The Poet and His Analyst

The pure poet is in an unhappy fix because he does not want to know that antipoets exist. He is a beautiful soul (eine schone Seele, une belle ame) insulated from the antagonisms of reality by A the loveliness of his discourse. The verbal object he makes (1TOLut) has to be inviolable. His should not mean, but He demands that we disbelief in whatever absurdity he presents, Thinkers as various as Hegel, Lacan, MacLeish, and Coleridge have informed us (each in his own way) of these peculiarities in the poet's behavior. Yet antipoets do exist. They are as scarce as true poets, but they nonetheless exist. Not that they are the literary Philistines who escape into the coifort of novels after a youthful failure to understand poetry. Nor are they the corpulent paraphraser-professors whose hostility derives from their unmentionable status as pobtes manques. They are not even the lean existentialists whose brows wrinkle at the frivolity and irrelevance of poetry. The poet's antithesis is a rarer bird than all of these. The true antipoet is the psychoanalyst, the kind of psychoanalyst who himself is as obsessed with language as is the poet, who has a poet's passion for hearing words, and whose articles are strewn with quoted verses. The psychoanalyst--a Freud or a Lacan--dares to know that the discourse of the belle ame, however lively and ideal, is but vain nostalgia. The psychoanalyst unmakes what the poet has made, violates the inviolable verbal object,subverts the overt and the not-so-overt devices in the text. He shows us that, unconsciously,the poem can indicate, can signify, can mean--as well as be. He reminds us to retrospectively suspend belief in the reality of the poet's fantasy. He claims that even the most extravagent indulgence in poetic license does not escape the law of psychic determinism. In short, psychoanalysis is so obnoxious to poetry that even the literary Philistines, the paraphraserprofessors, and the lean existentialists will join with the poet in taking offense at the analyst's assertions. For the poet, the aim is to please: is not true unless it feels good. But the analyst aims to offend: is not true unless it hurts. Abdication or reversal of these aims bores us. When the poet becomes offensive and the analyst inoffensive, we have tasteless poetry and

Art · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics