Another poet on the Poet

I'm reading Kathleen Norris' memoire The Cloister Walk, and I'm finding that I need some meditative space to mull over her writing. That's probably what she intended. Her thoughts come refreshingly after Emerson and Shelley, a mental break.

I was pleased to find a chapter in which she directly addresses Emerson's and Shelley's definitions of artists, poets. She, too, perceives herself as innately influenced by Romanticism, and she seems to have strong opinions on the matter:

It doesn't help that others often encourage artists to think of themselves as somehow more special, sensitive, "creative" than other mortals. This is false doctrine. There is but one creator, and "creating" is the very thing that artists cannot do. The gifts of the human imagination that artists employ operate equally in science and scholarship, teaching and philosophy, business and mathematics, ranching, preaching, engineering, mothering and fathering (Norris 40).

No doubt that artists - poets - oftentimes feel "other," and that sense of otherness can yield a compensatory self-confidence, what some read as arrogance, self-assertion. Norris makes this point later in her memoire. Yet, for me, compensatory self-confidence, a sense of responsibility for the gift of expression, doesn't equate to the Emerson-esque declaration of quasi-divine appointment. They aren't the same. The difference lies in Norris' assertion that "There is but one creator, and 'creating' is the very thing artists cannot do." Now, that's a novel idea. I hear so often of the author's creativity, his ability to generate if not new thought, then better-expressed thought. Yet here's Norris, claiming that "creating" isn't even the artist's doing. It has little to do with the artist. The agency isn't his. He's a vessel for the divine's creativity. The divine's expression. As is everyone else.

I like that.

It's easy for artists to claim for themselves, implicitly, quasi-martyr status. (Maybe that's the quasi-divine assertion's partner?) The emo, artsy/angsty leanings seem to be the modern manifestations of the tendency. Norris addresses this, too, with a positive spin:

Still, it can't be denied that artists interact strongly with their world, and that there is a measure of suffering involved as they come to a mature understanding of their communal role (Norris 40).

Communally, for the service of others. Shelley may have reached this conclusion had his thoughts not forked in the direction of artist supremacy. The mysticism and idealization of writing makes it seem so unattainable to the "common man."

For now, Norris' thoughts on the artist's role sound fitting. I appreciate her voice.