Miss Emily, Poetry and (Un)happiness
 

I saw “A Quiet Passion” yesterday. The portrait of Dickinson was darker than I imagine her, and it got me thinking about the relationship of poetry to happiness, which is an old question, but seems central to Davies’s vision. Is happiness or contentment inimical to writing good poetry, as a general rule? I can think of historical examples where unhappiness seemed to spur poetic creativity. If one is content to live, does that contentment curtail the need to write, as Yeats conjectured? Does living itself become the poem? Is this what happened to Eliot?

Do we value the poetry of suffering over the poetry of happiness?

I’m interested both in historical examples and in personal experience – all thoughts welcome...

Well there is the apothegm that Happiness writes white, but there are many poems about happiness, one of my favourites being John Betjeman's about the joy of achieving the perfect drive (golf).

And miserable poets are not always the best poets. Auden was, in general, a happy man.

John,

Thank you so much for reminding me of that apothegm, which I had not remembered, but was the sliver stuck in my mind. You led me to this wonderful exploration of the subject by Clive James (citing Eliot, Yeats, Shakespeare and Larkin, among others).

The mature Whitman and Rumi seem rather happy to me. I consider them both great. Perhaps Blake, though his happiness is of a rare (semi-cracked?) variety?

M

What a fabulous subject line, Mr. Ferris! It compelled me to open this discussion.

I am grateful for the heads-up, as I had not even heard about this movie.

As far as your vital question goes, I always am reminded of C.S. Lewis's insistence that the Victorian poets were the "Golden Age" of poetry in English literature for the simple fact that they were the happiest writers, living in the most prosperous and peaceful times in its (then)-history.

As for me -- I have no opinion on it, other than to say that, of course, it depends on the poet's temperament and disposition, whether to choose to be inspired by the circumstance. But how many possess the extraordinary imagination required to lift oneself out of unhappiness, into the realm of "Happy Poetry"?

But, by contrast to Lewis's observation -- look at the sublime examples of literature which came out of the Stalinist regime, in miserable Socialist Russia. Anna Akhmatova, for one, who is now considered to be among the greatest that nation has ever produced. Has a more miserable poet ever lived, than she? There is also a difference between "happiness" and "joy," methinks. One changes with circumstance. The other is a spiritual state, a state of mind which does not. You may do something which robs my happiness, but take from me my joy? Good luck with that.

Anyhow -- thank you for the interesting post!

Jennifer

Yes, what a good topic!
Joy, which may be hijacking this thread a little, makes me think of Gerard Manley Hopkins and after him George Herbert. Two great poets, I think we'd have to say, and in my memory, neither seems unhappy - though Hopkins did stop writing verse.
I think the experience of sorrow can linger. I for instance continue to produce poems about it, long after what sorrow I've seen has passed.
Goethe was fairly happy for most of his life, though Faust II to most readers seems duller than the early Faust I. Hoelderlin was not. I do think a great poet requires compassion, which adversity can teach. Uninterrupted happiness does a less good job of that to my mind.
Wordsworth became happy. Coleridge perhaps as well? And look what happened to their art.

Michael, like you, I thought "A Quiet Passion" seemed too one-sidedly gloomy. It left out the woman who spent so many pleasant hours in her garden, who wrote "Inebriate of air am I / And debauchee of dew" and admiringly described a hummingbird as "A route of evanescence / With a revolving wheel." Dickinson wrote hundreds of happy poems, but I'm afraid Clive James is on to something: we don't easily forgive artists for having an unrelievedly cheery view of the world. If we had only Dickinson's happy poems, we might--wrongly--think of her as a rather minor poet (and though most of her happy poems are astonishing, some are a bit fey). On the other hand, if we had only her poems of misery and grief, we might think of her as a great but limited poet and wish for greater range. Or as James puts it, "Dante's Inferno might be hard to take if we didn't know that he would later write the Paradiso, but the Paradiso would be unbearable without the Inferno."

Dickinson's happy poems can have an extraordinary sense of expansiveness, like this tiny personal Paradiso that might have been sent to a correspondent with a flower:

It’s all I have to bring today—
This, and my heart beside—
This, and my heart, and all the fields—
And all the meadows wide—
Be sure you count—should I forget
Some one the sum could tell—
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell.

One line of ironic modesty sets up seven lines of expansion. I love that teasing "be sure you count," as the rest of the poem makes clear that the "sum" could never be told.

I think it's worth looking at this question outside the English-language tradition as well. Horace for instance seems quite happy, and perhaps Virgil too. Theocritus is pretty happy.
Goethe of course said "I name the Classic the healthy and the Romantic the sick": "Ich nenne das Klassische des Gesunde und das Romantische das Kranke."

The ideal form for writing "happy" poems, or at least poems that are not sad, is the children's poem. I think of children's poetry as a "form" unto itself, broadly speaking, characterized in large part by the absence of the gloom of adult poetry. You even find Emily's "happy" poems included in children's anthologies, as well as the occasional "happy" poem by others.

I do think that truly "happy" poems written for adults are relatively rare. Even uplifting and optimistic poems for adults tend to achieve their uplift by overcoming or coming to terms with something sad. I think we've had a thread here once or twice challenging people to post poems that are entirely free of some form of sadness, and while there were some excellent examples that people came up with, the inventory of such poems ultimately proved rather thin.

I'm pretty sure this is why I write mostly for children.

Splendid thoughts!

I am in transit once again between coasts... I'm so glad to have these thoughts to consider up in the blue... more from me later.

Meanwhile, carry on!

I'm surprised you think of Hopkins as happy. He wrestled with depression - his "dark night of the soul" - and sometimes appears to hate the God he served as a priest. His later sonnets are known as the Terrible Sonnets, not because they're terrible but because they are so bleak.