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Psychology and Poetry

THE UNEVEN DANCE

ELIZABETH SEWELL

We shall start with an image and a poem. Poetry is my business, and with it comes a
method other than that habitually practiced in accepted academic work, so it will be
as well to plunge into that other method straight away. Our general subject is
“psychology and sensibility and culture,” but when I was asked to take this on I
knew I did not want to attempt any kind of “survey course” about the Arts in general
or even literature, despite this country’s mysterious passion for survey courses
everywhere in education today; so I am attending only to poetry, that and psychol-
ogy being quite enough to manage. Also when I was first asked, I asked my Muse for
a title, and s/he produced, almost at once, “the uneven dance.”
The Muse-does that seem to us to be outworn whimsy, I wonder? I name the
Muse because once again it is a question of method. We need to shift over into
another mythology than the accepted one in psychological usage to which we are all
so accustomed that we probably do not recognize it as myth at all. I use the word
myth, needless to say, in its profound and positive sense, not in the modern and
highly current distortion (one hears it in common parlance, in public pronounce-
ments, and on the media all the time) where the word is used as if it meant
“delusion” or “lie.” May I beg you, while I am at it, to watch your own speech in
this regard, and if you mean “delusion” or “lie” to say so?
The myth, familiar to us all in psychology, is that of the “unconscious,” or, in
one of its variants, the “subconscious.” Subconscious, superego-already we are
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looking at levels within that mansion of the mind. It is part of the great myth or
image system constructed by Sigmund Freud, whom George Steiner calls, properly
as I believe, “that great Jewish poet.” Rebecca West adds another dimension (for
poets build on poets, myths on myths) in The Strange Necessity. There, having set a
context of discussion about the cortex and Pavlov-the “strange necessity” is Art, by
the way-she talks about “the people downstairs” and how, if your project is a good
one, they will send you up presents from time to time, whereas if you have chosen
some unwise course, not merely will they give you no presents but they will hinder
you in every way they can, deeming you a fool for having made that choice. Owen
Barfield would have things to say about this as well. I am naming names whom I
trust, and that certainly includes Freud whom one can love and trust and differ
from energetically, which is a good kind of relationship.
Now for the poem, or rather half of it; the other half, the whole poem, waits for
us at the end.

Clearing on wooded hillside, fitful the moon

Glimpses the severdl two, dancers, alone,
Pursue their intricate steps, as each to other unknown.
The ground slopes steeply, grass unkempt and lush.

As you will understand, one does not allegorize or encode a poem’s images, so 1
have in my turn to divine by those it produces. If the dance is uneven, it is so in a
number of ways, everything in this method tending to be more than one thing.
Uneven, then, first in the sense of separated-writing these lines it suddenly struck
me that this is what “several” must mean: severed each from each. The dancing-
floor is uneven-it is a sharply raked hillside, like Helicon itself in the real Greek
landscape. The footing is uneven, tussocks and clumps of herbage where you could
easily turn an ankle. And there are two of these dancers. We would be inclined to
think of two as an even number, but I am reminded of the dyad in Pythagorean
thought where, after the unity of the monad, the division into two is almost a fall,
bringing with it matter, change, and corruption. Under these guises we are to think
about psychology and poetry, and the relationship between them, in the general
picture of contemporary culture.
In terms of general culture there is no question but that psychology has increas-
ingly affected many of the ways in which we think and speak about the world and
ourselves. Take dreams, for instance-I find people are often reluctant now to tell
their dreams for fear that some hidden sexual symbolism will reveal itself to the
listener. Yet interestingly, and here is the uneven dance again, poets continue to
make use of their dreams as they have always done, and on their own terms which
are not those of psychological technique. This was brought home to me some years
ago when at Hunter College in New York I was put in charge of a graduate class
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whose semester’s work was to listen to a series of contemporary poets reading their
works, published and unpublished. They were a very varied group, ranging from
Robert Lowell and Stanley Kunitz to Adrienne Rich and Jean Valentine, and it was
fascinating to me to hear one after the other speak of the centrality of dreams in their
poetic work, as poets have always felt and as if no profound changes had taken place
in ways of approaching these creations of the sleeping mind.
Clearly those new approaches, insofar as we understand them, do affect us all.
The currency of such verbal expressions as the Freudian slip, the Oedipus complex,
the collective unconscious, schizophrenia, even an archetype or two, can vouch for
our surface familiarity with psychology’s domain. In another vein it may be also that
our two disciplines, poetry and psychology, share responsibility for the present
generation’s cult of love and sex, respectively, as the one myth by which supposedly
to live. Yet when I turned to that vast popular repository of just such matters, rock
and country music, and what it expresses in its lyrics, I could come up with almost
nothing about either of our pursuits. For poetry all I recalled, from my own really
considerable repertoire, was a mortifying couplet, part of a song used as a kind of
booster anthem in my present home state of North Carolina. It says, in its final two
lines,

Lord, it’s just like living in a @me-

1 like calling North Carolina home!

If that is not particularly edifying, try to think what you could produce for psychol-
ogy in its turn. Here all that presented itself was a song, obviously and appropriately
enough from California. It is a lament, and in it the following passage occurs:

M y stocks are going down

And my shrink is out of town
And my house is on the Sun Andreas Fault . .

but who does the singer cry out to in his distress? Freud? Jung? Skinner or even Abe
Maslow? Not at all. What he exclaims is:

1 need you, Bany Manilow!

We neither of us seem, Bob Newhart and a few radio commercials notwithstanding,

to have gone either far or deep into these sensibilities.
To turn now to connections between the two disciplines themselves, I feel I am
in duty bound to spread out a little from poetry, and to encourage us to glance at
least at one or two other literary and artistic connections, for they certainly exist. I
am thinking mainly of how psychology has influenced letters, but I took the oppor-
tunity the other day of looking up the tabulated references to literature of all sorts in
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the big Zndex to Freud’s Collected Works, and I found it instructive both in the
quantity and variety of literature which he knew and quoted from. It is also helpful
to look at such manifestations of this interest as his Address on Goethe in 1930, read
for him because he was already too sick to read it himself. I find him open and
generous toward poets, with a judicious sense of limits or boundaries. Somewhere
he says (I do not have the exact reference) that it is not the business of psychoanaly-
sis to inquire where the artist’s inspiration comes from. I like that. (I should perhaps
confess quickly here and get it over that as a poet I do not trust Jung at all.)
When we look now at the other side, it is apparent that there have been mutual
relations between psychology and literature of various genres. A Freudian or
psychoanalytic approach has been employed in the criticism of a fair number of
literary works; we all know about Jones and Hamlet, and I think of Lewis Carroll as
another example. I can call to mind two really good professional novels which have
a psychoanalysis as what the eighteenth century would have called their “ma-
chinery,” Amval and Departure by Arthur Koestler, so much less well-known and
to me so much more interesting than his Darkness at Noon, and The Manticore,
the second work in a remarkable trilogy by the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies.
(The second of these portrays a Jungian analysis, by the way.) And in drama there
are plays like Eguus, and I seem to remember a cryptoanalyst years back in T. S .
Eliot’s play, The Cocktail Party.
One could obviously search out a lot more of this kind of thing, but that is
“survey” again, and I want to get on to poetry. When I first began to try to make the
connection, poetry-psychology, for this piece of work, I found myself thinking, “I
shall be ‘gravelled for lack of matter.”’ The uneven dance-it seemed as if the two
dancers were not meeting at all. Hence the start of the poem, and the realization
that this very absence of relations was my subject matter itself. And it has to do
essentially with method, which is why I have been insinuating something at least of
poetic method since the beginning.
It seems to me, first, that one reason for the nonmeeting of these disciplines or of
their methods is what I might call a difference in phasing, a difference in regard to
time. The poetic mode is prophetic. I mean by that nothing bombastic, simply that
it has as part of its operations an impulse to speak forward. The poet’s voice,
therefore, speaking in this strain, is not likely to be heard by that particular genera-
tion for some time to come, say, a hundred or a hundred and fifty years. William

’In elucidating the literary or mythopoeic dream, Freud also comes up consciously against limitations
in psychology. When Maxime Leroy sent him an account (not a wholly adequate one, the evidence
suggests) of Descartes’s three great Olympica dreams of 1619, the third of which is all about poetry, Freud
does what he can with them but then says, “We have no path open to us which will take us further.” It is
noteworthy that philosophy, tackling the same dreams in the person of Jacques Maritain, LQ Song de
Descartes, does not fare much better. The great account of them is given by Muriel Rukeyser in The
Traces ofThomas Hariot, and since I am writing for those in another discipline may I remind us all that
she was a poet, and an eminent one, of our own day.

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Blake is a case in point (and since, with the title of Professor Kaufmann’s address we
seem to be entering horses for the First Depth Psychologist Stakes, I would want to
put Blake forward as a possible contestant). He and many of his contemporaries
back at the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century, whose wavelength
we are perhaps just now getting attuned to, speak to us with a kind of passionate
intensity about imagination, the imaginative or poetic method, seen as in no way
irrational but rather as “Reason in her most exalted mood,” as Wordsworth says of it
in Book XIV of his long poem The Prelude which bears as subtitle “The Growth of a
Poet’s Mind,” a name which Coleridge glosses somewhere as “The Growth and
Revolutions of a Poet’s Mind.” In either case, psychology, under another mode of
working.
As I mention these poets among so many, I wonder how far they seem relevant to
the psychologist today, or whether the assumption would be made that the hundred
years this Conference is celebrating, a hundred years of psychology as science, have
superseded all that. It might be of interest to recall that the relative worth of our two
dancing or nondancing disciplines was considered imaginatively in the late and
wonderful poem by John Keats, his second “Hyperion,” bearing the name The FUZZ
of Hyperion: A Dreom. It is perhaps unexpected that the question which the poem
raises-which is more valuable to humankind, the active loving healer (of body
and/or mind) or the poet?-is answered unhesitatingly: the former. One might have
thought that this young genius, dying of a tuberculosis no doctor at that period
could cure, might in compensation have claimed his own dear vocation, but he
hears from the towering priestess in the ruined temple only what we all hear, “Thou
art less than they,” and accepts it and goes on painfully into the ensuing poem-
dream which is his next and almost his last work.
I want at this point to strike briefly a personal note. As I looked at our program
here and the speakers who would precede me, I wondered if any of them would be
disposed to speak of what psychology had done for them in their lives. Holding to
Keats’s company, I feel bound to say that I was analyzed in my mid-twenties by an
Englishman with the wonderful name of Theodore Faithfull, and that I in some
sense date my life from that point. He was a lay analyst as one could be in England,
i.e., not a medical practitioner; in fact he had been, he told me, a veterinarian, but
“found people more interesting than horses.” There was something immensely
reassuring, to this nervous patient, in the knowledge that one’s analyst had been, so
to speak, a horse-doctor. It removed immediately the nightmarish image of the
dogmatic, white-coated expert advancing upon one’s vitals with a scalpel. Clearly if
he could deal with such skittish animals successfully he would know how to deal
with an unhappy and unproductive poet. Actually, as I discovered, he treated all his
patients as if they were poets, though I do not think he thought of it that way in his
Freudian-Jungian-individualisticpractice. It is quite simply the rescue from a gray
desert of melancholy and powerlessness that I bear witness to here. In doing so, I
want also to remind us all of a contrary rescue: if you read the autobiography of that
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man of the mind, John Stuart Mill, you will recall that at about the same stage of
his life, after his intensely intellectual education was completed, he asked himself
whether, if all that he had been trained to consider as social betterment came true,
would he be any happier? His answer was no, and his depression so great that he
thought of suicide. Who rescued him? William Wordsworth, the reading of his
poetry, the breaking of the ice. I am insinuating, as you see, that we need each
other.
The separation nevertheless is real and continues to be so because obstinately the
poets dance their own dance, pursue their own method, as against-what? What is
the method which has come to be called, so ironically as I believe, the “scientific
method“? That, of course, is a question for you, not for me to answer. This is your
method, this Conference marks a hundred years of it, you know full well what it is.
Now and then something comes out of this frequently rather rigid and dogmatic
framework which really interests a poet: the writings of the neurosurgeon Dr. Joseph
Bogen, for instance, or the admirable audacity of the speculations of Dr. Julian
Jaynes. I want to point out in passing that this separation is not the only result of
the prevailing “scientific method” among yourselves who are, and I mean the
phrase solely as a description and not as an adverse comment, the Establishment.
When those highly “establishment” institutions, Oxford and Cambridge, have the
misfortune to have to make reference to one another, the phrase employed used to
be (I do not know if it still is) “the other place.” I want to remind you of your “other
place” which chooses to call itself “humanistic,” splitting off and then splitting
again and again, infinitely fissile as left-wing and revolutionary movements so often
are. They, too, are interesting to visit, but the dance continues solitary, the poet
intent upon another method of choreography.
Of the poetic or imaginative method I want to give only a few indications here:
first, an ability to read things and symbols, this depending also upon an ever-alert
power of detailed and loving observation (Goethe’s Beobachtung); next, a foster-
ing and cultivation of memory and prophecy, knowing each connected with the
other and both with imagination, and taking prophecy to mean here the ability to
think and feel oneself forward in the making of one’s life, one’s research, the ability
to ask and follow up Bacon’s prudens quaestio which Coleridge transposes into “the
forethoughtful question . . . the self-unravelling clue”; next again, the readiness to
work by synthesis and so to balance the reliance upon analysis which alone is taught
in modern education, learning to operate in terms of multiplicity, complexity
irreducible to simple discrete elements, fusion, where everything is always more
than one thing and the operative models come in forms such as metaphor, myth,
and metamorphosis; to work indirectly, apprehending one thing (or oneself) by
looking at another or through another, as is done in all dreams and fictions; to
attune oneself to a universe of overlapping networks of correspondences, best
grasped perhaps under the form of music or of Needham’s “associative logic.” YOU
can see that we have run parallel, or merged, with much in the great Neo-Platonic,
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Hermetic, and possibly alchemical, tradition, and could certainly add to this
method its other notes which hold for poetry as for philosophy, a passion for
numbers and mathematical forms, a constant search for precision, order, and due
boundaries.
I hope something might have been happening as that list emerged: that you might
have been saying to yourself, “But that is what I do.” Exactly. The sciencelart
separation which we have taken for granted for so long is senseless. The dance,
where dance it is, where the method is living and self-generating and not just
manipulation and technique, is one dance, though the dancers remain severed and
do not know it yet.
So now I, in my status as poet, am going to prophesy-was not a hundred years
the wavelength forward suggested for poets earlier?-that during the next hundred
years there is going to be a restitution, or in Bacon’s word an instauration of the
dance, a move from the unevenness into more unified patterns, a new metaphysic,
renewed method, a way out of our current isolation and impoverishment. The
poem speaks to this. Here now is all of i t

Clearing on wooded hillside, fitful the moon

Glimpses the several two, dancers, alone,
Pursue their intricate steps, as each to other unknown
The ground slopes steeply, grass unkempt and lush.
Late or soon wakes what god in underbrush,
Pipes keening and sharp enough
T o turn recalcitrant thighs and shins,
Though cold, in half-light, and the footing rough,
As far away the terrible lyre begins,
Thrum becomes thunder, to twine and realign,
First by impulsion, last in full freewill,
All scattered dancers over Helicon’s hill.

The poem says that more than one god is involved, and the effect includes others
than just psychology and poetry. I hope we would be agreeable to that.

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