THE DEMON AND THE ANGEL

Poet Hirsch (How to Read a Poem, 1999, etc.) struggles to put his finger on the source of artistic inspiration but winds up mainly with a commonplace look at other people’s takes on the matter.

Hirsch gropes toward an understanding of inspiration via the Spanish word duende. The duende is akin to the trickster or imp who stirs up trouble or keeps you uneasy. By extension, Hirsch takes it to represent a force, something ancient and mysterious that’s unleashed upon the land by the artist. But don’t expect a 12-step program toward an interview with your muse from Hirsch. Inspiration defies accountability; it can be luminous, but more often it’s a dark force, says he: The artist may act out of self-awareness, or out of psychic automatism, or simply through following an impulse without knowing why. Federico García Lorca brought duende to Hirsch’s attention, and afterward he went about looking for instances of it and for hints as to its source. But the best he can do is to provide examples. For García Lorca, duende “was associated with the spirit of the earth, with visible anguish, irrational desire, demonic enthusiasm, and a fascination with death . . . an erotic form of dark inspiration.” For Rilke, a poem sometimes unfolded like a dream, or simply “burst out of him.” Miles Davis had the restless gift for improvisation about which the great alto sax player Charlie Parker said, “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” And again, García Lorca called it “the remotest mansions of the blood.” Robert Motherwell, certainly known to wrestle intellectually with his images, even the automatic ones, spoke of “a place of ardent struggle, endless vigil,” easily witnessed in his elegies to the Spanish Republic paintings.

Whatever that impulse is—whatever the duende—Hirsch doesn’t corral it. Maybe Charlie Parker came closer when he said, “It is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom.”