The Future Poetry

Practical Suggestions for Writing English Poetry

Practical Suggestions for Writing English Poetry - I

If you want to write English poetry which can stand, I would suggest three rules for you:

1) Avoid rhetorical turns and artifices and the rhetorical tone generally. An English poet can use these things at will because he has the intrinsic sense of his language and can keep the right proportion and measure. An Indian using them kills his poetry and produces a scholastic exercise.

2) Write modern English. Avoid frequent inversions or turns of language that belong to the past poetic styles. Modern English poetry uses a straightforward order and a natural style, not different in vocabulary, syntax, etc., from that of prose. An

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inversion can be used sometimes, but it must be done deliberately and for a distinct and particular effect.

3) For poetic effect rely wholly on the power of your substance, the magic of rhythm and the sincerity of your expression—if you can add subtlety so much the better, but not at the cost of sincerity and straightforwardness. Do not construct your poetry with the brain-mind, the mere intellect—that is not the source of true inspiration: write always from the inner heart of emotion and vision.

Practical Suggestions for Writing English Poetry - II

The poetry of your friend is rather irritating, because it is always just missing what it ought to achieve; one feels a considerable poetic possibility which does not produce work of some permanence because it is not scrupulous enough or has not a true technique. The reasons for the failure can be felt, but are not easy to analyse. Among them there is evidently the misfortune of having passed strongly under the influence of poets who smell of the schoolroom and the bookworm's closet. Such awful things as "unsoughten", "a-journeying," "a-knocking," "strayèd gift" and the constant abuse of the auxiliary verb "to do" would be enough to damn even the best poem. If he would rigorously modernise his language, one obstacle to real poetic success would perhaps disappear,—provided he does not, on the contrary, colloquialise it too much—e.g. "my dear", etc. But the other grave defect is that he is constantly composing out of his brain, while one feels that a pressure from a deeper source is there and might break through, if only he would let it. Of course, it is a foreign language he is writing and very few can do their poetic best in a learned medium; but still the defect is there.

22.6.1931