MAKING OF A POEM
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show this, and Shakespeare's sonnets are full of expressions of
his
faith in the immortality of his lines.
From my experience I can clarify the nature of this faith. When
I was nine, we went to the Lake District, and there my parents read
me some of the poems of Wordsworth. My sense of the sacredness
of the task of poetry began then, and I have always felt that a
poet's was a sacred vocation, like a saint's. Since I was nine, I have
wanted to be various things, for example, Prime Minister (when I
was twelve). Like some other poets I am attracted by the life of
power and the life of action, but I am still more repelled by them.
Power involves forcing oneself upon the attention of historians by
doing things and occupying offices which are, in themselves, impor–
tant, so that what is truly powerful is not the soul of a so-called
powerful and prominent man but the position which he fills and the
things which he does. Similarly, the life of 'action' which seems so
very positive is,
in
fact, a selective, even a negative kind of life. A
man of action does one thing or several things because he does not do
something else. Usually men who do very spectacular things fail com–
pletely to do the ordinary things which fill the lives of most normal
people, and which would be far more heroic and spectacular perhaps,
if they did not happen to be done by many people. Thus in practice
the life of action has always seemed to me an act of cutting oneself
off from life.
Although it is true that poets are vain and ambitious, their
vanity and ambition is of the purest kind attainable in this world,
for the saint renounces ambition. They are ambitious to be accepted
for what they ultimately are as revealed by their inmost experiences,
their finest perceptions, their deepest feelings, their uttermost sense
of truth, in their poetry. They cannot cheat about these things, be–
cause the quality of their own being is revealed not in the noble senti–
ment<; which their poetry expresses, but in sensibility, control of lan–
guage, rhythm and music, things which cannot be attained by a vote
of confidence from an electorate, or by the office of Poet Laureate.
Of course, work is tremendously important, but, in poetry, even the
greatest labor can only serve to reveal the intrinsic qualities of soul of
the poet as he really is.
Since there· can be no cheating, the poet, like the saint, stands
in
all his works before the bar of a perpetual day of judgment. His
vanity of course is pleased by success, though even success may con–
tribute to his understanding that popularity does not confer on him
