The Poet's Mind: John Keats, W. B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, William Wordsworth

Note: Prompted by the observance of National Poetry Month by tomorrow's edition of The New York Times Book Review, I offer this post to quote and discuss these poets' point of view.

“In the letters Keats coined ideas such as the “Chameleon Poet,” which came to gain common currency and capture the public imagination…The poetical mind, Keats argued:

“has no self – it is every thing and nothing – It has no character – it enjoys light and shade…What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion [chameleon] Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity – he is continually in for – and filling some other Body – The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute – the poet has none; no identity – he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's Creatures” (1).

1. Wikipedia. “John Keats.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats

July 11, 2016

W. B. Yeats, 1923 Nobel Prize winner, hoped his “double” and “anti-self” “Leo” was a genuine spirit, but admitted “Leo” might be “a secondary personality”

“It was at Wimbledon, in 1912, that Yeats felt himself contacted by the spirit claiming to be ‘Leo’…’Leo’…said he had been with Yeats since childhood as his ‘opposite’…’Leo’ thereafter frequently reappeared to Yeats, who was so stirred that he began composing a correspondence with this alternate self…This imaginary dialogue was not wasted. It inspired the great antiphonal poem ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ written in 1915,” which included the following lines:

“I call to the mysterious one who yet

Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream

And look most like me, being indeed my double,

And prove of all imaginable things

The most unlike, being my anti-self…”

“Yeats freely confessed that his useful sparring partner ‘Leo’ might come from his own imagination. As he explained in 1917 to Sir William Barrett, past President of the Society for Psychical Research, ‘I think one should deal with a control on the working hypothesis that it is genuine. This does not mean that I feel any certainty on the point, but even if it is a secondary personality that should be the right treatment’ " (1, pp. 9-10).

1. Brenda Maddox. George’s Ghosts: A New Life of W. B. Yeats. London, Picador, 1999.

2016

“Emily Dickinson’s Use of the Persona” by John Emerson Todd: But is it more likely that she constructed personae or had alternate personalities?

Todd points out that in many of Dickinson’s poems, the “I” speaking is not Emily. It is a persona. He says she has four kinds: 1. The “Little Girl” Persona, 2. The “Lover-Wife-Queen” Persona, 3. Personae in Death and Eternity, and 4. Personae involving Psychology and the Divided Personality (1). He gives an example of the latter:

“I felt a Cleaving in my Mind —

As if my Brain had split —

I tried to match it — Seam by Seam —

But could not make them fit” (1, p. 83).

Todd uses the word “persona” to imply that Dickinson “more or less consciously adopted” those four kinds of “non-Emily” (1, p. xv) narrators.

But is that how most poems are written? Is that how Dickinson wrote? Where did her personae come from? Did she purposely, intellectually, construct them? I’m guessing that she didn’t construct her personae any more than most novelists construct their characters and narrators.

And that’s the trouble with concepts like persona, voice, alter ego, double, etc.: they are misleading about the creative process and uninformative psychologically. Emily Dickinson probably had alternate personalities.

1. John Emerson Todd. Emily Dickinson’s Use of the Persona. The Hague, Mouton, 1973.

T. S. Eliot: Multiple personality in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and in Eliot’s real-life identity as “The Captain,” possibly an alternate personality

This post continues my poetry-post retrospective. I want to make it clear that multiple personality is not an isolated quirk of any particular poet.

June 14, 2017

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot: In the first line—“Let us go then, you and I”—the “you and I” may refer to Prufrock’s alternate personalities.

“Eliot offered different identifications. At some time in the 1950s, he answered the enquirer that ‘anything I say now must be somewhat conjectural, as it was written so long ago that my memory may deceive me; but I am prepared to assert that ‘you’ in The Love Song is merely some friend or companion, presumably of the male sex, whom the speaker is at the moment addressing…’ On the other hand, in a 1962 interview, Eliot said that Prufrock was in part a man of about forty and in part himself, and that he was employing the notion of the split personality…

“But the immediate source for ‘you and I’ is likely to have been Bergson’s Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), published in translation in 1910…In the Essai, Bergson develops the idea of a double self: one aspect being the everyday self, experiencing common reality; the other, a deeper self, attuned to profound truths, and normally in subjugation to the superficial self” (1, pp. 48-49).

“Frederick Locke contends that Prufrock himself is suffering from multiple personalities of sorts…” (2). Laurence Perrine writes "The 'you and I' of the first line are divided parts of Prufrock's own nature” (2).

Comment

Why did Eliot, speaking about the poem in a 1950s interview, have to conjecture and presume what he had meant? Why didn’t he know for certain who “you” is in his poem? And why did he give a different explanation in the 1962 interview? Perhaps different personalities were answering the question in the two interviews. Prufrock.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Love_Song_of_J._Alfred_Prufrock

1. B. C. Southam. A Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot, 6th ed. New York, Harcourt Brace, 1996.

2. Wikipedia. “The Love Song of J. Alfred

June 18, 2017

T. S. Eliot: In a secret life, Eliot called himself “The Captain,” who may have been the alternate personality responsible for his pornographic poems.

“The flat Tom rented in early 1923 was to be the hub of his secret life…At Burleigh Mansions he underwent a metamorphosis: here he was no longer ‘Mr. Eliot,’ banker and dutiful husband, but ‘Captain Eliot,’ hero of the Colombo verses, captain of his crew…

“Osbert Sitwell noticed, when he visited Eliot in the ‘bizarre’ atmosphere of the Charing Cross Road flat, that ‘Visitors on arrival had to enquire at the porter’s lodge for ‘The Captain,’…

“ ‘Noticing how tired my host looked, I regarded him more closely, and was amazed to notice on his cheeks a dusting of green powder…I was all the more amazed at this discovery, because any deliberate dramatisation of his appearance was so plainly out of keeping with his character, and with his desire never to call attention to himself, that I was hardly willing, any more than if I had seen a ghost, to credit the evidence of my senses.’

“Osbert was almost ready to disbelieve what he had seen, but he went to tea with Virginia Woolf a few days later. ‘She asked me, rather pointedly, if I had seen Tom lately, and when I said ‘Yes’ asked me—because she too was anxious for someone to confirm or rebut what she thought she had seen—whether I had observed the green powder on his face—so there was corroboration!’ Osbert and Virginia were apparently equally astounded, and although they discussed Tom’s use of cosmetics at considerable length, could find no way of explaining his ‘extraordinary and fantastical pretence’…He remained mystified: Osbert never did discover why T. S. Eliot called himself ‘The Captain’ and wore make-up…(1, pp. 356-358).

“As a student at Harvard, he began circulating his Columbo and Bolo jingles between about 1908 and 1914. For men only, and degrading women, Jews and blacks, they offer the spectacle of a penis so mighty it can rip a “whore” “from cunt to navel”. This revel in violence is varied by the antics of the sex-mad King Bolo and his Big Black Kween, whose bum is as big as a soup tureen…

“At first, when I came upon the Bolovian Court and Columbo and his crew, I assumed that they were a juvenile aberration. The third volume of Letters (covering the period of Eliot’s conversion to the Anglican faith in June 1927) presents a challenge to this. For the obscene verse that Eliot continued to write and disseminate as late as the age of 44 is not, in his own post-conversion view, an aberration” (2).

Perhaps “The Captain” was an alternate personality responsible for Eliot’s Colombo poems.

1. Carole Seymour-Jones. Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, first wife of T. S. Eliot. New York, Anchor/Random House, 2001.

2. Lyndall Gordon. “T S Eliot and the sexual wasteland.” NewStatesman, 20 November 2015. http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2015/11/t-s-eliot-and-sexual-wasteland

Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Two Voices” in “The Poet’s Mind” by Gregory Tate: Poem demonstrates “double consciousness,” which means multiple personality

Professor Tate says that Tennyson’s “view of the embodied mind in his early writing, epitomized in ‘The Two Voices’, is of a fragmented and fluctuating compound of mental states whose operations often defy conscious control; a view that was also partly formed through personal experience…

"‘The Two Voices’ comprises a dialogue between a depressed speaker and an insidious inner voice that urges suicide” (1, p. 45).

The poem refers to states of consciousness that differ in what they remember, so that the relation of the poem to the psychological concept of “double consciousness…is evident in the emphasis that both place on the separation of the two states of consciousness through the fragmentation of memory” (1, p. 48).

Double Consciousness

Tate credits the concept of double consciousness to the work of 19th century doctor Henry Holland, who defined it as a condition in which “the mind passes by alternation from one state to another, each having the perception of external impressions and appropriate trains of thought, but not linked together by…mutual memory” (1, p. 48).

Here is another history of “double consciousness”:

“…the term "double consciousness" was applied to cases of split personality; by the late nineteenth century, it had come into quite general use not only in professional publications but also in discussions of psychological research published for general audiences as well…

“In 1817, in a New York professional journal called the Medical Repository, an account headed ‘A Double Consciousness, or a Duality of Person in the same Individual’ made use of the term in a way that remained fairly constant for psychology through the nineteenth century. The account was of a young woman—later identified as Mary Reynolds—who at about age nineteen fell into a deep sleep from which she awoke with no memory of who she was and with a wholly different personality. A few months later, after again falling into a deep sleep, she awoke as her old self. At the time of the 1817 account, she had periodically alternated selves for a period of about four years. As it turned out, this was to continue for about fifteen or sixteen years in total, until in her mid-thirties she permanently entered the second state. Her two lives were entirely separate; while in one, she had no knowledge or memory of the other. Such utter distinctiveness of the two selves was what made the editors of the Medical Repository refer to hers as a case of ‘double consciousness.’

“As a result of the Mary Reynolds case, the term ‘double consciousness’ entered into fairly extensive use. For example, Francis Wayland's influential mid-nineteenth-century textbook Elements of Intellectual Philosophy treated the concept of double consciousness as part of a general discussion of consciousness as such and recounted the Mary Reynolds case along with a few others by way of illustration. An 1860 article in Harper's also focused on the Reynolds case and on double consciousness as a medical and philosophical issue. As a medical term, then, it was hardly confined to the use of medical professionals.

“During the time Du Bois was formulating his ideas of African American distinctiveness, there had been renewed interest in double consciousness as a medical and theoretical issue. Most important for Du Bois was the role of his Harvard mentor William James. James stimulated this interest, not only in his Principles—in describing what he called ‘alternating selves’ or ‘primary and secondary consciousness,’ he drew on a body of contemporary French work which had been widely publicized in the United States as well—but also as a result of his own experience about 1890 with a notable American case of double consciousness, that of Ansel Bourne. James's work with Bourne (whose discoverer, Richard Hodgson, did use ‘double consciousness’ to label the case), as well as the American publication of the French studies on which James drew, occurred at the same time Du Bois's relationship with James was at its closest. Whether James and Du Bois talked about it at the time is impossible to say, but based on Du Bois's use of ‘double consciousness’ in his Atlantic essay he certainly seems to have known the term's psychological background, because he used it in ways quite consistent with that background” (2).

“The Two Voices” (3).

1. Gregory Tate. The Poet’s Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830-1870. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012.

2. Dickson D. Bruce Jr. “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness.” http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG03/souls/brucepg.html

3. Alfred, Lord Tennyson. “The Two Voices.” http://www.philaletheians.co.uk/study-notes/constitution-of-man/the-two-voices-of-lord-tennyson.pdf

William Wordsworth on his Multiple Consciousness: “often do I seem Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself And of some other Being.”

Wordsworth is famous for saying that poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquility,” which is from his Preface to Lyrical Ballads. But he says something quite different in The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind; An Autobiographical Poem.

His Preface may be quoted more often than his Prelude, because of prejudice against multiple personality (multiple consciousness).

August 3, 2014

William Wordsworth on his “Two Consciousnesses” and “other Being”

It is natural to believe that everyone has the same sense of self that you do. If you have a single sense of self, then you may suspect that anyone who claims otherwise is joking, lying, or crazy. If you have a multiple sense of self, then you may suspect that anyone who claims otherwise is lying or in denial.

So you might find it interesting to show the following quotation to people you know and get their reactions.

It is from Wordsworth’s The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet's Mind; An Autobiographical Poem, Book Second, School-time (1850 version):

A tranquillising spirit presses now

On my corporeal frame, so wide appears

The vacancy between me and those days

Which yet have such self-presence in my mind,

That musing on them, often do I seem

Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself

And of some other Being.

Wordsworth J, Abrams MH, Gill S (Eds). William Wordsworth The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850: Authoritative Texts, Context and Reception; Recent Critical Essays. New York, WW Norton, 1979.

August 4, 2014

Wordsworth footnote:

I almost did not write the last post, because the first time I read those lines from Wordsworth’s Prelude, I misread them.

At first, I thought he was making the trivial point that he had seen things differently when he was younger. But rereading, I realized that he was not making that trivial point.

Rather, he is saying that, now, as an adult, he is subjectively aware of two distinct, conscious Beings within him, one of which originated in, and relates to, his childhood; in other words, a child-aged alternate personality (the most common kind of alternate personality, because multiple personality starts in childhood).

Multiple consciousness—each with its own sense of “I”—is the essence of multiple personality. And that is what Wordsworth is describing.

Note: Please excuse some glitches in my reassembling of the above past posts.