Welsh Poet Doesn't Suffer

For those Harvard students wondering how the first National Poet of Wales gets over her writer’s block, Gwyneth Lewis says pressure is often the way to blow the lid off the can. “It’s amazing how a looming deadline will unfreeze you. Terror is a great loosener.”

Three years after serving as the National Poet, Lewis has returned to university life as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow to continue her education as a poet, non-fiction writer, and thinker. Lewis, who studied as a graduate student at Harvard from 1982-1983, originally wanted to return to the University to work on an epic poem titled “A Hospital Odyssey.” But she found herself embarking upon her position as the Mildred Londa Weisman Fellow having unexpectedly completed most of the work on the poem.

“I confessed all to the Radcliffe people and they didn’t mind,” she says.

As a result, Lewis has been able to take advantage of the diversity and breadth available to the Harvard community, which, in her case, has included auditing a neurobiology course.

“That has really made me think about how language and specifically creative use of language is hard-wired into us and therefore that poetic use of language isn’t just something fancy,” Lewis says. “It matches exactly the way we learn language as infants.”

This class has helped Lewis crystallize her feelings that poetry is essential in human life.

“I started in poetry,” Lewis says. “That’s the central form.”

In the Phelps Lecture that she delivered on Tuesday titled “The Health of Poetry,” Lewis delved into the importance of the form, exploring ideas of creativity and depression.

“I don’t buy this figure of the depressed and suffering poet,” Lewis says. “Poetry teaches you strategies to deal with depression. I think poets get this reputation for being depressed because they spend more time in tough terrain, not because they’re more delicate.”

But Lewis believes that poetry also has a meaning beyond the individual poet; it resonates physically within an individual and politically within a society.

“If we don’t have language that’s robust and honest on the political level, we get sick as a society,” Lewis says. “Poetry shows language at its most eloquent, and the whole of society needs it.”

Now at Harvard, Lewis is excited about her tenure as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow, and the chance to further develop her work.

“It’s all about people,” she says, “meeting the amazing people who are living and working and visiting Harvard, because you can’t replace that.”

As a member of the Lowell House Senior Common Room, Lewis has the opportunity to eat and talk—activities that she considers of the utmost importance—with undergraduates and members of the Lowell community. She says that she loves the opportunity to learn from the students and often finds herself mostly listening to them rather than talking herself.

In such an intellectual community, even Lewis, a well-respected writer, was intimidated at first. “I remember thinking the first week that I must think carefully before asking a question,” she says.

But Lewis is not a figure who has shied away from a public role. As the first National Poet of Wales, Lewis filled a more visible position that allowed her to participate in public events, such as a poem recitation at the new Parliament building in Cardiff in front of the Queen.

For Lewis, the best part of being a National Poet was her interactions with ordinary people. “I met all kinds of people and experienced a tremendous amount of warmth from ordinary people. I didn’t expect that,” she says. “People would come up to me and say ‘Are you the poet?’”

Currently, Lewis is working on two plays based on the Clytemnestra story, as well as a novella that is a retelling of a medieval Welsh tale. She says that she has been speaking with Harvard faculty members to help her research these projects.

Lewis says that she cherishes the Harvard environment for its depth and diversity across different disciplines and is grateful to now be at Harvard. “The first morning I was walking down Brattle Street,” she says, “and just burst into tears because I was so happy to be back.”