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THAT MOMENTARY PEACE
by Malcolm Parr
"Was you thinking at all of poetry?" Mr Wegg inquired, musing.
"Would it come dearer?" Mr Boffin asked.
"It would come dearer," Mr Wegg returned. "For when a person comes to grind off poetry night after night, it is but right he should expect to be paid for its weakening effect on his mind."
CHARLES DICKENS:
Our Mutual Friend.
In his essay 'The Sanity of True Genius' Charles Lamb says: "So far from the position holding true that great wit (or genius, in our modem way of speaking) has a necessary alliance with insanity, the greatest wits on the contrary, will ever be found to be the sanest writers. It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a mad Shakespeare... the ground of the mistake is that men, finding in the raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But the true poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject but has dominion over it."
Charles Baudelaire wrote in his journal that only artists and children (the link between the two he always insisted on) can look at pictures; for them "An image represents something else: a dream that they recall, a miraculous voyage, a salvation."
Imagination, then, is the key attribute of genius, "the queen of all our faculties", as Baudelaire calls it. He goes on: "Imagination is both analysis and synthesis... it is sensitivity... It is imagination that first taught men the moral meaning of colour, of contour, of sound, and of scent. In the beginning of the world it created analogy and metaphor. It decomposes all creation, and with the raw materials accumulated and disposed in accordance with rules whose origins one cannot find save in the furthest depths of the soul, it produces the sensation of newness. As it has created the world (so much can be said, I think, even in a religious sense), it is proper that it should govern it."
In his book on Dylan Thomas (subtitled 'Dog Among the Fairies'), Henry Treece relates how Dylan Thomas reacted to Treece's criticism of his early poems where he refers to Thomas's "diffuseness" as a serious fault. In his reply Thomas provides a detailed and fascinating account of his working methods and how his creative imagination grappled with his raw material. First, he rejects Treece's conception of a poem as a "concentric movement round a central image". Thomas's kind of poem is based on a "host of images". Then he explains how the first image spawns another and so on, one image contradicting another. The process is one of constant conflict, that is, simultaneously constructive and destructive. From the centre, Thomas explains, emerges the life of the poem. The birth and the death of one image in another form the sequence, what the poet terms, a succession of "creations, recreations, destructions, contradictions". In a typical oxymoron, Thomas calls this the "womb of war", and from this finally issues the poem, beautifully described as "that momentary peace".
To return to Baudelaire whose words are still relevant in the twenty-first century: "It is impossible for a poet not to contain within him a critic. Therefore, the reader will not be surprised at my regarding the poet as the best of all critics." For Baudelaire the term "poet" includes all creative artists whatever their medium. And the critical faculty in operation functions in much the same way as the creative one. For the critic's job, Baudelaire claims, is to convert "volupté" into "connaissance", the sheer joy or thrill provided by a work of art transformed into knowledge, but knowledge coloured by the personality and imagination, most definitely not the Gradgrind type. In other words, the outcome might well be a work of artistic creation.
Throughout the ages works of art in one medium have inspired artists in others. The response of visual artists to the word is rich in endless possibilities. One has only to think of Ceri Richards's sensitive interpretation of Dylan Thomas's poetry. In the famous 1949 BBC Radio broadcast, 'Swansea and the Arts', Alfred Janes referred to Swansea as "full of contrasts and conflicts and contradictions", and emphasised how important they were to the artistic imagination. This is no less true of Swansea today. And there is Dylan Thomas's own work which will always be with us. How we respond with our feelings and imagination and intellect is up to us. And it is worth remembering what William Blake, a favourite poet of Dylan Thomas, said: "The imagination is not a State, it is the Human Existence itself."
Malcolm Parr: Translator, poet, short story writer; now freelance writer / lecturer living in Swansea
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