英詩と偶然性 : 創作における「音の論理」

抄録

The creative process of S. T. Coleridge's Kubla Khan is not after all an extremely unusual one, because it dramatically exemplifies arbitrariness involved in the creative process of poems in general: it was spontaneous without any scrutiny on the part of the poet; and it was torn short, irrespective of the poet's original scheme, by an intruder, this time, a visitor from Porlock. The element of arbitrariness in the process is well demonstrated by the Japanese medieval song sequence, 'renga' in that each song was composed by each participant extemporaneously to be incorporated harmoniously into one whole body of a song sequence, highly depending upon the flowing atmosphere created by the participants. There each individual poet had to contribute one song each time, so to speak, surrendering a great part of his own poetic emotion to the main stream of others' mutually-affecting and mutually-affected emotions. The only type of English poetry comparable to this would be the traditional ballads in that individuals particpating in the communal creation had to collaborate, often undergoing arbitrary orientation and composition imposed by others. But the presence of collaborators in the creative process is not the only arbitrary factor; poetic prosody and even the language itself are after all embodiments of other people's presence or an accumulation of other people's consensus. This arbitrariness, which seems to wither individual's poetic flourish, however, is actually a necessity for poetic composition, or a clue by which the preverbal and amorphous poetic chaos is crystallized into a cosmos. One negative example is shown in the modern Japanese 'free verse' poem whose composition Japanese poets generally do not find free but haphazard and awkward, simply because, I think, it is free from 'arbitrary' prosody. Lack of prosody in it necessitates Japanese poets to compose lines on the basis of a contextual meaning or of a logical development of images. On the other hand, those poets, English or American, who impart their creative process, candidly and proudly tell that they make the best use of a word-finding 'game' to comply with the rules of rhyme and alliteration, etc. In other words, they willingly surrender themselves to the arbitrariness of word sounds, often at the expense of part of the contextual stream or of a logical growth of poems, only to achieve a glamourous, unexpected poetic creation. From the view-point of arbitrariness of word sounds, many poems can be more fully appreciated. I have chosen a soliloquy of Brutus in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, II, i, 10-34 where he justifies his decision to kill the 'tyrant,' to indicate 'ladder,' the central image of the latter half of the soliloquy was whimsically thought of simply as a rhyming word with 'adder,' which is the key word of the first image. I have also cited a poem by Emily Dickinson beginning with the line 'I can wade Grief,' in which the first line of the second stanza was begun, I think, with no definite idea concerning 'power' on the part of the poetess but was developed into a superb achievement of poetry entirely on the basis of sound association of [p] which had already been predominant in the first stanza. It seems to me that the development of a poetic embryo into poetic lines, the crystallization of a poetic chaos into a cosmos, is executed by means of free associations within the confines of prosody. And the illogicality of sound associations or the arbitrariness of language as a sound system turns out to be of great value in forging new combinations out of seemingly incompatible contexts.