A day is dulled and dimmed if it passes and I do not pick up a book of poems in my library, browse in some anthology, find a new poem in the latest issue of Poetry Review or The New Yorker or some other magazine or at least glance at some old favourite lines from Hopkins, Walcott, Yeats, Carter or a score of other supreme masters of the art and craft of making poems.
In most people’s lives poetry is absent. Of course I do not blame or condemn them, especially as many live better, more considerate, more caring and constructive lives than I do. But how sad, I think, that he or she may never have read, and may never read, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s great and terrible sonnets or Yeats’s Among School Children (which I once heard Martin Carter call the best poem ever written) or Derek Walcott’s astonishing autobiographical poem Another Life or the agonising lines about the death of his wife by Robinson Jeffers in his poem Hungerfield or any one of a thousand other masterpieces.
