Poetry Must be Authentic to Psyche

In addition to all of the important qualities a poet must have—talent, intelligence, and a passion, an obsession, or a compulsion to write—a poet’s work must also be authentic to psyche.

There is an expression of our psyche in everything we do including writing poetry. Great poetry is always authentic to psyche, that is, it is an expression of the psychology, of the soul, of the depth of perception of the poet.

All poets face the question of whether or not they will censor what they write, this is something a poet must decide each time he or she sits down to write if there are any doubts about the writing. We need to ask ourselves, “If I censor what I write am I being authentic to psyche?” We don’t have to write everything that crosses our mind, but most of the time we need to be true to ourselves in our writing.

All poets go through years of apprenticeship to learn how to write poetry, the lyf so short,

the craft so long to lerne. There is also the necessity to be aware of the “insecurity of art”, that being creative, writing poetry, requires an attitude of insecurity, not thinking you know all the answers. There is also the important quality of investing in our writing an authenticity to the psychic content. Without this authenticity, I don’t feel that poetry has much, or any, significance.

What does it mean to be authentic to psyche? Poetry that is authentic to psyche is poetry that people anywhere, at any time, will respond to; they will find this poetry consistent with their own vision of life, or find their vision enlarged by poetry. Readers can identity poetry that is authentic to psyche because they resonate to these poems that speak directly to their soul; it is the reader’s soul that identifies the authenticity of these poems that speak the truth of life, of existence, to the reader.

To be authentic to psyche is to be aware of a mythic quality in poetry. This removes poetry from the merely personal and quotidian to an impersonal and universal context while still relying on the details of the personal and quotidian. Being authentic to psyche is to write poetry that represents the archetypal dimension of psyche. “Real” poetry is always authentic to psyche, it contains psychic content; that is, there is the presence of archetypes, symbolism, metaphor, and so on.

 All poetry requires emotional content, we need to be moved by the poem, if not greatly moved, or moved to an epiphany, then at least “touched” by the poem so that the poem says something to us. These are poems that we spend a lifetime pondering, they unfold for us the complexity and beauty of life, they reveal a deeper truth about life that we can refer to again and again as we get older. In this context, I think of Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, Yeats’ “The Second Coming”, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, and so on in many other poems. For instance, Williams Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience”, Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, the poems of William Wordsworth and John Keats. I think also of D.H. Laurence’s poems and the poems of William Carlos Williams. The work of David Ignatow, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath also speak to an authenticity of psyche. Melville’s Moby Dick is not poetry but it is authentic to psyche. A good anthology of poetry is invaluable in this sense; every young person should be given a good anthology of English poetry. I grew up reading Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury and I still enjoy reading the poems in this book. These poems I’ve mentioned here, and so many others, are deeply moving and one of the reasons for this is that they are authentic to psyche. In this the unconscious is opened and changed, our psyche is spoken to, and our existence is reflected upon.