26
PARTISAN REVIEW
individual experiences in their unmitigated subjectivity and thus ex–
pands our subjectivity and cracks our horizons. The poet is not bound
by any man's thoughts; he records experience with its emotionally
colored thoughts and his thoughts about emotions. He neither imi–
tates an archaic torso of Apollo nor sets down in rhyme thoughts
about it which someone else has had before him. He gives us the
experience of a man who is unusually sensitive and thoughtful.
Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" is admittedly quite different
from a clinical recording of a stream of consciousness. But how can
one communicate an emotion, or for that matter any experience, see–
ing that emotion has part in all of them? General labels like "admire"
or "beautiful" or "love" conceal a multitude of thoughts, sensations,
and perceptions, if they do not altogether supplant the dazzling tex–
ture of experience. A phrase like "shoulders' lucid fall" is not the
emotional equivalent of a thought- what thought?- but the thought–
ful equivalent of an emotion.
In the child's consciousness, thought and emotion are not yet
dissociated, and many words that later lose their color have a power–
ful emotional impact. Gradually we learn to some extent to disen–
tangle thoughts from emotions, not only in mathematics and science
generally but whenever we are asked to tell simply and briefly "what
happened." Eventually, the emotions shrivel until they become weak
enough to be confined by a small vocabulary and content merely to
accompany that which really matters. The great artist liberates the
emotions and recreates the sheer wonder of childhood without sur–
rendering the development of the intellect.
Like a child, the great artist is less confined by convention than
most adults: he experiences things in a profoundly individual manner,
more intensely and honestly, less swayed by reputations and authori–
ties. Aware of this, Nietzsche and Rilke occasionally made the child
the symbol of the creator, but neither shared the anti-intellectualism
of some of the romantics or wanted to return to childhood or "na–
ture." Nietzsche in particular recognized that the greatest artists were
men of surpassing intellectual power, men like Leonardo and Michel–
angelo, Dante and Goethe; and he wanted the same freedom for
the intellect as for the emotions. Neither he nor Rilke would consider
following the precedent of some of the romantics by fleeing back into
the arms of authority.
