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

[Redbook7:142][19900613:0840]{Poetry (Extracts)}[13th June 1990]

19900613.0840

‘A man, said someone once, does not write poems about what he knows, but about what he doesn’t know. Sometimes he has a vague idea, and sometimes a reasonably precise one, of the mystery he must solve. Occasionally, as we have seen, he doesn’t know what he is tackling until the job is almost or completely over. The poet’s effort is, however, always that of exploration. C. Day Lewis in [‘]The Poet’s Task[’] commented: “We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.* But the more successfully a poem has interpreted to its writer the meaning of his own experience, or of others’ experience which imagination has enabled him to make his own, the more surely will it in the long run be understood.”’**

*[This is exactly why the present writer writes (long) fictions.]

**Skelton, T[each] Y[ourself] B[ooks] ‘Poetry’, 25-26

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