arensberg

Updated: May 15, 2025

Because the poet is drawn equally to this world and to the other world, shall we characterize him as a hybrid creature, and assert that an irreconcilable discord is in his soul? We shall prove ourselves singularly deaf to concord if we do so. Poets have been telling us over and over again that the distinctive element in the poetic nature is harmony. What is harmony? It is the reconciliation of opposites, says Eurymachus in the Symposium. It is union of the finite and the infinite, says Socrates in the Philebus. Do the poet's desires point in opposite directions? But so, it seems, do the poplars that stand tiptoe, breathless, at the edge of the dreaming pool. The whole secret of the aesthetic repose lies in the duality of the poet's desire. His imagination enables him to see all life as two in one, or one in two; he leaves us uncertain which. His imagination reflects the spiritual in the sensual and the sensual in the spiritual till we cannot tell which is the more tangible or the more meaningful. We sought unity in the poetic character, but we can reduce a nature to complete and barren unity only by draining it of imagination, and it is imagination which enables the poet to find aesthetic unity in the two worlds of sense and spirit, where the rest of us can see only conflict. There is a little poem, by Walter Conrad Arensberg, which is to me a symbol of this power of reflection which distinguishes the poetic imagination. It is called Voyage

Elizabeth Atkins - The Poet's Poet : essays on the character and mission of the poet as interpreted in English verse of the last one hundred and fifty years