The first English poet who claimed to allow his unconscious self deliberately to dictate his poems, was James John Garth Wilkinson. Havelock Ellis has recently called attention to him. In his Improvisations from the Spirit (1857) Wilkinson wrote down in rhymed verse the first impressions of a chosen theme. He depended chiefly on inspiration. His book was praised by Dante G. Rossetti, and forms the subject of an essay by the poet James Thomson, called "A Strange Book" in Biographical and Critical Studies. Emerson had also praised this physician, who was an authority on Blake and Swedenborg. Wilkinson claims to have written in what we would call the Freudian method of drawing on his unconscious. He considers reason and will secondary powers in the process. The poems resemble Blake's (even in their obscurity). Thomson rightly distinguishes Wilkinson from fraudulent spiritualists.
Wilkinson's poems, however, do not make good the claim to be absolutely unconscious art. If he had not told us that he improvised we would never have doubted that these poems were composed like all other poems, with some labor. We cannot believe that Wilkinson did not have to seek rhymes. He may have taken the first rhyme that came to his head but he had also to consider his metre. Again, no art dispenses altogether with the poet's use of artistic judgment, no matter how much an improvisation that art is. I do not believe that even Coleridge's famous Kubla Khan was actually composed in a dream, but that
it was merely suggested by a dream.[187-A] He fashioned the form consciously, that is the rhyme and metre. The substance of the poem is, however, always from the unconscious. Thomson considers Wilkinson's belief in the divine inspiration of his poem a delusion. Wilkinson's art is not utterly unconscious, for there is no uncensored idea therein, which is bound to be occasionally, in some dreams out of many, of the most virtuous man. This commendable feature shows Wilkinson exercised judgment, and this was a conscious artistic process.
Improvisation is one of the features that characterized Persian and Arabic poetry. It is easier there than in English because of the facility for rhyme in these languages, and because the improvisers usually composed in rhymed prose and were not hampered by metre. The test of the great poet often was his ability to compose a poem on the spur of the moment. Seemingly fabulous, yet apparently true stories of improvisation feats by Arabic poets are numerous. When they improvised in different metres, the Arabic poets in competition would compose alternately verse by verse as a rule. Sometimes the poet would improvise a short poem on the basis of any opening verse given to him. We remember the story of Harun al Rashid who recited a line to Abu Nuwas who composed a poem for him. The Arabian Nights is full of improvised poems. Arabic critics always dealt with improvisation as a feature of verse making, and this is an argument to those who maintain that Arabic poetry was conscious art and artificial. It was the ecstasy that unconsciously incited the poet to utter his inner thought.
I would like, however, to make special reference to two Englishmen, John Keble and E. S. Dallas, both now very
little read, who left critical works expounding poetry from a psychoanalytic point of view. Keble was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and the author of a most widely read Christian poem. He delivered lectures on poetry in the eighteen-thirties, in Latin. These were published in 1844 under the title of De Poeticae vi Medica. They were translated into English for the first time a few years ago. They have been praised by Cardinal Newman, Justice Coleridge, Gladstone and Saintsbury. Dean Church called them the most original and memorable lectures on poetry that had ever been delivered at Oxford.
Keble defined poetry as "a kind of medicine divinely bestowed upon man, which gives healing relief to secret mental emotions, and yet without detriment to modest reserve, and yet, while giving scope to enthusiasm, rules it with order and due control." He traces the origin of poetry to the desire for personal relief of pent up emotions in the individual and argues that this is the natural conclusion from his definition. He divided poets into two classes—primary and secondary. In the first class he put those who, moved by impulse, resort to composition for relief and solace of a hindered or overwrought mind. In the second class he put imitators of the first and all others. He had been meditating over these views for some time, and they also appear in some of the essays which were collected after his death under the title of Occasional Papers and Reviews. In fact, in one of these essays he used the Freudian word "repression," in referring to the creation of poetry.
Keble's views are so sound and clear that one marvels they were not taken up before Freud. It is true one will find much that is obsolete in his lectures; one will be amused by his Toryism, his over-emphasis on the religious side of poetry, his academic and classic standards. He
however recognized that poetry was a sublimation of the poet's surcharged emotions and that the poet healed himself, therapeutically treating himself by writing. He was really developing at length Aristotle's famous definition of tragedy as purging the audience of pity and fear. Aristotle was referring however to the aesthetic purgation of the feelings of the audience; Keble, like Freud later, had in mind the poet's relief to himself. Poetry ministers however to the overburdened mind both of the poet and the reader. Both are relieved in finding expression for ideas and emotions that are troubling them.
It was no doubt Keble's religious nature that made him perceive this important fact. He noted that the psalmists in the Bible sang to relieve themselves of their griefs and he saw that prayer had a psychoanalytic effect on people. Poetry is then the emotional expression of an overcharged heart. But this does not necessarily mean overcharged with grief. For it expresses people who are overflowing with joy or any emotion. It covers what Nietzsche called ecstasy, and especially the ecstasy of love or sexual excitement. It covers the desire for beauty which, as Nietzsche again saw, possessed a sexual contagion in it. The happy poet in love desires to give vent to his emotions by some form of expression, whether his love is satisfied or not. And those who seek the origin of poetry in religion must remember the close affiliations that anthropologists have found between love and religion.