Meridian Magazine :: Poetry : The Art of Personality

The Art of Personality
By Doug Talley

In a letter to Benjamin Bailey dated November 22, 1817, the poet John Keats wrote:

I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination — What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth — whether it existed before or not — for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty… (John Keats, Selected Poetry, Paul de Man, editor, New American Library, 1966, p. 326).

On the subject of Imagination, several years ago I noted in my journal a moment of morning play for my youngest daughter while I was preparing for work:

This morning as I was shaving, my three-year-old daughter came into the bathroom to play. She carried a small handful of purple grapes into the bathtub and pretended they were swimming together in the empty tub. After a few moments, she sensed the grapes were in grave danger, so she stood up suddenly and took off her pink pajamas, scooped up the grapes, and carried them in her cupped hands to the shower in order to save them — another disaster barely averted in her young world of constant, great moment! It strikes me now that what we frequently refer to as innocence in children is simply a pure and uninhibited imagination at play. And if adults have lost their innocence, does it mean that one of the casualties of this loss is a loss also of imagination?

In this life I am convinced we do not need revelation so much to discover what is in heaven, but rather to discover what is in our hearts. Poetry, like the scriptures, can serve as just the necessary seer stone to test what is in our heart and nature. Pulsing at the center of good poetry is a lively imagination and as we examine such poetry, I believe we are drawn closer to that imagination which rests in our own heart of hearts, or which may be buried there and in dire need of resurrection. The examination of poetry is worth the effort, because the expression of imagination through art is, in effect, a statement of Identity. We come to understand more intimately individual personality — our own unique identities — as we understand imagination.

Keats wrote another letter to his brother in March 1819 where he meditated on the development of individual identity. According to his thesis, it is only by experience of the heart that an intelligence develops into a soul with identity and thereby becomes fulfilled:

Call the world if you please “The vale of Soul-making.” Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature, admitting it to be immortal, which I will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it) I say “Soul-making,” Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence — there may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions — but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. Intelligences are atoms of perception — they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God — how then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them — so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one’s individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? This point I sincerely wish to consider because I think it a grander system of salvation than the Christian religion — or rather it is a system of Spirit-creation — this is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years — These three Materials are the Intelligence, the human heart (as distinguished from intelligence or Mind), and the World or Elemental space suited for the proper action of Mind and Heart on each other for the purpose of forming the Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity. I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive — and yet I think I perceive it — that you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible — I will call the World a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read — I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that school — and I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! Not merely is the Heart a Hornbook, it is the Mind’s Bible, it is the Mind’s experience, it is the teat from which the Mind or intelligence sucks its identity — As various as the Lives of Men are — so various become the souls, and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, Identical Souls of the sparks of his own essence — this appears to me a faint sketch of a system of Salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity — I am convinced that many difficulties which Christians labor under would vanish before it... If what I have said should not be plain enough, as I fear it may not be, I will put you in the place where I began in this series of thought — I mean, I began by seeing how man was formed by circumstances — and what are circumstances but touchstones of his heart? And what are touchstones but provings of his heart? And what are provings of his heart but fortifiers or alterers of his nature? And what is his altered nature but his Soul? — And what was his Soul before it came into the world and had these provings and alterations and perfectionings? — An intelligence without Identity — and how is this Identity to be made? Through the medium of the Heart? And how is the heart to become this Medium but in a world of Circumstances? (Id., pp. 343-344.)

The doctrine of evolving primordial intelligence Keats seemed to grasp intuitively. He thought that many “difficulties which Christians labor under would vanish” before the concept. It does seem a marvelous explanation of a distinctly Mormon doctrine whereby God organized intelligences into spirits and then sent them to earth for experience to develop god-like capacities, as Abraham had seen in vision when God had shown to him “the intelligences that were organized before the world was”. Abraham had seen that at the center of the Creation was a plan for going down where there was space and taking materials to “make an earth whereon these may dwell” (that is, the intelligences) and to “prove them herewith.” Cf., Abraham 3:22-25.

Keats wrote this letter and was thinking through this concept at about the same time that he wrote his great, imaginative odes in May 1819. There is much to be explored here, and it falls in agreeably with the view that the full development of individual personality is absolutely critical to any notion of eternal life. And the only way to fully develop individual personality is to learn from someone who has himself already aspired and achieved. When Jesus defined eternal life for humanity and said it was “to know thee, the only true God,” implicit in that statement was the principle that we could only know ourselves and our potential as sons and daughters of God by thoroughly knowing the parent and the older brother who marked the way. The story of Jesus is the story of how a child comes to the Father and is made divine — a fully realized Identity.

Central to Identity and the notion of personality is the expression of it in some form of art. The expression of personality through art has the potential to continue into the eternities. I once read somewhere that Brigham Young had said that in hell there is no music. He could have been referring to the Revelation of John, 18:21-23 — Thus with violence shall that great city of Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all. And the voice of harpers, and musicians, and of pipers, and trumpeters, shall be heard no more at all in thee: and no craftsman, of whatsoever craft he be, shall be found any more in thee; and the sound of a millstone shall be heard no more at all in thee; and the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee...

Contrast this with what is said of Zion in Psalms 87:

The Lord loveth the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob.
Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God…
The Lord shall count, when he writeth up the people, that this man was born there. Selah.
As well as the singers as the players on instruments shall be there: all my springs are in thee.

The chains of hell bind personality — they are the gradual extinguishment of personality through the abandonment of, and isolation from, all good, including the goodness and beauty of art. Heaven, on the other hand, resounds with personality and art. As Keats wrote on another occasion:

The excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth (Id., p. 328).

That sounds like another definition of heaven. Those few years ago when my young daughter in pure imagination saved her purple grapes from tragedy, she was simply refreshing her sense of heaven, by exercising her creative ability to make “all disagreeables evaporate” — an early lesson in the art of personality that hopefully will carry through to the eternities.