I In ancient times, in the "time of inspiration," the poet flew from one world to another, "riding on dragons," as the Chinese said. Isaiah rode on those dragons, so did Li Po and Pindar. They dragged behind them long tails of dragon smoke. Some of the dragon smoke still boils out of Beowulf: The Beowulf poet holds tight to Danish soil, or leaps after Grendel into the sea. This dragon smoke means that a leap has taken place in the poem. In many ancient works of art we notice a long floating leap at the center of the work. That leap can be described as a leap from the conscious to the latent intelligence and back again, a leap from the known part of the mind to the unknown part and back to the known. In the myth of Gilgamesh, which takes place in a settled society, psychic forces create Enkidu, "the hairy man," as a companion for Gilgamesh, who is becoming too successful.
The reader has to leap back and forth between the golden man, "Gilgamesh," and the "hairy man." In the Odyssey the travelers visit a Great Mother island, dominated by the Circe-Mother and get turned into pigs. They make the leap in an instant. In all art derived from Great Mother mysteries, the leap to the unknown part of the mind lies in the very center of the world. The strength of "classic art" has much more to do with this leap than with the order that the poets developed to contain, and partially, to disguise it. In terms of language, leaping is the ability to associate fast. In a great poem, the considerable distance between the associations, that is, the distance the spark has to leap, gives the lines their bottomless feeling, their space, and the speed (of the association) increases the excitement of the poetry. As Christian civilization took hold, and the power of the spiritual patriarchies deepened, this leap occurred less and less often in Western literature.
Obviously, the ethical ideas of Christianity inhibit it. At the start most Church fathers were against the leap as too pagan. Ethics usually support campaigns against the "animal instincts." Christian thought, especially Paul''s thought, builds a firm distinction between spiritual energy and animal energy, a distinction so sharp it became symbolized by black and white. White became associated with the conscious and black with the unconscious or the latent intelligence. Ethical Christianity taught its poets--we are among them--to leap away from the unconscious, not toward it.II Sometime in the thirteenth century, poetry in England began to show a distinct decline in the ability to associate powerfully. There are individual exceptions, but the circle of worlds pulled into the poem by association dwindles after Chaucer and Langland; their work is already a decline from the Beowulf poet.
By the eighteenth century, freedom of association had become drastically curtailed. The word "sylvan" by some psychic coupling leads directly to "nymph," to "lawns," to "dancing," so does "reason" to "music," "spheres," "heavenly order," and so on. they are all stops on the psychic railroad. There are very few images of the Snake, or the Dragon, or the Great Mother, and if mention is made, the Great Mother leads to no other images, but rather to words suggesting paralysis or death. As Pope warned his readers: "The proper study of mankind is man." The loss of associative freedom shows itself in form as well as in content. The poet''s thought plods through the poem, line after line, like a man being escorted through a prison. The rigid "form" resembles a corridor, interrupted by opening and closing doors.
The rhymed lines open at just the right moment and close again behind the visitors. In the eighteenth century man educated people in Europe were no longer interested in imagination. They were trying to develop the "masculine" mental powers they associated with Socrates and his fellow Athenians--a demythologized intelligence, that moves in a straight line made of tiny bright links and is thereby dominated by linked facts rather than by "irrational" feelings. The Europeans succeeded in developing the practical intellect, and it was to prove useful. Industry needed it to guide a locomotive through a huge freight yard; space engineers needed it later to guide a spacecraft back from the moon through the "reentry corridor."III Nevertheless, this routing of psychic energy away from "darkness" and the "irrational," first done in obedience to Christian ethics, and later in obedience to industrial needs, had a crippling effect on the psychic life. The process amounted to an inhibiting of psychic flight, and as Blake saw, once the European child had finished ten years of school, he was incapable of flight. He lived the rest of his life in "Newton''s sleep.
" The Western mind after Descartes accepted the symbolism of black and white and far from trying to unite both in a circle, as the Chinese did, tried to create an "apartheid." In the process words sometimes took on strange meanings. If a European avoided the animal instincts and consistently leapt away from the latent intelligence, he or she was said to be living in a state of "innocence." Children were thought to be "innocent." Eighteenth-century translators like Pope and Dryden forced Greek and Roman literature to be their allies in their leap away from animality, and they translated Homer as if he too were "innocent." To Christian Europeans, impulses open to the sexual instincts or animal instincts indicated a fallen state, a state of "experience." Blake thought the nomenclature mad, the precise opposite of the truth, and he wrote The Songs of Innocence and Experience to say so. Blake, discussing "experience," declared that to be afraid of a leap into the unconscious is actually to be in a state of "experience.
" (We are all experienced in that fear.) The state of "experience" is characterized by blocked love-energy, boredom, envy, and joylessness. Another characteristic is the pedestrian movement of the mind; possibly consistent fear makes the mind move slowly. Blake could see that after 1,800 years of no leaping, joy was disappearing, poetry was dying, "the languid strings do scarcely move! The sound is forced, the notes are few." A nurse in the state of "experience," obsessed with a fear of animal blackness (a fear that increased after the whites took Africa), and some sort of abuse in her childhood, calls the children in from play as soon as the light falls:When the voices of children are heard on the green, And whisp''rings are in the dale,The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind, My face turns green and pale.Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down And the dews of night arise;Your spring and your day are wasted in play, And your winter and night in disguise. The nurse in The Songs of Innocence also calls the children in. But she has conquered her fear and when the children say,"No, no, let us play, for it is yet day And we cannot go to sleep:Besides in the sky the little birds fly, And the hills are all cover''d with sheep.
"She replies (the children''s arguments are quite convincing), "Well, well, go and play till the light fades away, And then go home to bed." The little ones leaped and shouted and laugh''d And all the hills echoèd.She enjoys their shouts. The children leap about on the grass playing, and the hills respond. We often feel elation when reading Homer, Neruda, Dickinson, Vallejo, and Blake because the poet is following some arc of association that corresponds to the inner life of the objects he or she speaks of, for example, the association between the lids of eyes and the bark of stones. The associative paths are not private to the poet, but are somehow inherent in the universe.IV An ancient work of art such as the Odyssey has at its center a long floating leap, around which the poem''s images gather themselves like steel shavings around a magnet. Some recent works of art have many shorter leaps rather than one long one.
The poet who is "leaping" makes a jump from an object soaked in conscious psychic substance to an object soaked in latent or instinctive psychic substance. One real joy of poetry--not the only one--is to experience this leaping inside a poem. Novalis, Goethe, and Hölderlin, writing around 1800 in Germany, participated in the associative freedom I have been describing; and their thought in a parallel way carried certain pagan and heretical elements, precisely as Blake''s thought did at that time in England. A century later Freud pointed out that the dream still retained the fantastic freedom of association known to most educated Europeans only from pre-Christian poetry and art. We notice that dream interpretation has never been a favorite occupation of the fundamentalists. In psychology of the last eighty years the effort to recover the dream''s freedom of association and its metaphors has been partly successful. Some of the psychic ability to go from the known to the unknown part of the psyche and back has been restored. So too the "leaping" poets: Rilke and Bobrowski, Lorca, and Vallejo, Rene Char, Yves Bonnefoy, and Paul Celan.
Yeats, riding on the dragonish associations of Irish mythology, wrote genuinely great poetry. If we, in the United States, cannot learn dragon smoke from Yeats, or from the French descenders, or from the Spanish leapers, from whom will we learn it? I think much is at stake in this question. Let''s set down some of the enemies that leaping has in this country. American fundamentalism is against the journey to dark places; capitalism is against the descent to soul; realism is against the leap to spirit; populism and social thought are against the solitary wildness; careerism in poetry doesn''t allow enough time for descent; the reluctance of recent American poets to translate makes them ignorant. We notice that contemporary American poets tend to judge their poetry by comparing it to the poetry other people of their time are writing--their reviews make this clear--rather than by comp.