Poet Must Write for Individuals, Not Public as Whole, Muir Says

The poet should not try to write for the public, but for individuals who are in the public, Edwin Muir, Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry said last night.

Individuals belong to the public only when they participate in general activities," he said. The poet must find his audience among men and women not when they are part of the "public," but when they are feeling and thinking as individuals, he stated.

Muir spoke in New Lecture Hall on "The Public and the Poet," the fourth in his series of six lectures as Norton Professor.

The public is a creation of modern mass communication and its language is the cliche, he said. If the poet adopts this language, he will only hurt his art, the search for truth to which he owes his first allegiance, and will thereby further degrade the public.

The poet must not, however, use this refusal to pander to public taste as an excuse for obscurantism and the rejection of all audiences, Muir asserted. A poet always needs an audience for which to create. Often he doesn't find it--or it doesn't find him--until late in his career. He must therefore create it in his imagination. "Many of Yeats's poems were written this way, before he had found their audience," Muir said.

"Much experimental poetry of the twenties has made young poets mistakenly believe that they, too, do not have to write for an audience," Muir asserted. But these experiments were made to get poetry out of what seemed a dead end. Since they succeeded, Muir said, there is no longer any excuse for a similar disregard of the need for an audience.

"Yet the obscurity of these experimental poems seems to have given many critics the impression that poetry cannot be good if it isn't difficult," Muir said. They refuse to accept young poets who find themselves at liberty in a natural tongue, he stated.

"They forget that naturalness does not necessarily come easily," Muir concluded