The Making of a Poem
STEPHEN SPENDER
Apolog_v
I
T
wouLD be inexcusable to discuss my own way of writing poetry
unless I were able to relate this to a wider view of the problems
which poets attempt to solve when they sit down at a desk or table
to write, or walk around composing their poems in their heads. There
is a danger of my appearing to put across my own experiences as the
general rule, when every poet's way of going about
his
work and his
experience of being a poet are different, and when my own poetry
may not be good enough to lend my example any authority.
Yet the writing of poetry is an activity which makes certain
demands of attention on the poet and which requires that he should
have certain qualifications of ear, vision, imagination, memory and
so on. He should be able to think in images, he should have as great
a mastery of language as a painter has over
his
palate, even if the
range of his language be very limited. All this means that, in ordinary
society, a poet has to adapt himself, more or less consciously, to the
demands of his vocation, and hence the peculiarities of poets and the
condition of inspiration which many people have said is near to mad–
ness. One poet's example is only his adaptation of his personality to
the demands of poetry, but if it is clearly stated it may help us to
understand other poets, and even something of poetry.
Today we lack very much a whole view of poetry, and have
instead many one-sided views of certain aspects of poetry which have
been advertised as the only aims which poets should attempt. Move–
ments such as free verse, imagism, surrealism, expressionism, personal–
ism and so on, tend to make people think that poetry is simply a mat–
ter of not writing in metre of rhyme, or of free association, or of think–
ing in images, or of a kind of drawing room madness (surrealism)
which corresponds to drawing room communism. Here is a string of
ideas: Night, dark, stars, immensity, blue, voluptuous, clinging,
columns, clouds, moon, sickle, harvest, vast camp fire, hell. Is
this
poet–
ry? A lot of strings of words almost as simple as
this
are set down on
