The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration

A work of art, whether a painting, a dance, a poem, or a jazz composition, can be admired in its own right. But how does the artist actually create his or her work? What is the source of an artist's inspiration? What is the force that impels the artist to set down a vision that becomes art? In this groundbreaking book, poet and critic Edward Hirsch explores the concept of duende, that mysterious, highly potent power of creativity that results in a work of art. It has been said that Laurence Olivier had it, and so did Ernest Hemingway, but Maurice Evans and John O'Hara did not. Marlon Brando had it but squandered it. Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith had it, and so did Miles Davis. From Federico Garciacute;a Lorca's wrestling with darkness as he discovered the fountain of words within himself to Martha Graham's creation of her most emotional dances, from the canvases of Robert Motherwell to William Blake's celestial visions, Hirsch taps into the artistic imagination and explains, in terms illuminating and emotional, how different artists respond to the power and demonic energy of creative impulse. A masterful tour of the minds and thoughts of writers, poets, painters, and musicians, including Paul Klee Federico Garciacute;a Lorca Robert Johnson Miles Davis Billie Holiday Louis Armstrong T. S. Eliot Ezra Pound Wallace Stevens Charles Baudelaire Herman Melville Nathaniel Hawthorne William Blake Rainer Maria Rilke Arthur Rimbaud Walter Benjamin Mark Rothko Robert Motherwell Anthony Hecht Benny Goodman Ella Fitzgerald William Meredith Sylvia Plath Jackson Pollock

Only MysteryI WISH I HAD BEEN IN Buenos Aires on October 20, 1933, when Federico Garca Lorca delivered a lecture that he called "Juego y teora del duende" ("Play and Theory of the Duende"). Lorca was testifying to his own poetic universe, as his biographer Ian Gibson has recognized. It would have been electrifying to hear him, because on that night, addressing the members of the Friends of Art Club, the spirit of artistic mystery entered the room. It moved at the speed of Lorca's voice and burned like incense in the rich air. It was palpable to the audience, as if Lorca had thrown open the windows so that everyone present could hear the primitive wing beats shuddering in the darkness outside. The floor shifted a little under everyone's feet. The lamps trembled. Thinking about it now, sixty-nine years later, I can see the stammering flames leaping off the typescript of Lorca's talk. I feel the ancient heat.(One month later, at the Buenos Aires PEN Club, Lorca and Pablo Neruda staged a happening at a luncheon in their honor. The two simpatico poets-one from the Vega of Granada in southern Spain, the other from a small frontier town in rural southern Chile-used a bullfighting tradition to improvise a speech about the great Nicaraguan poet Rubn Daro, which they delivered alternately from different sides of the table. "Ladies...," Neruda began, "...and gentlemen," Lorca continued: "In bullfighting there is what is known as 'bullfighting al alimn,' in which two toreros, holding one cape between them, outwit the bull together." The virtuoso antiphonal performance at first bewildered and then delighted the audience as the visible spirit of praise started darting back and forth across the room. Daro was the enthralling inventor of Hispanic modernismo [a term he coined] who fused Continental Symbolism with Latin American subjects and themes, effecting a fresh musical synthesis-a "musical miracle"-in Spanish-language poetry. He was therefore a poet both of Spain and of the Americas, the Old and the New Worlds, and Lorca and Neruda were magically linking themselves through him, as if by electrical impulses.)Whoever speaks or writes about the duende should begin by invoking the crucial aid and spirit of this chthonic figure, as Lorca did whenever he read aloud from the manuscript of Poet in New York. The Dionysian spirit of art needs to be invited into the room. "Only mystery enables us to live," Lorca wrote at the bottom of one of the drawings he did in Buenos Aires: "Only mystery." It behooves any of us who would meditate on the subject of artistic inspiration to open the doors wide into the night and welcome into the house the spirit of inhabitable awe.Invoking the DuendeTHE AUDIENCE'S SENSE OF expectation as Lorca invoked the duende before a homecoming reading of his New York poems must have been running high. One imagines him sitting at a small table in front of a crowded room in Madrid-confident, charismatic, yet clumsy, vulnerable, "a solitary

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Excerpted from The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration by Edward Hirsch
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