![]() ![]() ![]() of the work” (Auden was a great reviser), but about the truthfulness of one’s response to any compelling situation, which might be an express delivery (‘Night Mail’) or The Tempest (‘The Sea and the Mirror’) or political disaffection (‘Under Which Lyre’), or hopeless love (‘If I Could Tell You’), or anything at all. This definition comes in ‘Making, Knowing, Judging’, his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, given in 1956 and collected in The Dyer’s Hand (1963), an anthology of essays as powerful and as intimate as any of his poems, and the instrument in my case, while I was still at university, of a freeing revelation that writing wasn’t about having something original to say, and certainly not about Yeats’s “perfection. By “sacred being” he did not mean a deity, or (to use his term) the Good One he meant (borrowing his frames of reference from Coleridge and Keats) a presence, or a moment burdened with significance: “it may be noble or something unmentionable in a drawing room, it may be anything it likes on condition, but this condition is absolute, that it arouse awe.” ![]() It was his life-long subject, in fact: how to respond to an encounter with a sacred being. Anyone who has tried to write a poem has wondered, long before the words settle into lines, at the compulsion itself, the sense of urgent waiting in the room, and no one has described the feeling as beautifully as W.H. ![]()
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