How do you possess a poem? Well, ‘same as for love’. Pay attention to it. Listen to it. It will speak to you on the page. Silently. Or you may wish, as the critic Harold Bloom advises, to speak it out loud to yourself. In time, as he believes, you may come to feel that you have written it. The poet won’t mind! Your interpretation ‘may differ from the author’s and be equally valid – it may even be better’. Eliot, giving us absolution. Poets came on earth ‘to startle us out of our sleep-of death into a more capacious sense of life’.
Decades have passed since I first embarked on this strange adventure of bringing to an audience great poetry read by our finest actors. And each time, at each new event, as I listen to some of the greatest language ever written, I am again transported. The fact that I am also on the stage to give my short introduction to the poet’s life and work is irrelevant. The poetry sounds out and I ‘trip . . . into the boundless’, as Frost described it. It is a thrilling journey and is, I believe, the secret of what happens underneath at these readings. We endeavour to transmit to our audience what the critic Ben Yagoda called ‘The Sound on the Page’. It is the sound of the human voice ‘somehow entangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear of the imagination’. Frost, again.
Within the imagination, suddenly, the poem finds you. You may not have been aware that you were searching for it. Indeed the poet himself or herself may have been responding to what Eliot (in discussing Gottfried Benn’s lecture on the lyric) described as ‘the something germinating in him for which he must find words’; and in finding language for ‘the something’ create the lines which we delight to ‘overhear’. When I first ‘overheard’ ‘Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened / Into the rose-garden’, the shock of recognition was physical.
I couldn’t move. I was in a sense, mesmerised. Then the words seemed to take up residence, to settle down, so to speak, within me. As did the lines which follow: ‘My words echo / Thus, in your mind. / But to
what purpose / Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves / I do not know.’ I still don’t. I remain, however, addicted to the echo, which continues to haunt and delight me.
By nature, I am an all or nothing girl, so line after line in poem after poem of T. S. Eliot’s tumbled into my mind. In poetic terms I had found my man. He – thankfully – did not demand exclusivity. I love, with passion, others, many of whom are in this book. Robert Frost reminds us of the silken unbreakable thread between poetry and love. Each begins ‘in delight and ends in wisdom’. Like love, which always desires possession, a poem can indeed become yours, for ever. It was in that belief I started Gallery Poets, so called because the Odette Gilbert Gallery in Cork Street allowed us, with incredible generosity, to hold our readings there in the late 1980s. I really have no idea how I managed to persuade the brilliant actors who took part, including the late Sir Alan Bates, Robert Stephens and Gary Bond – ‘Hello. You don’t know me, but I’d love you to read . . .’. My generous victims also included Eileen Atkins, Edward Fox and Michael Gough, on whose talent and kindness I still ruthlessly prey, and with whom I developed an Eliot programme, Let Us Go Then, You and I, which we presented at the Lyric, Hammersmith. (‘They queued and fought for tickets’ – a review by Valerie Grove which continues to delight us.) The production eventually moved, for a month, then extended to six weeks, to the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue, the first
and only time poetry has enjoyed a West End run. Michael Grandage has invited us to reprise that programme at the prestigious Donmar Warehouse – we are honoured. Since 2004, the British Library has provided us with what we hope is a permanent home. We are profoundly happy there, and profoundly grateful.
Sometimes we leave home for a visit. Last year, the National Library of Ireland invited us to read the poetry of W. B. Yeats. ‘Delighted!’ we replied. Bono, Sinéad Cusack and Jeremy Irons caught every nuance in poetry that has ‘gathered up the heart’s desire of the world’. It was, truly, a night to remember. This year on 7 April, at the invitation of the New York Public Library and to mark the American publication
by Norton of Catching Life by the Throat, we presented the poetry of Robert Frost and Robert Lowell. The great American actor Brian Dennehy and our own brilliant Mark Strong read the work of these haunting poets with perfect poise and grace. We have been asked to return to that most beautiful library and we will, soon. We have donated to the library two hundred copies of the American edition of Catching Life by the Throat. On the accompanying CD, the poetry of W. H. Auden is read by Ralph Fiennes; Emily Dickinson by Juliet Stevenson; T. S. Eliot by Edward Fox, Ian McDiarmid and Helen McCrory; Rudyard Kipling by Roger Moore; Philip Larkin by Harold Pinter; Marianne Moore by Elizabeth McGovern; Sylvia Plath by Harriet Walter; and W. B. Yeats by Sinéad Cusack and Bob Geldof. The UK edition and CD published in 2006 were, thanks to the generosity and cooperation of their publishers Virago and Hachette Digital, of the British Library and all of the actors, sent free of charge to every secondary school in Britain. We plan to do the same with Words That Burn, the title of which is taken from Thomas Gray’s lovely line, ‘Thoughts, that breathe, and words, that burn’.
We hope that in the poems in this new collection you will find ‘the very image of life expressed in eternal truth’. Certainly you will find the floating image of love, which is harder, much harder even for poets
to catch. And that’s the truth about love! Rossetti’s ‘When I am dead, my dearest / Sing no sad songs for me’ sounds a gentler note than that of the woman’s ‘old-fashioned tirade— / loving, rapid, merciless’, as it ‘breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head’ in ‘Man and Wife’, Lowell’s savage poem of love and sex gone wrong. Nobody does it better. Browning, the mysterious, whose own life was a lovefilled idyll with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, gives us in his sinister masterpiece ‘My Last Duchess’ a study in exquisitely calibrated moral brutality. However, the true poet of terror is Frost. Do not let his American country beat-simple speech deceive you. Byron, in his talking poetry (he wrote, he said, ‘exactly as I talk’) nails to the wall wickedly and wittily sexual duplicity both male and female in Don Juan. He also, in our excerpt from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, measures out the cost of overweening ambition that makes the ‘madmen who have made men mad’. (In the first decade of this century you may wish to name your own.) The child’s cry of pain in Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘In the Waiting Room’ is as penetrating as that of the woman in Munch’s not-so-silent painting. Shelley, the incandescent, burning up everything around him, shaped out of personal devastation and at the age of only twenty-nine the inevitable The Triumph of Life: ‘how Dante would have written had he written in English’ according to Bloom, to whom ‘poetry is the crown of imaginative literature . . . because it is a prophetic mode’. John Milton, whose Paradise Lost is a monument to awe-inspiring genius and sheer force of will, was born four hundred years ago. We have taken excerpts from Books I, IV and IX of Paradise Lost, in which we join Satan in the magnificence of his heroic defiance – ‘What though the field be lost?’ – and then follow him into the Garden of Eden, where, alas, he discovers Adam and Eve, and we discovered sin: It’s an old story. Milton knew in 1667 what we know still: the mind remains ‘its own place’ and many would prefer, like Satan, ‘to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n’. If the poetry of Dante is, in Shelley’s phrase, ‘a bridge thrown over time’, Milton too continues to span the centuries.