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Articles
Poetry and Biography
Roger Caldwell on meaning and innocence.
When I first started to write poetry there was for me no conflict between life and ‘art’ – and no evident connection either. When, as a fourteenyear- old, I tapped out on my newly-acquired typewriter the words which came to me, I had no idea that this was an activity in any way abnormal. Later, having entered the Sixth Form, I discovered that what I was writing was modern poetry, or what looked like it, so I gave titles to my sequences of words, and sent the results off to poetry magazines. I was vaguely aware that what I wrote carried some meaning or other, but was little concerned with what it might be. My criteria for success were those of feeling and sounding right; the sense, if any, was no concern of mine.
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