BEYOND THE TWILIGHT OF REASON
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would have been like one who does not know he is passing through a wood be–
cause his eyes are on the pathway. So I think that in the making and the
understanding of a work of art, and the more easily if it is full of patterns and
symbols and music, we are lured to the threshold of sleep, and it may be far be–
yond it, without knowing that we have ever set our feet upon the steps of horn
or of ivory.
I would say that the experience of both writing or reading poetry is
akin in many ways to remembering your dreams for many nights. If
you've been deprived of your dreams, useless as they often seem, a whole
dimension has been removed.
Hilton Kramer:
Denis Donoghue will respond, and then we'll take several
questions from the audience.
Denis Donoghue:
I would like to clarify what I might have inadequately
suggested. Many years ago, the critic Allen Tate wrote an essay called
"To What Is the Poet Responsible?" Tate wrote at a time when poets
were urged to be acutely socially conscious, to be responsive to, shall we
say, reality in its immediate, pressing, worldly sense. Yet at the end of the
essay, Tate concluded that fundamentally and finally the poet is responsi–
ble to his language. And language is the source of the provenance or
provocation of responsibility. Not ideas, not ideologies, not political pro–
grams. That of course, is what Czeslaw Milosz has been saying. And on
that emphasis I entirely agree. The question of form is, of course, a pro–
foundly crucial one, since form does not mean merely the counting of
syllables or the counting to fourteen if you're reading a sonnet. It's a far
more profound issue, as indeed Mr. Milosz also implied. The second
point I will try to make by way of a quotation. Seamus Heaney was kind
enough to send me a copy of his recent Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
There are many very beautiful things in it, but one phrase caught my at–
tention and stayed in my mind, where he spoke of "the sufficiency of
what is absolutely imagined." That struck me as a very telling and far–
reaching phrase. We might question whether anything can be "absolutely
imagined." But we would surely not want to question the sufficiency of
what is indeed profoundly and intensely imagined. That is an emphasis
that I would certainly wish to have made.
I finally would like to add that of course literature is related to other
activities, perhaps related to every other conceivable and nameable activ–
ity. But if we are to avoid the spuriousness of such relations, literature has
to be acknowledged as literature, to begin with. Then it can be shown to
have bearings, reverberations, and relations with virtually anything else
