An exact poetic duplication of a man is for the poet a negation
of the earth, an impossibility of being, even though his greatest desire
is to speak to many men, to unite with them by means of harmonious verses
about the truths of the mind or of things. Innocence is sometimes an acute
quality which permits the greatest representation of the sensible. And
the innocence of the poet's friend, who requires, dialectically, that the
first poetic rhythms have a logical form, will remain a fixed point of
reference, a focus which will enable the poet to construct half of a parabola.
The poet's other readers are the ancient poets, who look upon the freshly
written pages from an incorruptible distance. Their poetic forms are permanent,
and it is difficult to create new forms which can approach them.
The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them;
he exhausts the possibilities of his characters. The poet is alone with
infinite objects in his own obscure sphere and does not know whether he
should be indifferent or hopeful. Later that single face will multiply;
those gestures will become approving or disapproving opinions. This happens
at the publication of the first poems. As the poet has expected, the alarms
now are sounded, for - and it must be said again - the birth of a poet
is always a threat to the existing cultural order, because he attempts
to break through the circle of literary castes to reach the center.
He has a strange public now, with whom he begins to have silent and
hostile rapport: critics, provincial professors, men of letters. In the
poet's youth, the majority of these persons destroy his metaphysics, correct
his images. They are abstract judges who revise «mistaken»
poems according to an indifferent, poetic standard.
Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to
separate the poet from his poetry. However, I shall not indulge in autobiography
by speaking of my own country, which, as everyone knows, has been filled
in every century with Giovanni Della Casas, that is, with men of letters
of metrical neatness and fully developed dexterity. These high priests
of tradition have clairvoyance and imagination. Moreover, they are obsessed
with allegories of the credible destruction of the world. They do not tolerate
chronicles but only ideal figures and attitudes. For them the history of
poetry is a gallery of ghosts. Even a polemic has some justification if
one considers that my own first poetic experiments began during a dictatorship
and mark the origin of the Hermetic movement.
From my first book, published in 1930, to the second and the third and
the fourth (a translation of Greek lyrics published in 1940), I succeeded
in seeing only a stratified public of humble or ambitious readers through
the political haze and the academic aversion to harsh poetry that departed
from the standard classical composition. The Lirici Greci (1940)
[Greek Lyrics] entered fresh and new into the literary generation of the
time; and they initiated a truer reading of the classics throughout Europe.
I knew that young men quoted verses from my lyrics in their love letters;
others were written on the walls of jails by political prisoners. What
a time to be writing poetry! We wrote verses that condemned us, with no
hope of pardon, to the most bitter solitude. Were such verses categories
of the soul - great truths? Traditional European poetry, as yet unrestricted,
was unaware of our presence: the Latin province, under the aegis of its
Caesars, fostered bloodshed, not lessons in humanism.
My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to
be other people waiting to read my poems. Students, white-collar workers,
labourers? Had I sought only an abstract verisimilitude in my poetry? Or
was I being overly presumptuous? On the contrary, I was an example of how
solitude is broken. Solitude, Shakespeare's «long night», ill-borne
by the politician - who wanted a poet such as Tyrtaeus during the African
or Russian campaigns - became clearly poetic; taken to be a continuation
of European decadence, it was rather the rough draft for neo-humanism.
War, I have always said, forces men to change their standards, regardless
of whether their country has won or lost. Poetics and philosophies disintegrate
«when the trees fall and the walls collapse ». At the point
when continuity was interrupted by the first nuclear explosion, it would
have been too easy to recover the formal sediment which linked us with
an age of poetic decorum, of a preoccupation with poetic sounds. After
the turbulence of death, moral principles and even religious proofs are
called into question. Men of letters who cling to the private successes
of their petty aesthetics shut themselves off from poetry's restless presence.
From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that
is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue. The politician
and the mediocre poets with their armour of symbols and mystic purities
pretend to ignore the real poet. It is a story which repeats itself like
the cock's crow; indeed, like the cock's third crow.
The poet is a nonconformist and does not penetrate the shell of the
false literary civilization, which is full of defensive turrets as in the
time of the Communes. He may seem to destroy his forms, while instead he
actually continues them. He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to
speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally
and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger. The politician judges
cultural freedom with suspicion, and by means of conformist criticism tries
to render the very concept of poetry immobile. He sees the creative act
as being both extratemporal and ineffectual within society, as if the poet,
instead of being a man, were a mere abstraction.
The poet is the sum total of the diverse «experiences» of
the man of his times. His language is no longer that of the avant-garde,
but is rather concrete in the classical sense. Eliot has pointed out that
the language of Dante is «the perfection of a common language...nevertheless
the <simple style> of which Dante is the greatest master, is a very
difficult style». The poet's language must be given its proper emphasis.
It is neither the language of the Parnassians, nor that of the linguistic
revolutionaries, particularly in countries where contamination by dialects
only produces additional doubts and literary hieroglyphs. Indeed, philologists
will never revive a written language. This is a right which belongs exclusively
to the poet. His language is difficult not because of philological reasons
or spiritual obscurity, but because of its content. Poets can be translated;
men of letters cannot, because they use intellectual skills to copy other
poets' techniques and support Symbolism or Decadence for their very lack
of content, for their derivative thought, for the truths on which they
have been theoretically nourished when they are found to resemble Goethe
or the great nineteenth-century French poets. A poet clings to his own
tradition and avoids internationalism. Men of letters think of Europe or
even of the whole world in the light of a poetics that isolates itself,
as if poetry were an identical «object» all over the world.
Then, with this understanding of poetics, formalistic men of letters may
prefer certain kinds of content and violently reject others. But the problem
on either side of the barricade is always content. Thus, the poet's word
is beginning to strike forcefully upon the hearts of all men, while absolute
men of letters think that they alone live in the real world. According
to them, the poet is confined to the provinces with his mouth broken on
his own syllabic trapeze. The politician takes advantage of the men of
letters who do not assume a contemporary spiritual position, but rather
one that has been outdated by at least two generations. Out of cultural
unity he makes a game of sophisticated, turbulent decomposition wherein
the religious forces can still press for the enslavement of man's intelligence.
Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories
of man's expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content
is valid. It is a mistake to believe that a spiritual conquest, a particular
emotional situation (a religious state) of the individual, can become «society»
by extension. Pious abnegation, the renunciation of man by man, is nothing
but a formula for death. The truly creative spirit always falls into the
claws of wolves. The poet's spoken discourse often depends on a mystique,
on the spiritual freedom that finds itself enslaved on earth. He terrifies
his interlocutor (his shadow, an object to be disciplined) with images
of physical decomposition, with complacent analyses of the horrid. The
poet does not fear death, not because he believes in the fantasy of heroes,
but because death constantly visits his thoughts and is thus an image of
a serene dialogue. In opposition to this detachment, he finds an image
of man which contains within itself man's dreams, man's illness, man's
redemption from the misery of poverty - poverty which can no longer be
for him a sign of the acceptance of life.
In order to assess the extent of the politician's power - and here religious
power is also included - one need only recall the silence which lasted
for a millennium in the fields of poetry and the arts after the close of
the classical epoch, or recall the great paintings of the fifteenth century,
a period in which the Church commissioned the work and dictated its content.
Formalistic criticism attempts to strike at the concept of art by focusing
its attack on forms. It expresses reservations on the consistency of content
in order to infringe upon artistic autonomy in an absolute sense. In fact,
poetry will not accept the politician's «missionary» attempts,
nor any other kind of critical interference, from whatever philosophy it
may originate. The poet does not deviate from his moral or aesthetic path;
hence his double solitude in the face of both the world and the literary
militias.
But is there a contemporary aesthetics? And what philosophy offers truly
significant suggestions? An existentialist or Marxist poetry has not yet
appeared on the literary horizon; the philosophical dialogue or the chorus
of new generations presupposes a crisis, even presupposes crises in man.
The politician uses this confusion to give an air of illusory stability
to fragmented poetry.
The antagonism between the poet and the politician has generally been
evident in all cultures. Today the two blocs that govern the world are
fashioning contradictory concepts of freedom, even though it is clear that
for the politician there is but one sort of freedom, which leads in a single
direction. It is difficult to break down this barrier which has stained
the history of civilization with blood. There always exist at least two
ways of regarding cultural freedom: the freedom found in those countries
where a profound social revolution has occurred (the French Revolution,
for example, or the October Revolution); and that found in other countries,
which resist stubbornly before undergoing any change in their world view.
Can poet and politician cooperate? Perhaps they could in societies that
are not yet fully developed, but never with complete freedom for both.
In the contemporary world the politician may well take a variety of stands,
but an accord between poet and politician will never be possible, because
the one is concerned with the internal order of man, the other with the
ordering of men. A quest for the internal order of man could, in a given
epoch, coincide with the ordering and construction of a new society.
Religious power, which, as I have already said, frequently identifies
itself with political power, has always been a protagonist of this bitter
struggle, even when it seemingly was neutral. The reasons for which the
poet, as moral barometer of his own people, becomes a danger to the politician
are always those which Giovanni Villani cites in his Croniche Fiorentine.
He says here that, for the benefit of his contemporaries, Dante «as
a poet thoroughly enjoyed ranting and raving in his Commedia perhaps
more than was proper; but possibly his exile was to blame».
Unlike Villani, Dante does not write chronicles. To the excellent «hermetic»
poetry of the dolce stil nuovo Dante later adds, without ever betraying
his own moral integrity, the violence of human and political invective,
not dictated by his aversions, but by his internal standard of justice
which is religious in the universal sense. The aesthetes have gingerly
placed these verses, which burn in eternity, into the limbo of non-poesia.
Verses like «Trivia ride tra le ninfe eterne» («Trivia
smiles among the eternal nymphs») have always seemed only if he remains
the continuer of pseudo-existential enlightenment, the decorator of placid
human sentiments, or if he does not penetrate too profoundly into the dialectic
of his time, whether from political fear or simple inertia. For example,
Angelo Poliziano in the fifteenth century showed his artistic freedom in
one of the Stanze per lagiostra di Ginliano de' Medici[Stanzas Written
for the Medici Joust], where he cautiously speaks of a confused nymph who
goes to mass with secular ladies. But Leonardo da Vinci, a writer of a
different kind, was not free. Here liberty assumes its true meaning; it
is nothing but a permission granted by the political powers which allows
the poet to enter his society unarmed. Not even Ariosto and Tasso were
free, nor the Abbot Parini, nor Alfieri, nor Foscolo: the rhetoric of these
persecuted men places them in time among the propagators of the voice of
man - a voice that seems to cry out in the wilderness and instead corrodes
society's untruths.
But is the politician free in his turn? No. In fact, the castes that
besiege him determine a society's fate and act even upon the dictator.
Around these two protagonists of history, both adversaries and neither
of them free - and by poets we mean all important writers of a given epoch
- passions are stirred and conflict ensues. And there is peace only in
time of war or revolution - revolution the bearer of order, and war the
bearer of confusion.
The last war was a clash of systems, of politics, of civil orders, nation
by nation. Its violence twisted even the smallest liberties. A sense of
life reappeared in the very resistance to the inimical but familiar invader,
a resistance by culture and by folk humanism which, in Vergil's words,
«raised its head in the bitter fields » against the powerful.
In every country a cultural tradition remains detached from this military
movement. This tradition is not merely provisional, although it is considered
as such by the conservative bankers who finance construction on civilization's
«real estate». I insist upon saying not merely provisional,
because the nucleus of contemporary culture (including the philosophy of
existence) is oriented not toward the disasters of the soul and the spirit,
but toward an attempt to repair man's broken bones. Neither fear, nor absence,
nor indifference, nor impotence will ever allow the poet to communicate
a non-metaphysical fate to others.
The poet can say that man begins today; the politician can say, and
indeed does say, that man has been and always may be caught in the trap
of his moral baseness, a baseness which is not congenital but rather implanted
by a slow secular infection.
This truth, concealed among the unattainable attitudes of political
wisdom, suggests as a first conclusion that the poet can speak only in
periods of anarchy. The Resistance is a moral certainty, not a poetic one.
The true poet never uses words in order to punish someone. His judgment
belongs to a creative order; it is not formulated as a prophetic scripture.
Europeans know the importance of the Resistance; it has been the shining
example of the modern conscience. The enemy of the Resistance, for all
his shouting, is today only a shadow, without much strength. His voice
is more impersonal than his proposals. The popular sensibility is not deceived
about the condition of the poet or about that of his adversary. When the
antagonism is increased, poetry replaces the subordinate thought of the
politician who makes poetry into an idea that can be exploited or extinguished.
The Resistance is the perfect image of the conflict between the present
and the past. The language of blood is not only a drama in the physical
sense; it is the definitive expression of a continuous trial on man's moral
«technology». Europe was born of the Resistance and of the
admiration for the indeterminate figures who belong to that order which
the war sought to establish. These figures have now been torn out by the
roots. Death has an autonomous sleep, and any intervention to solicit this
sleep either by logic or by skill of political intelligence is inhuman.
Poetry's loyalty lies beyond any consideration of injustice or the intentions
of death. The politician wants men to know how to die courageously; the
poet wants men to live courageously.
While the poet is conscious of the politician's power, the politician
notices the poet only when his voice reaches deep into the various social
strata; that is, when lyrical or epic content is revealed as well as poetic
form. At this moment, a subterranean struggle begins between the politician
and the poet. In history the names of exiled poets are treated like human
dice, while the politician claims to uphold culture but, in fact, tries
only to reduce its power. His only purpose, as always, is to deprive man
of three or four fundamental liberties, so that in his eternal cycle man
continually retrieves what has been taken from him.
In our time the politician's defence against culture and thus against
the poet operates both surreptitiously and openly in manifold ways. His
easiest defence is the degradation of the concept of culture. Mechanical
and scientific means, radio and television, help to break the unity of
the arts, to favour a poetics that will not even disturb shadows. His most
favoured poetics is always that which allies itself with the memory of
Arcadia for the artistic disparagement of its own epoch. This is the meaning
of Aeschylus' verse, «I maintain that the dead kill the living»,
which I used as the epigraph to my latest work, La terra impareggiabile.
In this book man is compared to the earth. If it is a sin to speak of man's
intelligence, we can also say that religious powers - and the adjective
«lay» used to qualify intelligence is intended to indicate
not an accidental quality but rather an intrinsic value - go beyond their
bounds when they use their might to suppress the humble rather than to
deal with the internal fire of the conscience.
The corruption of the concept of culture offered to the masses, who
are led by it to believe that they are catching a glimpse of the paradise
of knowledge, is not a modern political device; but the techniques used
for this multiple dissipation of man's meditative interests are new and
effective. Optimism has become a tangible item; it is nothing but a memory
game. Myths and stories (anxiety about supernatural events, let us say)
not only sink to the level of murder mysteries, but even undergo visible
metamorphoses in the cinema or in the epic tales of criminals and pioneers.
Any choice between the poet and the politician is precluded. Elegant urbanity,
which sometimes pretends to be indifferent, ironically confines culture
to the darker corners of its history, affirming that the scene of strife
has been dramatized, that man and his suffering always have been and always
will be in their habitual confines, yesterday as well as today and tomorrow.
Surely. The poet knows that drama is still possible today - a provocative
kind of drama. He knows that the adulators of culture are also its pyromaniacs.
The collage composed of writers in any regime corrupts the literary groups
in the center as easily as on the periphery. The former groups pretend
to immortality with a tawdry calligraphy of the soul which they decorate
with the colours of their impossible mental lives. In certain moments of
history, culture secretly unites its forces against the politician. But
it is a temporary unity which serves as a battering ram to beat down the
doors of dictatorship. This force establishes itself under every dictatorship
when it coincides with a search for man's fundamental liberties. When the
dictator has been defeated, this unity disappears and factions again spring
up. The poet is alone. Around him rises a wall of hate built with the stones
thrown by literary mercenaries. The poet contemplates the world from the
top of this wall, without ever descending either into the public places,
like the wandering bards, or into the sophisticated circles, like the men
of letters. From this very ivory tower, so dear to the corruptors of the
romantic soul, he enters into the people's midst, not only into their emotional
needs, but even into their jealous political thoughts.
This is not mere rhetoric. The story of the poet subjected to the silent
siege is found in all countries and all chronicles of mankind. But the
men of letters who are on the side of the politician do not represent the
whole nation; they serve only - I say «serve » - to delay by
a few moments the voice of the poet in the world. In time, according to
Leonardo da Vinci, «every wrong is made right».
From
Nobel
Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam
