Poets and inspiration
It so perchanced that over the last week I was reading two books about poets - Frances Bingham's Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life and Alison Lurie's memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson, Familiar Spirits.
There were moments, reading about the ongoing draaaama of Ackland's life, that I was somewhat reminded of this passage in Cold Comfort Farm: Persons of Aunt Ada's temperament were not fond of a tidy life. Storms were what they liked; plenty of rows, and doors being slammed, and jaws sticking out, and faces white with fury, and faces brooding in corners, faces making unnecessary fuss at breakfast, and plenty of opportunities for gorgeous emotional wallowings, and partings for ever, and misunderstandings[.}
Though Ackland had genuinely encountered something nasty in the woodshed, as it were, her toxic bully of an elder sister, not to mention the problems with her mother. But there also seemed to be a sense that the emotional upheavals were also seen as 'for poetry', whether they were love-affairs or her conversion to Catholicism (which appalled Sylvia Townsend Warner).
However, will concede that she does not appear to have done the Robert Graves thing where he went out pretty much looking for someone to perform as a weird spiritual/emotional dominatrix being The Muse.
She also allowed that certain experiences had actually been bad for her poetry (the long tormented/tormenting affair with Elizabeth Wade White, and the RC conversion) (possibly a case could be made that it was the long sustaining partnership with STW that was most productive?)
But anyway I realized that there was also that motif of seeking inspiration in Familiar Spirits, in which Merrill and Jackson started experimenting with an Ouija board and ended up with an elaborate cosmogony (which increasingly looks like RPF of great figures from history whom they admired) which became the basis for a major work by Merrill.
The way this came to absorb their lives - and that of a young man who became a Merrill fan-boy and then partner - seemed to me an adult-onset version, or at least, reminiscent of, the Bronte's Web of Childhood or the youthful Farjeon's TAR. (Lurie does not make this connection.)
But it is probably a rather romantic, even sentimental, notion of the poet that assumes that they are struck into poetry by some perception of the quotidien in a new way and and that they should sit and wait for INSPIRATION to descend.
This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/3335129.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.