Free Bedouin of the London Evening by Rosemary Tonks Page B

heightened should be justified both by art and by life; while the poet remains vulnerable to those moments when a poem suddenly makes its own terms – and with an overwhelming force that is self-justifying. For this reason certain poetic ideas have little validity when lifted out of context. I am consequently uneasy when discussing the logic of a poem with those whose intellectual equipment is purely mathematical. If you say that the English have a love of order which is puritanical, and the French a love of order which is imaginative, that does not make one more orderly than the other. The progress of feeling in a poem may be no less logical than the development of argument.
    Telling the truth about feeling requires prodigious integrity. Most people can describe a chest of drawers, but a state of mind is more resistant. A hackneyed metaphor is the first sign of a compromise with intention; your reader damns you instantly, and though he may read on with his senses, you have lost his heart. Some poets do manage to converge on their inner life by generating emotion from an inspired visual imagery; in this instance the images existin their own right, but may be thought to be in a weaker position as the raw material of the emotion in preference to a larger existence as illustration of it.
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    Poetry Book Society Bulletin
(Spring 1963)

Interview with Peter Orr
    TONKS: I think it diabolical, this getting of a poet out of his or her back room and the making of them into public figures who have to give opinions every twenty seconds. I know this is what the French do, but I don’t approve of it.
    ORR: You don’t think it helps, do you, for a poet to talk direct to his public, otherwise than through his poetry?
    TONKS: Well, I avoid this on every possible occasion, first of all because it means a loss of something like two weeks’ work, during which time I worry about it, and then I get over it. When one is writing one is an introvert, and when one goes on to a stage one must make oneself into an extrovert.
    ORR: Unless, I suppose, one is a Dylan Thomas kind of person who enjoys that sort of thing enormously?
    TONKS: Yes, but it killed him eventually, the enormous strain of each performance, for a man who was both, of course, but who found it progressively more strenuous and who wrote less and less poetry, so that every time he went on the stage he knew that he was giving up another poem, practically, which he could have written. You either read and you give talks and you become a public person, or else you write consistently and every day and think on a certain level. You can’t go back to that deep level of thinking if you are too much a social person.
    ORR: Does this deep level of thinking preclude the idea of an audience?
    TONKS: I could communicate if only the English weren’t quite so English, but you know they don’t finish their sentences; and anyway they are not passionately concerned with their subject, and so the conversation tends to turn into a series of already-hammered-out academic platitudes, which means to say you are not going to break fresh ground, you are only going to exchange academies.
    ORR: Does this mean you keep away from the society of other poets as much as you can?
    TONKS: No, I try to seek it out. At one time, of course, when I was alone, I frightfully wanted to meet other poets. Now I go and meet them occasionally as a duty but they are rather a lost set, you know, here in London. They form movements.
    ORR: Do you feel, then, that contemporary poetry is a bit of a dead end?
    TONKS: It could be a great deal more exciting. I don’t understand why poets are quite ready to pick up trivialities, but are terrified of writing of passions. I remember it was Stendhal who was praising Byron at the time, because he said here is a great contemporary who writes of human passions, and this is something which has completely gone out of fashion, if you like. You can write if you are disgruntled, in the