Bellow on modern poetry

Incidentally, “The Gonzaga Manuscripts” is an excellently crafted tale (good Bellow for those of us with the attention span of a goldfish), though he cannot, of course, avoid getting serious too. Still, it is solid stuff, here for example are his views on modern poetry, again in the voice of his American protagonist Clarence Feiler:

“... you have to think first of modern literature as a sort of grand council considering what mankind should do next, how we should fill our mortal time, what we should feel, what we should see, where we should get our courage, how we should love or hate, how we should be pure or great or terrible, evil (you know!), and all the rest. This advice of literature has never done much good. But you see God doesn’t rule over men as he used to, and for a long time people haven’t been able to feel that life was firmly attached at both ends so that they could stand confidently in the middle. That kind of faith is missing, and for many years poets have tried to supply a substitute. Like ‘the unacknowledged legislators’ or ‘the best is yet to be,’ or Walt Whitman saying that whoever touched him could be sure he was touching a man. Some have stood up for beauty, and some have stood up for perfect proportion, and the very best have soon gotten tired of art for its own sake. Some took it as their duty to behave like brave performers who try to hold down panic during a theater fire. Very great ones have quit, like Tolstoy, who became a reformer, or like Rimbaud, who went to Abyssinia, and at the end of his life was begging of a priest, ‘Montrez-moi. Montrez … Show me something.’ Frightening, the lives some of these geniuses led. Maybe they assumed too much responsibility. They knew that if by their poems and novels they were fixing values, there must be something wrong with the values. No one man can furnish them. Oh, he may try, if his inspiration is for values, but not if his inspiration is for words. If you throw the full responsibility for meaning and for the establishing of good and evil on poets, they are bound to go down. However, the poets reflected what was happening to everyone. There are people who feel that there are responsible for everything. Gonzaga is free from this, and that’s why I love him.”

And since Manuel Gonaza did not exist (and should not be confused [presumably, though maybe Bellow is a fan] with the 18th-century Brazilian/Portuguese poet Tomás Antônio Gonzaga) but is Bellow’s invention, perhaps we can assume that these are Bellow’s opinions.

“Here, See what he says in some of these letters… ‘Many feel they must say it all, whereas all has been said, unsaid, resaid so many times that we are bound to feel a little futile unless we understand that we are merely adding our voices. Adding them when moved by the spirit. Then and then only.’ Or this: ‘A poem may outlive its subject—say, my poem about the girl who sang songs on the train—but the poet has no right to expect this. The poem has no greater privilege than the girl.’ You see what kind of man he really was?”

… “ ‘Lots of people call themselves leaders, healers, priests, and spokesmen for God, prophets or witnesses, but Gonzaga was a human being who spoke only as a human being; there was nothing spurious about him. He tried never to misrepresent; he wanted to see. To move you he didn’t have to do anything, he merely had to be. We’ve made the most natural things the hardest of all.’”