The poem is published in the current review of the London Review of Books. I don't know how much of it I can quote legally: the first verse reads:
I know the reason you placed nine white tulips
in a glass vase with water
here in the room a few days ago
was not in order to mark the passage of time
as a fish would if nailed by the tail
to the wall above the bed of a house guest.
There are another 8 lines.
So what do we know about our speaker and his or her situation. He or she is a guest: knowing he or she is welcome: “I know the reason wasn’t…” The flowers are a reminder that time is passing, but s/he hasn’t yet “made themselves at home”.
So let us assume that there is a relationship where one person feels as though he/she is not really at home and doesn’t really understand why not: she/he notices details, but these details don’t tell the reader anything specific about the relationship or about either the speaker or the person who is being addressed. We learn ‘you’ puts tulips in a vase full of water…hardly strange behaviour: a vase without water or full of beer might be worthy of notice; the host doesn’t nail a fish above the guest’s bed (how strange they don’t do that…) and owns a glass topped table that is by the window of the room. That’s all we know about “you.”
It could be argued that the fact that “I know the reason” which begins the poem and the “was not’ which qualifies it, is separated by four lines creating some kind of tension other than grammatical, perhaps performing the speaker’s doubt? ”I know you’d didn’t do it for this reason” suggests at least the thought that maybe he or she did. Later the same syntactic suspension occurs between “I did notice” and “my suitcase’? So the guest is not sure of his welcome, and he’s just realised he doesn’t feel at home enough to have unpacked the suitcase, but instead has it “by the door” ready for a quick exit?
Because it’s vague, I could come up with things that this is a metaphor for: early stages of a romantic relationship; a marriage, an aging poet addressing the reader, feeling that time is running out and the “suitcase’ (trans; word hoard) is still not totally unlocked……but we’re back with Teenage Cavemen. It’s almost a ready made metaphor you could use for any number of relationship situations without being specifically about anything. Ahaaa, I hear someone cry, this is so obviously a poem about……because white tulips are traditionally a symbol or …and Nine is a ….number and the fact that only two of them are dropping means….
It seems to me an example of a writer “being poetic” without actually offering anything to the reader than what must pass as a “poetic’ poem in some circles. The most arresting image in the whole thing, to which the only rhyme in the poem calls attention, the nailed fish, is not something that is really relevant; it’s something that is not.
Nagging at “content”, “meaning” and “trying to understand the situation” is obviously not the only way to read a poem. It’s usually a fairly limited one. But the writing here forces attention on content not only because it’s so vague (call it allusive if you want to be polite) but because nothing much is happening in terms of poetry. /I/ knows what’s going on. I don’t. And since I don’t care, what I’d like is something in the poem as a poem for me to enjoy.
In such a short piece I’d expect (Would you?) the writer to have chosen each word carefully. In such an old-fashioned first person lyric I’d expect syntax, diction and rhythm to be working together in ways they wouldn’t in prose. Heaney does informal syntax, but his poems at their best are held together with patterned sound and while the impression is a voice speaking to the reader the artifice itself is enjoyable.
But written out as prose The Guest doesn’t lose much.
Lines like “In a glass vase with water/here in this room a few days ago” are not interesting in themselves in terms of diction, syntax, rhythm or sound. Rhythmically the lack of any type of end stopping in the first verse paragraph keeps the eye moving, but it makes line endings redundant. How much difference is there between the printed version and this:
I know the reason why you placed
Nine white tulips
Here in this room a few days ago
Was not in order to mark the passage of time.
If poetry is about making words work then the diction here is consciously informal and uninteresting. The “grey light” of early morning, “the passage of time”, (both in the second stanza), if not clichés are too vague when placed beside “glass top table by the window” Why does it matter where the table is or that its top is made of glass? (On the other hand, the fact the suitcase in the last line of the poem is “by the door’ does seem relevant.)
Why “nine white tulips” (do we need to know there are nine and then two droop..is this important?) Or is “white” important. Why “even touching’ and not just ‘touching’? Why is the suitcase “only half unpacked“ and not just “unpacked”?
What does ‘as they lose their grip on themselves” mean in terms of flowers withering? What could it mean? Since the phrase is usually used about people, then are being invited to see the two wilting tulips as the guest and host but what could it mean that they are “losing their grip”? On what? Why?
Someone must have loved this poem; it’s published in the current edition of the London Review of Books. Which must be a prestige market. But for the life of me I can’t see the value of it. If this is "accessible poetry" (Collins sells well in the States. He's been American Poet Laureate.) ) when you push it the meaning isn't accessible at all: it evaporates, leaving nothing.
Showing posts with label heaney. Show all posts
Showing posts with label heaney. Show all posts
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Seamus Heaney's "Human Chain": coming home via three quotations
1)
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
(Eliot: Little Giddings)
not “to Know”, if to know means the “real truth” of something will be revealed to us, but to see the once familiar differently, to react in a new way based on new knowledge or experience. Or to discover that what we thought before we left has been confirmed.
So in the past year, as part of the new project, I have worked my way though the major sequences/long poems of the twentieth century. (There are a more of them than I thought) . It reminds me of traveling home on the Trans Siberian: large swathes of time and landscape I don’t remember, punctuated by intense moments: seeing Lake Baikal, the grey water steaming in the sub zero temperature, surf coming in to smack into snowdrifts, the Narnian beauty of sunsets, small villages all but buried under snow, like illustrations for European Fairy tales, the Chinese family who spoke neither Russian nor French or English but who managed to talk me into sharing their breakfast of boiled chicken feet and home made vodka…
But somewhere east of the beginning of Zukofsky’s “A’, about “A 9” perhaps, the images changed. I was back on the trans Kazak express, staring at an unchanging landscape, imagining trying to walk across the steppe, a tottering survivor of a massacre plodding onwards because he’d forgotten how to stop.
A long long way from Kerr’s Ass. Time to go home
And there was Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain waiting to be read.
But I had also been reading aggressive poetics:
Quote #2
…Establishment poetry is approaching the condition of journalism—"a form of writing as harmless as it is ephemeral": A generic "sensitive" lyric speaker contemplates a facet of his or her world and makes observations about it, compares present to past, divulges some hidden emotion, or comes to a new understanding of the situation. The language is usually concrete and colloquial, the ironies and metaphors multiple, the syntax straightforward, the rhythms muted and low-key. Generic and media boundaries are rigorously observed: no readymades or word sculptures here, no zaum explorations of etymologies, no Steinian syntactic permutations. As for Eliot's objective correlative, it emerges, in the mainstream poetry before us, as little more than a faint echo, an ironic tic.
Having read enough of this type of criticism I opened Human Chain and the first poem begins:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it
And I shut the book.
It took a while to see beyond the criticism of the quotation. Reciting Kerr’s Ass helps. Perloff may be a great critic, but it’s not the paradigm of the lyric speaker itself that is the problem but the way it is so easily abused. In the wrong hands it’s too easy, requires no great art or thought to churn out the formulaic “poem”. But open any journal or book and you’ll find poems ticking boxes that prove the writer is “having a poetic experience”. (The PE may be aggressively modernist, avant garde or lyric depending on which poetic the writer hangs his or her hat: Sooner or later everything becomes formulaic).
Heaney has never seemed a box ticker. It’s true that Human Chain has an air of familiarity about it; some of the poems feel as though they’ve been here before. The “Heaney topics” of rural boyhood, school, family and religion are ever present. At times his habit of using an unattributed pronoun as the subject of a poem becomes irritating. The poet knows who “he’ or ”she” is or was but the reader has no chance and the overworked pronoun collapses the poem into vagueness. One of the great defining characteristics of the man’s work, the sense that a voice is speaking directly to the reader, at times lapses into a syntax that produces lines and a stanza like ”flattened back/ against themselves/ a bit stand-offish’. Or the whole of “Canopy” with its opening stanza:
It was the month of may
Trees in Harvard yard
Were turning a young green
There was whispering everywhere.
Which never rises above a literate diary entry.
But having said that:
Quote 3#
The sight quenches, like water
After too much birthday cake.
(Thom Gunn: “Expression”)
In The Wanderer, wisdom is understood as intelligence looking back on experience in age. It’s not a popular ideal these days in cultures driven by the cult of eternal youth, so in one sense to say that these are an old man’s poems may not convey the intended compliment. And to stick 'wise' in front of old would only sound even more anachronistic.
At seventy, having survived a stroke, you shouldn’t be too surprised if the poet is in retrospective mode. The collection is ghosted by a sense of summing up and coming to terms. Each recent Heaney collection has contained at least one poem in memory of dead friends. Some of them are very good poems. Like the Old English poet, he can produce memorable poetry out of the specifics of a common sense of loss. He does elegy well. In this collection: ‘The door was open and the house was dark” with its lift towards its final memorable image is a fine example in this collection.
There is also that familiar ability of his to see things awry as in “Miracle’ with its arresting opening:
“Not the one who takes up his bed and walks/But the ones who have known him all along/And carry him in-“
After all the theory, after the poetics, the gabble of disaffected voices, the struck pose and the learnt strut, it feels good to come back to poems sturdy enough to walk in the day time, that celebrate rather than whine or denigrate or disappear into their own self serving ideological smugness.
Human Chain my be uneven. But that says something about the poetry. Its successes and failures aren’t hidden behind a hedge of conceptualized waffle. As verbal artifacts they succeed or fail. I suspect the success comes from the sense of recognition, of a shared experience spoken aloud.
Bunting said he had tried to make poems that would give pleasure but stand on their own without prop of theory or the support of party. He succeeded. So does Heaney. If nothing else there are poems in this collection that challenge the generalsied condemnation of Perloff's statement.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
(Eliot: Little Giddings)
not “to Know”, if to know means the “real truth” of something will be revealed to us, but to see the once familiar differently, to react in a new way based on new knowledge or experience. Or to discover that what we thought before we left has been confirmed.
So in the past year, as part of the new project, I have worked my way though the major sequences/long poems of the twentieth century. (There are a more of them than I thought) . It reminds me of traveling home on the Trans Siberian: large swathes of time and landscape I don’t remember, punctuated by intense moments: seeing Lake Baikal, the grey water steaming in the sub zero temperature, surf coming in to smack into snowdrifts, the Narnian beauty of sunsets, small villages all but buried under snow, like illustrations for European Fairy tales, the Chinese family who spoke neither Russian nor French or English but who managed to talk me into sharing their breakfast of boiled chicken feet and home made vodka…
But somewhere east of the beginning of Zukofsky’s “A’, about “A 9” perhaps, the images changed. I was back on the trans Kazak express, staring at an unchanging landscape, imagining trying to walk across the steppe, a tottering survivor of a massacre plodding onwards because he’d forgotten how to stop.
A long long way from Kerr’s Ass. Time to go home
And there was Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain waiting to be read.
But I had also been reading aggressive poetics:
Quote #2
…Establishment poetry is approaching the condition of journalism—"a form of writing as harmless as it is ephemeral": A generic "sensitive" lyric speaker contemplates a facet of his or her world and makes observations about it, compares present to past, divulges some hidden emotion, or comes to a new understanding of the situation. The language is usually concrete and colloquial, the ironies and metaphors multiple, the syntax straightforward, the rhythms muted and low-key. Generic and media boundaries are rigorously observed: no readymades or word sculptures here, no zaum explorations of etymologies, no Steinian syntactic permutations. As for Eliot's objective correlative, it emerges, in the mainstream poetry before us, as little more than a faint echo, an ironic tic.
Having read enough of this type of criticism I opened Human Chain and the first poem begins:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it
And I shut the book.
It took a while to see beyond the criticism of the quotation. Reciting Kerr’s Ass helps. Perloff may be a great critic, but it’s not the paradigm of the lyric speaker itself that is the problem but the way it is so easily abused. In the wrong hands it’s too easy, requires no great art or thought to churn out the formulaic “poem”. But open any journal or book and you’ll find poems ticking boxes that prove the writer is “having a poetic experience”. (The PE may be aggressively modernist, avant garde or lyric depending on which poetic the writer hangs his or her hat: Sooner or later everything becomes formulaic).
Heaney has never seemed a box ticker. It’s true that Human Chain has an air of familiarity about it; some of the poems feel as though they’ve been here before. The “Heaney topics” of rural boyhood, school, family and religion are ever present. At times his habit of using an unattributed pronoun as the subject of a poem becomes irritating. The poet knows who “he’ or ”she” is or was but the reader has no chance and the overworked pronoun collapses the poem into vagueness. One of the great defining characteristics of the man’s work, the sense that a voice is speaking directly to the reader, at times lapses into a syntax that produces lines and a stanza like ”flattened back/ against themselves/ a bit stand-offish’. Or the whole of “Canopy” with its opening stanza:
It was the month of may
Trees in Harvard yard
Were turning a young green
There was whispering everywhere.
Which never rises above a literate diary entry.
But having said that:
Quote 3#
The sight quenches, like water
After too much birthday cake.
(Thom Gunn: “Expression”)
In The Wanderer, wisdom is understood as intelligence looking back on experience in age. It’s not a popular ideal these days in cultures driven by the cult of eternal youth, so in one sense to say that these are an old man’s poems may not convey the intended compliment. And to stick 'wise' in front of old would only sound even more anachronistic.
At seventy, having survived a stroke, you shouldn’t be too surprised if the poet is in retrospective mode. The collection is ghosted by a sense of summing up and coming to terms. Each recent Heaney collection has contained at least one poem in memory of dead friends. Some of them are very good poems. Like the Old English poet, he can produce memorable poetry out of the specifics of a common sense of loss. He does elegy well. In this collection: ‘The door was open and the house was dark” with its lift towards its final memorable image is a fine example in this collection.
There is also that familiar ability of his to see things awry as in “Miracle’ with its arresting opening:
“Not the one who takes up his bed and walks/But the ones who have known him all along/And carry him in-“
After all the theory, after the poetics, the gabble of disaffected voices, the struck pose and the learnt strut, it feels good to come back to poems sturdy enough to walk in the day time, that celebrate rather than whine or denigrate or disappear into their own self serving ideological smugness.
Human Chain my be uneven. But that says something about the poetry. Its successes and failures aren’t hidden behind a hedge of conceptualized waffle. As verbal artifacts they succeed or fail. I suspect the success comes from the sense of recognition, of a shared experience spoken aloud.
Bunting said he had tried to make poems that would give pleasure but stand on their own without prop of theory or the support of party. He succeeded. So does Heaney. If nothing else there are poems in this collection that challenge the generalsied condemnation of Perloff's statement.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Old English Poetry: Seamus, Wulf, Eadwacer and me
In stepping stones, Heaney is asked why he was attracted to translating Beowulf: admiration for the poem or a love of Anglo-Saxon as a language?
“More the latter. I didn’t in truth have any special fondness for Beowulf before I started work on it.….The more elgaic poems “The Wanderer” “The Searfarer” were the ones that gave me a feel for the language , voices shaken by the North Sea wind, as it were, voices crying under the ness. I’m still not sure whether Anglo-Saxon was a heard melody for me or an unheard one, a music I imagined for myself.” (p436)
I’ve been wondering about this ever since I read it before Christmas. My feelings about Beowulf are damn near schizoid. But as sound system; as a spoken music Old English sings or it does in my head. I’ve never known if it’s an imagined music either. I’m sure some expert somewhere would haul me over the coals for the way I speak it.
But there are phrases that just sound good. Unweder sounds right in a way “bad weather” can’t and Byrthferth’s description of winter ”and he byð ceald and wæt” evokes a whole world of grey rain and people huddling by a smokey fire in a way "and it is cold and wet' doesn't. I think it's something to do with the vowel sounds.
But there are also individual poems that are part of the anthology that defines “poetry” in my head.
Wulf and Eadwacer is one of them. It’s often presented as an intellectual curiosity: it is. It’s notoriously difficult to translate. As is often pointed out the first two lines:
Lēodum is mīnum swylce him mon lāc gife;
willað hȳ hine āþecgan gif hē on þrēat cymeð.
could be translated:
Is to my people as if one might give them (a battle/sacrifice/gift/message/game)
Will they (receive/consume/oppress/relieve) him if he comes (with a host/in violence/in need).
The assumption is that if we only knew the back story; who the speaker is, who Wulf and Eadwacer are, it would make so much more sense and we'd know which choices to make in the brackets above. Most translations work on the circular argument of deciding what the back story is first, then translating to fit it.
But it's fun to play with the idea that the creator of this poem was not some hairy rugby player quaffing too much mead in between beating the billy be damned out of his neighbours, but a skilled artist who knew exactly Hwaet! he was doing.
Ambiguity is everywhere in Old English. In the first line of “The Wanderer”
Oft him ānhaga āre gebīdeð
the verb means to hope for but also to experience. The translator is forced to choose: does the speaker expect mercy or experience it? The original audience was under no such obligation: they could hold both options open. Yearning for it he experiences it?
So imagine the creator of Wulf and E enjoying the polysemic nature of the language and deciding to push it to the limit.
In one sense the speaker is saying in those first two lines, “who knows what they’ll do if he turn up, lots of things most of them bad”. Which sounds awful put like that but as
Lēodum is mīnum swylce him mon lāc gife;
willað hȳ hine āþecgan gif hē on þrēat cymeð.
are a model of compressed meaning.
It's true the lines sing. All poetry is spoken music but Old English more so than others. Wolf, my wolf just doesn’t have the melody of: Wulf, mīn Wulf
wæs mē wyn tō þon, wæs mē hwæþre ēac lāð
spits its message, the first half running smoothly, the second tripping over itself as if she is retching at the memory..
So the music is important.
But it’s the sense of a voice speaking, the irony of the words, the meaning pulsing along the lines. The odd combination of the very physically real: she sits by the hearth in rainy weather, it is not the lack of food but his infrequent coming that makes her ill and the mythic vagueness of the situation. Like folk tales before Walt and Co got to them.
Graves, God bless’im, argued that the rhythm of Anglo-Saxon poetry grew out of the creak of the oarlocks. You couldn’t prove that if your life depended on it, but it’s a great image and the sense of the poem, pulsing and pausing along the fetch of the line like a rowed boat, works for me.
That terse epigrammatic ending:
Þæt mon ēaþe tōslīteð þætte nǣfre gesomnad wæs,
uncer giedd geador.
raising the specific into the general without becoming vague or wishy washy.
Not just a heard music then, but a love of the made thing.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Reasons to be Cheerful: Heaney on CD
Sometimes I would like to be able to thank whoever came up with an idea that makes the day better: the inventer of ipods; whoever talked Jim Norton into reading the whole of Ulysses Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist for Naxos.
Today, I’d like to thank the genius who decided to ask Seamus Heaney to read all his books, recorded him, and then made the recordings available.
Not just for me now, but for the great grandchildren. Imagine, if someone could have caught Coleridge chanting Christobel, or Wyatt reading ”They flee from me”. Did Chaucer’s voice sound like the vocalization of a knowing wink? Did Caedmon sing or chant or simply speak rhythmically?
But a long time ago last Friday, I fell in love with “The Poet and the Piper” Cd. Heaney reading: Liam O’Flynn playing. Ok, so I was skipping the poems to get to the piping at first, but then I started listening to the poems and realised voice was the primal instrument. Not a singing voice, but a voice speaking in organised rhythms. One step before Sean nos.
And Heaney’s poems work as an extension of that voice. Since I first heard him read; I can’t read his poems without hearing him. Which is probably the highest compliment I can pay the man. Not that he needs any from me.
So to hear the whole of ‘Squarings’ read is a marvelous way to end a good day. Like meeting an old friend after a long break, rediscovering the connections but noting things I hadn’t seen or remembered seeing before.
So to RTE; Much and many thanks.
Do not waver into language/do not waver in it.
Today, I’d like to thank the genius who decided to ask Seamus Heaney to read all his books, recorded him, and then made the recordings available.
Not just for me now, but for the great grandchildren. Imagine, if someone could have caught Coleridge chanting Christobel, or Wyatt reading ”They flee from me”. Did Chaucer’s voice sound like the vocalization of a knowing wink? Did Caedmon sing or chant or simply speak rhythmically?
But a long time ago last Friday, I fell in love with “The Poet and the Piper” Cd. Heaney reading: Liam O’Flynn playing. Ok, so I was skipping the poems to get to the piping at first, but then I started listening to the poems and realised voice was the primal instrument. Not a singing voice, but a voice speaking in organised rhythms. One step before Sean nos.
And Heaney’s poems work as an extension of that voice. Since I first heard him read; I can’t read his poems without hearing him. Which is probably the highest compliment I can pay the man. Not that he needs any from me.
So to hear the whole of ‘Squarings’ read is a marvelous way to end a good day. Like meeting an old friend after a long break, rediscovering the connections but noting things I hadn’t seen or remembered seeing before.
So to RTE; Much and many thanks.
Do not waver into language/do not waver in it.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Ciaran Carson For all we know
Ciaran Carson wrote one of my favourite books: Last Night’s Fun. It’s a love letter to traditional music, beautifully written, idiosyncratic, and it introduced me to Joe Cooley. I feel I owe him just for that. He’s also written prose novels, at least one of which puts him up there with Flan O’Brian (about as ‘up there’ as it gets in the real sub-Joycean atmosphere.) He’s translated The Tain, another favourite book, as well as The Inferno and he’s written a body of poetry that is distinctive. Enough of the blurb.
The poetry took me a while to like. It was easy to admire. It was only when I realised that if Seamus Heaney and Liam O’flynn are a perfect paring, then the obvious Carson link (in my limited knowledge) would be to Seamus Ennis.
So Last Night’s Fun is my key. It’s a love letter, but it’s an oblique one. The same is true of the poetry. What’s not being said, what’s hinted at, suggested, alluded to is as important as what is being detailed. And because it’s not there on the page, it ghosts the reading process.
Beneath the surface dazzle and the play there’s an austere seriousness. Beneath the austerity, there’s a playful passion.
So logically, if your man decides to write a story in poems, he's choosing the form for a purpose.
For all we know…think of a musician, Ennis, showing off, but within the limits of a traditional form. The limitations are what define the player’s skills. This ain’t no dream of “free form self expression’. The framework creates the space, like a musical phrase creates a meaning for silence.
And so the narrative of For all we know is a poet’s answer to “why bother telling a story in poems”. Characters enter, reappear, slide. Events are described, then re-described, and the images fold and loop and move on. Because this is Carson, I didn't expect a straight narrative like the Monkey or Freddy Neptune.
I’m sure that if I knew anything about how a fugue works, I would understand more. But it reminds me of Herzog’s Nosferatu and the way the landscape suddenly becomes a character in the story, or the first three minutes of Suspiria where nothing happens but it happens in away that’s deeply and memorably disturbing
The poetry took me a while to like. It was easy to admire. It was only when I realised that if Seamus Heaney and Liam O’flynn are a perfect paring, then the obvious Carson link (in my limited knowledge) would be to Seamus Ennis.
So Last Night’s Fun is my key. It’s a love letter, but it’s an oblique one. The same is true of the poetry. What’s not being said, what’s hinted at, suggested, alluded to is as important as what is being detailed. And because it’s not there on the page, it ghosts the reading process.
Beneath the surface dazzle and the play there’s an austere seriousness. Beneath the austerity, there’s a playful passion.
So logically, if your man decides to write a story in poems, he's choosing the form for a purpose.
For all we know…think of a musician, Ennis, showing off, but within the limits of a traditional form. The limitations are what define the player’s skills. This ain’t no dream of “free form self expression’. The framework creates the space, like a musical phrase creates a meaning for silence.
And so the narrative of For all we know is a poet’s answer to “why bother telling a story in poems”. Characters enter, reappear, slide. Events are described, then re-described, and the images fold and loop and move on. Because this is Carson, I didn't expect a straight narrative like the Monkey or Freddy Neptune.
I’m sure that if I knew anything about how a fugue works, I would understand more. But it reminds me of Herzog’s Nosferatu and the way the landscape suddenly becomes a character in the story, or the first three minutes of Suspiria where nothing happens but it happens in away that’s deeply and memorably disturbing
Friday, October 10, 2008
The non anxiety of influence
Heaney,
who is that rare thing, a good critic who is generous.
"When poets turn to the great masters of the past, they turn to an image of their own creation, one which is likely to be a reflection of their own artistic inclinations and procedures."
"At the desk every poet faces the same kind of task, that there is no secret that can be imparted, only resources of one's own that are to be mastered."
who is that rare thing, a good critic who is generous.
"When poets turn to the great masters of the past, they turn to an image of their own creation, one which is likely to be a reflection of their own artistic inclinations and procedures."
"At the desk every poet faces the same kind of task, that there is no secret that can be imparted, only resources of one's own that are to be mastered."
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