On the lyric verse birth process: “Internal image” and “corporal words”

Abstract

The author of the article, proceeding from the famous poets’ opinion (Osip Mandelstam, in the first instance), advances a hypothesis of the way the lyric verse is born. Creating a poem, a poet hears it inside himself and garments it in words both for himself and for the reader, for the life of the opus outside the poet himself. Inside the poet, the poem initially sounds without any words, but as one whole piece (this process is not entirely perceived by the author’s consciousness); then - with words, in parts. Paradoxically, a lyric poem is born, at a time, in its entirety (“internal image”) and in parts (which we shall call tentatively, using a metaphor, “corporal words”). When a poet writes down (pronounces) the first word of his poem, this poem is already entirely born as an image sounding without words. The feeling of an opus image inside oneself is a process on the border between the unconscious and the conscious; however, the unconscious dominates in it. The creation of a verbal “envelope” of an opus also takes place at the confluence of the conscious and the unconscious, but here the conscious prevails. For a poet, the silence, the NON-creation of the unnecessary, is especially valuable. The silence is an important phase of a creative work, at which the word matures. The poet withdraws into silence, keens his hearing in order to imprint the “internal” image of a poem, born already in the back of his mind. The author of the article does not insist that the described theory of the birth of the lyric verse is the only one, and lets the other theories exist.