Windbags Can Be Right. Aphorists Can Be

The Composer Does Not Want The Self-sufficiency Of A Richly Complex Text: He Or She Wants To Feel That The Text Is Something In Need Of Musical Setting.

Writing For The Page Is Only One Form Of Writing For The Eye. Wherever Solemn Inscriptions Are Put Up In Public Places, There Is A Sense That The Site And The Occasion Demand A Form Of Writing Which Goes Beyond Plain Informative Prose. Each Word Is So Valued That The Letters Forming It Are Seen As Objects Of Solemn Beauty.

The Voice Is Raised, And That Is Where Poetry Begins. And Even Today, In The Prolonged Aftermath Of Modernism, In Places Where "open Form" Or Free Verse Is The Orthodoxy, You Will Find A Memory Of That Raising Of The Voice In The Term "heightened Speech".

My Feeling Is That Poetry Will Wither On The Vine If You Don't Regularly Come Back To The Simplest Fundamentals Of The Poem: Rhythm, Rhyme, Simple Subjects - Love, Death, War.

When Mr Ackroyd Says That In The 18th Century, Stranglers Bit Off The Noses Of Their Victims, I Feel That He Probably Knows What He Is Talking About. I Just Wish He Hadn't Told Me.