The magic in a poem is always accidental. No poet would labor intensively upon the intricate craft of poetry unless he hoped that, suddenly, the accident of magic would occur. He has to agree with Chesterton that the miraculous thing about miracles is that they do sometimes happen. And the best poem is that whose worked-upon unmagical passages come closest, in texture and intensity, to those moments of magical accident.... And there's this to be said, too. Poetry, to a poet, is the most rewarding work in the world. A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.... What's more, a poet is a poet for such a very tiny bit of his life; for the rest, he is a human being, one of whose responsibilities is to know and feel, as much as he can, all that is moving around and within him, so that his poetry, when he comes to write it, can be his attempt at an expression of the summit of man's experience on this very peculiar and, in 1946, this apparently hell-bent earth.
~ Dylan Thomas in "On Poetry" (1946), Quite Early One Morning
Posted by joydriven at June 11, 2004 10:43 PM | TrackBack