How is a great poem created? It is a mystery. It is like asking for an explanation of an exquisite square cut by Brian Lara or the flourish of a Rohan Kanhai cover drive, which I will never forget as long as I live. It is the same mystery that surrounds fundamental scientific discoveries.
One answer is that it is simply doing what genius must. Shelley expressed this view: “A man cannot say, I will compose poetry. The greatest poet cannot say it; for the mind in creation is a fading coal, which some invisible influence like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic whether of its approach or its departure.”
But there is surely more discipline in it than that. Genius needs to be cultivated. How many hours at the nets did it take a Lara or a Kanhai to perfect their strokes? How many hours past midnight did Einstein spend on his calculations before the relativity theory emerged full-blown? We know very well the extreme labours of revision and rewriting which went into TS Eliot’s great poem The Waste Land.
It is this necessary combination of innate genius and dedicated hard work that produces the great poet, the great painter, the great batsman, the great anything. But then what proportions of inspiration and perspiration still remains the question. You get the feeling that Mozart didn’t have to labour much, but that perhaps Wordsworth had to sit himself down at his desk hour after hour writing and re-writing, just as you know that other great tennis players spent countless hours more at practice than Roger Federer ever did.
One thing may be said: a great creation cannot be forced out by hard work alone. You must have its essence in the first place and the work reveals and shapes whatever it is. And so in life comes the difficult question: does one have the minimum of genius, or at least talent, that makes it worthwhile (essential?) to sacrifice a great deal else in life so that it may be nurtured? Very occasionally the genius in man or woman may be so overwhelming that there is no calculation or question or choice; just living is all the work that is needed. But most genius is granted in smaller measure. Indeed the measure may be very small indeed, hardly discernible. Then one may have to make a judgement as to whether it exists at all and/or if it is worth much time and what may be the great trouble and anxiety spent in coaxing it to see the light of day.
Genius itself may not be the best adviser in such matters. Rainer Maria Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet makes it seem a simple matter of deep self-examination: “This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour of your night: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be in the affirmative, if you may meet this solemn question with a strong and simple ‘I must,’ then build your life according to this necessity; your life must, right to its most unimportant and insignificant hour, become a token and a witness of this impulse.”
Following such advice may lead to much self-delusion and deprivation and also to a tremendous amount of very bad poetry. In the great majority of cases it is probably better to be as brutal as Naipaul advising one aspiring young poet who came to him. “Is this your poem?” he asked a student who had submitted a handwritten piece of verse (A New Nation Reborn) to him for comment. “Yes? Well, I’ve read it and I want you to promise me to give up poetry immediately. Don’t be depressed. Look at me, I’ve never written a poem in my life! I’m sure your gifts lie in quite a different direction. But you have lovely handwriting.”
The urge to write poetry from time to time does not guarantee that one is a poet or will produce anything but rubbish. It is best to be very sceptical about one’s own powers. It is probably best even to err on the side of neglecting a small spark of talent than on the side of trying with much sacrifice frantically to fan such a barely lit and faint scrap into a flame that will not catch.
Once I was lunching in the Travellers Club in London with an agent, Herbert Van Thal, who had placed a first novel, The Humming-Bird Tree, with a publisher for me. We were relaxed over the cheese and liqueurs. We weren’t talking too much about writing. I was telling him about how I was enjoying life in Guyana – the job I was doing, the tennis I was playing, the circle of humorous and interesting friends I had made, the exploring in the savannas and up the big rivers.
He leaned over and patted me on my arm.
“Good,” he said. “I’m glad to hear all this. Whatever you do, don’t give it all up and go live in a garret for the sake of your writing. I’ve known many too many young writers who’ve got published and decided they had been selected by fate to be the new wonder-boy of the world of letters. So sad. Stick to your good life. It’s even better than your good writing. But do that too if you can.”
Perhaps he was saying not much more than what Sam Johnson magisterially wrote: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” But it gave me food for thought and because writing is a hard and lonely business, compared with so much that day-to-day life has to offer, perhaps it seemed convincing because I wanted to be convinced that writing need have no priority.
I don’t really know the answer. I have a feeling that much too much good ordinary living is sacrificed on the altar of either self-supposed or else microscopic genius. On the other hand to neglect a God-given talent if it exists does seem some sort of sin against something that is sacred.
Coming back to the question: how is a great poem created? One thing can be said for sure: infinitesimally few great poems are ever created. Randall Jarrell in a letter to a fellow-poet spelt it out about right: “How hard it is to write a good poem! How few good poems there are! What strange things you and I are, if we are! To have written one good poem – good used seriously – is an unlikely and marvellous thing that a couple of hundred writers in English, at the most, have done – it’s like sitting in the yard in the evening and having a meteorite fall in one’s lap.”
And if you or I, thinking or hoping ourselves poets, can ever write one small fiery scrap to flare one moment across the sky, that would be a marvel and enough for one life.
