The Record 2009 - Keble College - University of Oxford

The College at Large
the choice of illustration. The dust-jacket of the Collected Critical
Writings, whatever may be thought of the content, is exceedingly
beautiful; among the most beautiful that I have seen anywhere
in recent years. It incorporates details from Eric Gill’s war
memorial at the University of Leeds: ‘Our Lord Driving the
Money Changers from the Temple’.
As to my poetry: what can I even begin to tell you about an
element that has possessed my being for more than sixty years?
I rather regret that in a spasm of malformed self-deprecation
I once referred to it, in response to an American literary
journalist, as ‘a hobby that has got out of hand’. I probably
trusted at the time that my tone of voice would convey my true
feelings; but I ought not to have done — people are so literalminded.
My true feelings on the matter require a degree of selfcensorship,
such is their intensity. My belief, moderately
expressed, is that poetry rightly practised and understood is
part of the nervous system of true polity. Simone Weil wrote in
1943 [Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, tr. Arthur Wills (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1952), p. 207.]:
Simultaneous composition on several planes…is the law
of artistic creation, and wherein, in fact, lies its difficulty.
A poet in the arrangement of words and the choice of
each word must simultaneously bear in mind matters
on at least five or six different planes of composition…
Politics, in their turn, form an art governed by
composition on a multiple plane.
Whenever I am asked to state my opinion of the ‘nature and
value’ of poetry, I find myself quoting these (and other) words
by Weil. Again I verge on the repetitious; but it is difficult not
to; I know no other description of the essential and necessary
relationship between the poetic and the civic domains more
pointed and more resonant. Needless to say ‘relevance’ and
‘accessibility’ and ‘reaching out’ play no part in the vocabulary
with which I attempt to describe my fullest endorsement of her
words. Nor does ‘enjoyment’, though joy is an essential element
in any true poem’s potency (‘But hark! joy — joy — strange joy. |
Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks’: Isaac Rosenberg
in 1917 [Isaac Rosenberg, The Poems and Plays, ed. Vivien Noakes
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) , p. 139.]). ‘Enjoyment’
(‘I have so enjoyed your new book of poems, Ms X’) strikes
me as a term of condescending possessiveness, as in the archaic
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