Myth and Poetry

...The essence of lyricism lies in the ineffable quality which has been integrated into the poem in the same manner that it is integrated into music...

...He is a mythomaniac, and this mythomania is, according to some psychiatrists, a rather grave form of neurosis...

...And poetry is constantly reviving a forgotten imth or creating a combination of images which live on by themselves, whether joined lo the words or separated from them...

...It is the core of our life and of our death...

...It would be like using a flashlight to explain the brilliance of the sun...

...The best, innermost part of our emotion cannot be explained in words...

...In this, he coincides with the popular tradition of Andalusia, where every song starts with love and ends with crushing despair...

...I am not sure that this is so...

...The Sphere" and other novels Although the best of Read's work is his criticism of pictorial art, the most interesting material in his new book is that dealing with the theory of poetic art...

...After long and complex reflections, Read concludes that the myths around which our entire life polarizes are love and death...

...Truth to tell, I don't believe that psychoanalysis has any need to demonstrate something so perfectly obvious...

...The "poetic science" of Herbert Read is, more properly, a science of the soul...

...Lyricism is the ineffable element in a poem, the second nature which is called into being by the words but for which we as yet have no expression...

...It would only be possible' to prove such an hypothesis, in any normal case, by a process of psychoanalysis...

...This realm, in which the miracles of ineffable emotion are wrought, is the realm of the latent miracle of absolute reality...

...explains the poet's nature as that of a neurotic mythomaniac, the unending miracle of that nature will always remain unexplained...

...When he discusses poetry here, he says things which are new and have substance and yet strike us as somehow familiar...

...It is, however, difficult to transmit...

...If we should find a precise expression, it would be at the price of detracting from the lyrical emotion...

...This absolute reality exists only in that part of man which is most genuine, pure, secret and unique...

...For example, subtle critic though he is, he does not succeed in defining lyric poetry...

...And the miracle of poetry will have receded and hidden itself once again...

...These, however, are all commonplaces from the past...

...Read's essays on poetry give an appearance of sureness and perception that seems almost scientific...

...Indeed, he himself says: "The farther science penetrates into the mystery of life, the more it reverts to a mythological world...

...And the more deeply we probe into our own sensibility and intellect through the objective means of science, the better we realize that everything carries us to the realm of myth—the immortal myths of antiquity and the modern myths, the length of whose survival no one can foretell...

...It is always latent and rarely present, for rarely are we in the presence of true poetry...

...It is a dream—a collective dream that is preserved through the ages by the medium of art or of spoken tradition...

...In rare instances, Herbert Read reveals some basic contradictions...

...Behind every discovery of science new labyrinths and more distant objectives will appear, as is the case in physics...

...If science I assuming that psychology is a science...

...In his pithy essays, he attacks the subject frontally and from the flanks and at times approaches a definition, but without actually crystallizing it...

...The words of a lyric poem act as oblique allusions, as a magical summons to a mysterious realm where only the poet can hold sway...

...The poet differs from other mortals in that he creates his own myths...

...Read has a lyric poem depend on subsidiary factors like emotional unity and length...

...It would be more correct to say that the true poet is a normal man who has learned to hypnotize himself and thereby enter into a world which is not exactly that of myths, nor yet of dreams, but rather what we might call the world of absolute reality...

...But there are, according to Read, differences between a myth and a poem: A myth persists by virtue of a series of symbols or images which can be transmitted to all other cultures, however remote in space or in time...

...The fatalistic eroticism of the Andalusians is apparently the lyrical synthesis of Spain and of the world—of the romantic world, at all events, for Read is a neo-romantic...

...The same is true of a set of lyrical qualities...

...All the great myths were poetry first, were born in poetry—Penelope...

...A poem, on the other hand, cannot be separated from the words which alone constitute its essence...

...But Read has many other things to say: "A little research would discover the symbols of life and death on every side of us—threaded through the fabric of our history and legend, our poetry and painting, our dreams and our speech...

...A lyric poem can be short or long, compact or fluid, and have unity or diversity of emotional tones...

...Dostoyevsky, that great quarry from which Freud mined his precious ore, was the best example...

...Like poetry itself, good poetic criticism must achieve an accent of intimacy, even when it says the most unexpected things or employs a tone of the coldest objectivity...

...Prometheus, Pygmalion and, more recently, Don Juan, Don Quixote and Hamlet...

...The songs of Heine and Goethe, together with the music of Schubert and others, and the songs of Andalusia, Castille and Spanish America, which often attain great lyrical heights, are carried throughout the world as much by their music as by their words...

...The sick person tells lies and, after telling them, believes them and adapts the conditions of his actual life to them...

...There are certain cases, however, which are not normal: There is the case of the poet...

...According to Read, no one can understand anything until he tries to understand himself...

...However, even Freud, for whom Read cherishes a veneration which I do not share, said that there exists a neurosis of the artist which is not morbid and a schizophrenia of the writer which also cannot be regarded as a true illness...

...Furthermore, poetry has frequently allied itself with religion and with other arts, especially music...

...What is a myth...

...If he succeeds in communicating it to others and the others turn it into a myth (that is to say, a collective dream), the poet can be numbered among those few who add to the storehouse of human riches...

...He believes that it must be short and compact, and that the lyricism consists in the poem's capacity to be transmitted by music...

...It is even possible that in many subtle ways these symbols dominate each individual life...

...When someone asks us, after we have attended a concert, to explain the source of our pleasure, we are baffled...