“The
basis of evil is in emotion; Good rests in the power of rational selection in
action, as a preliminary to which the emotion in any situation must be as far
as possible eliminated, and, in so far as it cannot be eliminated, understood.”
Among
others, Winters probably has in mind Hart Crane, a poet egregiously
self-indulgent with emotions. Winters described his erstwhile friend as “a
saint of the wrong religion,” and critics have subsequently caricatured Winters
as a super-rational despot, some even accusing him of pushing Crane to suicide.
Seemingly in contrast to the American, Murray, whose son is autistic, says in
an interview:
“A
lot of modern art is very autistic. There is this arbitrary law that you're not
supposed to be sentimental or have any feelings. What the bloody hell is that
but autism, pretending to be some kind of automaton?”
In
the same interview, Murray diagnoses himself as “a high-performing Asperger,”
odd in a man whose poetry is Shakespearian in its deployment of every emotion
known to humans. Here’s a test for both poets. If any subject invites sappy
sentimentality, wallows in whimsy, it’s dogs. Their extreme poetic admirers want to be
admired for their love of canines. To address the subject in poetry without
falsity or self-admiration means swimming against the warm fuzzy tide. Winters
raised and showed Airedales. Here is his “Elegy on a Young Airedale Bitch Lost Some
Years Since in the Salt-Marsh” (Before
Disaster, 1934):
“Low to the water's edge
You plunged; the tangled herb
Locked feet and mouth, a curb
Tough with the salty sedge.
“Half
dog and half a child,
Sprung
from that roaming bitch, You flung through dike and ditch,
Betrayed by what is wild.
“The
old dogs now are dead,
Tired
with the hunt and cold, Sunk in the earth and old.
But your bewildered head,
Drenched with ancestral dream,
And cast ashore to dry.”
That Winters loved his dogs is inarguable and probably irrelevant. Here he is writing a poem, not telling us how much he loved his young Airedale bitch. The poem’s operative phrase is perhaps “Betrayed by what is wild.” Beware of what is wild, in nature and in poetry. I find Winters among the most emotionally rich of modern poets precisely because he mediates emotional expression, transmutes it and makes it memorable through form. Murray is another dog lover. Here is “A Dog’s Elegy” (Conscious and Verbal, 2001):
“The
civil white-pawed dog who’d strain
to
make speech-like sounds to his humanslies buried in the soil of a slope
that he’d tear down on his barking runs.
“He
hated thunder and gunshot
and
would charge off to restrain them.A city dog too alive for backyards,
we took him from the pound’s Green Dream
“but
now his human name melts off him;
he’ll
rise to chase fruit bats and bees;the coral tree and the African tulip
will take him up, and the prickly tea trees.
“Our
longhaired cat who mistook him
For
an Alsatian flew up there full tiltAnd teetered in top twigs for eight days
As a cloud, distilling water with its pelt.
“The
cattle suspect the Dog lives
but
three kangaroos stood in our pasturethis daybreak, for the first time in memory,
eared gazing wigwams of fur.”
Asked
to distinguish between the sentimental and the not sentimental in the interview
cited above, Murray says: “I think it's probably in not telling lies. There's
always something false about the sentimental. When it's feeling without lies,
it's terribly scary, but it's not sentimental.” Murray has an eerie gift (one
formerly possessed by fiction writers) for inhabiting other beings in his poems (an
odd talent for a self-diagnosed proto-Asperger), including other species, as in
his 1994 collection Translations from the
Natural World. In the hands of another poet, capitalizing “Dog,” reading
the minds of cattle and interpreting kangaroo behavior might be dubiously
sentimental. Not here. In his foreword to In
Defense of Reason (1947), Winters defines a poem as “a statement in words
about a human experience,” and later in the same book says “special pains are
taken with the expression of feeling.” He writes of “special pains,” not
exclusion.
1 comment:
Aspies have as wide a range as any other type. Moreover, upbringing can make a lot of difference... the degree to which the child is socialized as an infant and small child.
My opinion is that the luckiest writer is one who has what is called "a splash" of Asperger's, enough to introduce a certain new freedom of thinking...
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