the truth of fact and the truth of art (2)

. . . And what moves me and gives meaning to life is this. Muriel Rukeyser wrote it in 1949, within the context of her reflections about the resistances to art, to poetry, and their sources, but it remains as perceptive as ever. Life-giving, the truth of art.


[Poetry] is art: it imagines and makes, and gives you the imaginings. Because you have imagined love, you have not loved; merely because you have imagined brotherhood, you have not made brotherhood. You may feel as though you had, but you have not. You are going to have to use that imagining as you best can, by building it into yourself, or you will be left with nothing but illusion.

Art is action, but it does not cause action: rather, it prepares us for thought.

Art is intellectual, but it does not cause thought: it prepares us for thought.

Art is not a world, but a knowing of the world. Art prepares us.

Art is practiced by the artist and the audience. It is not a means to an end, unless that end is the total imaginative experience.

That experience will have meaning. It will apply to your life; and it is more than likely to lead you to thought or action, that is, you are likely to go further into the world, further into yourself, toward future experience.

Art and nature are imitations, not of each other, but of the same third thing - both images of the real, the spectral and vivid reality that employs all means. If we fear it in art, we fear it in nature, and our fear brings it on ourselves in the most unanswerable ways.

The implications for society and for the individual are far reaching.

People want this speech, this immediacy. They need it. The fear of poetry is a complicated and civilized repression of that need. We wish to be told, in the most memorable way, what we have been meaning all along.

This is a ritual moment, a moment of proof.

We need all our implements, and there is strength in these moments.

All the equipment of tradition and invention offers us access to this door, and they work against the totalitarian hardening of modern life as it expresses itself in the state. There is an entire life for us to choose: there is no poetic science, but there are pillars, there are clues. . . .

[The usable truth]: the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things as they strike the eye of the man who fears them not, though they do the worst to him. . .

That pride is deep in our meaning, and in our truth.

But what use is here? What is the use of truth? Is not truth the end? Or has it no human use, does it lead to nothing?

The use of truth is its communication.


from Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry [1949] (Ashfield, Mass.: Paris Press, 1996), pp. 25-27.