More dream poetry

After posting my dream poem (below this post), I was reading in Edmund Wilson’s The Shores of Light and enjoying immensely his hard edged judgements and wise takes on the likes of Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, Gertrude Stein, H.L. Mencken, Sherwood Anderson, W. H. Auden, Elinor Wylie, Edna S. Vincent Mallay, E.E. Cummings, Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence and other writers of that era when American letters were finding a new footing. Wilson, besides his literary critcism, was a prolific writer on cultural life  for The New Republic, and he captured the fleeting fervor surrounding communism and its prominence in American life during that era, which now seems the musings of a different civilization entirely.

Anyway, in the book I was surprised to see an essay on Dream Poetry.

Wilson wrote about dreams that produced poetry, citing examples, the most prominent of course was Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, which is said to have come to him in an opium-induced dream state. Most dream poetry is not high art, of course, and is in fact touched by an other wordly whimsy.

Wilson recorded one of his dream poems:

The human heart if full of leaks;

The human head is full of vapors.

The crows disband: the mandrake shrieks;

The scandal was in all the papers.

And this from an anonymous poet:

It’s white to be snow,

It’s cold to be ice,

It’s windy to blow,

And it’s nice to be nice.

And one by E.M. Forster:

I will put down Hastings, you shall see

Companion to India as a boat gnawed.

Forster’s is closer to most dream poetry, I think, in which the dreamer feels that the “as a boat gnawed” is touched by genius, only to awaken, recall the words, and shake his head in wonderment.

I wish Wittgenstein would have taken an interest in this phenomenon of language produced in a dream, rather than action stories, states of feelings, fantasies, etc.