Peter Porter

It was the young Auden, writing at about the time he was composing his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, who declared that you could tell if someone was going to be a poet by considering his love of words. If he found words fascinating – their sounds, their peculiar symmetries and associations, their chimes, rhymes, assonances and quiddities – then he was likely to prove the real thing. If, on the other hand, he regarded words as the medium for important ideas he wished to impart, then, however impassioned or crusading he might be, he wasn’t going to be primarily a poet, even if he cast his messages to the world in verse. This nostrum begs many questions, but it remains a good rule-of-thumb. By this test, Clive James is a true poet. Line after line of his has a characteristic personal tone, a kind of end-stopped singingness which is almost independent of what it says. The following are taken at random from Other Passports:’

To Clive James

The origin of metaphor is strange. As boys we used (but don’t let me forget I only watched, I wasn’t very brave) To put two spiders in a bottle, wave It over flame, which usually made them fight, Or flood them from their deep holes for a change.

These were the deadly trapdoors whose one bite Sent an inclusive poison racing through Your veins: I think we...

In the Great Book of Beginning we read That the word was God and was with God And are betrayed by the tiniest seed Of all the world’s beginnings, to thrash Like sprats in a bucket, caught in deed As in essence by shapes of ourselves, Our sounds the only bargains we may plead.

So starts this solipsistic essay about words, Its first stanza chasing its own tail, Since no word will betray...

You know how images keep coming back, The lifted arm before the heart attack, Yet out of all the basket-work of shapes And plots, those vandalised electroscapes Of daytime dreaming, how remarkable The least significant of them is able To light the mind and flood the memory! Don’t introspect if you want honesty, And that’s what Freudians presumably Intend when fixing...