The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [116]
The imagination can create the future only if its products are brought over into the real. The bestowal of the work completes the act of imagination. Ginsberg could have said, “O dear, now I’m hearing voices,” and taken a sedative. But when we refuse what has been offered to the empty heart, when possible futures are given and not acted upon, then the imagination recedes. And without the imagination we can do no more than spin the future out of the logic of the present; we will never be led into new life because we can work only from the known. But Ginsberg responded as an artist responds. The artist completes the act of imagination by accepting the gift and laboring to give it to the real (at which point the distinction between “imaginary” and “real” dissolves).
The college of imagination which conducts the discourse of art is not confined by time. Just as material gifts establish and maintain the collective in social life, so the gifts of imagination, as long as they are treated as such, will contribute toward those collectives we call culture and tradition. This commerce is one of the few ways by which the dead may inform the living and the living preserve the spiritual treasures of the past. To have the works of the past come to life in the active imagination is what it means “to have gathered from the air a live tradition,” to use Ezra Pound’s wonderful phrase. Moreover, as a commerce of gifts allows us to give more than we have been given, so those who participate in a live tradition are drawn into a life higher than that to which they have been born. Bestowed from the dead to the living and from the living to the unborn, our gifts grow invisibly among us to sustain each man and woman above the imperfections of state and age.
A live tradition is neither the rhetoric nor the store of facts that we can learn in school. In a live tradition the images speak for themselves. They “itch at your ears,” as Whitman says. We hear voices. We feel a spirit move in the poems that is neither “me” nor “the poet” but a third thing between. In a live tradition we fall in love with the spirits of the dead. We stay up all night with them. We keep their gifts alive by taking them into the quick of our being and feeding them to our hearts.
Ezra Pound once wrote in a pamphlet: “Of religion, it will be enough for me to say, in the style of a literary friend …, ‘every self-respecting Ravennese is procreated, or at least receives spirit or breath of life, in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia.’” For Pound, a culture husbands its liveliness in its works of art; they are like storage barrels for that “tasteless water” which the citizen drinks to revive, or procreate, his soul.
A live tradition extends in both directions in time, but most artists seem to face themselves in a primary direction, toward either the past or the future. The fils à papa (the father’s son), say the French, has the spiritual attitude that serves the past, while the fils à maman is in love with emerging life. The terms well differentiate Whitman and Pound, to whom we shall be turning soon. Pound—one of the few American poets who remained close to his father throughout his life— was in love with the past. It fed his soul, and he dedicated his work to its preservation.
But Whitman, the mother’s son, courted the future. “I meant Leaves of Grass… to be the Poem of Identity (of yours, whoever you are, now reading these lines) …,” he says. He means “identity” in the sense we have developed—the poetry is a gift that offers to pass through and transform the self. When we speak of “the Whitman tradition” in art, we mean that line of artists—Hart Crane, Isadora Duncan, William Carlos Williams, Pablo Neruda, Henry Miller, to name only a few—who have professed the spirit that came to life with