Christian Wiman's Notes On Ambition And Dietrich Bonhoeffer

If a poet’s ambition were truly for the work and nothing else, he would write under a pseudonym, which would not only preserve that pure space of making but free him from the distractions of trying to forge a name for himself in the world. 

No, all ambition has the reek of disease about it, the relentless smell of the self — except for that terrible, blissful feeling at the heart of creation itself, when all thought of your name is obliterated and all you want is the poem, to be the means wherein something of reality, perhaps even something of eternity, realizes itself. That is noble ambition. But all that comes after — the need for approval, publication, self-promotion — isn’t this what usually goes under the name of “ambition”? 

The effort is to make ourselves more real to ourselves, to feel that we have selves, though the deepest moments of creation tell us that, in some fundamental way, we don’t. (Souls are what those moments reveal, which are both inside and outside, both us and other.) So long as your ambition is to stamp your existence upon existence, your nature on nature, then your ambition is corrupt and you are pursuing a ghost. [...] 

For all the modern talk about keeping an author’s work and life separate, all the schoolroom injunctions against mistaking art for autobiography, there are some works that life electrifies with meaning, some sayings only action authenticates. The charge is not always a positive one: Sylvia Plath’s late poems are so disturbing and powerful precisely because she committed the awful act around which they danced. 

The act is not always a willful one: the Hungarian poet Miklos Radnoti, after a long forced march with hundreds of other doomed men, was killed by the Nazis and dumped into a mass grave in 1944. After the war, when his body was exhumed and identified, his wife discovered in his coat pocket a small notebook filled with poems he had written during his last days. Prophetic, apocalyptic, and yet brutally specific, the poems are at once unflinching and uncanny. “The reader approaches these with a certain veneration,” writes the poet and translator George Szirtes, “as though they were more than poems. Slowly, everything assumes a mythic shape and the life embraces the oeuvre so comprehensively that the one disappears in the other.” [...] 

For acquired knowledge cannot be divorced from the existence in which it is acquired. The only man who has the right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the man who has left all to follow Christ. 

Every real action is of such a kind that no one other than oneself can do it. 

It hardly matters whether or not one “agrees” with any of this. The words have an authenticity and authority beyond mere intellectual assertion: they burn with the brave and uncompromising life — and death — that lie behind them.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed at the Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945. [...] 

Life is always a question of intensity, and intensity is always a matter of focus. Contemporary despair is to feel the multiplicity of existence with no possibility for expression or release of one’s particular being. I fear sometimes that we are evolving in such a way that the possibilities for these small but intense points of intimacy and expression — poetry, for instance — are not simply vanishing but are becoming no longer felt as necessary pressures.

Christian Wiman, "Notes On Ambition And Dietrich Bonhoeffer"; http://payingattentiontothesky.com/2013/09/13/notes-on-ambition-and-dietrich-bonhoeffer-christian-wiman/