“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Ruburt was correct in his introductory notes today (for Mass Events)—about the poet’s original, long-forgotten abilities, and his role. Ruburt has been a poet all of the time in the most profound meaning of that term. For the poet did not simply string words together, but sent out a syntax of consciousness, using rhythm and the voice, rhyme and refrain, as methods to form steps up which his own consciousness could rush.

(Pause.) The two of you thought of yourselves specifically as a writer—or rather a poet—and an artist before our sessions began. I would like to clear up some important issues.

You identified primarily now, as a poet and an artist because those designations, up to that time, seemed most closely to fit your abilities and temperaments. Ruburt’s writing set him apart. Your painting set you apart. These were recognizable, tangible proofs of creativity. You therefore identified with elements, characteristics, and traditions that seemed to suit you best.

[...] We talked about how Seth has said he wasn’t a poet, way back at the beginning of the sessions in 1963. [...] “Of course he’s a poet. [...]

His beliefs about poets were contaminated by ideas that said that the poet was too sensitive, too vulnerable to life’s experiences — that this sensitivity brought weakness instead of strength, and that true artists or true poets came to a tragic end for that reason.

(“Sunday afternoon before our visitors came,” she wrote, “I’d begun reading a book by Ralph Waldo Emerson [the poet and philosopher who lived from 1803–82]. I came across his essay, The Poet, in which he talked about the ‘speakers’ as being those who use their inner abilities to ‘speak the inner secrets of nature.’ The essay impressed me strongly, seeming to echo elements in my own writing and psychic characteristics; and of course I thought of Seth’s ‘Speakers’ as he described them in Chapter Twenty of Seth Speaks. [...]

[...] The poet is scarcely tolerated, for usually his or her gifts bring neither.

[...] I see it as harking back to the poet’s original role; to explore the reaches of his or her private psyche, pushing against usual psychological boundaries until they give, opening up a new mystical territory — the psyche of the people, of the species itself — perceiving a spectacular vision of inner reality that the poet then communicates to the people, translating that vision through words, rhythm, or songs.

The earliest poets were probably half shaman, half prophet, speaking for the forces of nature, for the “spirits” of the living and the dead, voicing their visions of man’s unity with the universe. [...]

These beliefs are centered around artists, writers, poets, musicians, actors and actresses, or others who seem unusually gifted in the arts or in various other methods of self-expression. [...]

You are aware of the nonsense connected with artists and poets and so forth—that they are too sensitive for the world, that great talent brings spiritual desolation, and that a man’s genius more often destroys him than fulfills him. Add to that list the belief that the great artist or writer concentrates upon his or her art so intensely and single-mindedly, and single-heartedly, that the focus itself forces the artist or poet to use those abilities to their utmost, or that great genius demands one-sided vision and a denial of the world. [...]

Ruburt was correct in his introductory notes (for Mass Events) today—about the poet’s long-forgotten abilities, and his role. Ruburt has been a poet all of the time in the most profound meaning of that term. For the poet did not simply string words together, but sent out a syntax of consciousness, using rhythm and the voice, rhyme and refrain as methods to form steps up which his own consciousness could rush.

(Pause.) The two of you thought of yourselves specifically as a writer—or rather a poet—and an artist before our sessions began. [...]

You identified, primarily now, as a poet and an artist because those designations, up to that time, seemed most closely to fit your abilities and temperaments. [...]

[...] You married a poet first and a female secondly. [...]

Poet.

I am no poet, and I know it, and I show it, da de da de da.

[...] The poet’s view of the universe and of nature is more scientific, then, than the scientists’, for more of nature is comprehended.

(Late yesterday afternoon my pendulum told me that Jane’s symptoms stemmed from her feeling that she had failed to become a successful “straight” writer—a novelist, poet, essayist, et al.; that she felt she had failed as the serious writer she had always dreamed of becoming, that the psychic work represented a turning down a wrong path; that actually, basically, the psychic work represented failure to her rather than success. [...]

[...] (Bach’s description of Jane for Time.) The middle-aged lady was mentioned as middle-aged, and as a psychic, poet and science fiction writer—a turning of the ways in that the psychic books were mentioned, but no books of poetry, which gave impetus to Dialogues.

This means of course that deeply felt hope must be sardonically examined, that deeply buried faith must be stated with parried thrusts, and to that extent the paper speaks for a concentrated portion of your population so that our Jim Poett, who is a poet at heart, must appear in the slightly worn cloak of the skeptic. [...]

[...] Each god or goddess had a poet who went in company, and the poets sang that they gave reason voice. [...] A strange mirror-image type of action followed, for when I spoke the poets’ words backwards, to my intellect they made perfect sense.”

[...] Many artists, poets, and musicians are Speakers, translating one world in terms of another, forming psychic structures that exist in both with great vitality — structures that may be perceived from more than one reality at once.

[...] He immediately makes a moral judgment against a poet whose material is artistically poor. [...]

[...] She simply experienced sudden new thoughts, and since she is a poet, these appeared as poetic inspirations. [...]

[...] That delightful leisure, that “loafing of the soul,” from Ruburt’s Whitman—the poet—is what ends up producing the kind of great creative “works” that Ruburt searches for.

[...] She remarked more than once about her failure to win the Yale prize for younger poets in years past, Tam’s attending Yale, and so forth. [...]