Poetry ,invention and discovery

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Poetry, for Wallace Stevens, was “the supreme fiction”. Poets invent things that aren’t there – or, at least, weren’t there before the poem brought them into being. Scientists, by contrast, are said to tell the truth. They discover things – things that are already there. The structure of DNA, Newton’s inverse square law, the speed of light are pre-existent features of the universe, waiting to be revealed. Some lucky scientist or other will get there first. On this model nothing could be simpler: poets are inventors, scientists are discoverers. The model is simple. It is also wrong.

We may not value poems for factual truth, but that is not to say that we value them either as merely spinning magnificent lies. A poem may well encompass or enact an important truth even if its facts are wrong or invented. Robert Graves was famously dismissive about Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” which, amongst other heinous errors, has Sophocles hearing the sound of pebbles flung up by the retreating tide – which, as Graves points out, is impossible, given that the Aegean, unlike the North Sea, is not tidal. But whatever truth-value is in the poem is there despite the poet’s careless way with facts. The facts in a poem are to be understood in advance as being in inverted commas. What is important is the truth that the poet brings to expression – or invents.

Is it possible, however, to invent the truth as opposed to discovering it? Some inventions work, after all, others do not. You can’t invent a perpetual motion machine, because such a machine would contravene the laws of physics: it wouldn’t work. All you can invent is the idea of such a machine. Similarly, if a poetic or other literary invention works, it is helpful to know why it works. Why have Hamlet, Werther, Jekyll and Hyde, Godot all become modern archetypes, part of the furniture of our minds – regardless of whether we have read the works in which they are instantiated?

It is true that, after Shakespeare, after Goethe, there were many more Hamlets and Werthers in daily life than there had been before. The poets, to that extent, had invented them, and changed things. But they couldn’t invent what had no basis in a possible reality. They named, they developed what existed already as potentialities in human psychology. Their invention, to that degree, is therefore, just as much discovery.

Indeed, there is a continuum rather than a disjunction between the two. Where poets like Hardy, Edward Thomas, Larkin are to a large extent discoverers, others, such as Wallace Stevens, Paul Celan, John Ashbery, J.H. Prynne, working at the limits of language, are primarily inventors. Where the poet of the first type fails, it is in telling us something we know already: where the poet of the second type fails, it is in an inability to tell us anything at all. To the extent that the poem of an inventer works, however, it makes a new use of language permanently available in which to explore truths – and perhaps lies – which it was not previously possible to express, rather in the same way that the invention of new concepts in a language makes it possible to think, and ultimately, to live differently than before.

Poets, of course, are not alone in this. Scientists too invent with greater or lesser success. They invented the ether, for example, which must count, in the end, as an unsuccessful invention, since it isn’t there, though it continues to haunt our language as an incoherent idea. But to discover what is there you must also have a theory as to what is likely to be there. Observation in itself counts for little. You must invent in advance. Who has ever seen a quark? What kind of a beast is natural selection?

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We are told sometimes that poetry is its own world, that poets explore the potentialities of language – as if language could somehow be separated from the world out of which it has arisen. As if there could be a pure poetry (or, for that matter, a pure science). Fine poets can be slaves of a deficient aesthetic, just as scientists may make obeisance to a flawed philosophy of science and succeed