Szirtes, George - Andrew Motion (review date April 1984)
Andrew Motion (review date April 1984)
SOURCE: Motion, Andrew. “Too True.” Poetry Review 74, no. 1 (April 1984): 64.
[In the following review, Motion discusses the love poetry of Szirtes.]
Once in a while, or maybe only once in a lifetime, most of us want to write love poems. And most of us, especially if the love we want to write about is happy, find it dismayingly difficult. Why? The most obvious reason—or at least the most commonly given, and the one made famous by Larkin—is that ‘happiness writes white’. It's an appealing excuse for the elegiac English sensibility. But behind it lies a complicated question about audience. It's usual for poets to claim that their relationship with their readership, no matter what its size, is always one to one—the point being that poetry is intimate and, in John Stuart Mill's word, ‘overheard’; it's a form of address to which every breast returns its own unique echo. With love poetry,...
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