Artificial Art

In 1955 the British Council, in collaboration with the Poetry Room at Harvard University, initiated a project called “The Poet Speaks.” Along with several colleagues, Peter Orr, head of the council’s recorded sound department, interviewed and recorded poets throughout Britain, and a wonderful series of spoken-word LPs showcasing the project was released on the Argo label. Over 20 years, more than 200 poets were interviewed—from Sylvia Plath and Louis MacNeice to Philip Larkin and W.H. Auden. In 1963, Orr interviewed Rosemary Tonks. The following is a transcript of that interview, which aired on BBC radio.

-The Editors

Listen to the full audio of the interview:

I think it diabolical, this getting of a poet out of his or her back room and the making of them into public figures who have to give opinions every 20 seconds. I know this is what the French do, but I don’t approve of it.

You don’t think it helps, do you, for a poet to talk direct to his public, otherwise than through his poetry?

Well, I avoid this on every possible occasion, first of all because it means a loss of something like two weeks’ work, during which time I worry about it, and then I get over it. When one is writing one is an introvert, and when one goes onto a stage one must make oneself into an extrovert.

Unless, I suppose, one is a Dylan Thomas kind of person who enjoys that sort of thing enormously?

Yes, but it killed him eventually, the enormous strain of each performance, for a man who was both, of course, but who found it progressively more strenuous and who wrote less and less poetry, so that every time he went on the stage he knew that he was giving up another poem, practically, which he could have written. You either read and you give talks and you become a public person, or else you write consistently and every day and think on a certain level. You can’t go back to that deep level of thinking if you are too much a social person.

Does this deep level of thinking preclude the idea of an audience?

I could communicate if only the English weren’t quite so English, but you know they don’t finish their sentences; and anyway they are not passionately concerned with their subject, and so the conversation tends to turn into a series of already-hammered-out academic platitudes, which means to say you are not going to break fresh ground, you are only going to exchange academies.

Does this mean you keep away from the society of other poets as much as you can?

No, I try to seek it out. At one time, of course, when I was alone, I frightfully wanted to meet other poets. Now I go and meet them occasionally as a duty but they are rather a lost set, you know, here in London. They form movements.

Do you feel, then, that contemporary poetry is a bit of a dead end?

It could be a great deal more exciting. I don’t understand why poets are quite ready to pick up trivialities, but are terrified of writing of passions. I remember it was Stendhal who was praising Byron at the time, because he said here is a great contemporary who writes of human passions, and this is something which has completely gone out of fashion, if you like. You can write if you are disgruntled, in the present day. This is quite enough to carry a poem, so current thought has it. You can have a tiff with your wife and that is enough. But all the really tremendous feelings you live by have been ignored, or people just get round them.

So the real poetry to you is a kind of elemental poetry?

Dealing with the things which really move people. People are born, they procreate, they suffer, they are nasty to one another, they are greedy, they are terribly happy, they have changes in their fortune, and they meet other people who have effects on them, and then they die; and these thousands of dramatic things happen to them, and they happen to everybody. Everybody has to make terrible decisions or pass examinations, or fall in love, or else avoid falling in love. All these things happen and contemporary poets don’t write about them. Why not?

You don’t feel now that we are more conscious, say, than people were two or three hundred years ago of the world around us, the world outside us, of things which are happening in the world like starvation and (a trite thing again to say) the shadow of the hydrogen bomb?

I think they are academically conscious of these things and that is no bad thing, because to be conscious of them at all is very important. But that is a dry consciousness. Mass starvation is an enormous theme and you need a large soul to be able to tackle it. You can’t tackle it with a trivial, offhand sensibility.

You mean you have to be able to comprehend this effect of starvation, and to feel it?

You must feel it: otherwise how are you going to make a poem about it? It’s better in prose.

And is this something that you would feel would be, for you, material for a poem?

Well, you see, I would have to experience it. I have been to countries like India, where people are deformed and ill, and I became ill myself. It was, frankly, almost too terrible to write about.

You mean, it was too close to yourself there?

Yes, you see, essentially, although my poems are a bit dark in spirit at the moment, I want to show people that the world is absolutely tremendous, and this is more important than making notes on even the most awful contemporary ills. One wants to raise people up, not cast them down. Or if you are going to write of these desperate things, then you must put them in their context and show the other side of the picture. This is very much a duty, isn’t it?

How much of the tone of what you write depends on how you yourself are feeling at a particular moment? I mean, if you get up in the morning bad-tempered, do you write a bad-tempered poem?

No. Because first of all, I live with the idea of the poem, think about it before I write it, and then I find the right vocabulary for it, and then I find exactly what I want to say, then I test it a hundred times with life to make sure it’s true, so that it isn’t thrown off quickly.

So that the writing of a single poem is a long and rigorous experience for you, is it?

It sounds long and rigorous, but it isn’t like that at all; it is frightfully exciting. All these poems have taken quite a long time, a couple of months, because there are layers of thought under them. Now I am trying to express the thought in a much lighter fashion with a colloquial comment. I am trying to develop an idea with a comment like Aristophanes. Cavafy comments also and, in fact, in the case of Cavafy the whole poem is held together by the quality of the comment, almost, which is the comment of a delightfully wryly-humored man who has seen every kind and turn of human circumstance.

So do you feel at some point in the poem that the poet has to emerge as an editorial figure, let us say? Does he have to take sides, does he have to emerge, as one poet put it, as a bully or as a judge?

I’m not sure about this. I don’t know whether this is raising a moral question or not. Everybody who writes takes a moral decision straight away, with the very act of putting down one sentence or another, there’s a moral bias to everything you write. I couldn’t take up one cause especially, and I don’t think I even want to stand outside my causes when I am writing about them.

Do you find yourself drawn to any particular set of themes?

 It depends. In this book, Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms, the themes, although different, are under the same driving force.

They’re urban mainly, aren’t they, with, perhaps, rural incursions, if I can put it that way?

I’m a tremendously lyrical poet and this has had to be cut away. My poems are strongly backboned and thought out, and I would write one poem after another about nightingales and leafy grots, but I can’t get a satisfactory poem out of it.

 Does this mean, then, that you are very critical of your own work?

I judge it the whole time. Only, if a poem has come off tremendously quickly, I am a bit doubtful about the language, but the actual theme of the poem has sharp scrutiny from the very first moment it enters my head, and it usually comes in after I have had conversations with people about their lives. That is what sets it off.

Do you find inspiration from literature in any way: not particularly poetry, drama, but, maybe, historical works?

Oh, yes, historical stories, not historical works, which are usually so terribly badly written, because historians can’t seem to learn how to write. I find French 19th-century literature tremendously exciting and inspiring. Once you have learnt that you can advance human sensibility in a certain way, you look at life in a new way; then you look back to literature, then you look out at life again. That’s how it works, isn’t it?

Have there been any writers, though, that have been a notable influence on you?

All the great writers from Shakespeare to Chekhov, practically all French literature.

You have never found yourself writing like them and having to stop yourself consciously?

Everybody does. The best thing about an influence is to realize it and to swallow it, and never to throw it away. It is like throwing away all the advantages of meter or rhyme, everything must be grist to your mill. You want to be on guard, but not afraid.

Somebody I was talking to in this vein recently said, “When you say so-and-so is influenced by, let us say, Dylan Thomas, what you really mean is that he isn’t sufficiently influenced by all the other writers in English literature.” Is this a point of view you would agree with?

Yes, one always tends to find somebody who is closer to oneself than the others, or whom one admires so desperately one wants to write like him, but this can be cured. You will only find your own idiom if you are grown up. If you are a person, in addition to being a well-read person, then you can cure your reading with your life.

In fact, the main stream of inspiration is a thing or environment which is around you and pressing on you directly?

No, which I make. Inspiration is a homemade thing. Poetry is an artificial art. The assumption that it is like dancing and singing, very close to nature, is an absolute fallacy. It is artificial from start to finish. You make it, but if it isn’t based on life, however much it is praised at the time, it will die. If it works it is almost more powerful than life, in the end.

Is the sound, the physical, audible sound of your poems important to you?

Yes, it is. But I don’t think a poem is only a poem to be read. I mean to say, it has a life on the paper which is quite as good as the life it has when it is read. It does not necessarily have to be read.

But you don’t feel, do you, as some of our contemporary poets do, that their poems exist really and fully on the printed page, but they don’t care how they sound when they’re read aloud?

Well, you see, there is an excitement for the eye in a poem on the page which is completely different from the ear’s reaction. Some poems, the eye can see nothing in them, literally, until they are read aloud. Basically, it would be fine if a poem could do both, but there are certain poems which never will do both, and are great poetry anyway.

So that you don’t feel that poetry is purely and simply singing?

No, it is not. It should do both. And, in fact, there are poems of mine which are quite difficult, but which I have put an awful lot of trouble into making musical, and the music has come over. “Poet as Gambler,” in which I labored on the music, is difficult to read, but, in fact, it is successful, I think.

You see, when I pick up a volume of verses by someone whose verses are unknown to me, my temptation is to read them aloud to myself.

Really? But isn’t this because your ear is so well-trained that you want to test it on the part of you which is best trained to take it?

That may be so, but on the other hand, this would destroy for me the enjoyment, if I applied it all the time rigorously to every poem written for the printed page. But what I meant to ask you is, you don’t have a person like me in mind when you write your poems, then, do you?

No, I don’t actually. I wish I had somebody in mind, but I feel extremely alone, I may say.

But the idea of communication, of somebody receiving, is important to you, is it?

Yes, because one writes poems to be read, doesn’t one, and there is no nonsense about that. If I make what I want to say well enough, somebody will respond to it, perhaps. I have to create my own sensibility forcefully enough for them first of all to recognize that it is valid, and also to like the sort of world I am giving them, because I am giving them a new world.

Interview recorded in London on July 22, 1963