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.
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