Edward Hirsch: 'The Demon and the Angel'

Subtitled Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration, Edward Hirsch's book about the irruption of an uncanny and wholly 'other' voice or formal directive in the artistic process takes Lorca's notion of duende and Rilke's conception of the angelic as its twin guiding principles, but it makes generous detours through the worlds of literature, visual art, music and dance, surveying examples of ecstatic and irrational experience in the works of artists ranging from Billie Holiday, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Miles Davis, Whitman, Emerson, William Carlos Williams and Martha Graham to Paul Klee, W.B. Yeats, Robert Desnos, Gerard de Nerval, Czeslaw Milosz and Rafael Alberti, William Blake, St. John of the Cross, Ibn Arabi and the Yahwist of the biblical Jacob. It is this vast range of material that comes to dominate the overall impression of the book, and because Hirsch makes vital connections between artists with such agility and ease of recall, the enterprise avoids clogging up in masses of compartmentalized detail, coming to resemble instead a sort of tapestry of interwoven, sparkling threads which deepen and illuminate his single, core idea.

Chapters are short, accessible, easy reads, variations on a theme, expansions and contractions of a foundational study in Lorca's ideas about danger, chthonic power, struggle, fire, death, and ecstasy, and in Rilke's terrifying vision of implacable and awe-inspiring angelic orders. Rilke and Lorca are similarly preoccupied, being differentiated mostly along a vertical axis whereby one's inspiration drops down from a celestial source whereas the other's bursts volcanically from below. But both are seen to be in the business of apprehending something inexplicable and numinous which transfigures the poem (and the poet) in a process of its own devising, a process of compressed associations which takes place on the edge of an abyss in a hitherto unknown dimension of the artist's mind. It is an Orphic dimension, crackling with gnostic implications, with secret and chimerical meanings, and with a supernatural power over conscious intention.

In his reading of Lorca's statements in Deep Song, Hirsch comments that duende rises through the body. It burns through the soles of a dancer's feet, or expands in the torso of a singer. It courses through the blood and breaks through a poet's back like a pair of wings. It smokes through the lungs; it scorches the voice; it magnetizes the words. It is risky and deathward-leaning. His reading is warm, personal, non-academic, motivated by a desire to share what inspires him as a poet and a reader of other poets, a passionate lover of American art, jazz and blues. There is no theory, no jargon. The tone is one of spirited conversation; Hirsch is the sort of dinner guest whose glass you want to fill again.

He doesn't delve too deeply into the psychic rootbed of inspirational experience - there is some mention of depth psychology, but his approach is mainly to illustrate by means of assortment and variety rather than to theorize. In a chapter entitled A Person Must Control his Thoughts in a Dream, he skips from Keats' feverishly motive consciousness to Rimbaud's rational derangement of all the senses, through psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's notion of flow (which hits a deeply unantagonized part of the mind) to Poe's dreaming wakefulness and Louis Aragon's description of Robert Desnos' induced trances by way of Claus Schreiner's book of essays by flamenco enthusiasts - all within the space of three pages. Hence the effect of movement and lightness (not frivolity) in the book as a whole. His reading is so wide (and at the same time so single-pointed) that analysis becomes redundant anyway - his interlocutors do a lot of the work, building up the picture bit by bit. There is a generosity, even a humility in this approach it is pleasing to encounter in a book which could so easily have become overwrought on account of its emotional terrain. I came out of it bristling with quotes and tips for further reading, a personal feeling for the author and a curiosity about his own poetry. All this - and an opportunity to view again one of Robert Motherwell's most beautiful paintings, from his Elegies to the Spanish Republic, on the cover. It is the perfect selection, and it speaks volumes about the author's sensitivity to his subject.