[R. Nemo Hill]

“Everything I saw and heard and felt did something to me, though I’ve forgotten most of the details. That’s one reason why one writes: sooner or later almost everything about a life is forgotten, by the person who lived it and by the others. The great mystery of the written word and its justification in the teeth of everything that people say about the ‘media’ — instant communication and instant blankness — lies in its power to oppose biological time, to create its own time dimension, the dimension that distinguishes human being from animals. A novelist may deal in biological time, or try to, and so may an autobiographer, but by doing so he inevitably shifts his material into the other dimension. If that shifting fails, the work will be neither here nor there. A poet knows that biological time can be nothing more than his complaint. If the things in his poems aren’t at home in the other dimension, he’s wasted his time putting them there. His material is what he doesn’t know, what the other dimension demands. If anybody feels like taking the trouble to look at my poems in the light of the little I remember of my life, if they’re worth the effort — he or she will find superficial traces in them of my experience; but the real sources, connections and developments are underground. My guess about them would be no better than his or hers.”

“ . . . . the emphasis, in universities, was not on interests or enthusiasm — or insights, for that matter — but on knowledge, and the systematization of knowledge. I should never have been able to tell a psychiatrist what it was in me that resisted the pursuit of knowledge as an end in itself — and knowledge of literature, at that, when it was the practice of literature that taught me how little I knew even about my most intimate and intense concerns. Nor could I have told him about the complex of assumptions and obsessions behind that resistance, if only because I couldn’t see it myself, until poems I wrote brought it to light. I hadn’t yet begun to understand what Keats meant by ‘negative capability’, or Thomas Hardy by the ‘nescience’ to which poets cling more stubbornly than to whatever knowledge, subtlety or even erudition they may also have needed to acquire; but in every poet, living or dead, who mattered to me I recognized a core of commitment not necessarily to the ‘ceremony of innocence’ but to innocence itself. If that commitment was lacking in a poet, he could be knowing, subtle or erudite as he pleased, and his work would leave me cold. There would be no room in the poetry for the unexpected knowledge that comes in a flash, and comes only where ‘nescience’ has left a gap to be filled.”

“As for the ‘mug’s game’ of poetry, its pursuit has become harder and easier. Harder, because ambition, like every external incentive, has fallen away. Easier, because that loss is another liberation. I can be no more sure than I was thirty years ago that my poems are good enough to be worth the price paid for them, by which I mean not the time and work that have gone into them but the specialization they demanded, the concentration claimed at the cost of other pursuits and commitments. What I am sure of now is that, whether good or bad, durable or negligible, the poems I write are those I have to write. The profession of authorship has no bearing on that. The opinions and judgements of critics have no bearing on that. Nor have the anxieties that beset me when I couldn’t write. There are more than enough good poems, real poems, in print than any reader can exhaust in a lifetime. Ours is the first recorded age in which it has become almost a crime to reproduce the species. Much the same is true of the writing of poems, now that our world is over-populated with them; and, unlike even the best people, the best poems obstinately refuse to die and make way for others. I would much rather write no more poems than a poem I do not need to write.”

“Ultimately, though, it is not my business to ask why or how I go on, how or why my work appeals or does not appeal to those who read such work — a tiny minority at the best of times — nor even whether it will prove durable enough to have been worth the price paid for doing it. What matters to me now is the durability of that for which it was a receptacle and conductor. My business is to remain true to the wonderment and outrage as long as they recur, always unexpectedly, always a little differently, always in a way I can neither plan nor choose; and to keep quiet when there is nothing that wants to use me to make itself heard.”


Michael Hamburger
(String Of Beginnings)