he French expression feu de joie refers to a military celebration when all the riflemen of a regiment fire one shot after another, in close succession: ideally the sound should be continuous, like a drumroll. I first saw a feu de joie performed at an Australian army tattoo, in the main arena at the Sydney Showground, while I was still in short trousers. Later on, when I was doing national service in longer trousers, I saw the ceremony performed again, on the parade ground in Ingleburn, New South Wales, in 1958. Symbolically, the fire of joy is a reminder that the regiment’s collective power relies on the individual, and vice versa. Imprinted on my mind, the succession of explosions became an evocation of the heritage of English poets and poetry, from Chaucer onwards. It still strikes me as a handy metaphor for the poetic succession, especially because, in the feu de joie, nobody got hurt. It was all noise: and noise, I believe, is the first and last thing that poetry is. If a poem doesn’t sound compel­ling, it won’t continue to exist. This is an especially important thing to say in the present era, when the pseudo-modernist idea still persists that there might be something sufficiently fascinat­ing about the way that words are arranged on the page. With a poem the most important thing is the way it sounds when you say it. At that rate even the most elementary nursery rhyme has it all over the kind of over­stuffed epic that needs 10 pages of notes for every page of text, and reduces all who read it to paralysed slumber – or even worse, to a bogus admiration. My understanding of what a poem is has been formed over a lifetime by the memory of the poems I love; the poems, or frag­ments of poems, that got into my head seemingly of their own volition, despite all the contriving powers of my natural idleness to keep them out. I discovered early on that a scrap of language can be like a tune in that respect: it gets into your head no matter what. In fact, I believe, that is the true mark of poetry: you remember it despite yourself. The Italians have a word for the store of poems you have in your head: a gazofilacio. To the English ear it might sound like an inadvisable amatory practice involving gasoline, but in its original language it actually means a treasure chamber of the mind. The poems I remember are the milestones marking the journey of my life. And unlike paintings, sculptures or passages of great music, they do not outstrip the scope of memory, but are the actual thing, incarnate. With the contagious crackle of the feu de joie still rattling in my ears, let me flash back to Opportunity School at Hurstville, Sydney, whose supposedly playful regime was symbolised by its rule that every pupil, at the end of the day, had to stand beside his desk and recite a memorised poem before he was allowed to go home. It was a fantastic combination of Parnassus and a maximum-security prison. I usually managed to get an Early Mark, not just because my memory was good, but because I was lucky in the draw, being assigned poems that were hard to forget. The remarkable thing, I suppose, is not that I memorised a few poems, but that I never forgot them. Perhaps because the reward for success was freedom, I thought of poetry, forever afterwards, as my ticket out: the equivalent of hiding in the laundry in the truck out of the prison camp. When I am busy with the eternal task of memorising chunks of Milton, I can hear the sirens as I escape through the woods outside the wire of Stalag Luft III. For me, poetry means freedom. Even today, in fact especially today, when the ruins of my very body are the prison, poetry is my way through the wire and out into the world. Later on, during my first year as an arts student at Sydney University, the excellent lecturers in English heavily emphasised the truism that English poetry had not started from nowhere and from nothing, but had started in England at the time of Chaucer. This was an especially important idea to absorb when you could practically hear the Pacific surf crashing on the beach only a mile or two from the lecture room. The key notion was one of development: poetry from Chaucer onwards had been written by people who had read the poets who came before them. It was a story of someone writing something wonderful, and someone else coming along, reading it, and feeling impelled to write something even more wonderful. Even behind Chaucer there might have been another poet (I privately called him Robin Rimefellow) who invented the couplet, or anyway at least half of it. I met actual living poets during the first week at university. They were fellow students. By the second week, I too was wear­ing a long scarf, baggy khaki drills, the soft desert boots that were called brothel-creepers, and carrying an armful of books by Ezra Pound. I decided to become a poet, although there was nothing bold about this decision, as it was already clear, even to me, that I was useless for anything else. The poet, in my view, is the kind of time-waster who thinks he is doing something cru­cial with the time he wastes: steering it towards eternity perhaps, or getting an Early Mark. Smart teachers view the young poets with despair, but even smarter teachers realise there is something essential about them. If a university does not produce the occasional eloquent skiver, or unquenchably verbal time-waster, it is not fulfilling its true end. Almost all universities will somehow enforce the require­ment for the student to study poetry, but they couldn’t enforce the creation of it even if they had tyrannical powers. Although we, the poets, pursued the common fantasy that we were some­how cooperating in an eternal creative venture, we were competing like hell: a microcosm of the perpetual poetic desire to cap the other guy’s effort with something even better. That line of fire that continues past you, leading into the dis­tance, is as bound to continue as you are not. Creativity is the great mystery. Anyone can be destructive, but the capacity to build something will go on being the great human surprise. The flashing fires of the poems we can’t help remembering are clear proof of that. Nobody knows who wrote it, but that in itself could be stated as an ideal of English poetry: the best poems seem all to have been written by the one sensitive, sensible per­sonality. Even the extravagant poets like Milton, Swinburne and Hopkins don’t stray all that far from ordinary language, and what makes them poetic is their vision more than their quirky diction. Back beyond Chaucer, who can be said to have started the fashion for poets having names, this poem must have got into the heads of everyone who heard it. Probably it still does. My guess is that it was written by a woman. One assumes, here, that the narrator and the poet are one and the same, but the assumption seems fair, unless there were already poets on council grants wandering around and observing women in a local setting. And if it was composed by a woman, she wasn’t the lady of a grand house; she’s out there in the weather. What can get her warm again? Enter the lover. This neat little poem is packed with drama, like a tiny purse full of gold. One way or another, most good poems do have drama. And usually the story is the first thing to look for. There are famous poems that have no story but they are getting closer to being just words, which is always a dangerous lure for a poet. If poetry were just words almost anyone could do it. This poem loses nothing by being anonymous. Sometimes I think of it as having been written by myself, halfway up an orchard ladder, and shivering in a pair of self-darned tights. When it comes to John Clare, the hard work con­sists mainly in struggling not to drown in the detail he has revealed to you. Blessed, or cursed, with the knack for omnidirectional attention, he notices everything, especially about life in the countryside; but no reader’s attention can sur­vive noticing everything at once. While the poet revels in the rustic detail, the reader curses the abiding fact that he himself was not born to the green wellingtons, the oiled Barbour and the bouncing Land Rover. A spare elegance is hard to find in Clare. He’s more crowded than any old barn. But this is one poem which seems to me to have benefited from a sudden determination on his part, perhaps while lying awake, to write a more austere poem the next day. Clare had it all: and almost always he overcrowds the poem in the attempt to prove that. But for once he relaxes, and the reader can do the same. I have to confess to having mixed feelings about Emily Dickinson – the kind of confession that in America can lead to you being locked up. In her homeland, no one is allowed to be less than worshipful of her miniaturised density. There are reasons for worshipping her, and the reasons are better than for worshipping, say, an Aztec priest – but the cold truth is that you wish most of her poems were like longer poems instead of short notes. (You look at one of her poems and think: “Yes, she could probably have made a good poem out of that.”) But in spite of my conviction that she always said just that crucial bit too little, I have always had the urge to read more of her. Her collected works are a bowl of beads. In her life she was dedicated and self-sacrificing, but those qualities on their own aren’t necessarily poetic. Poetic qualities, on the other hand, are. Any amount of posthumous psychiatric analysis directed at her eccentric per­sonality can’t take away the central stability of her strange magic. Shadows still hold their breath when she speaks. Some of Charlotte Mew’s best poems are tricky to reprint because she often wrote in long lines. She could afford to do this because she had a faultless sense of rhythm. The metrical progress of her sense of form had the impressive weight of a slowly moving train, but it was a train that was clearly going somewhere, through relished landscapes, search­ing for stillness and quiet after a long struggle. Born into a family racked by childhood death, insolvency and mental illness, she compensated for the instability by sticking, metrically, to a measured poetic tranquillity that some today might call severe. Charlotte Mew should be much better known than she is. She had some significant literary champions in her own time, but financial and family troubles continued to dog her, and she was eventually committed to an institution, where she killed herself. A biography like that might enhance the stature of a male poet but she dates from an era when a woman who dressed like WB Yeats was unlikely to be given credit for her bardic aspira­tions, even by WB Yeats. (My mental picture of Mew is always mixed up with the hushed and mysterious appearances of Miss Froy, the British woman spy in the well-cut tweeds who enlists the aid of Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood in The Lady Vanishes.) When I was literary editor of the Sydney University student newspaper Honi Soit a copy of Oxford University’s envi­ably glossy magazine Isis landed on my desk. It contained, as the latest instalment of its hagiographical series called “Idol”, a worshipping piece about Dom Moraes. Judging from his photograph he was only just out of his teens at the time. I was impressed by the generous welcome that the English seemed prepared to give Indians, and wondered vaguely if they might do the same for Australians. But what most impressed me was the way Moraes could write English verse. “But sometimes the antarctic eyes glance down” unrolls with such rhythmic authority that it stops you wondering whether arctic eyes would be any different. I was impressed also by the way that “flowering” managed to be the most disgusting word in a lineup of physical horrors. But the final stroke was the knockout punch. “And breathes, Arise.” I went around saying it. By the time I reached England, Moraes was well on his way to oblivion, having taken a swan-dive into a bottle. Back he went to India, where he continued writing, but to small effect. It was a terrible pity, but finally nothing can stop the poets destroying themselves if they have a mind to. All other things being equal, theirs is the only life of perfect freedom. Quite often, however, that’s exactly what scares them stupid. The above poem is a version, or a translation: a word which usually means, with Robert Lowell, that the original is only dimly in sight and typically unacknowledged. Here the plundered victim is the 19th-century Spanish poet GA Bécquer. Nevertheless, it’s a poem great enough to justify the theft. “But these that stopped full flight to see your beauty …” Stopping in full flight is quite a hard thing for swallows to pull off even when lovestruck, but poetry is a magic land – or per­haps it’s better to call it a mad land. During various episodes in his life, Lowell was as mad as a hatter, but in poems like these he went crazy for a purpose. He could make a surrealist land­scape feel like a real one. Prodigiously gifted and ambitious, Lowell was a long time working his way to this kind of simplicity, and then later on he lost it again. Back in his early collections, a poem such as “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” was as gnarled and twisted as a sea-blown tree. With his intermediate volume, Life Studies, he became famous for his “confessional verse” which too often con­sisted of confessing the embarrassments of other people. It was his worst habit. As the bird with the air brakes demonstrates, Lowell could rise to sublimity and fall to banality within a single phrase. The key poem of his full maturity was “For the Union Dead” where his twin-yoked capacities for complexity and simplicity worked sumptuously together. For all of us on the Soho literary scene, Lowell featured like a visiting brontosaurus. I can remember well one of his editors cowering behind his desk at the prospect of his American-aristocrat-star contributor suddenly appearing with a fresh crate of sonnets. But this poem and a few others show unmistakably the precision, compression and evocation of which he was capa­ble when sane. A sharp reminder, there, that insanity is always a great pity, and a double reminder that it rarely leads to defin­itive creativity. But let’s not forget the third reminder: that talent has a mind of its own, and sometimes prevails against all the inner turmoil that can threaten to wreck a life.