Not Writing the Poem

According to Henry David Thoreau, “the art of life, of a poet’s life, is, not having anything to do.” W. H. Auden quoted this line just before launching into “Making, Knowing and Judging,” an essay based on a lecture that he delivered after he was named Oxford professor of poetry and that he opened by querying the very terms of that distinguished position: “Even the greatest of that long line of scholars and poets who have held this chair before me . . . must have asked themselves: ‘What is a Professor of Poetry? How can Poetry be professed?’”

This isn’t a question that many people ask nowadays. As recently as 1948 Robert Graves was still declaring, “Though recognized as a learned profession [poetry] is the only one for the study of which no academies are open and in which there is no yard-stick, however crude, by which technical proficiency is considered measurable.” Unfortunately, however, that long tradition has vanished. Today poetry has become a career rather than a vocation; and, at least in the United States, poets who refuse to buy a degree for the sake of a job (or, more often, the shadowy dream of a job) are generally ignored as serious artists, at least by the collegiate elite.

Yet Thoreau had it right: art doesn’t require a certificate of proficiency. It requires long stretches of emptiness, not only so that artists have spans of time to produce new work but, more important, so that they can attend to the plain routines of living. Great art grows from the intensity of an artist’s interaction with his or her own life. I don’t mean to imply that her life has to be dramatic or even all that interesting. But the artist must make long acquaintance with her days—days that are rarely trancelike but that plod through the seasons: that strip the beds and ream out the barns and trudge through the snow to the insurance office. In this sense, then, to “profess poetry” a writer simply needs to pay attention to her hours, read the words of people who paid attention to their hours, now and then follow an urge to hammer those hours and words into her own poem, and occasionally be willing to talk about that task. As Auden said, “There is nothing a would-be poet knows he has to know. He is at the mercy of the immediate moment because he has no concrete reason for not yielding to its demands.” In other words he is merely awake and alive.

There are days when I believe that being awake and alive is the only thing I’ve managed to accomplish with my life. I seem accidentally to have followed Thoreau’s instructions to avoid “having anything to do.” Instead I’ve spent or squandered most of my career years being a cook, a laundress, and an underemployed, mostly self-educated reader and writer of small obscure books. Talking about his trajectory as a novelist, John Fowles said, “I had been deliberately living in the wilderness; that is, doing work I could never really love, precisely because I was afraid I might fall in love with my work and then forever afterwards be one of those sad, faded myriads among the intelligentsia who have always had vague literary ambitions but have never quite made it.” My actions have been neither so ascetic nor so ruthless. Nonetheless there’s a selfishness about a life spent doing nothing, especially when one has growing children and a tired husband. Twenty years of well-cooked meals and clean socks are not substitutes for a paycheck.

This trade-off seems even worse when I’m struggling to write, as I have been during the past few months. If I’m not managing to do anything remunerative, shouldn’t I at least be writing? In truth, however, my problem is not “not writing” per se. Clearly at this very moment I’m writing this essay. Almost every morning I write a longish blog post about reading and writing. I read seriously every day; I’ve been steadily revising...