Q. Now that few people need
A poem which requires them
To turn the page—it tires them:
Why in your work has a read
Of about three hundred lines
Lately become the norm?
A. If I am tempted to perform
A ‘bit part’, he declines;
The manager I mean.
—We will come to him, but
Not by a short cut.
In the classroom, at fifteen,
My first poem hummed over
Shakespeare’s ‘bare ruin’d choirs.’
Keats had then brought me satyrs
To snuff yellow broom and clover.
But a beginner in
The Twenties, anywhere,
Had at once to be aware
Of the Moderns and their kin.
And I pored over Pound,
Roy Campbell and Rimbaud
And Valéry—said no
To Eliot then, but found
The way to what, though not
Free verse, was freer; and so to
The breakthrough at twenty-two,
And to write, not a lot
Well,
The long grew longer and stronger,
The short shorter, and the longer
Could try to parallel
That gain in understanding
We look for, with the loss of youth;
While the more sudden truth
Of feelings demanding
The short poem like a gesture
Later has come more rarely.
Q. But could one, not unfairly,
Argue that you have suppressed your
Identity, or tried—
See the persons and occasions
In long pieces as evasions?
A. Why set poetry on one side
And apart from other art,
And plays and novels? Why not say
‘Take a line’ with Paul Klee
‘And let it walk’, or start
Like Beardsley with a blot
And push it until something comes?
A dramatist becomes
Himself in every jot
Of plot, murder or love-affair,
And those who act or suffer.
Oneself as an old buffer
Or young fogey, is both there
And not there, in what one makes.
A. Surely he undertakes,
Whatever as a man
He may do, like the bees and birds
To make something, but in words;
And surely then he can
Do or not do, or half do it.
In a painting once said to be
By Giorgione, one could see
A small boy with a kit
Of tools, watching a bearded man,
His tutor, bent, intent
On testing a new instrument,
An astrolabe. Below them ran
A motto on a sill
In Latin, with the moral
Of which I would not quarrel:
INGENIUM ‘Our skill’
Or ‘mother wit’ (of which we see
The boy with file and mallet is
Symbolical) NON VALET ‘is
Not worth a damn’ NISI
FACTA VALEBUNT ‘unless
What we have made will
Work.’
Q. Yet no amount of skill
Can guarantee success,
We know—and the opposite:
That roughness or a fault
May give an edge, like salt.
Poetry may ‘work’, but can it
A. Not being mechanical,
And of no use at all,
The poem can wear a smirk
And float above, beyond
Any test or measure.
Once it had to give pleasure,
Now it need correspond
To no taste or interest.
But float, sink or walk about,
It is there to give out,
With luck and at the best,
What has gone in—and goes.
Q. Please put some details in.
A. The reader is a violin
A novel stops and bows,
According to Stendhal.
—If you like turn it round:
What matters is the sound
Living, a live animal
Moving, set free. The piece
Of writing where that lurks,
And that can release it—works.
The poet found his release
In shutting it away alive,
As the Serpent found an art,
In Shaw, to shut some part
Of its own life, to survive
In a thin case of white earth,
An egg.
In Shaw, of course,
The Serpent is the Life Force
Q. So the musical score needs
To be played, and the egg hatched,
Yes, and the poem matched
By somebody who reads.
But the dose you decree,
One thing needful, the effect
Of life in the art-object—
How, in what, in what degree
Can one identify that?
A. How can we, as we are able
To say ‘a chair’, ‘a table’,
When at twenty we have sat
In a Last Judgement, then
Every ten years, sat again?
Writers we might disdain
As too human, boring men
And women, can acquire the dose
Of life, as we live through,
And leave, our chosen few.
Our choice, as we come close
Or pull away, may change.
Then, all of us consumers
Have quirks like Ben Jonson’s Humours,
And so a limited range.
—But these are commonplaces,
And queries beyond these
Rage in modern theories.
Q. Then say we have no basis
For pinning the life down:
Can the writer himself try
A. He may prefer a noun
To an adverb—join a Church
Or Party and exclude
As unorthodox, some mood
Or material; he may search
The wide world for his kind,
Or not move—hunger after
Popularity and laughter
And money, or be resigned
To not being in the swim.
I think that anything
His conscious will can bring
May or may not help him
Through what is really dreamt.
All those things are like a crutch
Because the poem as such,
Art itself, is the attempt
To wake, and breathe, and be.
Q. So you believe the choice is
To a large extent not his,
The writer’s?
A. If he is like me,
He will think hard and try hard:
But the rest will depend,
Both to begin and end,
On a subterranean guard—
A ‘demon-guardian’
Might be the right word.
You remember he occurred
Q. And how, with him or without,
Do you now see, may one ask,
The poet and his task
And your own work?
A. I doubt
That there could have been
But wish there had been, more
And better.
But as for
The ‘task’, the word must mean
Or pretend, that poetry
Has some utility,
The poet some ability,
If not to make the wind blow, sea
Flow and rain fall, to bestow
Some equivalent kind
Of good thing on mankind.
And generations have thought so,
But were certain to be blind
In practice, and condemn
What might be good for them.