About Poetry
Hideo Kobayashi
Poetry is generally difficult to define and, as I am not a poet, I do not hold any poetics-like beliefs from my experience of writing poetry. However, when I was a student, I was so influenced by poetry, especially by the work of the French Symbolist poets, that to say anything about poetry seems to mean that I have no choice but to talk about the nature of that influence. What the Symbolist poets revealed to me was the spirit of criticism. This was the defining event of my youth, so much so that if I had not met Baudelaire, I would not have the spirit of critique that I have today.
In Baudelaire's discussion of Wagner, there are these words, "The critic becomes a poet." It may be surprising that a critic becomes a poet, but it is impossible for a poet not to become a critic. I consider the poet the best critic of all critics. Certainly, Baudelaire was the best critic of his time, but he was also the best Symbolist critic.
The Symbolist poetic movement would have been inconceivable without the influence of Baudelaire. The term is ambiguous not only in Japan, but also in France, where it has been used by Valéry. Rather than calling them Symbolist poets, he says that it is better to describe them as a movement of a group of poets who strove to wrest the wealth from music after Baudelaire. Baudelaire wrote his treatise on Wagner in 1861, by which time he had already drawn enough influence from Edgar Poe's poetics to have written at the time, and he may have felt that Wagner's music was the final touch to his poetics. It was also in this year that the second and expanded edition of 'The Flowers of Evil' appeared. The short-lived poet left to his successors the difficult task of recapturing his wealth from music, a cursed legacy, it seems. The arrival of Symbolist poetry in Japan was not accompanied by Romantic music. "The use of symbols in poetry is not necessarily a modern invention, but something as old as the mountains," said Ueda Satoshi. The poets soon learnt, however, that the path of the modern poet is a very difficult one, even in Japan.
The Romanticist movement in music was, so to speak, a movement to wrest its riches from literature. As individual experience and subjective content take on greater significance in the process of artistic expression, the universal forms of classical music began to seem like a musical, all too musical, world. The ideas of Beethoven, the era of Schumann, and the plays of Wagner all speak to the same haughtiness of the musician towards literature. What provided extraordinary cooperation for the musicians who took advantage of this momentum was the invention and development of musical instruments. Advances in piano mechanisms made possible the generation of pure musical sounds without gender or individual differences, and the expression of all their precise chords and modulations. Thus, the musician's motive for creation was to create a musical work that would be both literary and musical.
As a result of this influence, he accepted the complex and diverse oscillations of his individuality, while at the same time, as a means of expression, he adopted the strict development of Japanese-style instrumental music. If you look at the incomprehensibility and isolation, the actual works and rebellions of the many great poets who have accepted the title, you will realise that they are only half-hearted. Thus, of course, the greatest Romanticists such as Wagner were also the greatest theorists. When his Romanticism reached the point where it was no longer satisfied with the musical expression of poetic or title music ideas, but had to regard the movement of sound itself as a dramatic "action," this, from the other side of the story, shows the astonishing wealth of harmonic instrumentation that had been achieved. The point is this: poetry is not the unfolding of nature. Poetry is not a development of natural expression.
Perhaps what Baudelaire marveled at in the metrical and rational organization of the movement was that in the great poet's spiritual life, a crisis was inevitable, and for its awareness and expression, analysis and reasoning were inevitable. In 'Tannhäuser,' he would have heard ringing out, to use his words, "a blow-by-blow commandment aimed at infallibility in poetic creation." But for the poet, there was no musician's fortune. The musician has the basic unit of the musical note to rationally construct the architecture of music, but the ear, a precise organ for discerning poetic language blended into everyday language, is of no great use to the poet. This was an understandable difficulty, but the best critics in Baudelaire's storehouse wanted to test their abilities in the most difficult task of all: to prove the reality of the captivating reality of poetry through the composition of the sensuous substance of poetic language. Music ate and sang the language, but time was thinned by being wound up in the interstices of music.
Romantic literature first of all sought an outlet for its passion for self-emancipation in confessional literature. To those who were willing to confess freely at all costs, all forms seemed external. The age of prose was coming, the age of the novel. Literature, which lacks any rules or commitments regarding the means of expression, loses itself in freedom. The liberated ego does not know where to stop between disorder and agitation. The attitude of scientific observation brought a great deal of order to these tendencies. But the order brought about by precise observation was the reflection of the order of things in literature, not the creation of a new order within literature itself. Everything was objectified in the eyes of the writer. The world of things expanded in proportion to the intensity of observation. The ego became a psychological object. The writer's self became an observational device. The idea that the self is a delusion unwittingly permeated the creative attitude of writers. The so-called "Réalisme" or "naturalist" novels are examples of this.
The reader of a novel feels as if he actually sees the things, incidents, and characters depicted in the novel. Réalisme in fiction means that such illusions are coherent as illusions, accurate and rational, but if we use the word Réalisme in poetry, it is of a completely different nature. The charm of poetry cannot be precisely limited, but it is not an illusion. Poetry is not like a novel. First of all, it does not appeal to the reader's brain. The novel gives us a lush conception of an incident, but time is an incident, and we must respond immediately, both physiologically and ideologically, to the charm of poetry. A child reading an adventure novel is breathless and motionless. A song will make him dance. In the age of prose, the human spirit discovers the truth, but the truth is not ours to give birth to.
The prose age was supported by the idea that the human spirit discovers truth, but that truth is an external, independent, and objective phenomenon, which continued during the Romantic period, as in the famous words of Thénu, "Virtue and vice are products like sulphuric acid and sugar." Towards the end of the nineteenth century, when rationalist philosophy came under suspicion, the dogmatic opinion that scientific theory is the reproduction of existence was also discredited by the development of science, even among scientists themselves. When we consider the work of the Symbolist poets from this reactionary period, it can no longer be regarded as a mere stubbornly solitary aesthetic work. They appear as if they were the most ardent of the reactionaries. The poet's instincts were not in error. The self, so diffused in the scent of prose, was preserved in the poets' work by an internal concentration. The poet's work was kept inwardly focused, his words so accurate that he could not be seen to be saying anything else.
It can be said that the preparation and care and awareness of the personal necessity of things and actions have secured the dimension of human truth by preparing for the return to the exact words of the poets. It was this that most moved me in my youth when I came into contact with the Symbolist poets in my youth. I felt that there was an indescribable condition in language to capture the real fascination of the poem. The poet's inability to speak the language, to understand the reality of the poetic enchantment of "self," was an uncontrollable condition of the poet, but his storehouse of critics' speculation, analysis, scepticism, and review of the difficult question of what the self is, was astonishing. It was as if my spirit had been assaulted.
These words filled my spirit with such precision. No longer do contemporary novelists place their trust in the Réalisme and naturalism of yesteryear. The problem of the ego, brought to light by Romantic literature, seems to have once again become a new burden for each writer, but the free means of expression of prose, once acquired, is too great a legacy to be discarded, and the poet is still alone. But since the problem of the writer's ego can only really be solved in practice by reorganising language to create an autonomous and more or less permanent form, the home of literature is still poetry. The Symbolist poets' extreme campaign to wrest the wealth from music may continue to find little success. Prose may undergo its own purification. In any case, the old meaning of "symbol" will not change as long as we believe in literature. The literary man combines the sign of the literary form he has created with the sign of the poetic soul, the ego that is unknown even in everyday life.
(April 1950)