Status Updates From Collected Poems, 1934-1953

Now Spender himself has no idea of form; his poetry is so much like poetry, and so remote from poems, but I think most of his work will become almost as un unreadable as the worst of the Georgians – and very soon

The poem is, as all poems are, its own question and answer, it’s own contradiction, it’s own agreement. I ask only that my poetry be taken literally. The aim of the poem is the mark of the poem itself makes… A poem moves only towards its end, which is the last line. Anything further than that is the problematic stuff of poetry, not of the poem.

Very much of my poetry is, I know, an enquiry and a terror of fearful expectation, a discovery and facing a fear. I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, downthrow & upheaval, and my effort is their self expression.

… The life in any poem of mine cannot move concentrically round essential image; the life must come out of the centre; an image must be born and die in another; and any sequence of my images must be a sequence of creations, recreations, destructions, contradictions.

I let, perhaps, an image be made emotionally in me and then apply it to what intellectual and critical forces I possess – let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bread out of the other two together, a fourth and contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict.

Any poet or novelist you like to think of – he either works out of words or in the direction of them.