(a) In a sense poetry now is very much concerned with ‘the issues of our time’. For example, in a recent first book by a young poet, almost successive pages dealt with killing animals, the Bomb, the Camps, capital punishment. I think poetry would be more ‘effective’ if it were concerned with those issues less directly or with less obvious issues – as, say, Auden’s Paid on Both Sides was concerned with the issues of its time.

(b) The use is essential, the pleasure incidental.

(c) Yes, great dissatisfaction, both for myself and others. I visualise myself writing several kinds of longer or non-lyrical poems but doubt whether I shall ever manage any of them. Donald Davie is one of the few of my contemporaries aware of this tide in poetic affairs, but I hope the unease will spread.

(d) I think I am possibly too old to be influenced afresh.

(e) Of course, one isn’t aware that diction has become artificial until the new diction comes along. There is much ‘poeticisation’ even in the plain diction used currently by many poets – in the very convention of the sort of poem that starts ‘I remember my accountant father’ or ‘I see an earwig cross the path’. Perhaps this is ‘undue impoverishment’ though.

(f) I think it is not too bad. World affairs are so frightful that they seem to have passed beyond the paralysing effect they had in the thirties – DOOM no longer insists on coming in at the end of every poem. (On the other hand we are at a rather awkward distance from the experiments of the Eliot revolution.) I just wish English poets would be less cosy and self-satisfied and inbred as a group, and that their poems would take imaginative flight from the first person.

Robert Conquest

Most of these questions can be answered by the single point that you can’t ‘programme’ a poet as you can a computer or something; he can’t even do it to himself – the things that strike what one might call his poetic imagination adequately are not necessarily those that his political, or even his artistic, conscience (or any other conscious force) would prefer him to write about. But, in more detail:

(a) Not more effective as poetry. The Thousand Worst Poems About the Atomic Bomb is an imaginary collection rivalling in awfulness even The Hundred Worst Poems About the Death of Dylan Thomas.

(b) No doubt, but only indirectly: I have strong political views in some spheres, but at most two or three poems out of six score odd I have published show much sign of this (perhaps because my political views themselves involve hostility to the exaggerated pretensions of politics). I can’t distinguish between use and pleasure here: pleasure (or ‘elation’ as Dr Davie puts it) is the use of poetry.

(c) I suppose all poets have a vague notion of a historical or cultural quasi-epic they’d like to write. But an enormous amount can be said in forty-seventy lines. Perhaps if one never wrote a poem longer than ten or twelve lines, one would get restive.

(d) Consciously, none. Unconsciously all that I like, I suppose. I find Auden cropping up when I don’t want him, and Gunn in a more welcome way, but not thus as major influences, which mostly come undifferentiably, in an un-deliberate compost.

(e) I agree with Pasternak: the bane of modern verse has been ‘dreams of a new language’. He adds that the real creator ‘uses the old language in his urgency and the old language is transformed from within’.

(f) As good as any, so long as the poet ignores the unprecedentedly noisy voices presuming to issue his marching orders.

Laurie Lee

(a) Poetry is always an issue of its time, like love and murder. So is the poet an issue of his time even if he’s wrapped in glass-wool in a cave. The value of poetry is not only to the reader but also to the man who writes it.

Even so I would like to see more humour, more indignation, more magic and more care in what is being written today. Poetry should weave spells, comfort, enchant and challenge. It should also burn truths in raised letters on the memory. It should never be written sideways with an apologetic cough, or be ashamed of itself, or whine, or ramble.

Poets should use the weapons the age gives them; and here I think many of us fail. The poetry of our time, in terms of impact, is clearly the pop song lyric – designed to be taken with a built-in jazz-beat and an electronically erected virility. Much of it is none the worse for that. We could try to make it better.

The resolution of present chaos and the word that is to save us (if there is such a word) is more likely to come from the poet than the politician.

(b) Giving pleasure is surely one of the unquestioned uses of poetry, as it is of much music, painting and dancing. But poetry is not a stick of rock lettered ‘pleasure’ throughout. It can be what it chooses, do what it will – seduce, shock call out the army, start revolutions – it simply depends on the poem.

(c) I like poetry to be portable; I like to carry it about in my head; I think we’ve become slaves to the printed page. In the past those people with the most vigorous poetry were often the dispossessed, the wanderers, forced to travel light and to distil their experiences into memorable, portable patterns. I also like to travel light, so the short lyric suits me perfectly. Most of the long poems I know – with a few classic exceptions – seem to suffer from grievious inflation. Indeed, much that is memorable in Shakespeare often turns out to be a diamond lyric bedded in a huge clay cliff of rhetoric. (Roy Campbell used to say that almost everything he’d ever read – including War and Peace – he felt could have been put better in a twelve-line lyric.)

I don’t think I want to attempt a long poem, ever. I have always been content to write lyrics of a length that never required the reader to turn over the page. Incidentally, one of the few poems of mine ever to break this rule has since twice been reprinted in anthologies with the last two verses missing. The editor just hadn’t turned over the page.

(d) Among others, the poets who specially give me pleasure are Auden, MacNeice, Hughes and Gregory Corso. Two are older than I am; two much younger. I don’t know whether they influence me.

(e) To choose to write in a ‘poetic’ language is, of course, equally as phoney as to choose an ‘un-poetic’ one. What comes natural is all that counts. Anyway the poem should write its own language.

(f) I prefer silence to work in, and in this small respect the present age is not too good for me. On the other hand, audiences are larger than ever before, more people are writing poetry than ever before – most of it bad, but it was probably always like that. But in this rich age of communications – even though some may be blurred round the edges – poetry remains one of them, and could even prove the most powerful. The resolution of present chaos and the word that is to save us (if there is such a word) is more likely to come from the poet than the politician. One may judge this, therefore, to be a good period for poetry – perhaps the most crucial ever.

Thomas Blackburn

There are as many ‘Issues of our time’ as there are people alive in it. As opposed to ‘academic’ versifiers who are making verses for the sake of verse, the contemporary poets who interest me are writing about the complexity of our present age, and so they are concerned with these issues.

What seems important to me is whether we can gain some lucidity and self-knowledge and stop wishing away our own negative emotions on to other people. On this depends whether or not we will blow ourselves to blazes, and this planet.

I believe that the international situation is only the individual predicament writ large and so coarsened and simplified. In both the personal scheme and the general there are human beings behaving more or less insanely, and so the same psychological principles apply to both. It’s a question of ugly scenes and temper tantrums, and whether we can gain enough sanity to straighten them out and make our behaviour reasonably lucid.

In the thirties poets often wrote about the human situation writ large in politics. Perhaps there was something particularly glaring about the evil of that time which made such an approach inevitable. On the Continent it was the SS Men and Concentration Camps; at home it was the hunger marchers and the unemployed at their street corners. Now we have some social justice at home, and it’s difficult to think of countries in terms of black and white; neither wholly good or bad they all appear a rather shabby grey. That is our own colour as well, and a realisation of this means that evil should return to its true habitat, ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’.

It seems to me that the most interesting contemporary poets are writing about just that, and attempting to explore and clarify in their work some confusion or turmoil of man as it expresses itself in a particular situation. This seems a most important activity, since on our waking up to the fact that we have psychological conflict, and that it conditions our behaviour, may depend whether or not we have a future. Of course on another plane this clarification of motive is a question of what Catholics call ‘making our souls’ and has a religious significance. As regards the ‘Poeticisation’ of language you mention, I do think there is a tendency for some poets with academic training to indulge in a kind of literary incest. All their energy seems to be ploughed home into the mother tongue as an end in herself. The result is some very nice mating of noun and adjective and pretty verse movement, but the merest nail paring of significant statement. It is my belief that poems should say something about man and his environment; so I deplore verse about writing or not writing verses, about haircuts or what it would feel like to be a poem if one had not been written.

As to whether this is a good period for writing poetry, it’s all we have got either to live or write in, and I strongly suspect that in some curious way we are the situation into which we are born. One remembers Under Milk Wood, how Polly Garter remarks to her baby, ‘Isn’t life a terrible thing; thank God.’

Derek Walcott

(a) I think poetry has very little influence on politics, but a fair amount of contemporary verse, especially in America, engages large issues like the Bomb, Race, etc. Yeats and Auden are examples that come to mind of political poets, but the effect of a poem is personal, not popular. To be really effective as rhetoric a poem has to be bad, which isn’t good for the poet or the public.

(b) I have no particular politics, but hope I am religious in an active sense. Religious feeling can become blurred in verse, whereas political feeling can be a rather ephemeral thing. I think that poetry is separate from religion and politics but that it can comprehend both. The uses of poetry are in its beauty, and beauty in the spiritual meaning is a useful thing for a society or an individual, and the beautiful thing, if it can be recognised, pleases.

(c) No. The short lyric is eternally difficult and as much can be said sometimes in four lines as in four pages. I am writing long poems, not narratives, and trying to keep a lyric element in them for as long as the poem lasts. When the element expires the poem is over, whatever its length.

(d) Do I have to choose? When I began to write, Spender, Auden, MacNeice, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, John Crowe Ransome, Lowell. Residually they must still be in here, but of late, Graves, I suppose. This is outside the question but now also, Aime Cesaire of Martinique and St Jean Perse from Guadeloupe who are from my region.

(e) While I enjoy the ‘tough reasonableness’ or ‘reasonable toughness’ of poets like Hughes, Gunn, Plath, Fuller, Graves, et al. in which the self and voice of the poet can be heard, I hear a lot of the lecturer, critic and academic in the tone of contemporary verse which has its own artificiality and archness, in other words, that the natural diction is itself becoming poeticised. I live in a region where the accent is different, and I have to try and relate its rhythm to my style. It is a rich opportunity, and a different problem to English or American writing. As for part two of your question, I think that poetic diction at the moment is very close to high-grade journalism, which is not good.

(f) I like poetry so much that I would try to write it under any conditions, and so would any poet. The period is only bad when the poetry is not good.

Judith Wright

Categorical imperatives drawn up by the intellect are generally the death of poetry, which is an organic growth if it is anything at all, and takes on the colours and shapes and limitations of its time and its writer, whatever his notion of poetry may be. That is, poetry has to be concerned with the ‘issues of our time’, even if only by implication or omission. But then, what are the issues? Not the obvious scarehead issues; not even perhaps the fall-out or the colour-bar or the tear-gas bombs flung over the wall, but something a good deal deeper and less temporal. A reconciliation with ourselves, perhaps? – which implies a reconciliation with the others, who are also ourselves.

If that is true, poetry has a good chance of becoming once more an influential art-form – if poets take it and themselves seriously and rightly. Poetry, like the significant dream in an analysis, is a reconciling force where self and outer image can come together in understanding. Precisely, poetry only happens when being and image clash and generate a spark – that’s poetry. A way of finding a difficult balance: relating inner and outer.

That has always been the immediate problem for writing in a new country. The European consciousness, particularly here in Australia, was plunged suddenly, after centuries of growth inside traditions, into a totally new situation where the traditions went ludicrously astray. We have had to discover just what has happened to us, and in discovering, laboriously make the happening true. Even when it has looked from the outside as though we were merely imitating – building mock-English sandcastles – Australian writers have been occupied with something quite other; trying to find a way to make these new pressures, shapes, events mean something to a consciousness trained to expect everything to be other than it was. When East becomes North and West is under you feet, your compass spins frighteningly. To calm it, you must find for yourself a new axis.

If you live in an ivory tower, then you can write in one. If not, not.

For us, it has not been easy. We have been stripped of a great deal; poetry’s validity was deeply tested, and much that did not apply melted like English snow in an Australian December. What came through intact, what even increased in meaning, was poetry’s assertion of the holiness of being, the relationship of man and man, and of man and his imaged world, created through language.

D. J. Enright

(a) Poetry is concerned with ‘the issues of our time’. If it isn’t, it has no meaning, and therefore is not poetry. The trouble begins when you try to define these ‘issues’. Where poetry is concerned, each poem must be judged on its own merits – whether or not it deals with such ‘issues’ won’t be the sole criterion, obviously, and may not even be a conscious one.

(b) I don’t see how they could help but do so, to some degree. If you live in an ivory tower, then you can write in one. If not, not. Not that I claim any striking views on either politics or religion – I have some fairly strong views on views, views being what they often are: short-sighted and bullying.

(c) Other sorts of dissatisfaction loom larger, alas. I just try to visualise myself writing another poem.

(d) I don’t think I am much influenced by the living poets I admire, except in the obvious way: Go and do thou half as well otherwise. More influenced, I suspect, by the ones I don’t admire: Go and do thou otherwise.

(e) The language of poetry always requires a certain ‘poeticisation’ – poetry is not small talk – and it always requires ‘to be broken up in favour of a more “natural” diction’ – because ‘poetic diction’ soon ceases to be poetic. In a successful poem the two processes are going on simultaneously and at rates nicely (though hardly consciously) adjusted.

(f) I suppose this period has its peculiar disadvantages. Perhaps one of them has to do with the Cold War and the tendency to ascribe writers to one or other camp though they belong to neither – that attitude on the part of readers, though more pronounced on the part of organisations, of ‘he that is not with me is against me’. In the part of the world where I now live, politics is practically everything and practically everything is politics, and so whatever one publishes is likely to be interpreted politically, i.e. crudely. (Political readers can’t read.) But this is an objection to publishing – it can be an added incentive to write.

Then there is the phenomenon of full employment, or over-full employment. It’s not easy to starve in a garret these days. They won’t let you – even if they did, you wouldn’t let yourself. And so the poet may find too much of his time and energy disappearing into other activities, some of which (being human) he may even enjoy and take a pride in. You need considerable faith in yourself to starve – even more to commit your family to starving. And this brings me to a more fundamental consideration: belief in the usefulness of one’s writing.

The Romantics believed in their own usefulness, as poets; so did Pope and Johnson. Ours is a scientific and technological age, etc. (because we are convinced of the human importance of science and technology, or because of their political implications?), and the arts are merely peripheral. There will be a time for them hereafter – as the better-disposed will tell you, especially in my part of the world, where people are blunter than elsewhere – first things first. (The trouble is, the first things take so long.) Many writers are bound to feel doubts of this sort. We suffer from a deficiency of the Egotistical Sublime. Unfortunately the Egotistical is rarely Sublime, these days – more often disastrous.

Every period has at least one advantage – that one happens to be living in it.

Thom Gunn

Diction: The terms ‘natural’ and ‘poetic’ are not that relevant to us, implying that we are in the situation of Wordsworth or Pound, who were faced with a ‘poetic’ language gone stale. But their battles have been won, and we all use natural language nowadays, John Masefield, John Betjeman, Jon Silkin, everybody.

The distinction that is relevant is between formal and informal kinds of natural diction. They are both available. It looks, for example, as if the potentialities of William Carlos Williams’s informal language are at last being exploited intelligently by some of the young Americans, and another kind of informality has been used with imagination and sensitivity by Amis and Larkin; while the potentialities of formal language in poetry are as rich as ever – as can be seen from the diversity of its success in the work of Edgar Bowers, Hyam Plutzik, Ted Hughes, Donald Davie and Robert Conquest (whose ‘On the 1956 Opposition of Mars’, in the PEN New Poems 1957, is one of the best poems since the war). What is important is that two kinds of diction can at last co-exist – and they must continue to, if we are to get away from the boring up-and-down of alternating fashions in poetry.

Though diction is only a part of it. After all, diction, form, subject and tone depend on each other. There appears, for instance, to be a relationship between the use of free verse or syllabics and a particular kind of informal language. When I began writing poems in syllabics a few years ago I found that I suddenly had access to a certain spontaneity of language and perception that I hadn’t been able to get when using traditional metres. Yet I feel uneasy about the split in my work between the two kinds of poems I write, the metrically intense and the syllabically casual. Each excludes too much of the other. The poem I want to write, in fact, is one in which the qualities of each could exist: it would be a kind of equivalent in poetry to the best of Isherwood – for example, the passage about the liner in The World in the Evening or the first two pages to the second ‘Berlin Diary’ in Goodbye to Berlin, where the particularity of the things described does not diminish the intensity of their implications and where the language is plain, unornamented and eloquent.

Charles Causley

Sometimes I think the central attraction of writing poetry is that like the act of sex, and unlike most other art-forms, it can with a little ingenuity be practised anywhere, at any time. Perhaps this explains, partly, the inevitable resurgence of poetry in wartime. All the same, the present day doesn’t seem to me any more, or less, propitious for the writing of poetry than any other moment of history. What is important, always, is the presence of the poet on the scene, any scene, and the vigilant exercise of his gift of experience and talent.

One can only be relieved at the accident of geography and history that turned Shakespeare to the only place where the poet, half-outside his own calling, may survive: in the theatre. 

The poet doesn’t gather material like a child picking blackberries. He has to learn to let life happen to him, as well as the poem. He learns to play patience with fate, and not strain his eyes anticipating which card’s going to turn up. He must be wary of the poet’s greatest danger, impatience: the impatience Goethe warns writers against when he says, ‘We must be right by nature so that good thoughts may come before us like free children of God, and cry “Here we are!”‘

An attendant danger, more easily recognised, is the stern pressure put on him to earn easier, more ‘real’ money, in other ways. Almost everyone wishes that the poet wrote something else. I feel that in the final count the poet can’t also be, for example, the novelist. He runs too much risk of missing the single target, let alone two. For me, Hardy’s novels are the dull disasters of perhaps the greatest poet of the last century. One can only be relieved at the accident of geography and history that turned Shakespeare to the only place where the poet, half-outside his own calling, may survive: in the theatre. Here, a dangerous world, the poet more often than not commits verbal hari-kiri.

The poet mustn’t read too many books: printer’s ink in large quantities is fatal to the system. He should organise his solitude with the gentle determination that most men reserve for their bowels. He may never waste time coyly awaiting ‘inspiration’, but must somehow invoke it from the messes of speech, paper, feelings, thought, ink, at hand. At the same time, he must be careful never to write a poem unless he has something to say. Who still thinks that a poem is merely an arrangement of words in a pretty way?

But each poet has to work out the answers to the problems of writing himself. Only one thing is certain as death: that unlike arithmetic, the answers may all be correct, yet all different.

What does the poet need most in addition to his own talents? I’d say, as with all creative artists, courage. If he is to get immediately out of life what most other people get at second-hand out of a work of art, he needs it.

Bernard Spencer

(a) Yes, it would probably interest more people, but I don’t think, in the present state of English society and education, very many more. The dangers would be the over-simplification which we have been familiar with in our own lifetimes, over-simplifications due to the unaccommodating subject-matter and the temptation to try to lush-up a public to whom poetry has always been foreign. If he didn’t worry much about that public I don’t see why a poet who felt warm enough politically shouldn’t cultivate a side-line in political satire on the model of Byron’s.

I think the principal issue of our time is the survival of the loving, feeling individual against the political-social spook – so every good poem is eventually taking sides.

(b) Almost not at all. Politics and religion in their present forms do not affect me at the deep level from which poetry starts. On the other hand, I can imagine a poem about the human disaster caused by some doctrinaire political or religious concept.

Apart from its pleasure, poetry must have a score of uses. Perhaps the most important one is that described by Shelley, that it makes the writer or the reader of it go out of himself in that act of sympathy which apparently underlies the main virtues.

(c) The short or medium-short lyric is how poetry happens to me. I have enough trouble with that

(f) A good period, anyhow in English-speaking countries, first in the sense that there is a good confusion in the world around the poet and in himself to be sorted out. Secondly, the poet now has almost limitless possibilities of form and general treatment, since there is no Dr Johnson to tell him how to write. I welcome this – it makes each poem more of an undertaking, more of a risk. What each poet has got as a guide or control or fertiliser is the nature and history of his language, without there being any widely accepted critical opinion about which aspects of this he ought to be guided by.

Then, although there isn’t usually much money from a poem or book published, the poet can get a lot of publicity considering how few people read new poetry. Anthologies keep rolling out, even school anthologies (which is a good reminder to the poet not to be a bore, since some child somewhere who has happened to be preserved from literary fashions may see clearly what he actually wrote). University jobs, contracts for radio programmes or for lectures not infrequently follow publication. The long-term financial rewards for writing a few good poems are probably greater than they have been before in this century, and they may be less embarrassing to collect than in periods of private patronage.

Vernon Watkins

If I were not myself a practitioner I might feel very differently about writing poetry. In theory I believe in every variety of poetic activity, in every creative form, but in practice I find myself much more compelled by a certain kind of poetry than by other kinds.

I feel that a poet cannot choose his material, that it is offered to him in an uncompromising way. My own experience is that I am always pulled back to the demands of a poem from the wide, speculative areas which lie outside it. As for other poets, I am sure that it is better for a poet to give all his attention to the object of his imagination, even with a total disregard of the issues of our time, than to give a part of it to those issues from a feeling of duty.

Certainly my poetry depends, for its existence at all, on a religious attitude to life.

I believe that lyric poetry is closer to music than to prose, and that it should be read as exactly as a musical score. I also believe that it is always a gift, the reward of tenacity and minutest attention, and that unless it comes out of exaltation or moves towards it, it is not worth writing.

I suppose every writer, in applauding another’s work, undergoes a modulation of sensibility, but I cannot see how any poet whose roots are deep can be fundamentally influenced by a living contemporary. I never think a true style can be learnt from contemporaries.

A good poem is one that can never be fashionable. What is fresh must also be ancient, and a poem is not finished until it attains its most ancient form. The more ancient a poem is, the more modern it becomes; and will remain so, when apparent modernity is obsolete.

The handling of language is inexhaustibly mysterious. To write poems in the order of natural speech can be very good, but that is by no means the only criterion of excellence. Every restrictive theory of writing leads to monotony, and unforgettable poetry springs only when theory is abandoned, and from recognition that the order of imaginative emphasis is right, whether it is the order of natural speech or not. Natural speech is a corrective of artificial poetic diction, but form is itself artificial, and unless the artificial demands of form are satisfied in a poem, its impulsive life will not be held in a lasting form.

I think every age is as good and bad as possible for writing poetry. The more the fledgling is pampered, the sillier it becomes. There is now an abundance of talent in Britain and America. Some poets employ strict form, others what is almost a prose idiom. The potentialities of prose as a medium of communication must not be under-estimated, but ultimately one is bound to ask whether the virtues of the poem are prose virtues. Perhaps, if they are truly memorable, it does not matter.

Ted Hughes

The poet’s only hope is to be infinitely sensitive to what his gift is, and this in itself seems to be another gift that few poets possess. According to this sensitivity, and to his faith in it, he will go on developing as a poet, as Yeats did, pursuing those adventures, mental, spiritual and physical, whatever they may be, that his gift wants, or he will lose its guidance, lose the feel of its touch in the workings of his mind, and soon be absorbed by the impersonal dead lumber of matters in which his gift has no interest, which is a form of suicide, metaphorical in the case of Wordsworth and Coleridge, actual in the case of Mayakovsky.

Many considerations assault his faith in the finality, wisdom and sufficiency of his gift. Its operation is not only shadowy and indefinable, it is intermittent, it has none of the obvious attachment to publicly exciting and seemingly important affairs that his other mental activities have and in which all his intelligent contemporaries have such confidence, and so it receives no immediate encouragement – or encouragement only of the most dubious kind, as a flagellant, questioning his illuminations, might be encouraged by a bunch of mad old women and some other half-dead gory flagellant; it visits him when he is only half suspecting it, and he is not sure it has visited him until some days or months afterwards and perhaps he never can be sure, being a sensible man aware of the examples of earlier poets and of the devils of self-delusion and of the delusions of whole generations.

Poetry is a combination, or a resultant, of all that the poet is, unimpeachable evidence of itself and, indirectly, of himself, and he can do nothing but accept it. 

Wordsworth himself is a good example of both the true poet and the false, the man trusting his gift and producing the real thing, and the man searching for his satisfaction among more popular and public causes. And his living poetry is a good example of how the greatness and even the timely significance of poetry depends on qualities of depth, breadth, intensity and accent in the spirit of it, rather than in reference to many matters.

The important issues of the two decades following the French Revolution were, in England, overwhelmingly social and political, one would say. Wordsworth and Coleridge and Blake were the great poets of that time, in English, and were as involved, intellectually, in those issues as anybody well could be, but that seems to have had very little to do, directly, with their poetry. From their surviving poetry alone one might suspect Wordsworth would have done better to leave his mountains and broaden his mind somewhat on life, that Coleridge ought to have wakened up to his time and come out of the dark ages and away from those fogs of the South Pole of all places, that Blake needed friends of a more worldly and liberal conversation. This flower, this little girl, this bird, this old man paddling in a pool, this boat-stealing and woodcock-snaring, these soul-notes of a mountain-watcher, and these magical damsels in a magical forest and this dream flight with a dead bird, and these angels and black boys and roses and briars, all this infatuation with infancy and innocence, what did these have to do with the great issues of the time? Nothing whatsoever, till the spirit that worked through Wordsworth and Coleridge and Blake chose them for its parables. And looking back now, if we wish to see the important issues of those two decades, we see nothing so convincing and enlightening to so many of us, as the spirit which seems to touch us openly and speak to us directly through these poems.

Damon, quoted by Plato, says that the modes of music are nowhere altered without changes in the most important laws of the state. Is a musician to listen to his gift then, or study legislation? The poet who feels he needs to mix his poetry up with significant matters, or to throw his verse into the popular excitement of the time, ought to remember this strange fact.

His gift is an unobliging thing. He can study his art, experiment, and apply his mind and live as he pleases. But the moment of writing is too late for further improvements or adjustments. Certain memories, images, sounds, feelings, thoughts and relationships between these, have for some reason become luminous at the core of his mind: it is in his attempt to bring them out, without impairment, into a comparatively dark world that he makes poems. At the moment of writing, the poetry is a combination, or a resultant, of all that he is, unimpeachable evidence of itself and, indirectly, of himself, and for the time of writing he can do nothing but accept it. If he doesn’t approve of what is appearing, there are always plenty of ways to falsify and ‘improve’ it, there are always plenty of fashions as to how it should look, how it can be made more acceptable, more ‘interesting’, his other faculties are only too ready to load it with their business, whereon he ceases to be a poet producing what poetry he can and becomes a cheat producing confusion.

Sylvia Plath

The issues of our time which preoccupy me at the moment are the incalculable genetic effects of fallout and a documentary article on the terrifying, mad, omnipotent marriage of big business and the military in America – ‘Juggernaut, The Warfare State’, by Fred. J. Cook in a recent Nation. Does this influence the kind of poetry I write? Yes, but in a sidelong fashion. I am not gifted with the tongue of Jeremiah, though I may be sleepless enough before my vision of the apocalypse. My poems do not turn out to be about Hiroshima, but about a child forming itself finger by finger in the dark. They are not about the terrors of mass extinction, but about the bleakness of the moon over a yew tree in a neighbouring graveyard. Not about the testaments of tortured Algerians, but about the night thoughts of a tired surgeon.

In a sense, these poems are deflections. I do not think they are an escape. For me, the real issues of our time are the issues of every time – the hurt and wonder of loving; making in all its forms – children, loaves of bread, paintings, buildings; and the conservation of life of all people in all places, the jeopardising of which no abstract doubletalk of ‘peace’ or ‘implacable foes’ can excuse.

I do not think a ‘headline poetry’ would interest more people any more profoundly than the headlines. And unless the up-to-the-minute poem grows out of something closer to the bone than a general, shifting philanthropy and is, indeed, that unicorn-thing – a real poem, it is in danger of being screwed up as rapidly as the news sheet itself.

The poets I delight in are possessed by their poems as by the rhythms of their own breathing. Their finest poems seem born all-of-a-piece, not put together by hand: certain poems in Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, for instance; Theodore Roethke’s greenhouse poems; some of Elizabeth Bishop and a very great deal of Stevie Smith (‘Art is wild as a cat and quite separate from civilization’).

Surely the great use of poetry is its pleasure – not its influence as religious or political propaganda. Certain poems and lines of poetry seem as solid and miraculous to me as church altars or the coronation of queens must seem to people who revere quite different images. I am not worried that poems reach relatively few people. As it is, they go surprisingly far – among strangers, around the world, even. Farther than the words of a classroom teacher or the prescriptions of a doctor; if they are very lucky, farther than a lifetime.

Edwin Brock

Judging by the sales of poetry, the question ‘what is the use of poetry?’ must be asked by a good many readers. And it is asked justifiably, for those editors and publishers who do use it treat it as though it were produced by the victim of some rare disease, who must be kept alive so that the doctors may have something to write about. Keeping the disease alive is even given a name – it is called Prestige.

Why, then, does the poet go on doing it? If this is a ‘bad period’ for poetry, why doesn’t he give up and try to write the successful novel which would at least solve his financial problems? And what is his disease?

It is the tangibility of poetry, the heightened self-awareness, which enables a poet to express in these words the most concrete realisation of this man in this situation.

William Barrett, in a comment upon man in today’s society, has this to say: ‘Every step forward in mechanical technique is a step in the direction of abstraction. This capacity for living easily and familiarly at an extraordinary level of abstraction is the source of modern man’s power. With it he has transformed the planet, annihilated space, and trebled the world’s population. But it is also a power which has, like everything human, its negative side, in the desolating sense of rootlessness, vacuity, and the lack of concrete feeling that assails modern man in his moments of real anxiety.’

For the existentialist (Mr Barrett is writing of existentialism) the moment of anxiety is the moment of decision: that point in time when, having been made acutely self-aware, a man is most capable of choosing between this future or that one. For the poet, this moment produces poems; and it is the poet’s inability to accept abstraction which is his disease.

But why poems? Why is the cry made in this form which, for so many readers, is an anachronism?

The clue is in the phrase lack of concrete feeling. It is the tangibility of poetry, the heightened self-awareness, which enables a poet to express in these words the most concrete realisation of this man in this situation. Prose can’t do it for, in the main, it accepts abstraction as its starting point; and, in any case, is already in the hands of the enemy – writing market reports, theses and accounts of the Royal Family.

But what about abstract poetry? I deny that such a thing exists. For me, the adjective and noun cancel each other out. I cling to the concrete by the skin of my teeth, and hope that by paring it down, simplifying it, expressing it in the most colloquial manner, its reality will shine through.

At best, this attitude produces a poetry where the language is the situation which is the poem – it could not, for instance, produce the discursive philosophic parts of the Four Quartets. I suspect it is an attitude which confines its expression to short lyric poems (you cannot prolong a cry) unless you extend your definition of poetry to include plays like The Caretaker and Waiting for Godot.

Hugo Williams

(a) ‘The issues of our time’, I feel as though I’m hopping over quicksand: one false move and you’re in the muck. No. I have enough trouble with my own negotiations. Such things, however, have always been implicit in certain personal conflicts and are sometimes realised when they’re being worked out in poems. L. S. Lowry is widely accepted as being a great socialist painter, but he does not know, he is not interested, he paints people. This is the true level of poetry. It could only slacken the wire to be hypothetical. Poetry should be concerned with the heart of the matter, the conception, not the birth: i.e. the modern mental attitude. Once it moves on to the issue itself it is starting at the end of the poem. It can never dictate. It must be a complete equation in itself.

(b) Of course poetry has uses as well as pleasures. The poem is the pleasure, the use is the continuation of the thread, the spun web. But it must essentially be an entertainment; if it is written for its use alone it becomes a utility: not poetry but propaganda, and we can’t issue the pure at heart with propaganda.

(c) When I feel like writing a long non-lyric poem, I shall begin a novel. Poems are short as far as I am concerned.

(d) I am influenced by every poet I read. I am easily influenced, and as easily warned. (A few minutes ago I heard a girl on Radio Luxemburg confess that she had 500 pictures of Billy Fury and every disc he’d ever cut and yet she’d never liked him.) But to recognise influences in the finished product and to make a deliberate attempt to reproduce the tensions of another poet are two quite separate thing: one involves style, the other does not. How gladly I would accept blood tranfusions from W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, Robert Graves, Roy Fuller, Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. I have always greatly admired Dorothy Wellesley.

(e) I cannot answer this question as I feel myself to be in the dock rather than among the jury. Naturally I plead innocent.

(f) All periods are equally good, equally tough, because of the compensating differences. You gain a sharpness through the loss of each successive element; but the epoch has little to do with the quality of poetry. It all depends on what sort of mood the poet’s in.

John Fuller