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PARTJ'SAN REVIEW
nel-such as the odor of rotten apples or the taste of tobacco or tea–
then other distractions outside oneself are put out of competition.
Another possible explanation is that the concentrated effort of .
writing poetry is a spiritual activity which makes one completely for–
get, for the time being, that one has a body. It is a disturbance of the
balance of body and mind and for this reason one needs a kind of
~nchor
of
sens~tion
with the physical world. Hence the craving for
a scent or taste or even, sometimes, for sexual activity. Poets speak
of the necessity of writing poetry rather than of a liking for doing it.
It is spiritual compulsion, a straining of the mind to attain heights
surrounded by abysses and it cannot be entirely happy, for in the
most important sense, the only reward worth having is absolutely
denied: for, however confident a poet may be, he is never quite sure
that all
his
energy is not misdirected nor that what he is writing is
great poetry. At the moment when art attains its highest attainment
it reaches beyond its medium of words or paints or music, and the
artist finds himself realizing that these instruments are inadequate to
the spirit of what he is trying to say.
Different poets concentrate in different ways. In my own mind I
make a sharp distinction between two types of concentration: one is
immediate and complete, the other
is
plodding and only completed by
stages. Some poets write immediately works which, when they are
written, scarcely need revision. Others write their poems by stages,
feeling their way from rough draft to rough draft, until finally, after
many revisions, they have produced a result which may seem to have
very little connection with their early sketches.
These two opposite processes are vividly illustrated in two
exam~
pies drawn from music: Mozart and Beethoven. Mozart thought out
symphonies, quartets, even scenes from operas, entirely in his head–
often on a journey or perhaps while dealing with pressing problems–
and then he transcribed them, in their
completene~,
onto paper.
Beethoven wrote fragments of themes in note books which he kept
beside him, working on and developing them over years. Often
his
first ideas were of a clumsiness which makes scholars marvel how he
could, at the end, have developed from them such miraculous results.
Thus genius works in different ways to achieve its ends. But
although the Mozartian type of genius is the more brilliant and dazz–
ling, genius, unlike virtuosity, is judged by greatness of results, not by
brilliance of performance. The result must be the fullest development
in a created aesthetic form of an original moment of insight, and it
