Preface

MANY YEARS AGO, in Cambridge, England, I attended one meeting of a rather esoteric faculty group that believed you could communicate with the dead. It was a disquieting experience with a gyrating table and spirit voices drifting in. I left, rather abruptly, because I felt out of place. Long before that, my charming mentor George Wilson Knight attempted to persuade me of his conviction that séances were authentic. I recall protesting that this seemed to me an over-literalization of a human yearning. George chuckled and said I was still too young to comprehend a vital truth.

The poet James Merrill, a good acquaintance, sometimes teased me about my skepticism. Like William Butler Yeats, he called up spooks to give him metaphors for poetry. With both poets, the results were wonderful, whether or not sprites aided the imaginings.

My own concern is rather different. When I read my departed friends, I have an uncanny sensation that they are in the room. Common readers, so many of whom are in touch with me, are very moving when they say that reading or rereading a book highly valued by their beloved dead comforts them.

All of us wish that, when we experience sorrow, we could be shown the end of sorrow. If we are secular, that cannot be expected. Possessed by Memory is not intended to be a lamentation for my own generation of critics and poets. Instead it hopes, in part, to be a living tribute to their afterlife in their writings. The other evening, I glanced at my writing table and saw books by many of my lost friends. There were volumes of poetry by John Ashbery, A. R. Ammons, Mark Strand, Alvin Feinman, and of criticism by Richard Rorty, Geoffrey Hartman, Angus Fletcher, and John Hollander. I had been close to all of them for at least half a century, and to most of them for two-thirds of my lifetime.

I will be going on eighty-nine when this book is published; in its composition over the past several years I began to apprehend my ongoing writing as a dialogue with my dead friends. These include mentors like M. H. Abrams, Frederick Pottle, Gershom Scholem, Hans Jonas, and Kenneth Burke. Sometimes they were good acquaintances: Frank Kermode, Anthony Burgess, A. D. Nuttall, Northrop Frye.

This book is reverie and not argument. My title is the book in a single phrase. What is it to be “possessed by memory”? How does possession differ in these: to possess dead or lost friends and lovers, or to possess poetry and heightened prose by memory? The range of meanings of the verb “possess” are varied: to own as property, to have power over, to master knowledge, to be controlled by a daemon, to be filled with felt experience or with cognitive apprehension, to enjoy sexual intercourse, to usurp and pillage.

The Indo-European root poti- implies lordship or else potency. Possession ensues from potential, a sense of something evermore about to be. There is a kindling of effort, expectation, desire, and then an ebbing, as in the Shakespearean “Desire is death.” Memory contains the composite triad in which the Kantian summa—Freedom, God, Immortality—transmutes into poetry’s countersumma: individuating voice, drawing down or augmenting a waning God, and bestowing upon us the Blessing that is more life.

In a poem the image of voice is always a trope listening for a tone you may have heard before your world was made. The Blessing frequently coincides with a change in your name. When you have a poem by heart, you possess it more truly and more strangely than you do your dwelling place, because the poem possesses you. Drawing down a god can be an esoteric procedure, yet poems at their strongest strike the lyre, and then the god becomes an issue of the strings.