By LUIS V. TEODORO
Art, it has been said, is a matter of execution. It is not what the writer says, but how he says it, that really matters. The artist strives for a union of form and matter. How effectively he has done that will determine the quality of his work. A good example in the short story is Hemingway’s “The Killers,” wherein the terse, violently pounding rhythm of the sentences is welded with the violent, disordered world of the story. A negative example in poetry would be a poem by Longfellow, “A Psalm of Life,” which while articulation a more or less profound theme, nevertheless sounds like “Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow.”
In poetry specially, the form, the method of saying what the poet wants to say, is the primary consideration. The poem is never judged according to the reviewer’s view of theme or subject. For that matter the English courses one takes in the University are appallingly deceptive.
While we are at it, we might also add that neither is the poet to be judged by a single poem. It would either be unjust to the writer or unjust to the reviewer. If one concluded from one poem that the writer is a bad poet, one may be doing him an injustice, for the poem may have been written during a period of immaturity or at a time when the writer was still groping for expression. If one, on the other hand, concludes from one poem that the writer is a poet indeed and would leave his mark in the literary scene, one may have to eat one’s words later. One poem is not the poet. It is always advisable to read most of the poet’s works and distinguish among them the good and the bad and then say which is which. Sweeping statements can be believed by an unbelievable number of people.
These are all quite elementary.
Is there such a thing as “poetic language.” The metaphysical poets of the 17th century did not think so. Neither do most twentieth-century poets whose poetry may be described as a fusion of the metaphysicals and the French symbolists.
There is such a thing as “polite language” though and it is used in “polite society.” But between this society and the society of poets is an unbridgeable gap indeed.
We can understand the feeling of the rebel who rebels against practically everything. His views of things is primarily based on Nietzsche’s superman concept, “Man is something that must be surpasses,” said Nietzsche. And the writer, contemplating the conventions around him–the fraud, the blind obedience, the idiocy in conformist thinking; middle-class morality and standard; the pettiness of “polite society” and the conventions imposed by unscrupulous or weak mean, all of which would enslave his humanity—damns them all and sings the song of the uninhibited, unshackled individual.
A charge of obscenity levelled against the writer by self-styled moralists and crusaders can be a double-edged weapon which can cut both ways. Perhaps turned on the accuser, it might prove more valid.
Again, art is primarily a matter of execution.
The name-dropper is first of all a status-seeker. He drops names, hoping to indicate thereby that he is “in”. Names to him should be dropped as abundantly as cliches are used by the hack-writer. One meets him everywhere: in social circles, in government, in the campus, even (or should we say, more so in the campus?).
Literary name-droppers should be lined up against a latrine wall and shot, with the braying of asses for a choral background to remind them of their blasphemous rantings.
There is a death of campus writers today. When the need arises, we find ourselves still dependent on the old reliables: the poets, the short-story writers, the essayists who have been around for so long that it would be a cardinal sin to ask for their ages.
This is not to say, however, that there are no potential writers in the campus. They are silent because they are either too lazy to write and consequently have not improved their writing, or still have not discovered what they can do best.
The creative writing workshops reveal that there is a group of potential writers in the campus who have long kept silent.
One case in which silence does not necessarily mean non-existence. ●
Published in print in the Collegian’s August 16, 1961 issue with the title “Union of Form and Matter.”
Former Collegian editor and UP College of Mass Communication dean Prof. Luis V. Teodoro has died at 81. During his college days, Teodoro, along with the editorial staff, protested the intervention of then Collegian Faculty Adviser Francisco Arcellana. Teodoro continued his advocacy for a free press, as evidenced by his reports and scholarly works on the political economy of the Philippine media. In 2014, Teodoro became the founding chairperson of Altermidya, a network of independent and progressive media outfits, institutions, and individuals.
