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The following questions were sent to a number of poets, for them to answer individually or to use as a basis for a general statement about the writing of poetry today.

(a) Would poetry be more effective, i.e. interest more people more profoundly, if it were concerned with the issues of our time?

(b) Do you feel your views on politics or religion influence the kind of poetry you write? Alternatively, do you think poetry has uses as well as pleasure?

(c) Do you feel any dissatisfaction with the short lyric as a poetic medium? If so, are there any poems of a longer or non-lyric kind that you visualize yourself writing?

(d) What living poets continue to influence you, English or American?

(e) Are you conscious of any current ‘poeticization’ of language which requires to be broken up in favour of a more ‘natural’ diction? Alternatively, do you feel any undue impoverishment in poetic diction at the moment?

(f) Do you see this as a good or bad period for writing poetry?

NORMAN NICHOLSON

     Verse is primarily the literary medium of the illiterate. It began as an oral art, useful in two ways. First, it was incantatory or bardic, useful for spells and ritual. And second, it was mnemonic: at a time when reading was unknown or known only to a few, verse was the most reliable method of remembering and communicating laws, advice, social instruction, tribal records, biography and favourite fiction. Oral verse has continued, though with diminishing importance, right down to the present day, and written verse has not entirely forgotten its oral origin. Epic and lyric, in particular, have preserved the convention of the reciter or singer, while spoken verse has proved the best of all media for stage dialogue — where, incidently, it has the practical advantage of being more easily made audible.

     All these kinds of verse draw largely on the incantatory tradition and I suppose it is inevitable in a literate age, when most people read rather than listen, that it is as incantation that poetry will chiefly be valued, as a means of stirring the imagination, of saying things too subtle or complex or ambiguous or even too dangerous to go easily into prose. But I do not think that the old mnemonic function is out of date or ought to be disregarded. For one thing, we are quite possibly at the beginning of a new age of general illiteracy, for modern man scarcely needs the written word for ordinary communication and certainly not for entertainment. Letter-writing, the newspaper, the magazine and the story book may pass out of common experience, while the degree of literacy needed for text-books and manuals of technical instruction is not high enough to maintain a large reading public. In such circumstances verse might well become once again a popular medium, one that could range over all subjects and adapt itself to most of the purposes for which the spoken word is used.

     To say that poetry would ‘interest more people more profoundly if it were concerned with the issues of our time’ is, however, very doubtful — presuming that the material of the news is what is meant by ‘issues of our time’. For poetry at present is read almost entirely by a highly literate public which does not turn to it for that kind of information or comment. To me this seems a most unfortunate state of affairs which limits not only the poet but the reader of poetry, for it conditions his response from the start, making him put on a special kind of face even before he begins to read.

     Obviously, then, I feel that my views on religion and politics influence the poetry I write. If they did not, I should not want to write it. The didactic and the hortatory are among the strongest of those impulses which impel men into rhythm, and it is no accident that of all ‘forms’ of prose the sermon is about the closest to the poem. I think it is quite ridiculous to rank as inevitably inferior those poets who have ‘a palable design upon us’. A man who has no design upon me is a man, on the whole, who is not interested in me and I can hardly be blamed for not being interested in him. Of course, if you limit poetry to what Mr Eliot calls its First Voice — that of the poet speaking to himself — then this question does not arise. But I don’t want to limit poetry at all.