There are at least two words 'poetry', one meaning linguistic activity of a certain kind, the other meaning verbal matter produced by such activity. I speak in this little essay of what it is that poets are doing and what their activity amounts to in the scales of human behaviour, rather than of poetry the verbal matter - although I may be drawn into making incidental references to it. Another way of describing my point of view, here, is to say that I am trying, here, to function in the field of human criticism rather than in that of literary criticism. (In my fundamental attitude to poetry as a poet, my conception of poetry was not a categorically literary one.)

LRB 7 September 1995 | PDF Download