For Robert Graves, they required solitude and complete silence. They came to A. E. Housman during long walks, after a pint of beer at lunchtime. Michael Longley said that if he knew where poems came from, he’d go there. The nature of poetic inspiration is something of a mystery even to practitioners. W. H. Auden wrote in The Dyer’s Hand:
In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
Many poetic careers have been marked by periods of silence (Longley’s own) or even the complete abandonment of the art (Rimbaud or Laura Riding).
There have been heated debates about whether poetry should flow spontaneously or must be worked at. In R. S. Thomas’s “Poetry for Supper”, ‘two old poets, / Hunched at their beer in the low haze / Of an inn parlour’ argue about whether ‘verse should be as natural / As the small tuber that grows on muck’, or ‘Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer / Said once about the long toil / That goes like blood to the poem’s making?’ Keats was famously on the side of inspiration (‘Poetry had better come as naturally as leaves to a tree or had better not come at all’). Of “Endymion”, he wrote:
it will be a test, a trial of my Powers of Imagination and chiefly of my invention which is a rare thing indeed—by which I must make 4000 Lines of one bare circumstance and fill them with Poetry;
a practice Byron described as ‘a sort of mental masturbation’. Seamus Heaney believed in Picasso’s dictum that ‘inspiration exists, but it has to find you working’, evidence of which can be found in the recent Collected Poems, with much reworking and even recycling of material. Despite his rock-and-roll image, the punk poet, John Cooper Clarke, thinks that inspiration is for amateurs and insists, ‘You’ve got to put the hours in.’
In The White Goddess, his highly idiosyncratic ‘historical grammar of the language of poetic myth’, Graves borrows Nietzsche’s dichotomy between the Apollonian and Dionysian to distinguish between the rational (‘the God Apollo’s golden mean’) and the irrational in poetry. According to the Apollonian (or Classical) theory, he says, poetry need not be original, ‘since the test of a good poet is his ability to express time-proved sentiments in time-honoured forms with greater fluency, charm, sonorousness and learning than his rivals’, whereas it’s the irrational and ecstatic Dionysian element that is, for Graves, the approach of the true poet, who ‘must always be original, but in a simpler sense: he must address only the Muse—not the King or Chief Bard or the people in general—and tell her the truth about himself and her in his own passionate and peculiar words.’
A similar distinction in American literature was made by the critic, Philip Rahv, in his famous article, “Paleface and Redskin”, published in The Kenyon Review in 1939. Contrasting ‘the drawing-room fictions of Henry James and the open air poems of Walt Whitman’, he believed there was ‘a dichotomy between experience and consciousness—a dissociation between energy and sensibility, between conduct and theories of conduct, between life conceived as an opportunity and life conceived as a discipline.’ He considered that the palefaces had dominated literature throughout the 19th century, but in the 20th had been overthrown by the redskins and wondered ‘whether history will make whole again what it has rent asunder.’
On the face of it, all this might seem like a straight distinction between left brain (Apollo) and right brain (Dionysus). It’s notable, however, that all the poets in my first paragraph, despite believing so firmly in inspiration, in fact wrote carefully-crafted rather than rhapsodical poems. That includes Graves himself, who also said that: ‘There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting.’ In Gravesian terms, it might reflect the fact that The White Goddess stands above both Apollo and Dionysus and is herself the only source of true inspiration. In less mythic terms, it suggests that both hemispheres are necessary for the creation of a poem.
Certainly, for Iain McGilchrist, the author of The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, it’s a question of both/and rather than either/or. Although his main thesis is that the world we live in now gives too much emphasis to the left hemisphere, he stresses that both hemispheres need to work together, ‘that the apparently separate “functions” in each hemisphere fit together intelligently to form in each case a single coherent entity’. The issue is not what each hemisphere does, but how it does it.
In a distinction that sounds remarkably close to Rahv’s description of palefaces and redskins, the left brain is characterised as analytical and literal, tending to deal more in isolation with pieces of information that it already knows, whereas the right brain deals more with entities as a whole, apprehending new things, good at making unusual connections and at the non-literal use of language. The title of McGilchrist’s book is itself a metaphor, using a story apparently from Nietzsche (again) to characterise the right brain as a wise spiritual master, whose usurpation by his clever emissary, the left brain, leads to tyranny and the collapse of society. But while the balance needs to be redressed, both are clearly necessary.
McGilchrist is a former Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, who began as an English Literature specialist before retraining as a doctor and becoming a psychiatrist. In 2010, he was interviewed for Poetry magazine by the poet and critic, Ange Mlinko. (You can read the interview here on The Poetry Foundation’s website.) It is notable that he pushes back against her tendency to describe things in terms of alternatives (itself a left-brain activity), such as the distinction between metaphor (a comparison between unrelated objects) in a poem by Philip Larkin and metonymy (replacing one related thing with another) in a poem by John Ashbury.
For McGilchrist, metaphor and metonymy are both a non-literal use of language and therefore belong to the right hemisphere. He doesn’t think that metaphor has to be new: in fact, the best ones can never be (‘The trick of the poet is to make what seemed feeble, old, dead come back to life’). He also disagrees that having a clear metrical pattern and rhyme scheme is limiting, or that they belong to the left hemisphere (‘They are the condition of all music and dance, the right hemisphere’s domain’).
For him, ‘everything depends on the reciprocal relationship between our minds and the relatively independent world beyond them.’ He thinks that the worship of the difficult, endemic in Modernism, goes against the direction poetry takes towards what we already knew, but never understood. ‘In poetry, being simple takes more skill than being difficult’ and ‘poetry need not seek novelty, because true poetry makes what seemed familiar new.’ This might not be quite the same as Pope’s ‘What oft was thought but ne’er so well express’d’, but such Apollonian ideas would no doubt have had Robert Graves turning in his, well, grave.
Nevertheless, it’s difficult to disagree that poetry, like other human activity, involves both hemispheres of the brain. In McGilchrist’s words, ‘poetry is nothing if not the recruitment of the right hemisphere’. Language itself, however, is situated in the left.
Stephen Claughton