The Light Side of the Moon

as much nonsense has been talked about poetry as about gastronomy or politics. Any great branch of human endeavor spawns its critics and its interpreters, some of them men of valorous minds, many with little equipment except the desire publicly to be heard. Indeed, since poetry is at base a word game and therefore capable of being examined by a horde of word-lovers, it is perhaps the most overscrutinized of accomplishments. Even the people who ought to understand it best the poets are not altogether to be trusted. Poets practice an irrational art. Theirs is an attempt to express the inexpressible (maybe as good a definition of poetry as any other) and they often bring it off. In other words, the outward shape of a poem may be logically planned but it has its nativity in imagination rather than mind. Trying to explain their procedures after the event, poets invent. They attribute conscious artifice to what was essentially a creative experience, a kind of drunkenness. I suppose I am alluding to that intangible which amateurs call Inspiration. There is such a thing as inspiration (lower case), but it is no miracle. It is the reward handed to a writer for hard work