Eleanora gave me her three volumes of The Divine Comedy for my sixth birthday. February 28, I946. 'You will like,' she instructed me. 'Dante is God.' I was too young to argue. And even if I could, I wouldn't have.

I looked at the words and pretended I could make sense of them. I couldn't read either. Not big Italian words. Not even small Italian words. My father helped me as best he could. But translating Dante wasn't his forte. He was a painter, not a poet. He gave me a sheet of paper and a pencil and told me to copy the illustrations. 'You gonna be an artist, like a me,' he said. 'You gonna go to an art school. Learn to painta the pictures.' So, it never dawned on me that I would be anything else.

(Actually, my father spoke perfect English. I only put him as speaking like Chico Marx for effect).

I enrolled as a junior student at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, a month short of my fifteenth birthday. But Camberwell provided a choice. A liberal attitude to teaching art offered more than just courses in painting. Jazz was one. Big Names on the British Jazz Scene had recently been students. Names like Monty Sunshine, Wally Fawkes and Humphrey Lyttelton. The traditional jazz revival more or less began at Camberwell. No young musician could resist wanting to be a part of it. I thought: now I can play jazz, and paint. Or, instead of.

As well as having Monty Sunshine give me hints on how to play clarinet like they did in New Orleans, there was the library. First floor, first on the right.

The library was in many ways the heart of the school. As well as holding the finest collection of books on painting available at the time, there was every kind of weekly and monthly periodical, a large section devoted to the best in contemporary international fiction, and a shelf full of poetry.

So now, I could not only learn to be a painter and a jazz musician. I could also learn how to compose verse. My ideal trinity of the arts.

It was the one room in which students specialising in crafts such as print-making, stone-carving, ceramics and the rest could meet, if not talk. I spent more time in the library reading A.E. Housman and swooning over Jeanette Walker than I ever did in the life class. (I am possibly exaggerating, slightly).

Jeanette spent a lot of her time in the library. Reading about weaving. She had Titian-red hair, which she wore to her shoulders, large, sea-green eyes and a body that Brigitte Bardot would have stopped dyeing her blonde hair for. Jeanette was my first and most disturbing love. Fifty years on... She died a month before her Thirtieth birthday, and the small passport photo she gave me still lives between the leather folds of my wallet.

Housman, and my undying love for Jeanette Walker, led me to think that I should write a poem myself. During a lull in a lettering class, I had a go. This is it.

On a cold and frosty night,

I fell in love with candle light.

It burnt my heart, it burnt my fingers.

I buried my soul in the dying cinders.

The more poetry I read, the more I wrote, and the more I began to think that the life of a painter had been chosen for me. It was not a life I had chosen for myself. But it was too late to change. And in any case, change to what? I knew of no schools that would teach me how to write poetry.

My solution was to read every poetry book in the library. I read Pound, e e cummings, Dylan Thomas, Housman, Graves, all the American Beats, George Herbert, Blake, Ogden Nash, Hopkins, Keats, Robert Frost, a lot of French and Italian verse, the first and only poems by boy soldiers in the trench, poems printed in Punch, poems printed in the New Yorker...

I understood very little of what I read. I still don't. I was amazed. That's all. To be amazed is my main desire. To be thrown off course. Dazzled. Resurrected. To be set new horizons. Have the wool pulled over my eyes. Have the carpet pulled from under my feet. Not to know what my right hand is doing. To be lost in space. To be filled with wonder. If you understand a poem, either you haven't read it properly or it is a dud poem.

Ninety-nine point nine per cent of poems written - and the same number printed - are duds. Light the blue paper and nothing happens. No bang. No sparkle. Poetry societies have shelves full of it.

I have spent the most precious moments of my life writing, reading and thinking about poetry. I have written on average three poems a week, every week. From the late 1950s to the present. There have been times I have written ten poems in a day. Add it up. It's a lot of poems. And I read at least one new poem a day. Or re-read a favourite.

As I come to the end of my life, I realise that little of what we do adds up to much that's worth keeping. Great poems define what it is to be human. If nothing else, this thought alone is worth a well-kept grave. To put in it something worth burying seems like a reason to have lived.

Trite though it sounds, I often find myself saying that the point of poetry is that it puts into words what you otherwise can't put into words.. To conclude, here are a few of my favourite poems, all things that could not be put into words until, by some miracle, they were written.

*

Horace Book II  XV

Iam pauca aratro iugera regiae

moles relinquent, undique latius

extenta visentur Lucrino

stagna lacu platanusque caelebs

evincet ulmos; tum violaria et


myrtus et omnis copia narium


spargent olivetis odorem

fertilibus domino priori,

tum spissa ramis laurea fervidos

excludet ictus. non ita Romuli


praescriptum et intonsi Catonis


auspiciis veterumque norma.

privatus illis census erat brevis

commune magnum: nulla decempedis

metata privatis opacam


porticus excipiebat arcton

nec fortuitum spernere caespitem

leges sinebant, oppida publico

sumptu iubentes et deorum

templa novo decorare saxo.

*

Old Salt Kossabone

Far back, related on my mother's side,

*

*

from: La Vita Nuova, Canto XX  

After this canzone was circulated for a while amongst people, as it happened that one of my friends heard it, his will moved him to beg me that I should tell him what Love is, having, perhaps from the words he heard, a greater faith in me than was merited. So, thinking that after treating of that subject it would be good to say something of Love, and thinking that my friend would be pleased, I decided to write a verse in which I would treat of Love: and then I wrote this sonetto, which begins: 'Amore e´l cor gentil'.

Love and the gentle heart are one thing,

as the wise man puts it in his verse,

and each without the other would be dust

as a rational soul would be without its reason.

Nature, when she is loving, takes

Amor for lord, and the heart for his home,

in which sleeping he reposes

sometimes a short, sometimes a longer day.

Beauty may appear, in a wise lady,

so pleasant to the eyes, that in the heart,

is born a desire for pleasant things:

which stays so long a time in that place,

that it makes the spirit of Love wake.

And likewise in a lady works a worthy man. 

Dante Alighieri 

*

The Song of Solomon

Chapter 3

By night on my bed I sought

him whom my soul loveth: I

sought him, but I found him not.

2  I will rise now, and go about

the city in the streets, and in the

broad ways I will seek him whom

my soul loveth: I sought him, but

I found him not.

3.  The watchmen that go about

the city found me: to whom I said,

Saw ye him whom my soul loveth?

4  It was but a little that I passed

from them, but I found him whom

my soul loveth: I held him, and

would not let him go, until I had

brought him into my mother's

house, and into the chamber of her

that conceived me.

5  I charge you, O ye daughters of

Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the

hinds of the field, that ye stir not

up, nor awake my love, till he please.