THE POETIC IMPULSE: THE ETHOS OF CREATIVITY

By DR. JERNAIL S. ANAND

Poetry pervades the universe like water which is visible and at the same time, invisible.

Some patches of earth are too soft, and cannot sustain and the water springs out. Same is the case with some soft consciousnesses which cannot bear the pressure of emotions and burst out into poetry.

This poetic flow is like a stream of water, and sometimes like a river, or even a tornado, if it happens to be a Shelley or a Walt Whitman.

This article is intended to understand what is poetic impulse, how it is created, and how it works, and secondly, what are the essentials of poetic creation.

DEFINING POETIC IMPULSE

a] Primary Impulse and Secondary Impulse:

Impulse, by definition, is a sudden inclination to act. The Poetic Impulse refers to the creative moments in a poet, when he is impelled by some external stimuli to create. We should remember that a poet, when he is not in his passion, is just like an ordinary man. He is a poet at rare moments, and these moments are the result of an impulse, a poetic moment, which is highly arbitrary.

A poet does not know beforehand what will impact his mental processes and set him to writing a poem. He is going for his work. For a walk. Watches the people around. But who knows when his poetic consciousness would get hold of him, and put the entire ordinary things into a different light, so that objects would start radiating meanings which ordinary people cannot discover in them.

This is Primary Impulse. Its source is uncertain and arbitrary. The poet cannot stop the flow of his emotions. He starts thinking, reacting, fantasizing, and gathering from his memory, if there was anything comparable with it. Mostly, poetry is created out of a sense of comparison.

How a rainbow looks? It evokes some images from our memory. All similes and metaphors are acts of comparison and it is the softer consciousness which can think and feel at the same time.

Poetry born out of this Primary Impulse is of a high order, because it is pure passion for creation, untouched by any other consideration, like winning an award, or to fighting a competition. It is also described as Inspired Poetry.

In fact, the quality of poetic creation depends on why you are writing poetry. If it is for sheer joy, for release and self-catharsis, the poetic output will be of a high order, attended in person by the presence of the Muse. Here, you are creating poetry.

But there is a Secondary Impulse also, which is manipulated by outside agencies. You have a prompt and you are expected to emote. Or as in pictorial poetry, there is a photograph before you. You are expected to compose a poem.

We should understand the difference between a poem which is created, and a poem which is composed.

For creating poetry, we need Primary Impulse, inspiration and an attempt at catharsis, we are impelled to write, whereas for composing poetry, we need the Secondary Impulse, which may or may not bring about catharsis, and in this case, we are not at all impelled, but rather compelled by a desire to win. When we write poetry on order, it is second rate poetry, something close to a commercial adventure, which loses its ethereal glow. It impresses no doubt. Here too, only those poems click with the masses where the poet has great creative powers, and possesses the genius of imagination in abundance.

ETHOS OF CREATIVITY

Ethos, Pathos, and Logos: Aristotle recognizes three aspects of communication. Ethos [Greek for ‘Character’] focuses attention on the writer’s or speaker’s trustworthiness or credibility. Pathos is making an emotional connection, essentially, the reason people believe that what you are saying will matter to them. Logos is your mode for appealing to others’ sense of reason, ergo the term logic. Combining the three is the path to achieving the greatest success.

Picking up from what Aristotle says, let us look at creativity and see what makes it trustworthy. Or in other words, what are the charactertistics of a piece of literature which makes it trustworthy for the people.

As I have already pointed out, creation can be the outcome of either Primary Impulse or Secondary Impulse.

OF ENTERTAINMENT AND INSTRUCTION AND THE HIGHER TRUTH

According to Plato, poetry is meant to entertain and instruct. In fact, only entertainment or only instruction renders a poem ineffectual in its ultimate analysis. So far as entertainment is concerned, let me refer to the fools of Shakespeare’s play. They were meant to entertain, but behind their apparent foolery, they would shoot arrows of wisdom.

Jaques in As You Like It asks Duke Senior:

Give me leave to speak my mind, and I will
Through and through
Cleanse the foul body of the infected world,
If they will patiently receive my medicine.

Dryden feels that ‘Delight is the chief, if not the only end of poesy”. Dr. Johnson writes: “The end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or to endure it”. Even Keats who was a lover of beauty, remarks: “

[Poetry] should be a friend to soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of men”. Wordsworth too goes beyond sheer entertainment, when he says: “I am nothing if not a teacher”. His poems are full of moral lessons, philosophical truths about life and religion, packaged with delight.

So, entertainment which is not directed at some higher truth loses its characteristic value in the same way, as a piece of poetry which is openly trying to instruct its readers into a particular way of life. Sophisticated readers do not like preaching and pontification. Therefore, literature blends the two in a digestible amalgam, so that while they take the pill, they laugh also.

Thus it seems that the function of poetry is to ennoble the reader and impart him the moral lessons but in sugar-coated form so that the learning becomes implied and plausible.

TRANSCENDING TIME AND SPACE:

A work of literature which deals only with the present predicaments of society may have a limited time value and it can be circumscribed also at a certain place to which it concerns itself. Inferior poets who cannot invest their poetry with timelessness and which is not informed by an objective stance, often make loud noise, which is stilled once the moment is gone. Suppose we write a poem for an Exhibition or for a Special Day.

But a mature artist invests his poetry with a deep message. He finds in every moment and every event the stuff of eternity and addresses it in his poetry. It makes him transcend time and space. Only those poets and playwrights have lived beyond their age whose work concerned itself with truths which were not only immediate, but were also the ultimate in character.

THE THIRD DIMENSION

Writing poetry is one thing, and making it reach the masses for whom it has been written is quite another. However, apart from these twosome objectives, the poet cannot sit still after writing his poetry.

His job is not over by emoting over heart wrenching incidents. Words which shed only tears leave much to be desired because the field is open for the poet to move in and act out his messages. In other words, I believe in Literary Activism. Heaps and heaps of poetic works are gathering dust and nobody opens them after their release. I wonder what is the use if one goes on writing and publishing poetry which is already short of readership?

Plato says: poetry entertains and instructs. But here, let us add the third dimension: The Activist Poet. Poets are messengers of goodwill and they should be actually reaching out to the poor and the depressed for whom they are writing; and the messages of love that they send in their poems, must find a real character.. They must be acted out in actual.

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

As soon as we hit upon a stimuli, our mental processes get into motion, and this stream of thoughts is called the stream of consciousness which moves as per the law of association and relativity.

The stimuli determines what type of memories open up, and how from thought to thought, idea to idea, vision to vision, we tumble, and as we move forward, the poem is being written. We are not aware of what will come next, until it has arrived and knocked at our doors.

Thus, poetic creation has no fixed agenda. What words and formations will join the procession, the poet is blissfully unaware of it. All his memories get into working, and this caravan of memories, reflexes, events good and bad, moves forward forcing, automatically, the most appropriate words, and images which are capable of reproducing the state of mind of the poet.

A REALTIME POETIC EXPERIEMENT IN SUDDEN COMPARISON:

Sudden Comparisons also help in poetic creation. I go for a walk. And, leaving the road, I venture into a small pathway which leads towards the fields. On the side of the pathway, there are acacia trees, whose branches are used for tooth brushing in the morning. When ever I tried to pick up a soft branch, I found it laden with big thorns.

I started wondering what is the need for these thorns? This was the poetic moment. My consciousness started working, and I started thinking that armed guards are employed to guard things we treasure. Then, I started thinking what is so precious in this so simple acacia tree?

I remember my father who used to bring the fruit from the acacia and told me: it is full of medicinal values. I don’t know what is so precious about acacia, but the size of thorns is enough to tell: there is something very precious in this tree. Here is the poem that I wrote:

THE GUARD DIVINE

Humans are well known for rationality.
They also lay their sole authority

Over wit and wisdom.

Of course, they know
How to guard precious things.

ATMs are guarded by armed men,
And so are our borders.
All treasures and valuables
Have around them
An army of guards.

Wherever I find thorns,
I come to the conclusion
They are on armed duty

To guard something precious.
From human trespass.

Every rose has a thorn,
And rich are in nutrition the trees
Which bear thorns.
Wisdom too has thorns,
A bluntness essential to save good.

Every thing good has to be protected
With a hundred rites
Which are equivalents of thorns –
Nature’s language
To raise an alarm.

Jealousies, hatreds, fights,
Conspiracies, intrigues
Are human equivalents
To safeguard
Things we consider precious.

Only difference is
Nature works with equipoise
While humans sorely lack
The sense of being human.
How easily they tumble into barbarity!

I had no idea how I would end this poem, or in other words, how the comparison would end.
This is poetic creation, in which the author is blissful unaware of what he will write.

OBSCURITY

Poetry is never a clean game. Poets do not inject obscurity with any special effort. Any poem which tries to say what it has to say, and the poet is very particular that there should not be any doubt about his feelings and thoughts, has to make a very special effort to remove all possibilities of abstractions, and this would be an unpoetic exercise.

The more it is abstract, the more it is rich in intellectual nutrition. The more the words and sentences mean, the greater is the scope of a poetic expression. So, obscurity, in my opinion, is the most precious ornament of a poem. A simple line when engages the attention of generations and no one knows what is what… this is the beauty of a single line of poetry which Keats wrote;

Truth is beauty, and beauty truth.

Generations of researchers have spent millions of hours and they go on discussing, debating, and finally, saying something which is contradicted by someone else. It is Keats’s greatness, not any lacunae that his poetry yields more meanings than the people who have approached them.

DR. JERNAIL S. ANAND, Professor Emeritus, [Hony]
The European Institute of the Roma Studies and Research, Belgrade.