The problem with the question “what is the relation between a poet’s life and work?” is that it is already an answer in disguise. This is clear if we consider why, for example, we do not ponder the relations between a poet’s actions and his life. We of course assume that these two cannot be separated. Actions are among the very element of a life. To inquire into the relation between life and work, therefore, already assumes that the work is not one of life’s essential constituents. Thus, the prepositional form “What is the relation between x and y” has an insidious ability to sunder what was once entire, and to raise false problems on the ruins of that former wholeness. The poet has been prized from his works by grammar.
Even to say that the work is an escape from the life is to propose that it plays a role within it. What would happen to the “life,” we might ask, if that getaway were blocked? What need or desire has generated that escape? What compelling necessity does it express?
The obvious borderline case when it comes to the work-life relation is letters. Their status is tricky. Sometimes, as in Proust (or Kafka) the letter can seem little more than a “pretext”, an occasion for writing. It is not, so much addressed to its nominal recipient; rather the author is testing a literary style, using the letter to enlarge, polish and refine his expressive range. The case of Yeats (for example) is rather different. Typically these letters do not even glance sideways at their own language. Recent issues of Yeats’ letters have, to be perfectly frank, been rescued for literariness by the Stygian labours of the poet’s editors and the goldmine of footnotes which belie and prop up the sundry ragbag of shopping lists and monetary demands etc. They are quick emissaries – persuading, requesting, haranguing, reminding or arranging. 40 or so years later, most of these would have been telephone calls. These pieces of writing are simultaneously and obviously ‘actions’, fully integrated within the ‘life’. .
But is there not a sense in which even the most recondite and hermetic poem, ostensibly self sealed and firmly/ staunchly closed to instrumentality, is nonetheless an action/ gesture/ event within the life of the poet. Writing, we might say, at least in certain instances, made a difference, and constituted a biographical “event”. (I would add that many of Yeats’ poems seem to be about this very “making a difference” – about an utterance or assured inscription that works like an action or gesture to intervene in and radically to alter the situation at hand.)
It seems to me that there are certain writers, moreover, who seem to render biography superfluous, precisely because of the peculiar reconfiguration of the life/work relation they have achieved. Kafka would be one of these. Genet, for example, would not. I will try and explain what I mean by this in a future post.