IS WRITING AN INNATE CAPACITY OR ACQUIRED

Do writers possess an innate capacity to write? Well, according to me, writers read and, they read neither to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. Hence, reading becomes an avenue for writers to emancipate themselves from the fallacies that they had acquired earlier. Nay, they are always unlearning by forgetting or by disapproving the falsehoods previously held. Most writers write for the latter purpose, and therefore in the process creating a new system of thought in the process. That is why the Irish novelist and essayist Clive Staples Lewis says, “In reading great literature I become a thousand men yet I remain myself.”

Great writers like Homer, Shakespeare (writers who either contributed in shaping the character of their nation or the language of their people) can be said to have read wide. Theodore Alois Buckley in his introductory notes to Pope’s translation of the Iliad writes, “At this time... there lived at Smyma a man named Phemius, a teacher of literature and music, who not being married, engaged to Critheis (Homer’s mother)... willing to adopt her son, who he asserted would become, a clever man, if he was carefully brought up...”

This explains Homer’s ability dilate over a range of topics, from chariot driving to military tactics, from medicine to religion, from fishing to architecture. Moreover, he has an immense influence over later poets like Virgil, Shakespeare, John Milton, Alexander Pope just to mention but a few. No wonder Pope describes him as “...a copious nursery, which contains the seeds and first productions of every kind of which those who followed him have but selected some particular plants, each according to his fancy, to cultivate and beautify... What he (Homer) writes is the most animated nature imaginable: everything moves, everything lives and is put in action...” such that no other poet has been able to enlarge the sphere of poetry beyond that which was set by Homer. Undisputedly Homer is the father of diction who not only taught the “language of gods” but also what Aristotle called “living world” since his works is characterized by daring figures and metaphors.

Shakespeare, an Elizabethan playwright, derives his inspiration from Metamorphoses. Metamorphoses is a collection of poems in Greek and Roman mythology by Publus Ovidius  Naso commonly referred to as Ovid. In Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare retells the stories Philomel, Pyramus, and Thisbe. Using W. B Yeats’ poem The Second Coming, Chinua Achebe describes the jyre- the cycle of violence that has characterized the last two centuries.

                        “...The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
                                    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
                                    Are full of passionate intensity...”

Nothing exists in a vacuum: nothing can come out of nothing. At the genesis of speech, language itself was poetic. This fact is attested by slang- a corrupted Kiswahili.

“Tumuz nguyaz umejakuz”

You are here my friend

Thus, poetry was born. Therefore, to write a poem one has to be educated on the tenets that make poetry, poetry and not prose.

However, reading and studying alone does not make one good writers since writers often have keen eyes to see what others do not see. Writers see beauty in a deformed creature, robbing death half its horror such that one derives pleasure reading a novel full of ghost. Thanks to this, writers are able to marry concepts that cannot co-exist in real life: they can marry ugly and beauty, exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change. This keen insight is innate, as one has to be born with the ability.

To opine that writers are born, one leaves the other part the trivial part that makes a writer. On the other hand, to suggest that one can read and have no keen insight into their doings and undoing in their community is a lie since you present a half baked truth: both are made for each other aid like man is to woman.