I have been re-reading Martin Carter as one should regularly do. He is, without reservation, the finest of all Guyanese poets. He is also, without reservation, one of the finest poets to have emerged in the Caribbean region. And the varied subtlety and power of his poetry carries him without any doubt into the first rank of world poets.
How are great poets created? It is a mystery. It is like asking for an explanation of a cover drive by Rohan Kanhai. It is the same mystery that surrounds fundamental scientific discoveries. One answer is that it is simply genius doing what it must. Shelley expressed this view:
“A man cannot say, I will compose poetry. The greatest
poet, even, cannot say it; for the mind in creation is a
fading coal, which some invisible influence like an
inconstant wind awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the odour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic whether of its approach or its departure.”
But there is surely more discipline in it than that. Genius needs to be cultivated. How many hours at the nets did it take Kanhai to perfect his cover drive? How many hours past midnight did Einstein spend on his calculation before the relativity theory emerged full-blown? We know very well the labours of revision and rewriting which went into T.S. Eliot’s “Waste Land.”
It is this necessary combination of innate genius and dedicated hard work that produces the great poet, the great painter, the great batsman, the great anything. Martin Carter played many roles in an eventful life – he was a radical politician, Cabinet Minister, U.N. Ambassador and University lecturer among other things – but above all the he was a poet. Rainer Maria Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet gave the following advice:
“This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour of
your night: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a
deep answer. And if this should be in the affirmative,
if you may meet this solemn question with a strong and
simple “I must”, then build your life according to this necessity; your life must, right to its most unimportant and insignificant hour, become a token and a witness of this impulse.”
Martin Carter always built his life around the necessity of poetry. We are the beneficiaries of that dedication. For one thing can be said for sure: infinitesimally few great poems are ever created. The American poet, Randall Jarrell, in a letter to a fellowpoet spelt it out about right:
“How hard it is to write a good poem! How few good poems
there are! What strange things you and I are, if we are!
When we are! To have written one good poem – good used
seriously – is an unlikely and marvelous thing that only
a couple of hundred writers in English, at the most, have done – it’s like sitting in the yard in the evening and
having a meteorite fall in one’s lap.”
One fiery meteor is rare as a good poem is rare. But a shower of meteors is rarer still as is a whole collection of good poems. Let us be thankful that we have Carter’s Selected Poems, this shower of meteors dropping in our laps. These poems justify all of us. Long time to come those who come after us will say this at least they achieved, that they produced such a poet as this.
