Inner Origins of Elegence and Design:A 21st Centrury View

[RonPrice]

AVOIDING THE FIRE

...The intellect alone can never be enough. Intuitions, suggestions, impressions mean more to the poet than opinions, but they are far less manageable. He needs time and leisure...He needs a period of assimilation in which the pieces of the jigsaw-consciousness can fall into place, before Experience puts out a hand again to jumble them into confusion....the happy withdrawal of an artist into himself takes on the appearance of a siege. -Clive Sansom, The World of Poetry: Poets and Critics on the Art and Functions of Poetry, Phoenix House, London, 1959, p. 124.


One can get only so much of a vista of hours and days
without interruption from inner contemplation.
Fire, endless fires, murderously drive men
from this private world, like animals
from their places of safety, the home of the mind.
As far as possible the artists, the poet,
the architects of life must say no;
they must be dragged beyond the wall
of “the big no” by something special
that only they can define
and for which there is no waspish protest,
only a willing “big yes.”

These poets must keep recapturing solitude,
great inner solitude, intense awareness,
like a shadowland, vacant, silent,
free of irrelevancies. Here, here,
they will meet faithful souls
of such power that they will hear
their subject gathering words,
gathering force, leaven.

Ron Price
19 September 1995