20th-century-british-poets

"The best poetry of the second World war written by both British & American servicemen need not fear comparison with the generally more well highly regarded work of the 1914-18 poets."

"Well, here I suppose is my life, or part of it, by which I would wish to be judged... poems which have been written from a sense of compulsion, a real need to explore and articulate experiences which have been important to me."

"The intellect had rejected the rational basis of belief, yet the imagination & sensibility yearn for simple faith."

"Some poets are more deeply involved than others in the raw experience which lies behind the poem and for them the act of composition is an act of self exploration with the definite goal of enlightenment rather than the ideally depersonalized construction of a beautiful and autonomous object."

"The poet's need to try to find his own voice , a recognizable individual voice that carries the signature of his voice in almost every line . . . the unique tone being the consequence of the poet's rigorous search for truth ( his truth(, his absolute fidelity to the nature of the experience he was exploring."

"The best poetry of WW2 , the most truthful and penetrating, poetry which is rooted in the ground of physical experience, suspicious of the abstract and conforming to the discipline of provenly effective forms."

"All true poets are, of course, primarily concerned with artifact, the making of a verbal construct, a durable work of art."

"The poet , absorbed in the solving of formal problems, the struggle with slippery eels of language, has no time for dissimulation and he tells us more about himself than he knows."

"I was the living proof of T. S Eliot's assertion that poetry can communicate before it is understood.the conscious,analytical part of my response was lulled into a kind of stupor by the rhythms and richness of the imagery of the poetry I was reading."

"The practice of reading aloud did do something towards attuning my ear .The subtle cadences of Elizabethan blank verse taught me more than the substantial study of English prosody could do at that time."

"Past events are not dead but constantly making their claims on the present, modifying it even as they themselves are modified in the maw of subsequent events and in the memory which is part of the shaping of imagination."

"I would say that my aims of writing this book are less concerned with the facts of history than with the truth of art."

"You can find out far more about a writer from his poems or fiction ..because in his stories or poems, his preoccupations, obsessions, moral standards, the quality of his intelligence, his loves, hates, aspirations, belief and fears.. insist on expression."

"I'm no novelist.Or anything else, I suppose, except, just possibly a poet, once in a while."

"Of my childhood & youth the greater part of which had been spent in an atmosphere of cultural twilight."

"The impulse to create is pure, self sufficient, its own reward or punishment."

"The proper act of reading of a poem was not an act of passive submission but one of collaboration with its author."

"All I am is in my verse."

"Neither Sassoon or Owen were notably exploratory or original in technique ,each developed a style which permitted them to give a full expression to their deepest thoughts & feelings about war."

"A word or a phrase or a line is not a poem. A poem is the exploration and shaping of an experience. A real poem demands intelligence, imagination, passion, understanding, experience and not least a knowledge of the craft."

"It is impossible for a poet to fashion the voice deliberately by contrivance and experiment; it could not be discovered or simulated through the cultivation of an eccentric diction or prosody, or by the employment of regional speech rhythms and patterns."

"I hope this book will throw a little light on the nature of human coutage and its lack..when the last argument of kings viz cannon or war pursues its loud & murderous course."

"The desire of a poet for his writings to be in print is as natural as a painter needs to exhibit his work in public."

"Poetry Archive"

"I believe one of the functions of language used poetically is to explore experiences and hidden sources of behavior in a way that will not be tedious to the reader."

"In the excitement and rigours of the game or battle with words and shapes, self-interest is mislaid and objective truth may often be revealed."

"As a writer, I must keep writing, poems can never be forced, the muses will not be raped, so I feel this kind of prose (autobiography), however inadequate, share some of the exploratory features of the poetic use of language."

"The genuinely innovatory , the truly 'experiential' poetry is always firmly rooted in the achievement of the past."

"The word experiment derives from 'experimentum' - that which has been experienced and what , for the writer , has been experienced is the work of his great predecessors"

"Whether we are writing prose or verse we must never use language in a merely decorative way, every qualifying word, every adjective and adverb must be carefully inspected & weighed before it is used and ask before its use , is it really necessary."

"Ther poetry of the second World War conveys the true feeling of those desolate and desperate days with an urgency and sense of truth that no other means of recording could emulate."

"The servicemen of the 1939 - 45 war could not be disillusioned because they held not illusions to start with, the most common mood found everywhere was one of dour resolution, skeptical, resigned."

"The authentic British poetry of the second world war was not a poetry of protest, still less was it inspired by patriotic enthusiasm"

"The great artist may be, outside the confines of his art, cruel, weak, arrogant and foolish, but within them he can transcend his own condition and become noble, passionate and truthful beyond the range of ordinary men."

"The Daily Worker has been renamed The Morning Star. I find nothing starry about it. A more informative new title would have been the Daily Striker."

"Do not despair For Johnny-head-in-air; He sleeps as sound As Johnny underground."

"Rhythm includes metre, but metre is a relatively small part of rhythm."

"Good free verse is not at all easy to write, for there is no repetitive beat to lull the reader's critical faculty, much pattern and discipline is to be found in it, though the pattern of sounds and choice of exact words, gives it its beauty."

"One way of looking at poetic periods is to notice what contemporary interests and knowledge penetrate the best verse written at the time and what moods are permitted in treating of these matters."

"A poet educated to his finger tips will tend to be allusive"

"It normally happens that if you put two words together, or two syllables together, one of them will attract more weight, more emphasis, than the other. In other words, most so-called spondees can be read as either iambs or trochees."

"Can the ear hear a thirteen-syllable line as consisting of thirteen syllables? I don't think so, but I think that a series of thirteen-syllable lines (supposing that was the length chosen) would, after a while, begin to have a characteristic resemblance. For the most part, though, counting the syllables seems to be something that works, if it works, for the poet. It is a private method of organization."

"Tennyson follows his feelings in creating each line. He follows the music in his head. If you had asked him, at the end of the day, to describe the prosody of the poem to you, he would no doubt have had to think for a moment before he could answer you, not because he was ignorant of the terms, but because he had been writing a poem, not a metrical exercise. At every point, he was exerting his free will. And the outcome of that exertion was the form."

"The composer does not want the self-sufficiency of a richly complex text: he or she wants to feel that the text is something in need of musical setting."

"There is always a nasty surprise in store for the imperial mind. It is typical of the imperial point of view that it is ignorant of, or blind to, the other. The imperial mind keeps missing the point. It fails to appreciate, for all its benevolence, why it might come under attack, why it might, for instance, be worth a nation's while to rise up against it. The imperial mind has to be shocked out of its daydreams."

"The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation."

"Imitation, if it is not forgery, is a fine thing. It stems from a generous impulse, and a realistic sense of what can and cannot be done."

"We are never such kleptomaniacs as in our juvenilia. We steal from our masters. We steal from our friends, from our enemies even. We try out tones of voice for which we are ill suited. We write as if we belong to some other period. We are suckers for gorgeous words such as nenuphar, asphodel, and pelf. And because we are not yet in command of our vehicle we get out of control. We reveal ourselves inadvertently and we inadvertently commit ourselves to some point of view that really isn't "us" at all."

"Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world."

"Among those today who believe that modern poetry must do without rhyme or metre, there is an assumption that the alternative to free verse is a crash course in villanelles, sestinas and other such fixed forms. But most...are rare in English poetry. Few poets have written a villanelle worth reading, or indeed regret not having done so."