Topic 1 (session A) - Levels of language: Linguistic levels, style & meaning > How writing happens ...

How great writing happens - Genius, or the careful choice of language?

Many people have an image of writing and writers, particularly poets, which assumes that they are geniuses, from whom great writing flows in an almost magical and unanalysable way. A good example of this stereotype is an advertisement which Heineken, the Dutch lager makers, put out a few years ago as part of a themed advertising campaign. Heineken ran a series of ads where a person or part of a person was lifeless, but became reinvigorated when he or she concerned drank a can of Heineken. The slogan 'Heineken Refreshes the Parts Other Beers Cannot Reach!' was displayed.

Later in the series of ads they had one where the famous Lake District poet, Wordsworth , who lived about 30 miles north of Lancaster, is trying to compose his famous poem about daffodils, 'I wandered lonely as a cloud'. He is pictured sitting by the side of a lake trying, again and again, to write the poem, but always failing to get started. Then he drinks a can of Heineken which he has brought with him and the poem just pours out of the end of his pen. You can watch the original advert on the History of Advertising Trust website.

I wander'd lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o'er Vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden Daffodils . . . . . . and so on.

Click on the "play" button (below) to see our own version of that advert, starring the "Heineken Fairy"!.

Unlike the rest of us, who usually have to work rather hard at our writing, apparently all Wordsworth had to do was drink the right brand of lager! And the slogan?

Heineken Refreshes the Poets Other Beers Cannot Reach!

The pun is obvious enough. This humorous representation is not that far from the stereotype of poetic genius handed down to us by the nineteenth century Romantics and which today still dominates our image of how great writers compose. We only have to think of the story of Coleridge, who, we are told, woke from a sleep (probably opium-induced) and began feverishly to write his poem 'Kubla Khan'. Unfortunately, so the story goes, he was then interrupted by a visitor from Porlock, and, unfortunately, by the time the visitor had gone, the poem had gone too! Opium refreshes the poets other drugs cannot meet?

If great writing really is like the image of it portrayed in the 'Kubla Khan' story and the Heineken ad, there would be no real point in trying to understand how it is produced and how it affects us. Magic (and also the states induced by alcohol and other drugs) is, by definition, un-analysable. But the reality of the writing process is actually rather different. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that poets work rather hard at their poems, struggling through successive drafts to achieve the complex of meanings and effects they are striving for. Indeed, many variant drafts of poems by famous poets like William Blake, W. B. Yeats and others are collected in what are usually referred to as the variorum editions of poems. You will be able to see this drafting process at work elsewhere in this session when you look in detail at Wilfred Owen's 'Anthem for Doomed Youth', a poem about young men dying in war. But for the moment, let's look at a line from a poem by John Keats , called 'The Eve of St Agnes'. The beautiful Madeline is going to sleep:

Blissfully havened from both joy and pain.

The last line of the relevant stanza, which rhymes with the one just quoted, is different, with respect to one word, in the first and the final version of the poem. Which one do you think is Keats's final choice? Try to work out why the choice you prefer is best, and then submit your guess. You will then be given an analysis of why we think Keats changed his mind from one word to another:

Home ¦ Outline ¦ Contents ¦ Glossary