How is a great poem created? It is a mystery. It is like asking for an explanation of a square cut by Gary Sobers or a cover drive by Rohan Kanhai. It is the same mystery that surrounds fundamental scientific discoveries.
One answer is that it is simply genius doing what it must. Shelley expressed this view:
“A man cannot say it, I will compose poetry. The greatest poet, even, cannot say; for the mind in creation is a fading coal, which some invisible influence like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises far 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 Sobers or a Kanhai to perfect their strokes? How may 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 T S 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 a 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 Geoff Boycott spent countless hours more at practice than Viv Richards 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? The genius in a man may be very occasionally 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.
Great genius itself may not be the best adviser in such matters. Reiner 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 a tremendous amount of very bad poetry. 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 fiery but faint scrap into a flame that will not catch.
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. Two occasions I remember and I still think about them without coming to any conclusion.
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 Heinemann for me. We were very 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 played, the circle of humorous and interesting friends I had made, the exploring in the savannas and up the big rivers, the girls I was seeing. 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 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.
Yet I also remember a summer’s evening a long, long time ago in a garden in Sussex. Just my grandmother, 75 years old, and I, her oldest grandson, were sitting together eating strawberries out in the open in beautiful sunlight and we were talking about this and that and began to talk about poetry. Unprompted by me she suddenly said something about her whole life which strikes me still. She said what a marvellous life she had enjoyed, good in every respect – childhood full of love, a good education, a happy marriage, children she had been proud of always, satisfying careers both as helpmate in her husband’s medical research and in her own right as broadcaster, information officer, and legislator (she was in the 1930s the first woman member of the Antiguan Legislative Council), fine friends, a lovely home full of the seawind. What more could there have been? And yet she found, at this age when life was almost over; that she was nagged by an uncomfortable regret. She had written poetry too; a couple of slim volumes had been published. And now it nagged and nagged in her that perhaps she had not been just to herself to have devoted so little of herself and her time to forcing out the poems that were in her. And so it seemed her life to that extent may have been wasted in a fundamental sense. I most emphatically denied any such waste in her full and accomplished life. But she was silent. Perhaps it was just an old lady’s mood. But it shook me a bit. Her life was such a wonderful life. Yet at the core of it why did she seem to feel there was an emptiness? Whence came this restless unfulfilment? Why did she still hunger so? It makes me uneasy still as my own days slip past.
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 meterorite 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.
