What Are Intimations?
I’ve had the thought myself
but didn’t know how to put it
Such is the intimation of a reader upon setting down the words of a poet. Such is the work of a poet to make known to himself and to others those things which can be intuited by the heart yet remained unarticulated and disembodied.
Both the slogans which are clear but have settled to the bottom
And the dark, obscure things which have never before been uttered in such a way.
These are the materials of a poet.
What is that “In such a way”? The figuration of the imagination. The work of the poet. The hammering and chiseling. The sanding and grinding. As HD said
it merges the distant future
with the most distant antiquity
Always there must be cast by the imagination those novel experiences we find ourselves in. The right way of saying it, of understanding something. Everyone is capable of it to some degree, hence everyone is a poet.
But he who makes it his business of finding the right way of saying something is the poet as craftsman.
What is an intimation? It is the wellspring into which the poet dives. It is the marine sinkhole. Something down there lay submerged that must be brought to the surface. The poet makes the journey there, in his diving bell, in his submersible, and returns with the treasure in the right words, the right way of saying it. Wordsworth brings up that sunken sense of immortality felt in childhood. Whitman finds the pearl of universal, communal soul. Baudelaire and Poe dredge up hideous things, but polish them and make them beautiful.
Intimations are the voice of God. But we do not believe in God, or we believe obliquely. Hence our poetry sounds fragmentary and elusive. It translates but translates literally. It leaves out the spirit, the meaning, and seems an echo of an echo. It uses figuration to obscure, not elucidate.
What is an intimation? A little box in which to hatch a butterfly. The poet is the lepidopterist who tends to the nursery.