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which made my work hitherto worthless, a complete revolution of sensibility. It no longer seemed to me interesting that a poem should be remembered; its sole interest was that it should be valid.’13 And again: ‘The state in which I found myself when I had experienced my metaphysical change was very much like a rebirth. I had died the death of ambition, and found that that death was only a beginning.’14 He later offered the following definition: ‘A poet is born when his ambition is born; but he is born a metaphysical poet when his ambition dies.’15 After an interval Watkins went back to work, at Lloyds Bank in Swansea, where he worked, apart from the War years, until his retirement in 1966. Thus began his solution to the riddle regarding: ‘the relation of a poet to society’. As his wife Gwen Watkins put it, ‘he worked in the Bank every day and wrote poetry every night’.16 Watkins himself was able to say: ‘If Dante had been a steeplejack and Milton a deep sea diver I can still believe their works would have been written, though not exactly as we have them today… The inevitable part of poetry will always be written. That is why I think a poet can do any work in the world and not lose by it, provided that he is a poet first.’17 As a consequence of this resolution, Watkins determined no longer to publish. Eight years later he changed his mind about this, but without altering his new-found attitude to fame and publication. As he wrote to a younger poet in 1941: ‘Don’t be fascinated by a reputation or the idea of publication; both are a snare for the unwary.’18 Watkins’s objection to ‘reputation’ was, primarily, because of its transience. A poet may be ‘fashionable’ for a while, but unless their work is ‘valid’ it will have no ‘permanence’: ‘I said to a questioner, If you want a reputation for ten years, put something ingenious into your line; but if you want permanence, for God’s sake take it out!’19 The true artist must therefore meet much greater demands than those that determine public acclaim: In every genuine artist the first care is to use his gift in such a way as to satisfy his imaginative need. If the whole world applauds a work, and it does not meet this need, the work, from the point of view of the artist, is a failure. A shallow artist is disheartened by failure, but a profound one is more likely to be disheartened by success.20 xiv New Selected Poems
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Watkins was aware, however, that if an artist lives up to these greater imaginative demands, his work will in the end acquire its audience. Having remained rigorously true to his principles, Watkins, for all his shunning of public acclaim, was quietly aware of the value of his work. He told his friend Dufau-Labeyrie, after listening to a radio broadcast: ‘we heard MacNeice & Spender & Day Lewis & a few others. What a lot reputation does for people. My poems are better than theirs & nobody knows. Even you don’t know. I say this from instinct, not pride.’21 He also said, in words which clearly apply to himself: ‘The audience of a poet is always an audience in depth, and he mustn’t really mind if even fifty years or a hundred go by before his work is felt by people exactly attuned to it, because that’s happened to very great poets in the past.’22 And again: ‘I have remembered… that many great poets published little or nothing in their lifetimes, that publication and present audiences are an accident, however precious, and that poems that are genuine always eventually draw their audiences to them, unless they happen to be lost.’23 * In 1935 Vernon Watkins, who was just beginning, after his new start, to discover his true poetic voice, met another young poet from the same town, who had just had his first book published – Dylan Thomas. An intense personal and working friendship developed between them. As Watkins describes: ‘We became close friends almost immediately, from an affinity which I think we both recognised at once. That affinity was particularly clear when we talked about poetry or read it aloud.’24 Thomas Taig, a theatre producer in Swansea, bears witness to this ‘affinity’: It was only when I… heard them repeating fragments of their latest poems that I began to understand the basis of their close friendship and their high esteem for each other both personally and professionally… there was never any talk… about aesthetic theories, philosophies or literary movements… the real interest lay in detailed discussion of the value of a particular syllable in a particular line and whether some word should be changed or deleted. There was no need to argue, for both moved freely in what I have called the inner world and both understood the arduous business of meticulous craftsmanship.25 Introduction xv

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which made my work hitherto worthless, a complete revolution of sensibility. It no longer seemed to me interesting that a poem should be remembered; its sole interest was that it should be valid.’13 And again: ‘The state in which I found myself when I had experienced my metaphysical change was very much like a rebirth. I had died the death of ambition, and found that that death was only a beginning.’14

He later offered the following definition: ‘A poet is born when his ambition is born; but he is born a metaphysical poet when his ambition dies.’15

After an interval Watkins went back to work, at Lloyds Bank in Swansea, where he worked, apart from the War years, until his retirement in 1966. Thus began his solution to the riddle regarding: ‘the relation of a poet to society’. As his wife Gwen Watkins put it, ‘he worked in the Bank every day and wrote poetry every night’.16

Watkins himself was able to say: ‘If Dante had been a steeplejack and Milton a deep sea diver I can still believe their works would have been written, though not exactly as we have them today… The inevitable part of poetry will always be written. That is why I think a poet can do any work in the world and not lose by it, provided that he is a poet first.’17

As a consequence of this resolution, Watkins determined no longer to publish. Eight years later he changed his mind about this, but without altering his new-found attitude to fame and publication. As he wrote to a younger poet in 1941: ‘Don’t be fascinated by a reputation or the idea of publication; both are a snare for the unwary.’18

Watkins’s objection to ‘reputation’ was, primarily, because of its transience. A poet may be ‘fashionable’ for a while, but unless their work is ‘valid’ it will have no ‘permanence’: ‘I said to a questioner, If you want a reputation for ten years, put something ingenious into your line; but if you want permanence, for God’s sake take it out!’19 The true artist must therefore meet much greater demands than those that determine public acclaim:

In every genuine artist the first care is to use his gift in such a way as to satisfy his imaginative need. If the whole world applauds a work, and it does not meet this need, the work, from the point of view of the artist, is a failure. A shallow artist is disheartened by failure, but a profound one is more likely to be disheartened by success.20

xiv

New Selected Poems

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