MAKING OF A POEM
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Sometimes, when I lie in a state of half-waking half-sleeping, I
am conscious of a stream of words which seem to pass through my
mind, without their having a meaning, but they have a sound, a
sound of passion, or a sound recalling poetry that I know. Again
sometimes when I am writing, the music of the words I am trying
to shape takes me far beyond the words, I am aware of a rhythm,
a dance, a fury, which is as yet empty of words.
In these observations, I have said little about headaches, midnight
oil, pints of beer or of claret, love affairs, and so on, which are sup–
posed to be stations on the journeys of poets through life. There is
no doubt that writing poetry, when a poem appears to succeed, results
in an intense physical excitement, a sense of release and ecstasy. On
the other hand, I dread writing poetry, for, I suppose, the following
reasons: a poem is a terrible journey, a painful effort of concentrating
the imagination; words are an extremely difficult medium to use, and
sometimes when one has spent days trying to say a thing clearly one
finds that one has only said it dully; above all, the writing of a poem
brings one face to face with one's own personality with all its familiar
and clumsy limitations. In every other phase of existence, one can
exercise the orthodoxy of a conventional routine: one can be polite
to one's friends, one
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get through the day at the office, one can
pose, one can draw attention to one's position in society, one is-in
a word-dealing with men. In poetry, one is wrestling with a god.
Usually, when I have completed a poem, I think 'this is my best
poem,' and I wish to publish it at once. This is partly because I only
write when I have something new to say, which seems more worth
while than what I have said before, partly because optimism about
my present and future makes me despise my past. A few days after
I have finished a poem, I relegate it to the past of all my other wasted
efforts, all the books I do not w!sh to open.
Perhaps the greatest pleasure I have got from poems that I have
written is when I have heard some lines quoted which I have not
at once recognized. And I have thought 'how good and how inter–
esting,' before I have realized that they are my own.
In common with other creative writers I pretend that I am not,
and I am, exceedingly affected by unsympathetic criticism, whilst
praise usually makes me suspect that the reviewer does not know
what he is talking about. Why are writers so sensitive to criticism?
Partly, because it is their business to be sensitive, and they are sensitive
