It is surely astonishing how many young people of both sexes, when asked what they want to be in life, give neither a sensible answer like “a lawyer, a farmer, an innkeeper”, nor a romantic answer like “an explorer, a racing motorist, a missionary, President of the United States”. No, an astonishing number reply “a writer”, and by writing they mean — dreadful word — “creative” writing. Even if they say: “I want to go into journalism”, this is only because they are under the illusion that in that profession they will be able to create. Even if their most genuine desire is really to make money, they will still make for some highly paid sub-literary pursuit like Advertising.

Among this host of would-be writers, the majority have no literary gift. This is not surprising in itself. A marked gift for anything is not very common.

What is surprising is that such a high percentage of those without a marked talent for any particular profession should think of writing as the solution. One would expect that a certain percentage would imagine they had a talent for medicine, a certain percentage for engineering, and so on. But this is not the case. In our age, if a boy or a girl is untalented, the odds are in favour of their thinking they want to write.

When so many untalented people all express a wish to write, the public must be labouring under some strange misapprehensions as to the nature of literature. They must imagine, for example,

either (1) that writing requires no special talent but is something that any human being, by virtue of his humanity, can do if he tries,

or (2) that writing is the only occupation today in which one is free to do as one likes, the only one in modern society where one can act as an individual, not as a depersonalised cog in a machine,

(3) that writing — and this idea, is, I think, particularly prevalent in regard to the writing of poetry — is a kind of religious technique, a way of learning to be happy and good. In my opinion, the public is partially right as regards (2), namely in thinking that the writing of art is gratuitous, ie play, but precisely because of this, their other two ideas must be wrong.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. Whether this love is a sign of his poetic gift or the gift itself — for falling in love is given not chosen — I don’t know, but it is certainly the sign by which one recognises whether a young man is potentially a poet or not.

“Why do you want to write poetry?” If the young man answers: “I have important things I want to say,” then he is not a poet. If he answers: “I like hanging around words listening to what they say,” then maybe he is going to be a poet.

As TS Eliot has said in one of his essays, the sign of promise in a young writer is not originality of idea or emotion, but technical competence. The subject matter of promising juvenilia is as a rule slight and unimportant, the style derivative, but this slight derivative thing is completely said.

Two theories of poetry. Poetry as a magical means for inducing desirable emotions and repelling undesirable emotions in oneself and others, or Poetry as a game of knowledge, a bringing to consciousness, by naming them, of emotions and their hidden relationships.

The first view was held by the Greeks and is now held by MGM, Agit-Prop and the collective public of the world. They are wrong.

The girl whose boyfriend starts writing her love poems should be on her guard. Perhaps he really does love her, but one thing is certain: while he was writing his poems he was not thinking of her but of his own feelings about her and that is suspicious. Let her remember St Augustine’s confession of his feelings after the death of someone he loved very much: “I would rather have been deprived of my friend than of my grief.”

Everyone in his heart of hearts agrees with Baudelaire: “To be a useful person has always seemed to me something particularly horrible,” for, subjectively, to be useful means to be doing not what one wants to do, but what someone else insists on one’s doing. But at the same time, everyone is ashamed to admit in public that he is useless. Thus if a poet gets into conversation with a stranger in a railway coach and the latter asks him: “What is your job?”, he will think quickly and say: “A schoolteacher, a beekeeper, a bootlegger,” because to tell the truth would cause an incredulous and embarrassing silence.

The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolteachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow-poets. This means that, in fact, he writes for his fellow-poets.

Happy the lot of the pure mathematician. He is judged solely by his peers and the standard is so high that no colleague can ever win a reputation he does not deserve. No cashier writes articles in the Sunday [New York] Times complaining about the incomprehensibility of modern mathematics and comparing it unfavourably with the good old days when mathematicians were content to paper irregularly shaped rooms or fill bathtubs with the waste-pipe open.

It is a sobering experience for any poet to read the last page of the Books section of the Sunday Times where correspondents seek to identify poems which have meant much to them. He is forced to realise that it is not his work, not even the work of Dante or Shake-speare, that most people treasure as magic talismans in time of trouble, but grotesquely bad verses written by maiden ladies in local newspapers; that millions in their bereavements, heartbreaks, agonies, depressions, have been comforted and perhaps saved from despair by appalling trash while poetry stood helplessly and incompetently by.

From Poets at Work ©1948 by WH Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd

The bewitching hours

“When I first read Auden, as a schoolboy,” writes Andrew Motion, “I was bewitched. It was poetic language of a sort I’d never come across before: language drawn from engineering, from commerce, from very unpoetic worlds. I wanted to be like that. In 1972, when I was an undergraduate and Auden was living in Oxford, we were introduced. It was like meeting God. I sent him some of my poems and he wrote and said, ‘Let’s talk about them.’

So every Thursday at 4pm, I knocked on the door of his cottage next to Christ Church. There were black leather armchairs almost as wrinkly as him and I remember a Hockney etching of a naked boy — behind the door so you could only see it once you were inside. At 6pm exactly, he’d make me a martini. Our meetings were about knocking into shape things that needed redrafting. It was nitty-gritty stuff, nuts-and-bolts, details. You’d call it a creative-writing class, now, I suppose but the term didn’t exist then. He gave me a sense of possibility, the blessing of his interest.”

OXFORD LITERARY FESTIVAL

Andrew Motion, John Fuller and Simon Callow celebrate Auden at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival, on Tuesday, March 20, at 6pm

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