22 March 21, Ars Poetica #6: Horace and Gary Snyder

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

T.S. Eliot

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

Adrian Mitchell 

Our friend, Horace, has far more to say regarding the ascended art of writing. Today, we present the sixth excerpt from Ars Poetica, Horace’s advice to a friend on the matters of good writing. As you know, this advice has made its way from 19 B.C. through many centuries and on into many thousands of serious writers’ hands. Let’s take a moment to take stock of why all the fuss.

Arguably, this work (originally written in Latin) has inspired poets, dramatists, and other authors as much as any treatise about writing. Ars Poetica is the foundational work pointing toward explaining the art of poetry. The core of Ars Poetica advises us that writing (particularly poetry) should attract admiration as much as a supremely created painting or sculpture. In other words, a poem needs no explanation; it is an immersive experience which makes use of gorgeous imagery to fascinate the reader/viewer/listener. Creating such a masterpiece is not a Saturday afternoon venture. It involves creating guiding principles and “rules” to provide the artist/poet with a framework on which to create. As you can see from the this and the last five Ars Poetica posts, there is no shortage of poets who write about poetry. The central objective of any writing, says Horace, is to instruct audiences as well as please them with originality, concrete imagery, and substantive meaning. All this, and more, come together to produce a lasting piece of literature.

Don’t miss Gary Snyder’s poems wherein he compares making an axe to writing a poem. His second poem uses the five elements to compare various kinds of poets and the poems themselves to empty houses, wild geese, seaweed, fuel oil and propane, and swift gales. Reading is believing when it comes to Mr. Snyder.

Sixth Excerpt from Horace’s Ars Poetica with Brief Commentary

Nor must you make such an exordium, as the Cyclic writer of old: "I will sing the fate of Priam[1], and the noble war." What will this boaster produce worthy of all this gaping? The mountains are in labor, a ridiculous mouse will be brought forth. How much more to the purpose he, who attempts nothing improperly?

"Sing for me, my muse, the man who, after the time of the destruction of Troy, surveyed the manners and cities of many men." He meditates not [to produce] smoke from a flash, but out of smoke to elicit fire, that he may thence bring forth his instances of the marvelous with beauty, [such as] Antiphates[2], Scylla, the Cyclops, and Charybdis.[3] Nor does he date Diomede's[4] return from Meleager's[5] death, nor trace the rise of the Trojan war from [Leda's] eggs: he always hastens on to the event; and hurries away his reader in the midst of interesting circumstances, no otherwise than as if they were [already] known; and what he despairs of, as to receiving a polish from his touch, he omits; and in such a manner forms his fictions, so intermingles the false with the true, that the middle is not inconsistent with the beginning, nor the end with the middle.

Do you attend to what I, and the public in my opinion, expect from you [as a dramatic writer]. If you are desirous of an applauding spectator, who will wait for [the falling of] the curtain, and till the chorus calls out "your plaudits;" the manners of every age must be marked by you, and a proper decorum assigned to men's varying dispositions and years. The boy, who is just able to pronounce his words, and prints the ground with a firm tread, delights to play with his fellows, and contracts and lays aside anger without reason, and is subject to change every hour.

The beardless youth, his guardian being at length discharged, joys in horses, and dogs, and the verdure of the sunny Campus Martius[6]; pliable as wax to the bent of vice, rough to advisers, a slow provider of useful things, prodigal of his money, high-spirited, and amorous, and hasty in deserting the objects of his passion. [After this,] our inclinations being changed, the age and spirit of manhood seeks after wealth, and [high] connections, is subservient to points of honor; and is cautious of committing any action, which he would subsequently be industrious to correct. Many inconveniences encompass a man in years; either because he seeks [eagerly] for gain, and abstains from what he has gotten, and is afraid to make use of it; or because he transacts every thing in a timorous and dispassionate manner, dilatory, slow in hope, remiss, and greedy of futurity. Peevish, querulous, a panegyrist of former times when he was a boy, a chastiser and censurer of his juniors. Our advancing years bring many advantages along with them. Many our declining ones take away. That the parts [therefore] belonging to age may not be given to youth, and those of a man to a boy, we must dwell upon those qualities which are joined and adapted to each person's age.

An action is either represented on the stage or being done elsewhere is there related. The things which enter by the ear affect the mind more languidly, than such as are submitted to the faithful eyes, and what a spectator presents to himself. You must not, however, bring upon the stage things fit only to be acted behind the scenes: and you must take away from view many actions, which elegant description may soon after deliver in presence [of the spectators]. Let not Medea[7] murder her sons before the people; nor the execrable Atreus[8] openly dress human entrails: nor let Progue[9] be metamorphosed into a bird, Cadmus[10] into a serpent. Whatever you show to me in this manner, not able to give credit to, I detest.

Commentary

A writer should follow the traditions of the Muse; or, if he strikes out something new, must be consistent. No better guide can we follow than Homer. A writer too should observe the characteristics of each age of man.

Certain rules not to be transgressed. 

POEMS by Gary Snyder

Axe Handles

One afternoon the last week in April

Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet

One-half turn and it sticks in a stump.

He recalls the hatchet-head

Without a handle, in the shop

And go gets it, and wants it for his own.

A broken-off axe handle behind the door

Is long enough for a hatchet,

We cut it to length and take it

With the hatchet head

And working hatchet, to the wood block.

There I begin to shape the old handle

With the hatchet, and the phrase

First learned from Ezra Pound

Rings in my ears!

"When making an axe handle

the pattern is not far off."

And I say this to Kai

"Look: We'll shape the handle

By checking the handle

Of the axe we cut with-"

And he sees. And I hear it again:

It's in Lu Ji's Wen Fu, fourth century

A.D. "Essay on Literature" – in the

Preface: "In making the handle Of an axe

By cutting wood with an axe

The model is indeed near at hand. –

My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen

Translated that and taught it years ago

And I see: Pound was an axe,

Chen was an axe, I am an axe

And my son a handle, soon

To be shaping again, model

And tool, craft of culture,

How we go on.

As For Poets

As for poets

The Earth Poets

Who write small poems,

Need help from no man.

The Air Poets

Play out the swiftest gales

And sometimes loll in the eddies.

Poem after poem,

Curling back on the same thrust.

At fifty below

Fuel oil won't flow

And propane stays in the tank.

Fire Poets

Burn at absolute zero

Fossil love pumped backup

The first

Water Poet

Stayed down six years.

He was covered with seaweed.

The life in his poem

Left millions of tiny

Different tracks

Criss-crossing through the mud.

With the Sun and Moon

In his belly,

The Space Poet

Sleeps.

No end to the sky –

But his poems,

Like wild geese,

Fly off the edge.

A Mind Poet

Stays in the house.

The house is empty

And it has no walls.

The poem

Is seen from all sides,

Everywhere,

At once.

Background

Gary Snyder is an American man of letters. Perhaps best known as a poet, he is also an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist with anarchoprimitivist leanings. He has been described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology". Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the American Book Award.

Exploration 1: When it comes to writing principles and rules, do you think a writer should adhere faithfully to their direction?

Exploration 2: What is the meaning of the following excerpt from Horace? “He meditates not [to produce] smoke from a flash, but out of smoke to elicit fire, that he may thence bring forth his instances of the marvelous with beauty . . .”

Exploration 3: Do all the Greek mythology characters distract from Horace's instructions?

NOTES

1. Priam – legendary king of Troy during the Trojan War.
2. Antiphates – King of the Laestrygones, a mythological tribe of gigantic cannibals.
3. Scylla, Charybdis, the Cyclops – monsters in The Odyssey.
4. Diomedes – a hero known for his participation in the Trojan War.
5. Meleager – leader of the Calydonian boar hunt. The Iliad relates his story.
6. Campus Martius: Originally used primarily as a military exercise ground, it was later drained and, by the first century BC, became covered with large public buildings—baths, amphitheater, theaters, gymnasium, crematorium, and many more temples. The Pantheon is the most notable structure extant.
7. Medea - In Greek mythology, Medea is the daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis, a niece of Circe and the granddaughter of the sun god Helios. 
8. Atreus – a king of Mycenae in Greek mythology.
9. Progue – no further definition
10. Cadmus – founder and first king of Thebes. Cadmus was the first Greek hero and, alongside Perseus and Bellerophon, the greatest hero and slayer of monsters before the days of Heracles.