Note:  Hope Against Hope is a memoir about the life of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam written by his wife, Nadezhda. I was really moved and fascinated by a chapter in the book about poetic composition, and how the language of the poet is so different than the linguistic hackery of the tyrant. By extension, the language of the poet is profoundly different from the machinations of artificial intelligence. The book recounts Mandelstam’s punishment at the hands of the Soviet regime after writing a poem criticizing Stalin, and how the bureaucratic “machine” of a bloated, manipulative government is at odds with the truth-speaking calling of the poet.

Nadezhda Mandelstam starts off chapter 18 in her memoir Hope Against Hope by noting that the process of poetic composition, ironically perhaps, doesn’t begin with actual words. Poems spring from “musical phrase,” a humming in the mind that won’t shut off until the poet can find the adequate structure to give it life and coherence. A poem is an unspoken song that requires careful attention to formulate; until all the right words are chosen and applied to this inchoate music in the mind, the poem stays restless, teasing the poet, never leaving him alone.

Nadezhda even says that words can disrupt the enchantment of this initial musical impression. If too many words, or the wrong word, are included in the poem, it hasn’t done the music justice.

Nadezhda’s unique understanding of the creative process made me think about the ongoing debate over whether thought precedes language or vice versa. Here, she seems to regard language as the prime instrument we use to try to mine the ineffable intuitions, impressions, and half-formed thoughts that form the often-unspoken bedrock of human experience. The poet’s responsibility, then, is to conform language to the original musical phrase, which Nadezhda believes appear from an “unknown source.”

A Complete Unknown

“People don’t want to know where the songs come from,” says a moody Bob Dylan, played by Timothée Chalamet in the new biopic on the bard, A Complete Unknown. “They want to know why the songs didn’t come to them.” Dylan himself admitted he didn’t know where the words for many of his poetic compositions came from. He too was a carrier of the mysterious hum from an unknown source, and his only solution was to write it out, to set the songs free.

The enduring mystery, then, in the creation of real poetry stands out in this brief chapter of Hope Against Hope. However enigmatic the process of composition, though, one truth shines through: Poetry is an avenue toward enchantment. And enchantment is the enemy of any totalitarian regime. Poetic enchantment leads people into the territory of the beautiful, the numinous, and the transcendent, a place the mind can go to escape the strictures of the all-encompassing state. Poetry leads people to the truth.

The love of poetry doomed the young Lev, a family friend, earlier in Nadezhda’s account because he was brimming with lively ideas. He had an active mind prone to “make a stir.” Anyone who had encountered the enchantments of real poetry, borne of this unknown source, was suspected of undermining the state’s control over body, mind, and soul.

The poet employs language to do justice to the subject matter, while the totalitarian hijacks language by giving words arbitrary meanings, substituting reality with ideology. Orwell discusses this at length in his classic essay “The Politics of the English Language,” warning of the dangers of detaching words from their actual meanings and using language to control thought instead of as an instrument for giving thought due expression.

“When you attach an arbitrary meaning to the phonetic unit known as a word,” writes Nadezhda, “the result is jargon, or the kind of verbal chaff used for selfish purposes by high priests, soothsayers, heads of state and other charlatans” (p. 74).

The true poet, by contrast, is a servant of the poem, of the word waiting to be fully realized.

Cross-posted at Battle the Bard.