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Shakespeare’s plays are, as we know, populated by some of the most vivid characters ever created. They feel alive to us. When we read them, or see and hear them onstage, we experience each of these characters as fully developed beings, with ways of seeing the world that are, for them when they are speaking, fully true. We know these points of view are inherently limited, but that does not make them any less real. These limitations are precisely what make the characters feel so alive.
The perspectives of the characters conflict, giving the plays their plots and energies. It’s not that we necessarily agree with the characters, or approve of their actions, especially some of the most vivid—Lear, Othello, Iago, Macbeth, and so on—who are the agents of their own disasters. It’s possible to know a character is mistaken, but also to become completely immersed in his or her point of view, especially during a soliloquy.
If in reading the poem you get distracted by an irritable need to come up with a consistent, coherent set of ideas that the speaker has in his feelings about the urn, an overall message about the urn, or silence, or time, or mortality, instead of thinking about the statements of the poem as a series of deeply felt, shifting, even contradictory thoughts, you will miss what is truly great about the experience of reading it. Maybe poems are not to be read for their great answers, but for their great, more often than not unanswerable, questions.
Unlike every other use of language, poems are where contradictions and possibilities of the material of our meaning-making system are not an unfortunate and troubling ghost in the machine: they are brought forth to be celebrated. The role of the poem is to bring out all the aspects of language: its provisionality, uncertainty, slippage, as well as its miraculous ability to communicate, to mean. Consistency, logic, the pleasurable obligations of plot and setting and characters . . . those are conveniences for the poet, to be adopted or discarded at will. What are the marks of a failed language act everywhere else—not following through on what you have started to say, jumping around and making unjustified connections, saying what is beautiful and exciting rather than what is strictly necessary, and so on—are, if not the mark of, at least the beginnings of poetry.
I OFTEN SAY TO MY STUDENTS—AND IT IS STILL SO FUNNY AND strange to me to think that I am no longer a student but am a teacher myself, because in my mind, especially in relation to poetry, I will always be one—that without clarity, it is not possible to have true mystery. By clarity, I mean a sense in the reader that what is being said on the surface of the poem is not a scrim or a veil deliberately hiding some other hidden, inaccessible certainty. Clarity for me in poetry is a kind of generosity, a willingness to be together with the reader in the same place of uncertainty, striving for understanding. To give the impression that something important is happening but that the mere reader cannot, without some kind of special, esoteric knowledge, have access to it strikes me as deeply ungenerous, even cruel.
What is the special role of poetry in this condition? Poets, according to Stevens, help us live our lives, not by telling us what to think, or by comforting us. They do so by creating spaces where one individual imagination can activate another, and those imaginations can be together. Poems are imaginative structures built out of words, ones that any reader can enter. They are places of freedom, enlivenment, true communion.