Spooky Sylvia and the art of inspiration
Ever wonder what Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes did for fun? They used to conjure spirits via a Ouija board and flirt with the supernatural, obviously. Turns out they summoned a psychic spirit named 'Pan' who could predict football scores and recite poetry:
More significantly for the subject of this article, the half-lying spirit of the Ouija also popped up on occasion to discuss poetry with the couple via the medium of glass and board. Apparently, his favourite poetry was that to be found in King Lear; but he couldn’t remember, quite, what his favourite line from Shakespeare’s great play was. This fact, it seems, caused Pan to bemoan the state of his memory, in fairly sublime terms:
‘Why shall I ever be perplexed thus?
I’d hack my arm off like a rotten branch
Had it betrayed me as my memory.’The poetic quality – and beauty – of this phrase is obvious. Hughes himself, later to become poet laureate, and one of the English language’s best-loved versifiers, was impressed enough by it to write “Where did he find that? Or did he invent it?” In those lines, Hughes sums up quite succinctly the nature of the whole debate around poetic inspiration; in short, where do poets get their ideas from?
That's the central question of a splendidly supernatural article about poetry and the paranormal in the Fortean Times, a journal of strange phenomena. Is the poet a mere communicator, or a medium channeling another realm? Writer S.D. Tucker offers this anecdote about Hughes's decision to become a poet by way of an answer:
The story goes that while still an undergraduate at Cambridge in the 1950s, Hughes, exhausted from writing a constant stream of essays on literature, fell asleep at his desk one night. These essays, he felt, were not truly creative exercises, more a kind of analytical labour. As if to bring home this fact to him, a memorable dream – a message from another realm, if you will – gave him a harsh, yet beautifully expressed message. In it, a flaming bipedal fox entered Hughes’s room, walked across to the essay that lay still unfinished on his desk, and left a burning paw-print on the paper before turning to Hughes and saying, in no uncertain terms: “You are killing us."
Tucker then posits that poets have oft been known to dabble in all things otherworldly in an attempt to define the ever-elusive origins of inspiration and creativity:
This, then, is where inspiration comes from. As the word seems to suggest, when we are inspired, we are, literally, breathing in the air of the spirit; spirare, from which both the words spirit and inspired are ultimately derived, means ‘to breathe in’. What we are breathing in when inspired, according to Coleridge, is nothing other than the anima mundi. Through performing this act, the poet is sharing, in some sense, in the divine act of creation itself, which is then reflected in the inferior yet nonetheless beautiful act of the production of poetry; or, in a more general sense, of art itself. Primary imagination, then, is the act of perception of the divine beauty; secondary imagination is the act of writing it down in a poetic way.
But wonders if the true source of inspiration supernatural - or merely biological:
“The function of metre in poetry is to drive the electrical activity of the brain” and, thus, to make people susceptible to performing the will of their imaginary gods. [7] The implications of this statement, if true, are enormous. In order to best ensure their own survival in the harsh and violent world of pre- and early history, “most men at one time, throughout the day, were hearing poetry… composed and spoken within their own minds.”
Spooky.