Allen Grossman, whose reading of Caedmon I’m pirating here, abstracts from this story (and there are many versions of this story) a harsh lesson: Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine. You’re moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. In a dream your verses can defeat time, your words can shake off the history of their usage, you can represent what can’t be represented (e.g., the creation of representation itself), but when you wake, when you rejoin your friends around the fire, you’re back in the human world with its inflexible laws and logic.

Thus the poet is a tragic figure. The poem is always a record of failure. There is an “undecidable conflict” between the poet’s desire to sing an alternative world and, as Grossman puts it, the “resistance to alternative making inherent in the materials of which any world must be composed.” In an essay on Hart Crane, Grossman develops his notion of a “virtual poem”—what we might call poetry with a capital “P,” the abstract potential of the medium as felt by the poet when called upon to sing—and opposes it to the “actual poem,” which necessarily betrays that impulse when it joins the world of representation.