Status Updates From Collected Poems

Now Spender himself has no idea of form; his poetry is so much like poetry, and so remote from poems, but I think most of his work will become almost as un unreadable as the worst of the Georgians – and very soon

The poem is, as all poems are, its own question and answer, it’s own contradiction, it’s own agreement. I ask only that my poetry be taken literally. The aim of the poem is the mark of the poem itself makes… A poem moves only towards its end, which is the last line. Anything further than that is the problematic stuff of poetry, not of the poem.

Very much of my poetry is, I know, an enquiry and a terror of fearful expectation, a discovery and facing a fear. I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, downthrow & upheaval, and my effort is their self expression.

… The life in any poem of mine cannot move concentrically round essential image; the life must come out of the centre; an image must be born and die in another; and any sequence of my images must be a sequence of creations, recreations, destructions, contradictions.

I let, perhaps, an image be made emotionally in me and then apply it to what intellectual and critical forces I possess – let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bread out of the other two together, a fourth and contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict.

Any poet or novelist you like to think of – he either works out of words or in the direction of them.

I’m nearly trying to show you… How essentially false writing is… The reader refuses to believe that you believe that you are one with all these things; you have to prove it to him, and you most certainly won’t by cataloguing a number of other things to which you say you are related. By the magic of words and images you must make it clear to him that the relationships are real.

I employ the scenery of the island to describe the scenery of my thoughts, the earthquakes of the body to describe the earthquakes of the heart

I fail to see how the emphasising of the body can, in any way, be regarded as hideous. The body, it’s appearance, death, and diseases, is a fact, sure is the fact of a tree. It has its roots in the same earth as the tree.

Poetry finds its own form; form should never be superimposed; the structure should rise out of the words and the expression of them.

As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,

In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,