Who Needs a Horse That Flies? Pt. I
Most of what we do or make, for good or ill, originates in the imagination. This makes it the most indispensable and powerful of all our human potentialities. I am not speaking here only of art or those word creations that we call poems. I am speaking of anything that we first dream or, if you will, conceive and then realize as facts—facts that have the imagination as their source. This can be anything from how we are dressed this minute (which we imaginatively planned before we chose the clothes we chose) to the building or house in which we now find ourselves (which originated in the imagination of the architect who designed it) to the city and the society in which we live (the former originating in the imagination of the original pioneers and planners, and the latter originating in the imagination of Thomas Jefferson and the unique group of deist politicians known as the Founding Fathers.) In that sense we can regard the entire experience with American democracy for more than two centuries as the participation of citizens in an ongoing imaginative experiment. In other words, it was imagined that people could live communally no longer on the basis of tribal loyalty or race or heredity but on allegiance to a citizen-created constitution—a government of, by, and for the people in the words of Lincoln’s great “poem,” subsequently called “The Gettysburg Address.” Lewis H. Lapham, the former editor of Harper’s and a superb essayist in his own right, confirmed this when he wrote that democracy “is a shared work of the imagination.” And we can logically conclude that any breakdown in democracy can be attributed to a breakdown in the imagination, which permits the former allegiances to race, blood, or custom to re-assert themselves. Thornton Wilder has even gone so far as to claim that violence itself can be attributed to a failure of imagination.
Portrait of S. T. Coleridge from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and The Vision of Sir Launfal, published by Sampson Low, 1906.
Thought of in this way, the imagination, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge called an “esemplastic power,” is the father of both invention and, where literature and art are concerned, creation. Let us consider architecture as an example of the imagination at work since architecture involves both creation and invention. Architecture, which has been defined as the “creation of artificial space,” permitted man to live in places other than natural shelters like caves because at some point a human beings imagined that it could be otherwise. Stone, wood, thatch, and even ice were used to create dwellings of various types, but it was the inchoate architectural imagination that conceived of them as habitable and protective. And, adjusting to man’s nature and his social demands, architecture slowly evolved beyond housing into everything from palaces to prisons. Of course, such an evolution, as in all things creative or inventive, is subject to other influences, not all of them beneficent. A man who owned a city block, for example, could derive income from stores, offices, or places of business built at street level. But in the name of entrepreneurism (the contemporary password for any profit-making enterprise, which in turn is probably prompted by something as undisguised as greed) that same landowner could imagine additional income if he built a second, third, or fourth floor on top of the street-level real estate. And continuing upward to higher floors he could add to his income as long as the ascent was architecturally possible. Thus, the skyscraper, despite the PR ballyhoo, is nothing but a way of acquiring more and more income from more and more stories.
It is all answerable to the creative impulse as influenced by a desire for more and more profit. That and the invention of the elevator, with further refinements added by Mr. Otis and his elevator company, show that the creative impulse, however admirable and “esemplastic,” can be wrested to other purposes. It’s certainly not confined to architecture. When the imagination is diseased by ideology or spiritualism disguised as revealed religion, we often have societies that in time degenerate into fundamentalist barbarism. The concocted belief in what they imagined as their own superiority motivated the Nazis to slaughter millions in the name of purification. The current policy of the United States in the Middle East, which is dubbed “humanitarian intervention,” is already being identified by historians and others as a tragedy begotten of historical naïveté and hubris. The deaths, physical and psychological maimings, and outright waste are in the news every day to remind us of what can happen when the imagination goes awry.
If we consider speech and its representation in print as a form of creation, what challenges does this present to the imagination? And what can be said of oral or printed speech that we identify as poetry? It is universally conceded that speech in whatever language is what differentiates man from the other animals. But speech has many levels. There is the level of conversation, petition or gossip, the level of simple or complex communication, the level of rhetoric, and so on. All of these serve a purpose, to be sure, but they all lack what poetry by its very nature possesses—the capacity to engage those who experience it at several levels at once, i.e., the literal level (what the words actually mean), the suggestive level (what the words sound like or how their meanings may be enhanced when placed next to other words), and the symbolic level (what it evokes over and above its literal, tonal, and associative meanings). Straight communication is rarely concerned with the last two considerations, but poets are. When they are able to bring multiple capacities of language into play, they somehow create in those who read or hear them more than straight communication. It is a sense of communion—co-union. We irresistibly become one with the subject. When Mercutio, for example, is asked if he had been wounded after his skirmish with Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet, he could simply have said yes. If he were a medical student, he could have said, “It’s a single stab wound three inches to the right of the navel and just below the lowest rib.” Instead, realizing that he has been mortally wounded, he says with his usual flare, “Tis not deep as a well nor wide as a church door, but it will do.” Which of those three responses has the more poetic dimension?
The vision that is given by what words mean, what they suggest, what they evoke by their tones or half-tones and by their rhythm is language expressed in full. In this context it is relevant to remember that the Greeks conceived of poetry as a winged horse named Pegasus. Something about the way a horse cantered or galloped approximated for the Greeks the rhythms of poetic language and the way those rhythms can come to engage our total attention when we hear them. But in addition to hooves, Pegasus has wings. This suggests to me that the Greeks were not only sensitive to poetic rhythm but to the visionary power of words to ascend or, in keeping with the metaphor, to transcend the moment, to fly.
We live in a society of transmissions, explicitly stated concepts, sloganeering, bites of sound (words tailored to the time allowed to say them), the siren songs of slang and advertising. In other words, we are inundated by everything from straight talk to finessed lying. Language in this sense does not and cannot create moments of intimacy or union. Poetry somehow does, and this is as primal and universal and “feelingly” understandable as a scream, a moan, or a cry of unbearable pleasure or pain. It stops us. It transcends the moment. And above all, it expresses who we are in words that are unmistakably human. If we place that next to the demagoguery and all the various flavors of lying from political correctness to the syrupy deceptions of diplomacy and the malicious falsehoods we call slander, we realize that without the candor of felt speech, we are left only with inferiorities—a Babel of “sound and fury signifying nothing.” This is why poetry is an optional but an essential and ongoing engagement. “The survival of poetry, in fact the survival of humans and their words,” warns Wendell Berry, “depends upon the cultivation of better language.” And he continues: “Poems worthy of the name, and of the effort to make them, are made of necessity by inspiration and because they are needed.”
Samuel Hazo is the founder of the International Poetry Forum, which he directed for 43 years. A National Book Award finalist and inaugural poet laureate of Pennsylvania, Hazo is the author of nearly 60 books, including his latest book of poetry, Becoming Done, and book of essays, Who Needs a Horse That Flies?: Essays on Poetry and Pretense, which is the source of this article.