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myself, but rather find myself committed and engaged with little
hand, foot, and head behaviour, however, are almost in a different world.
sense of driving on the road and not on the sidewalk. And I am not
you have what a bicameral man would be like. The world would happen
to him and [to act] he would have to wait for his bicameral voice
which with the stored up admonitory wisdom of his life would tell him
Jaynes, in his work The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral
Mind, is here providing an example albeit a simplistic one of the complex idea of a
bicameral human. To borrow his words again: at one time human nature was split in two, an
executive part called a god, and a follower part called a man (84) which both existed within the
same physical form. What we perceive as consciousness, Jaynes posits, only sprained forth as
this partition between god and man dissolved although due to the brevity of this essay, we
must here ignore the very interesting why but poetry, in a rudimentary form, predated the
breakdown of this partition. How could poetry, a thing seemingly created by conscious poets,
predate consciousness itself? It is my belied and here I seem to be not alone that poetry is
Poetry began with the bicameral mind (361). Jaynes suggests here he does point out
that due to the persistent arrow of time, the evidence is only inferential (362) that the god-
part of the mind of humans of antiquity spoke in a type of verse. As consciousness developed
and the following should be obvious it did not spring forth spontaneously and simultaneously
in all people, but rather was brought forth via gradual evolution. Those who lagged behind in this
age of transformation and remained bicameral into the new age of consciousness were often of
two orders: oracles, who communicated, often in a type of verse, messages of their (internal)
gods; and poets, who would pray to internal gods of inspiration, who would aid the poets in the
creation of their works, or perhaps simply speak through them. In our current form, we have all
evolved past these types of internal forces but poetry still exists. It began in the voices of our
internal gods, but in poetrys current state of being it retains a quality of the wholly other
(Jaynes 377). Through poetic inspiration, we can reach into our minds, and access the areas
which, in antiquity, spoke to us internally. Of course, seeing where something began does not
always precipitate an understanding of what something will be, or from our perspective, is. This
idea of an internal god-poet does seem to point, however vaguely, to a natural state: an organic
This runs, in a fashion, in tandem with the ideas of Emerson and Shelly regarding
veritable child-like states conductive to poetic creation. It would be useful to agree on how to
conceive of this state of child; let us view this childhood, not as a tabula rasa on which the ways
of civilized people must be inscribed, but rather as a sate of natural existence. This state would
be, in a way, closer to the state of our very distant ancestors: not necessarily in mental faculty,
but in base desires and actions, which are later over-written with societys script. Emerson, in his
essay Nature, suggests that poetry lives in a child-like sense of wonder regarding our
surroundings. This state of awe creates a tighter link between thought and word, between a thing
seen and its written counterpart, and in this tighter link our preconceptions of the thing dissolve.
The poet is able to see a tree in a thousand different forms where a wood-cutter may only see a
shaft and timber (216) or, as with Stevens, in able to look at a blackbird in thirteen different
ways. Language, of the mundane everyday variety, had been contaminated by our own relative
intelligence; through over-thought we destroy the true shapes of our ideas. To look at a blackbird,
or a tree, of anything for that matter, in a variety of ways, one must first momentarily forget what
a thing is. The poet must revert to a state of un-knowing in which, as if a child or a savage, they
see something for the first time, hold no definitions of the thing, and experience only their own
pure thoughts. Those who only have basic language speak often in nouns and nouns used as
verbs and in a sense communicate without the contamination of modern language and as
we follow this direction of simplification we see that language becomes more picturesque, until
its infancy, when it is all poetry (224). This infant language of poetry does not dwell in our
children but in the child-hood of our species or culture. This simplification of language and the
state of un-knowing is mirrored in the young of our time, and is what the poet must strive to
approximate. There is poetry in the natural, and it was once natural for us all to see it, but with
the passing of ages, and our individual maturation, it becomes harder and harder to see.
In Shelly we find a connected view. In A Defence of Poetry he states:
Even original language near its course is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: the copiousness of
lexicography and the distractions of grammar are the works of a later age, and are merely the
It should be clarified that I am not suggesting that all children are poets, nor that through, nor
that through not knowing a languages rules can anyone create great poetry, but that the same
degree of poetry that dealt in language in its own childhood can be approximated when a poet
temporarily reverts to a child-like state of wonder , and in that state the poet is not troubled by
the constraints of grammar and the like which our age has imposed upon language. A poet often
has learnt many grammatical rules, as many romantic poets, for example, also write intricate
essays, but a poet must also learn to forget these rules for a time.
In Aristotles Poetics we again find an idea connected to childhood, and in this case
directly, although implicitly, to the natural state which exists in children. He puts forth the idea
that poetry rose out of two natural human elements: imitation and pleasure.
Imitation comes naturally to human beings from childhood (and in this [we] differ from other
animals, i.e. in having a strong propensity to imitation and in learning [our] earliest lessons
through imitation. (6) Given, then, that imitation is natural to us, and also melody and rhythm
(it being obvious that verse-forms are segments of rhythm), from the beginning those who had
Here we see a slight difference, but also an important congruency, between Aristotles and
Jayness theories. Aristotle sees poetry as growing from individuals whose natural inclinations to
imitation and verse were strongest, whereas Jaynes sees these early poets as bicameral man who
existed in a constant state of closeness to verse (as their internal spoke in a type of verse-form),
which, in itself, was a natural state. As the internal god-poet of the bicameral human mind gained
its insight through the interaction of the bodys environment, its poetry can be seen to have
stemmed from a type of imitation as well. These details are, however, largely irrelevent to use
here; the most important congruency is the fact that poetry seems to be a manifestation of
language that is natural to us, or at least that poetry grows from natural elements of ourselves.
The elements Aristotle puts forth, imitation and pleasure, though interesting and important in
their own right, both from from a lower common denominator: both imitation and pleasure are
natural to us all.
Paradoxically, what is natural does not come naturally, or rather, not easily to us. Other
than in childhood, when do we speak often and easily in a sing-song voice? If I were to speak
now only in verse though it would be quite an achievement not only would I be
perpetually exhausted by the difficulty of such a task, but the wider world would most likely
think me mad.The copiousness of lexicography and the distractions of grammar to which Shelly
refers are works of our relative age. Their persistent existence is something to which we have
become accustomed, and avoiding or ignoring such rules to enable perpetual poetry seems
absurd. However alien it may seem, to access the natural state of our minds from which good
poetry leaps,9 we must find a way to stop our thoughts before the filtering effects of our ages
grammatical and linguistic constraints. To write poetry, or rather to write poetry of any worth, a
poet must forget the advice of our collective mothers and leap without looking, linguistically
speaking.
This idea of spontaneity is, by itself, idiotic. To write without any thought would only
produce nonsensical word-vomit: a far cry rom the elegance of Keats. Agamben says that the
inspired poet, or, to add clarity, the poet who relies on inspiration alone, is without works (60).
Pure inspiration is not enough; a degree of manipulation is necessary, but there is an every-
shifting balance that must be maintained between inspired authorship and diligent editing. In the
case of poetry, rather differently than in ordinary speech or prosaic text, this manipulation of text
is akin to an artist sculpting raw clay the initially raw, unedited inspired text rather than an
artist manipulating the clay before it physically exists, after which only subtle adjustments are
made. The absurdity of the latter example should shine light on how ludicrously unnatural an act
it is to employ grammatically constraints to an idea before it exists fully, and thus, how natural
Wordsworth, Shelly, and Agamben all supply theories of the creative act of poetry, and all
these theories express the idea of editing as separate from creation, and seemingly different from
societys firm linguistic rules. Wordsworth sees all good poetry as being created in a
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, but points out that such poetry must be created by a
poet who being possessed of more than the usual organic sensibilities [has] also thought long
and deeply (396). Shelly sees the poet, whose imagination is expressed through poetry, as an
instrument over which a series of impressions are driven like wind over an Aeolian Lyre,
but adds that there is also, in humans, an ever present internal adjustment so that, in the poet, it
is as if the lyre could accommodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them (826). In
either case, whether before spontaneous conception or after, the words of the poet are shaped by
the poets own agency, rather than by the impositions of grammar. Agamben refers to an idea
related to this as the idea of the Muse, whereby through inspired authorship, as manifest in
poetry, a poets words can come, and not simply be manipulated (59). Here simply is a key
words of the poet do not simply come either. We have already seen his views on the merits of a
purely inspired text without shaping by the hand of the poet, or rather his view of such a works
lack of existence, but I believe he would be as condemning of a text made of only manipulation,
void of inspiration.
Poets, as in the case with any creative individual endeavouring to create, must labour
greatly to create their works. I assuming that I am in fact a poet, and not some type of
impostor have spent hours meditating on a single word in a poem I have written, trying to
come to a decision regarding its removal or replacement, but only after the first draft was pulled
from my lucid mind. Poetry, like anything important, requires a great deal of mental refraction,
and its creation, like anything worth while, takes time. For poetry to remain pure, however, and
not simple become an imitation of a truer, ancient poetry, the first draft, whether written or only
held in the mind of the poet, must come into being with a degree of spontaneity, and only be
kneaded into its final form secondarily. Without sufficient kneading, as should by now be
Poetry, as has been my contention thus far, is the most natural state in which language can
exist. It is not, however, the most natural form that language takes when exiting our mouths. To
create poetry, the poet must pay respect to his or her poetic communication. The amount of effort
it takes to return to such a natural state of language cannot be overstated, but I truly believe that
it is always in such a return natural language, whether the poets were themselves conscious of
such a return or not, that the greatest poets of our past and present created their own greatest
works. How else can we explain how as poets age, and their experience increases, the greatness
of their works does not always follow the same curve of increase? Om the case of poetry,
practise does not make perfect, but rather perfection is reached through a combination of
idea in its most pure form. Though it may unprecedented effort, the works of great poets of the
past stand, and the works of great poets of days to some will stand, as proof that such a struggle