A Quote by Julian Jaynes
I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind.
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Poetry begins as the divine speech of the bicameral mind. Then, as the bicameral mind breaks down, there remain prophets.
I think that were beginning to remember that the first poets didn't come out of a classroom, that poetry began when somebody walked off of a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, "Ahhh." That was the first poem.
The bicameral mind with its controlling gods was evolved as a final stage of the evolution of language. And in this development lies the origin of civilization.
When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read - Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier - were rhyme poets. That's what captured me.
In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.
Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. When it's a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography - Apollinaire's 'Calligrammes,' that sort of thing.
I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have made safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you do not have to write it up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for you. But, I don't know - the poetry written in that city might not seem like poetry if read outside of the city. It would be like the jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to appreciate them.
One thing I feel is this: that a great deal of poetry is the product of adolescence-or of an emotionally adolescent frame of mind: and that as this state of mind changes, poetry is likely to dry up.
The Baathist state did two things extremely well. One was create information-gathering intelligence networks and a filing system. There's actually a lot of information on a lot of people and that is a major achievement of a police state. The second one is the promotion of literature and poetry, and the arts generally. So this is a state that's producing mass police archives - surveillance - and poetry. And in fact a lot of the archives are about what poets are writing or what they should be writing.
Poetry transcends the nation-state. Poetry transcends government. It brings the traditional concept of power to its knees. I have always believed poetry to be an eternal conversation in which the ancient poets remain contemporary, a conversation inviting us into other languages and cultures even as poetry transcends language and culture, returning us again and again to primal rhythms and sounds.
where are the gods the gods hate us the gods have run away the gods have hidden in holes the gods are dead of the plague they rot and stink too there never were any gods there’s only death
I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.
Actually, my first literary heroes were the Romantic poets, so I began to get serious by writing poems. I have notebooks full of them that I cherish but am afraid to look at.
I began to write in an enclosed, self-confident literary culture. The poet's life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time. Poets were still poor, had little sponsored work, and could not depend on a sympathetic reaction to their poetry. But the idea of the poet was honored.
For who shall defile the temples of the ancient gods, a cruel and violent death shall be his fate, and never shall his soul find rest unto eternity. Such is the curse of Amon-Ra, king of all the gods.
I feel deep gratitude for the life poetry has allowed me to live. I know the life I could have lived without it. Both on the physical plain, and the soul plain. Poetry helps us endure.
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