{Poetry (Extracts) [continued (5)]}[13th June 1990]

[Redbook7:143-144][19900613:0840e]{Poetry (Extracts) [continued (5)]}[13th June 1990]

19900613.0840

[continued]

‘This belief in poetry as autobiography also causes many would-be poets, who have real talent, to miss the bus. Because they are convinced that poetry must stem from their own personal experiences, they cripple their imaginations, and allow a wholly laudable but misplaced sense of integrity to prevent them from extending the range of their perceptions.

If there is one temperamental characteristic which is common to all poets, it is their tendency to take up expedient attitudes – expedient, that is, for the making of poetry. Robert Frost goes so far as to say, “Poets stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them, like burrs when they walk in the fields.”

The unit of Poetry is, in fact, not the Poet but the Poem. Each poem demands a completely new approach. The poet himself, has, as Keats says in a famous passage, “no identity – he is continually informing and filling some other Body ... It is a wretched thing to confess; but it is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature – how can I, when I have no nature?”

“What shocks the virtuous philosopher”, Keats says, “delights the chameleon poet.”’*

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Ibid, 31-32

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