Poetry and Vision

Visionaries, even if they happen to be like our Campana, are inevitably the most artless, the blindest of creatures on this earth. Eugenio Montale I am afraid to start this essay on "vision" in poetry because, like many Americans, I have been blessed and cursed with an acute terror of sounding high-minded. It's easy to guess where this terror comes from, but difficult to challenge it, and these days difficulty in poetry must with every breath justify its existence. Now when I find myself at the head of the workshop table, I can see firsthand how often a young writer's ambition toward "vision" in poetry is used to excuse a myriad of indulgences, that is, easy, paid-off absolutions. So often young writers do mistake mystification for mystery, obscurity for difficulty. I envy how my students can invent their sensibilities from scratch. Yet their sometimes arrogant insistence on freedom from expectation must have something to do with their sense of a prolonged and painful adolescence, with having physically left their homes and yet finding themselves in loco parentis, in purgatorial dormitories--still tethered financially to their parents. Their impatience is lovely, but impatience can lead to a mistaken notion of vision: the invention of inwardness through inscrutability. True, young poets have to defend their impulses before they can afford the leisure to examine them. Yet such unself-questioning inwardness may not be vision at all. What is vision in poetry? Vision doesn't happen without maturity, but along with maturity, maybe a certain unanswerability is also necessary. And unanswerability makes those who consider themselves the mature guardians of a reckless world a little nervous. So--and perhaps very justifiably--Montale's appreciation of Dino Campana that I'm quoting from betrays a little ambivalence: elsewhere Montale characterizes Campana as a voyant "visited by too many abstract possibilities," feeling no limitations in poetry, no need to answer to the exigencies of reality or prevailing taste. For Montale, this visionary is blind; he goes his own way, but he also stumbles into walls. A visionary poetry presumably becomes a heightened account of those stumbles. Curiously, the elder poet's characterization of the young Campana resembles our own culture's stereotype of visionaries as young, idealist, naive, beclouded more than clarified by possibility, and potentially self-destructive because not of this world. I must say I can't think of one poet-friend, however transcendental (to use another out-of-fashion epithet) his or her poetry may be, who would admit to being a visionary. It's easier by a few degrees to admit to having a drinking problem. Moreover, our culture's current caricature of visionaries as misfits has longstanding precedents. Here are some of the ways the Oxford English Dictionary defines visionary: "given to fanciful and unpractical views"; "having little regard to what is actual or possible"; "speculative, dreamy"; "seen only in a vision, unreal, non-existent, phantom, spectral"; "existing in imagination only, imaginary, not actual or real, incapable of being carried out, fantastic." A visionary is "one who indulges in fantastic ideas or schemes." With these dictionary definitions in mind, it's hard to imagine a visionary making it to the corner store without falling into a manhole. What also explain our distrust of visionary elements in poetry are our misapprehensions about ourselves and our hopelessly human motives. To take just one instance of how our collective self-distrust tempers our aesthetic responses to the world, consider how connected our attitudes toward the human body are to our aesthetics. We view our bodily senses as extensions of base--that is, untrustworthy--instincts. The prevailing attitude toward sensory vision since the Romantics has been a prejudicial one, informed by our attitude toward sensory vision in nature. At worst, sight is a hunting sense, with predators often having the sharpest sight (eagles can see their prey from a distance of two or three miles), and at best it is a defense against hunting. …