...cloistered in these living walls...

We are all living inside our heads - at least I've always known this about myself. As a child I used to scare myself: what if my perceptions are the only thing that's real, and the whole world is nothing but a thing my brain is telling me is there? AS Byatt now shows us, in an essay published in last week's Times Literary Supplement, how physical our mental experiences really are. (But the good news is that the brain's impulses do seem to come from external reality. I wish I'd known that when I was seven!) Read her article here.

This is, by the way, an essay from the new Cambridge Companion to John Donne; if the rest of it is anything like this, would be well worth the price, whatever that may be. Donne is the man of the moment, in any case. But in this case he is the Dean, not of St Paul's, but of a particular kind of mental function - and mental pleasure.

Early on in the essay, before most of the detail kicks in, Byatt writes:

"Donne does feel his thought. But what he feels – and makes us, his readers, feel – is the peculiar excitement and pleasure of mental activity itself. It isn’t smelling roses. It is being aware of, and delighting in, the electrical and chemical impulses that connect and reconnect the neurones in our brains. Thought is material, according to neuroscience. I think of it in terms of Sir Charles Sherrington’s description of the waking brain, the 'head-mass' as 'an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern, though never an abiding one . . .'. The pleasure Donne offers our bodies is the pleasure of extreme activity of the brain."

This is all based on a remark of Eliot's, that "Tennyson and Browning are poets and they think, but they do not feel their thoughts as immediately as the odour of the rose." Byatt asks: "what precisely does it mean, to 'feel your thought'?" She takes a particular view, for which our Dean is the perfect exemplar.

Byatt has read up on the science of neurons – well, I guess, neurology – which seems to be expanding exponentially in the same way as physics. It’s all quantum inside our heads. And the webs formed by thought patterns, and recognition patterns, form channels along which ideas spark. I know this is a crude and possibly wrong description, but I’m not a scientist. Anyway, Byatt describes vividly the physical pleasure caused by these sparks in our brains, and how they are caused by linguistic feats like, for example, a Donne poem.

This may well be the first thing I’ve ever read that described how the pleasure of poetry feels. It acts as a neat rebuttal to the slightly authoritarian idea mooted around-and-about that, for poetry to have meaning and reflect everyday life, it should somehow confine itself to some sort of empiricism and simplicity - whatever those are. So much current, anecdotally-based poetry just seems tame and pale to me. Byatt's article makes a case for what, to me, feel like the real pleasures of poetry.