mind. There are times when research and scholarly analysis
are necessary ingredients of art and the study of art. But there are also times
when the exercise of one’s own mind is the stimulant.
[from a draft chapter of The Conversation: Learning to Be a Poet (Autumn House Press, 2014).]
2 comments:
Love this!!!
Thanks, Ruth!
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