Inspiration in writing, appreciation in reading

 I suppose I have been reading more poetry recently because I’ve been thinking about a remark made by my old friend Melvyn. When he was 69, he wrote this: 

I am reading the poems of W.B. Yeats, and I can see that he is a great writer, but I cannot for the life of me enjoy poetry very much (singular exceptions, of course). The best prose seems to me more profound, more moving, more musical, even.

 

Melvyn was a great reader, mostly of fiction. But when I would talk about poets, he would just smile, as if I were hopeless. I have the same reaction when someone goes on about certain poets. I know that Edmund Spenser, T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens were great poets. Maybe one day I’ll have an epiphany that will allow me to appreciate them, but time is not on my side.

The differences in the way we humans appreciate things are mysterious to me. I don’t think “taste” covers it.

Some ancient Greek thinkers were interested in where dreams come from and speculated that artistic inspiration might come from the same source.

Here’s Carl Jung with a modern version of that idea:

 

We know that something unknown, alien, does come our way, just as we know that we do not ourselves make a dream or an inspiration, but that it somehow arises of its own accord. What does happen to us can be said emanate from mana, from a daimon, a god, or the unconscious.

 

Maybe some artists draw from wells that are so deep or remote I just can’t get to them.

• Source: C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. My note says the quotation is from “Late Thoughts.”