"The best lack all conviction,While the worst are full of passionate intesity."Those two lines
of Yeats for me sum up the matter as it stands today when the very currency ofbelief seems debased.
I was brought up in the Christian church. Later I believed for a while thatcommunism offered the
best hope for this world. I acknowledge the need for belief, but Icannot forget how through the ages
great faiths have been vitiated by fanaticism anddogmatism, by intolerance and cruelty, by the
intellectual dishonesty, the folly, thecrankiness or the opportunism of their adherents.
Have I no faith at all, then? Faith is the thing at the core of you, the sediment that's left
whenhopes and illusions are drained away. The thing for which you make any sacrifice becausewithout
it you would be nothing - a mere walking shadow. I know what my own core is. Iwould in the last
resort sacrifice any human relationship, any way of living to the search fortruth which produces
my poem. I know there are heavy odds against any poem I write survivingafter my death. I realize
that writing poetry may seem the most preposterously useless thing aman can be doing today. Yet it
is just at such times of crisis that each man discovers orrediscovers what he values most. My
poet's instinct to make something comes out moststrongly then, enabling me to use fear, doubt, even
despair as creative stimuli. In doing so, Ifeel my kinship with humanity, with the common man who
carries on doing his job till thebomb falls or the sea closes over him. Carries on because of his
belief, however inarticulate, thatthis is the best thing he can do.
But the poet is luckier than the layman, for his job is always a vacation. Indeed, it's so like
areligious vacation that he may feel little need for a religious faith, but because it is always
tryingto get past the trivial and the transient or to reveal these as images of the essential and
thepermanent, poetry is at least a kind of spiritual activity.
Men need a religious belief to make sense out of life. I wish I had such a belief myself, but
anycreed of mine would be honeycombed with confusions and reservations. Yet when I write apoem I am
trying to make sense out of life. And just now and then my experience composesand transmutes itself
into a poem which tells me something I didn't know I knew.
So for me the compulsion of poetry is the sign of a belief, not the less real for beingunformulated
... a belief that men must enjoy life, explore life, enhance life. Each as best hecan. And that I
shall do these things best through the practice of poetry.