right for yourself

The old maxim, "write for yourself" has been seeing some criticism lately. To a certain extent, Richard has a point: writing, like any form of art, is a communication, between artist and audience, between the canon and the artist, between worlds, between thoughts. At the same time, I think perhaps the point has been missed.

When writers say, "Write for yourself," they're not saying that what they write is created purely for themselves to read. They mean, "Write what you want to write. Write what you have to say." Write what you have to communicate, not what other people want you to communicate. It's about being true to yourself, to the story that only you can tell. About being honest in your work.

In his preface to his Selected Poems, Auden writes,

A dishonest poem is one which expresses, no matter how well, feelings or beliefs which its author never felt or entertained. For example, I once expressed a desire for "New styles of architecture"; but I have never liked modern architecture. I prefer old styles, and one must be honest even about one's prejudices. Again, and much more shamefully, I once wrote: 'History to the defeated/May say alas but cannot help or pardon.' To say this is to equate goodness with success. It would have been bad enough if I'd ever held this wicked doctrine, but that I should have stated it simply because it sounded to me rhetorically effective is quite inexcusable.

This is the point. To write for yourself is to be honest with yourself and your readers in what you write. It is to not write simply what sounds good, nor to write to impress others. It is to offer unique truth and beauty as your eyes see it, as your voice expresses it.

For those who know me and my opinion of what Yeats and Eliot, Rimbaudt and Pound and Shelley have to say about the artist and tradition, about subsuming the voice of the artist in literary tradition... well, this may seem to fly in the face of those opinions. Yet Yeats writes (in A General Introduction to My Work and I believe I have quoted it here before):

all that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt.... If I wrote of personal love or sorrow in free verse, or in any rhythm that left it unchanged, amid all its accidence, I would be full of self-contempt because of my egotism and indiscretion, and foresee the boredom of the reader. I must chose a traditional stanza, even what I alter must seem traditional.... Speak to me of originality and I will turn on you with rage. I am a crowd, I am a lonely man, I am nothing. Ancient salt is the best packing.

Eliot says almost the same thing in Tradition and the Individual Talent, Pound in I Gather the Limbs of Osiris. Rimbaudt intimates it in his letters and it is something I agree with to some extent: it is arrogance to consider one's untrimmed personal thoughts art. The best of art has an awareness of its place in a vast body of art, communicates with the very thing it partakes in, feeds from it and gives back to it. At the same time, the artist's work must come from somewhere and that is from themselves, the world around them and how they experience it;

A poet writes always of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness; he never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always phantasmagoria.... he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete. A novelist might describe his accidence, his incoherence, he must not; he is more type than man, more passion than type. He is Lear, Romeo, Oedipus, Tiresias; he has stepped out of a play, and even the woman he loves is Rosalind, Cleopatra, never The Dark Lady. He is part of his own phantasmagoria and we adore him because nature has grown intelligible, and by doing so a part of our own creative power.

Yeats again. And here is the point: you write what you know, from your life and that is what is refined, is made no longer personal but universal and timeless. That allows it to speak to people.

The artist packs himself in ancient salt, but he is always and eternally still there.