Poetics - II

from Over Vandet Går Jeg - Skitse Til En Poetik (Over The Water I Walk - Sketch For A Poetics) by Pia Tafdrup.




II

The disintegration of the classical aesthetic ideals began when French symbolism embraced a new conception of beauty derived from a modern reality, which was far from harmony. Baudelaire maintained that beauty always consists of an eternal and unchangeable element. I would say of beauty that it is a dance on a knife edge between the eternal and the changeable.

A special conception of wholeness has survived far away from the classical, harmonious idea, but even in the art work that signals splitting or simultaneous presence of several instances a perfection must make itself valid. Beauty still flowers brightly shining, and this in spite of the fact that art no longer takes it upon itself to stand guard over traditional values. If emptiness is not to conceal itself behind beauty, and deathly boredom not lurk behind the good and the true, these phenomena must today at least have miraculous dimensions.

Of the beautiful Rilke says: ‘Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen….’ Beauty is here connected with terror, because the perfect is static and unchangeable, and as such an expression of death. The terrifying and unendurable experience of beauty and terror in one is fundamental to this century, in which the lack of beauty is no less than in Baudelaire’s time.

If beauty alone is to meet an aesthetic need, it becomes slack and the poetry narrow. The beauty lies in the formal devices the poets use. Rilke’s angel is not beautiful, it is terrible, but the elegies are some of the most beautiful things that can be read. And like all beauty they produce a resonance in the body.

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The art that encounters resistance or is reproached for being ugly will undoubtedly be accepted later, when the work’s innate beauty will come through even in the most far-reaching experiments. The new and different is seldom experienced as beautiful –and not at all the art that struggles against order, the art that expresses disharmony, breaking of norms, illness, abnormality or annihilation.

The conception of beauty is conditioned by a number of circumstances, including events within science, e.g. with the paradigm shift in mathematics which has led to the phenomena of chaos being subjected to revision. Just as chaos and order appear to be kindred quantities, so beauty is unthinkable without its opposite. To hanker after pure beauty is to be 200 years too late.

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The conversation with the classical works has altered meaning. What they were once they are not today. They are, but they will always be something else, and yet they can preserve their intensity across historical time – a most important quality. The connection is at certain points integration, at others a distance, but the dialogue never ceases to acquire a new character.

The ‘old ones’ are not interesting because they are old, but for the simple reason that some of them are masters. What makes their works classics is not only that they are executed with artistic precision, but that they contain a universal value. They are still able to make an impression and set our minds ablaze, they still urge us to read and re-read them, and reconsider them. New poetry that really wants to be challenging must take the poetry of earlier times seriously.

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The idea of a tabula rasa idea is an illusory one. All that we know, we know through language. Even our thoughts can never be said to be our own. Tradition is therefore already to a certain extent inflicted on us. It would moreover be extremely stupid to try to ignore the past or pretend to have lost our memory. Why not examine what the art that now exists looks like? Why not find out where it can be continued from? For how otherwise is one to contribute something new and never seen before?

An epoch is characterised at least as much by what it reads as by what it writes.


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The new does not consist in an overturning of the older poetry, in fact the new exists only by virtue of it. Ideas may rest and acquire topicality again, or with intervals of years may prove to be unexpected challenges. The question is not: what would my poems look like without a tradition? But: would they exist at all, had not poems been written before?

For something to call itself new, it must be new in relation to something else. If I want to seek for the new, it will not happen unless I have first made discoveries in what has gone before, the new will art least not allow itself to be embraced with a flight from the past. Knowledge of tradition is required if I want to step over it and not run the risk of writing poems that have already been written. Only by acquiring an insight into the poetry of earlier times can I have any hope - starting from my personal universe - of continuing the aesthetic articulation all art is.

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Every reading of the classical works is to add new knowledge to what one already has. Thus one book is more than a book, it is a conscious multiplication, for the greatest works are again born of many other readings and therefore bearers of an insight and a memory no one, even though his life were a long one, would be able to arrive at.

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The poet who no longer has ideals is finished.

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Thoughts and ideas are not exhausted in the age in which they were born. The past is constantly present, so that even though I live in the twentieth century, I am confronted with earlier periods. ‘Of course one belongs to an age,’ said Karen Blixen, but added: ‘Well, I can’t really say of myself that I belong to a particular generation,for ever since I was a child I have read - well, the classics - Dante and Shakespeare and Euripides…’

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It is not a question of how far nowadays it is possible to reproduce older verse forms or rhetorical figures. Classical aesthetic ideals should not be given up, nor should they be sentimentalised, but only put to use if they have their justification. A quest for original values can easily take on the character of compulsion or sterility - free access to the sources, on the other hand, is something quite different.

When two ages confront each other, a further dimension may be added to the poem. A number of traditional features still exist in poetry, fully deliberate, but they enter a new complexity, where the pulse is different and where, for example, the measure is taken of the peculiarly musical quality of the Danish language. To work one’s way into this field of tension is a challenge, a charged and condensed place to be.

Someone has set a level that cannot be ignored. The classical starting point – for me Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Rilke, Celan, Char and Sachs – determines real new creation. It is in interaction and contrast that my lyrical profile comes into being, at least I cannot possibly avoid writing under the influence of what has already been written. I write my individuality in an attempt to synthesise past and present. I ‘cut in the darkness my sleep shadow. Drag my wings through the mire.’


If people now talk so paradoxically about reinventing tradition, it is because the classics have lived a suppressed existence. It has long been the vogue to take a critical attitude, which in practice has meant that many have been so preoccupied with breaking tradition that they have not had much to do with it. Others have as a matter of course taken the classics into their intellectual orbit, quite simply because eminent works have been written before our own time. The reinvention expresses itself mainly as a rereading, but in some cases also as a rewriting.

Dialectics in art arises in the field of tension between tradition and experiment. By all means call it modern to criticise the criticism that has set the modern works alone at the centre. The cultural context is that the words exist side by side: the new books and the classics.

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I live between the echo from the poems that went before, and the whispering and murmuring that are already now heard from future poems.

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When my generation of poets were making their debut, I not rarely heard other poets mutter in the corners: Is it really new, what they are bringing? But is it not still worth talking about life, love, loss, longing, death and decay? Is it not the task of every human being to discover for himself what has always been? No one can ever take over the experiences of others. The only possible way of progress is to fight one’s own way forward. Could their resistance be connected with the fact that they had imagined the world and man to be new?

There is a collective material from which I as a creative individual derive my personal subject-matter, or my subject-matter may simply be seen as part of a common material property. It is the same ontology and possibly also the same attention radius, but my focus is another, my contexts and interpretations different, as the existential contexts take the form of a specific historic period. And finally my poems are coloured by my essence and temperament.

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The modern should not be viewed as the loss of a past. But on the other hand one may search in the modern in order to see the past. In the modern it survives in a new and unexpected form. For no thought that is brought into the world ever leaves it again. Something may be forgotten, but it reappears and is reactivated. Books influence one another, but the idea that one large common work is being written, is a utopia. The thought is a clever one, yet it implies a united perspective that is no longer applicable. On the other hand: now and then I am be seized by the mad idea that the planet is kept floating in space and constantly rotating – carried by all us writers… As long as we write in the recollection of where our unique position comes from

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In art revolution leads inexorably to classicism, as Mandelstam has formulated it.

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The books that have meant the most to me? The Bible, the Anatomical Atlas and the Dictionary of the Danish Language..