Category Archives: Walt Whitman

May 10, 2023 · 2:22 pm

Why Writers and Artists Are So Intense

I wanted to know why artists and writers are so self-absorbed.

Then I wanted to know why writers, painters, and other artists bloom late.

In popular posts I addressed those questions. Now I want to know why so many writers and artists are intense and have intense personalities.

 

Waking, Wanting To Get Going

Hands typing on a laptopI was excited waking up at 3:00 A.M. yesterday, and I was not thinking of going back to sleep. I wanted to finish some poems where I had left off the night before. I thought, “Let my wife–a calmer, less excitable person–sleep; I love to work and I have work to do.”

Then I started thinking that it was likely that other creative people I know–good friends in the arts–at that very moment also were waking early and were anxious to get to work on their project, that we are similar–we resemble each other in regard to the emotions we bring to bear as we live and work–that we are all creative and we are all intense and excitable. Certain qualities endear creative people to me. One is their intensity.

It seemed to me then that intensity and excitability were a pattern, a hard and fast characteristic of myself and my artful friends, and come to think of it, of many of the famous writers and artists and other creative people I have been reading about, studying, admiring, and writing about all my life. Their intensity made them different.

The Feeling of Intensity

What does intensity feel like?

Sunrise over a lake with blue and orange streaksIntense writers and artists do everything intensely–experiencing, feeling, thinking, and imagining. They are significantly different human beings from other writers and artists (and agents and family members and co-workers) who are not intense. They feel their emotions strongly. They soar high with elevated emotions, and they plunge into dark moods, at times their moods changing so fast as to be bewildering. In contrast, people who are not intense the way so many writers and artists are feel their emotions more mildly and without such major fluctuations between the high moods and the low moods. Differences in intensity between people who work closely together or live together may cause conflicts.

Some writers and artists feel that they are being flooded by waves of joy, that their every cell is being excited. Some writers and artists–perhaps you, certainly I–revise their work tirelessly, at times almost maniacally, ten times, twenty times, thirty times, until they are satisfied the work is the best they can do. Only then can they stop themselves.

The intensity of writers’ and artists’ personality is a powerful element of their creativity. The wonderful poet John Keats thought that intensity–not intelligence or any other quality — in and of itself is the most powerful creative element of all.

Intensity and the Arts

Deep blue-pruple crocus flower against green leavesIntensity is a quality found in many creative people that facilitates artistic pursuits. Abbe Dimnet said that the creator’s intensity will be reflected in the quality of the work: “The experience of most artists is that the quality of their production is in keeping with the intensity of their wish.” Henry James wrote: “It is art that makes life, makes intensity, makes importance.” Horace said, “Painters and poets alike have always had license to dare anything.” It is their intensity that gives them strength. Keats said, “The excellency of every art is its intensity “ A problem every writer and artist faces is maintaining in every phase  of their story or painting  the intensity that keeps it going and energizes the  creator’s every gesture and the work’s every detail.  They must be able to generate and sustain intensity as they work.

Emotional Intensity and Over-Excitability of Many People in the Arts

“Emotional intensity” of the kind I am describing is a quality that Polish psychologist, psychiatrist, physician, and poet Kazimierz Dabrowski found when he studied intellectually or artistically gifted people. The degree of a person’s emotional intensity is a stable characteristic. Some people are intense; some are not. Just as self-absorbed artists and writers can’t help being self-absorbed any more than they can help having the color eyes they do, intense artists and writers can’t help being intense.

Dabrowski recognized that, as I thought, creative people experience an intensification of experience much beyond what other people experience. Dabrowski considered the intensity of their emotions, their sensitivity and emotional extremes–their “over-excitabilities”–to be part and parcel of their makeup. Every aspect of their personality is intense.

They are “spirited,” and are also more sensitive, perceptive, energetic, and persistent than other people. They possess what I have called “inner” skills such as persistence, confidence, and courage that not everyone has but that lead directly to success in the arts. Dabrowski identified five “overexcitabilites” exhibited by more people in the artistically gifted population than in the general population.

The Five Dimensions of Intense Writers’ and Artists’ Lives

  1. Sensual

Sensualists, intense writers and artists seek an enhanced sensory and aesthetic pleasure in seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, hearing, and sex. They delight in beautiful objects and in sounds of words, and in form, color, and balance. Negatively, they may overeat and be sexually over-indulgent.

  1. Psychomotor

Intense people have a surplus of energy, are competitive, enjoy intense physical activity such as fast games and sports, often are compulsive talkers–they may jabber–and act impulsively. They may have nervous habits. They may bite their nails or have nervous twitches.

  1. Intellectual

They enjoy intensified activity of their mind in their curiosity, concentration, and in their capacity for sustained intellectual effort, avid reading, asking probing questions, and making keen observations. They can vividly recall what they see with their eyes (that fundamental necessity for writers and artists) and may be detailed planners.  They are tenacious problem-solvers. They search for truth and understanding. They think about thinking and love theory and analysis. They are logical and independent thinkers.

  1. Imaginational

In speaking and writing, intense writers and artists often use images and metaphors, are given to poetic and dramatic perceptions, and are skilled at inventing. Some can make up fantasy worlds of their own and imaginary companions and are attracted to magic and fairy tales. Under emotional tension their imagery can mix truth and fiction. They may have elaborate dreams and illusions. They cannot tolerate boredom. They may lack self-judgment and be overly-critical.

  1. Emotional

The feelings and emotions of over-excitable writers and artists are intensified. They are given to extremes of emotions, complex feelings and a large range of emotions and have an awareness of the feelings of others. They have heights and depths of emotions that others lack. At times their mood soars. And it also may plunge. Their moods change quickly.

They may have strong physical expressions of over-excitability such as tense stomach, sinking heart, pounding heart, sweaty palms. Intense writers and artists experience euphoria, enthusiasm, and ecstasy, but also shyness, timidity, and obsessiveness.

But Dabrowski found that inner forces were at work in them also, forces that generated overstimulation, conflicts, and pain, and often set them out in a search for a way out. One way out may lead to inner growth and transformation, another may lead to results such as addiction.

Examples of Famous Intense Writers and Artists

Photograph of Walt Whitman with a long white beardWho could be more intense than poet Walt Whitman who expressed a wish to have “one hour of madness and joy,” “to feed the remainder of life with one hour of fullness and freedom,” “To have the feeling today or any day I am sufficient as I am.” Who more intense than novelists Charles Dickens with his phenomenal storehouse of drive that enabled him to work on a multiplicity of books, speeches, plays, travels, and social projects at the same time without ever tiring?

Or Thomas Wolfe whose monumental goal was nothing less than to describe in the millions of published words that poured out of him uncontrollably, as from a spigot, every experience he had ever had? And Gustave Flaubert, a pioneer of a modern writing style, who agonized rewriting his novels and stories to perfection? Or intense painter Vincent van Gogh who produced a masterpiece a day, or Claude Monet, who for his artistic experiments could paint thirty or forty canvasses of exactly the same scene.

There are drawbacks to a writer or artist being over-excitable and intense. But the advantages of being a writer or artist who is intense and has the powerful energies, the drive, and many other qualities that facilitate success in the arts far outweigh the negatives. The creative’s intensity is reflected in the quality of the work they produce–more intensity, better quality work.

If writers and artists are asked to identify the important characteristics they would l really like to have that would positively affect their career, they will be wise to identify intensity.

An intense writer or artist trying to create a vision they perhaps alone perceive is fortunate.

 

© 2023 David J. Rogers

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Filed under Artists, Charles Dickens, Claude Monet, concentration, Dabrowski, Developing Talent, Human Potential and Achievement, energy, Excellence in the Arts, Imagery in the Arts, Inner Skills, Intensity, Moods, Over-Excitabilities, talent, Walt Whitman, Writers, Writers' Characteristics

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August 21, 2015 · 7:08 pm

Self-Taught Artists and Writers

I’m guessing that very few of you reading this post graduated from the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and  many did not graduate from any graduate writing program, and possibly you were not even an English or journalism major in college. You might have had a major that was totally unrelated to writing, like Nobel novelist Saul Sorbonne634035_640Bellow, an anthropology major, or innovative French novelist/ screenwriter/essayist Alain Robbe-Grillet, an agronomist, or may not have attended college at all. Many great writers, like Nobel winner Ernest Hemingway, had no interest in attending college, and many others, like Nobel winners William Faulkner and playwright Eugene O’Neill didn’t take college seriously (well that’s probably true of 30 or 40% of all college students), and quit it because they thought it was not only not helping them, but holding them back. And I’m guessing that not more than, let’s see, two of you painters attended the Sorbonne, and some possibly never attended any art school. Yet you’re capable and have had writing and painting success. Your work has been published and art works have been shown. Some of you are professionals earning a substantial living.

The majority of you are autodidacts—mainly self-taught–and many of you autodidacts, you formally “untutored” creative people, have surpassed and achieved more success than many if not most Iowa writers, and Sorbonne painters. When most of what you know about how to paint or write creatively is a result of what you have taught yourself, of knowledge and experience you’ve acquired on your own, there is directness, freshness, and truthfulness in your work that you might not have achieved had you followed a more conventional developmental route that “everyone else” seems to be following.

French painter Henri Rousseau (1840-1910) was a self-taught autodidact too. An official with the French customs office, he began painting as a late-blooming amateur “Sunday painter” who might take his cheap paint box out into the park for an afternoon’s relaxation. He signed Rousseauhis first picture at the age of 36 and exhibited in his first show at 40. His earliest paintings were technically incorrect and unsophisticated as the work of a beginner usually is. The forms were stiff and simple; the proportions were inaccurate, and the perspectives were wrong. But in his work there was “something” that drew the attention of critics and the public—the honesty in the works, a directness that came right out of his obvious joy in the act of creation. He was an advanced autodidact and did things that other unschooled artists did not usually do, and conventionally trained painters did not do. Paint which in a run-of-the-mill painting of a beginner would be thin and dry is applied with rich body. Colors that would be anemic or muddy in the ordinary newcomer’s work were clear in Rousseau. His work continued to grow in popularity. His paintings created a world of enchantment.

This was a dangerous point for Rousseau because he had to strike a balance of learning to be more technically proficient, but not to the point that technical qualities would obliterate the originality that came to him naturally, just as I hope however technically advanced you become, you never lose your natural and authentic voice.  Rousseau had to guard his naiveté and so he created for himself a personal style based on the forms that had been spontaneous to him as a beginner—a highly cultivated style that at the same time was rooted in an untutored simplicity. And that is Rousseau’s special charm.

Although seriously technically limited by conventional standards, a painting or a story, poem, or novel, or any creative product, may be a work of art even if the work’s quality is half-accidental, as it was with Henri Rousseau.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892), another thoroughly self-taught autodidact, ended his formal education at eleven. During the six years between 1849 and 1855 he turned himself from a lazy second-rate journalist and less than average creative walt-whitman-391107_640writer who couldn’t hold a job into–through a “liberation of language” never seen before on earth—one of the greatest poets the world has ever known. Prior to his first book– Leaves of Grass–he seemed to be a very untalented man. Before becoming the” father of American poetry,” he worked as a carpenter (building his own home) and as an elementary school teacher, printer, editor, shopkeeper, and in the world of newspapers, paled around with artists and sculptors, attended operas (said he learned more about writing from operas than from anything else), studied history and astronomy on his own, read voraciously, and believed in self-help and self-education. He said that during those years before Leaves of Grass when he was writing “conventional verse” he was “simmering, simmering, simmering.” This man who wrote, “I have not once had the least idea who or what I am” developed in those mystical six years a vision and style that no one since has been able to duplicate. His poetry startled the literary world and started a new direction in poetry. Readers were astonished.

Living not far from Whitman at the time, and working in solitude, unknown to the literary world, was quiet, subdued poet Emily Dickinson. Do you think it is a coincidence that those two untutored autodidacts who worked alone, were unknown, taught themselves, and never met,  would become America’s finest poets and produce work the likes of which no one had ever seen before?

Most often the reason a writer, artist, composer, etc. is not yet accomplished is not because she’s unintelligent or not talented, but because she isn’t knowledgeable enough yet. In writing and every other art, every other discipline, knowledge isn’t everything, but almost everything. The more you know, the more you can achieve—the greater your reach. The self-taught creator knows that and follows an atypical but most productive route to the knowledge she needs to excel. She looks for it wherever it may be and acquires it on her own. She has high motivation and a thirst for learning about her craft that cannot be quenched.

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) was reading Whitman in 1886 around the time he was painting the apocalyptic “Starry Night.” If you know your Whitman that makes perfect sense. A solitary who worked outside of any school or tradition, vincent-van-gogh-89422_640van Gogh was self-made. He had only one year’s total training from instructors, but studied ceaselessly on his own, the autodidact of autodidacts. He had tremendous faith in the future of his work, and felt it was worth sacrificing everything for it. He was a harsh self-critic, considering many of his paintings now accepted as masterpieces mere studies. At the time of his death he had sold one painting and traded another for brushes, had been represented by just a few dealers, had participated in a half-dozen shows, and had dissuaded critics from writing about his work. Few artists of any kind have made themselves as knowledgeable or clear-sighted about their art, or have a more developed understanding of painting. He rarely signed his works, believing that to do so was arrogant, and that an artist should work humbly. He had a short but prodigious career, leaving behind a legacy of more than 2,000 paintings and drawings at his death at thirty-seven.

Artists and writers and people in general who don’t follow a traditional route to expertise and beyond that to excellence–who go off on their own–may produce direct, fresh, original work they might not have been able to produce had they followed a traditional path. They are original often because they see that the traditional rules don’t suit them, or they don’t know the rules and aren’t limited by them. It may take them longer. By necessity they may have to be late-bloomers like Rousseau, van Gogh, and Whitman. But what does time matter if time is needed for you to come into your own? When writing Leaves of Grass, Whitman told himself, “Make it new.” and he did.

What we learn from autodidacts is to be original, be true to ourselves, be honest, be direct, don’t hide from ourselves, and find our own truth though it may be different from everyone else’s. You are not like other artists or writers. In Leaves of Grass Whitman writes, “I celebrate myself” which seems to me not a bad place for creative people to start.

(For further reading, you may wish to see the excellent Van Gogh: A Retrospective, edited by Susan Alyson Stein, and Geoffrey Dutton’s Whitman)

 

© 2015 David J. Rogers

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