The concern of the poet in 1956 A.D. is still the same as it was in 1956 B.C. That is to say, he is not interested in personalities or psychology or progress or news -- the extreme opposite of poetry is the daily newspaper. What moves him to write are his encounters with the sacred or numinous, in nature, in human beings -- nothing else. By the sacred, I do not, of course, mean only the good. "La belle Dame sans Merce" is as sacred as "Beatrice." The sacred can arouse terror and despair as well as awe and wonder or joy and gratitude. Nor is the sacred confined to the romantically mysterious fairy lands forlorn. Indeed every set of verses, whatever their subject, are by their formal nature a hymn to Natural Law and a gesture of astonishment at that greatest of mysteries, the order of the universe. No one and nothing becomes sacred, and hence a poetic subject, by their own efforts; it is rather the sacred that chooses them as agents through which to manifest itself. Vice versa, the poet cannot feel its presence by wishing to. To say that good poetry must be inspired means, not that poems are a sort of automatic writing enticing us to work, but that the stimulus to a good poem is given the poet -- he cannot simply think one up.

The essential difficulty for the poet in the present age is not that he has some peculiar experiences which others do not have. No, all of us, readers and nonreaders alike, are in the same boat. We all have experiences of the sacred, but fewer and fewer of them are public, so that the present-day reader of poetry has to translate a poem into his own experiences before he can understand it in a way that readers in earlier times did not.

Before people complain about the obscurity of modern poetry, they should, I think, first ask themselves how many profound experiences they themselves have really shared with another person.