When I write a poem I try to know what I am doing—at least with respect to craft. Luck is needed too, of course, and luck is unpredictable. All I know about it is that it has to be earned. Everything beneath the surface of technique remains obscure. It is this subterranean world … I shall try to explore in these very tentative notes. (p. 20)

I do not believe in progress in the ordinary sense of the word. The more recent poems in [Collected Verse] are neither "better" nor "worse" than the earlier, and what differences there are depend on the genre or the occasion, not on the time of writing…. The different voices and different modes called for by the different occasions should not obscure the underlying unity pervading even the most apparently different poems. Ballade un peu Banale is in one tone, Good Friday and Canticle of St. John are in another; but each is equally serious, and each modifies the others…. I agree with Geoffrey Grigson that there is no essential difference between an epic and a limerick. "You cannot suppose a divine or an inspired origin for one against a secular or rational origin for the other." Each must be equally well written; each must be as good as its author can make it. That is the function of the poet with respect to his poems. He is a craftsman, and for a great part of the time he is a conscious craftsman. It is only in the essential climactic moment (or hour) that the Muse takes over and the work goes on one cannot say how or why.

My poems are not, I think, autobiographical, subjective, or personal in the obvious and perhaps superficial sense. None of them is revery, confession, or direct self-expression. They are fiction, drama, art; sometimes pastiche, sometimes burlesque, and sometimes respectful parody; pictures of possible attitudes explored in turn; butterflies, moths, or beetles pinned wriggling—some of them, I hope—on the page or screen for your, and my, inspection. The "I" of the poem, the protagonist of its tragedy or the clown of its pantomime, is not me. As Rimbaud said, Je est un autre, I is another.

"Indeed?" I can hear you explain. "Then who is this collector of butterflies and bugs you have been describing? Your emblem ought to be the chameleon or mole, not the Phoenix or swan."

You have a point all right. And it's an important one. It goes to the heart of the general problem of the role of personality, conscious and unconscious, in artistic creation—the problem, indeed, of personal responsibility. As a poet (no philosopher or moralist) I can only touch upon it lightly and indirectly—as in the poem Poor Innocent:

             It is a gentle natural (is it I?) who
             Visits timidly the big world of
             The heart, &c.
                                    (pp. 22-3)

The controlling mind, the critical shaping faculty of the rational consciousness sends the tremulous instinctive and sensuous fancy packing.

It is this rather bossy intelligence which chooses what is to be expressed, considers how, and judges the final outcome. But what a lot escapes it—or cajoles it, or fools it! It did not choose the images, the metaphors, the sensations, or the sounds that chime and clash in the consonants and vowels—though it did eventually approve them…. Where do the images of a writer come from? From experience, I suppose. But not—in my case at least—from experience as emotion, and not remembered (that is, not consciously remembered) in tranquillity or otherwise. When, for instance, did I look up at an "icicle sharp kaleidoscopic white sky" or see "birds like dark starlight twinkle in the sky"? When did I gaze on "the gold sun's winding stair" in the deep pine-woods or see "the green hills caked with ice" under a bloodshot moon? I don't know when, but I must have, waking or in dream, and the experience sank into the depths of the Self to be dredged up heaven knows how long afterwards. (pp. 23-4)

Let us return to the known world of the consciousness. Irony and wit are intentional, and I note that there is one device of irony that I have seemed to find particularly congenial. This is ironic understatement or anti-climax, the intentional and rather insulting drop into bathos. This can be dangerous when turned upon oneself; ironic self-depreciation can be too easily taken by others as sober literal truth. But when turned against the knaves and fools who are the traditional targets of classical satire it can be very effective. (p. 24)

It is obvious that there is much here that is consciously contrived; much too whose author, a greater poet might say, is in eternity. How good either is, it is not for me to say. I hope every reader of this piece will buy the book and judge for himself. (p. 26)