Marriage and Poetry

An interesting coincidence: I received two wedding invitations in the mail yesterday, (inaugurating the beginning of wedding season, I suppose), and that made me think about poetry, and, since I am neither married nor much of a poet, I am entitled to strong opinions about both.

My one big idea about literature, and poetry in particular, and art in general, is that it always exists within a set of boundaries, and therefore these boundaries should be well understood and intentional (and preferably intended as part of a tradition). [1]

Walt Whitman, with his trademark exuberance, sung about breaking open doors (implying, I imagine, that all doors are in some sense prison doors):

Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs![2]

And this can be thought of as a rallying cry to poets who wish to dispense with form altogether, which actually amounts to replacing an old form with a new one, a screen door with a storm door, which really is often a shame. Although it is possible to create great poems without traditional forms (William Carlos Williams and Whitman himself come to mind), yet freedom in poetry usually has an unhappy result, as my own little offerings over the past couple weeks have likely made perfectly apparent. Shigalyov, a radical in Dostoevsky's Demons, says:

I got entangled in my own data, and my conclusion directly contradicts the original idea I start from. Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism.[3]

The poet must give up his freedom to say whatever he wants in order to say something worthwhile, and forms help us do this. X. J. Kennedy wrote:

People say, "I dislike rhyme. It won't let me say what I want to say." I answer, "Yes! You've got it! That's what's great about it!"[4]

That's what great about marriage, too (well, that's one of the great things about marriage).

Mr. G. K. Chesterton has said everything I have just said, but with significantly more wit:

Anarchism adjures us to be bold creative artists, and care for no laws or limits. But it is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called "The Loves of the Triangles"; I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular. This is certainly the case with all artistic creation, which is in some ways the most decisive example of pure will. The artist loves his limitations: they constitute the thing he is doing. The painter is glad that the canvas is flat. The sculptor is glad that the clay is colourless.[5]

He even makes the same connection to marriage:

To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else. That objection, which [will-worshippers] used to make to the act of marriage, is really an objection to every act. Every act is an irrevocable selection exclusion. Just as when you marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take one course of action you give up all the other courses.[6]

But when you marry one woman, you should not only give up the possibility of being married to all other women, you also give up the possibility of having your own way. And this is a good thing, but I imagine it is rather difficult. Anyway in these and other ways marriage is like art. "Truly, this is a great mystery, as says the apostle."[7]

At any rate the two invitations arriving on the same day is not such an amazing coincidence because both weddings will take place on the same weekend, and the invitation senders were bound by the same laudable sense of etiquette. I'm planning to go to the one here in Pittsburgh. It is a bit of a shame, though, because Massachusetts is lovely in June.

[1] Although I can't pretend to know the first thing about literature, I am told that this has to do with Representation Theory. But I owe the beginnings of my own ideas on the subject, probably, to Neil Postman and also my own misunderstanding of Marshall Mcluhan's maxim "the medium is the message." (But, who knows? Perhaps his whole fallacy is wrong).

[2] From "Song of Myself."

[3] I am quoting here from Richard Pevear's introduction to Notes from Underground (Vintage Classics Edition. September 1994) but really if you get a chance you should read Demons.

[4] The only place I can find a reference to this is on the Alsop Review website where its quoted without a citation.

[5] From Chapter 3 of Orthodoxy. It's in the public domain. You can read it here:
http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/ortho14.txt

[6] Ibid.

[7] Father Ambrose of St. Barlaam monastery, Meteora, as quoted in Peter Hammond's The Waters of Marah