Why I Write

Much of what I have to tell you is anecdotal, rooted in a personal meditation, but throughout I have tried to tease out the implications of my own experience. I am reminded of T.S. Eliot’s ideas about poets writing about poetry: “The poet, at the back of his mind, if not as his ostensible purpose, is always trying to defend the kind of poetry he is writing or to formulate the kinds he wants to write. He is not so much a judge as an advocate.”

It seems to me that all writers, at some point, must respond to a question—posed either by themselves or someone else—in order to answer, as Orwell did in his 1946 essay, “Why I Write.” The first time I had to do this I was trying to get into a graduate creative writing program and I needed a statement of purpose. Back then, my father, a poet and professor of English, suggested that I read—of all things—Orwell’s essay. I could barely contain my excitement when I sat down with it. His words were thrilling; they seemed to speak directly to me, emboldening me as they provided a scaffolding of ideas that seemed to justify one of my evolving attractions to words. These sentences stood out to me: “I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed”; and, “Looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives, and humbug generally.” Armed with Orwell’s words (I know I must have quoted him), I composed my essay, and—as I would find out a few years later—barely got into that graduate program. A famous poet on the admissions committee rejected the sheaf of poems and the statement included in my application by writing on a little slip of paper that I was “too concerned with my message to write real poetry.” I was lucky that a second poet on the committee, on yet another slip of paper, had concluded—instead—that I was “young and could be woken up.”

Later, when I learned of their remarks, I had to look up the word message and ponder the definition: a significant point or central theme, especially one that has political, social, or moral importance. And then, I asked myself: What was wrong with that? Hadn’t those things always been a part of poetry? Didn’t the poems I loved stir in me a moral vision, a sense of empathy, of social, ethical engagement? Hadn’t I turned to them to learn something about myself, my relationship to the world? The poems of Yeats and Whitman, Auden and Bishop, Williams and Hayden, Brooks, Ahkmatova and Hughes: and did I not attend as much to their music, their sound, as to their meaning, the messages I took away from them? What mistake had I made by revealing that political, social, and ethical concerns undergirded my poems and gave me a sense of purpose? Discouraged, I began to ask myself what had made me think, beyond Orwell’s words, that I should be a writer and that the subject matter that would be my calling was worth answering in the language of poetry. Looking back at Orwell’s essay now, twenty years later, I see points to disagree with—and yet, there are still parts that ring true to me, that help me make sense of my early impulses and the commitments I have even today.

It should be noted that long before Orwell would arrive fully at his sense of political purpose, he discovered—as he puts it—the “joy of mere words,” the sounds and associations of them, how they could send shivers down one’s spine, pure pleasure. In this acknowledgment, I found an echo of my own experience—that moment of reading something that was thrilling in its use of language and that feeling of delight in words just for their sound...