Often one spends weeks trying to write a poem out of the conscious mind that never comes to anything - these are sort of 'ideal' poems that one feels ought to be written, but don't because (I fancy) they lack the vital spark of self-interest. A 'real' poem is a pleasure to write. Philip Larkin
About This Quote

Lord Byron is a very well-known English Poet. He was a Romantic Poet. He was the one who wrote to the Queen of England, "I am the most miserable man living." "I am the most miserable man living." - Lord Byron "Often one spends weeks trying to write a poem out of the conscious mind that never comes to anything - these are sort of 'ideal' poems that one feels ought to be written, but don't because (I fancy) they lack the vital spark of self-interest." -Lord Byron The importance of self-interest in poetry is something that's acutely apparent in Lord Byron's words. When you really get down to it, what makes poems fun to write is that they're not just about love or about nature or about war, but they're about you.

The reason you're writing it is because you're you and you're thinking about yourself while you're doing it. You want to be thought of as a good writer, so good writers try and think about themselves when they sit down to write.

Source: Philip Larkin: Letters To Monica

Some Similar Quotes
  1. Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake. - Wallace Stevens
  2. To be great, be whole; Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you. Be whole in everything. Put all you are Into the smallest thing you do. So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor Because it blooms up above. - Fernando Pessoa
  3. The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it. - Jane Kenyon
  4. Truth is a friendthat asks for loyaltyand acceptancethen it enters our heartsdissolving the boundariesfreeing us from lonliness - Nirmala
  5. Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may record our emptiness. - Kahlil Gibran
More Quotes By Philip Larkin
  1. What will survive of us is love.
  2. Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone fidelity They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.
  3. I'm terrified of the thought of time passing (or whatever is meant by that phrase) whether I 'do' anything or not. In a way I may believe, deep down, that doing nothing acts as a brake on 'time's - it doesn't of course. It merely...
  4. I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others & myself...
  5. One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the same day as we do ourselves.
Related Topics