On a village or a town street, in an estate park or garden, on an expanse of beach or a landscaped something-or-other: hardly a living soul is ever to be seen. Casually these observations are inserted. Here or there. In a word, a sentence, a fragment. At what turns out to be just the right moment in just the right paragraph. The one that resembles a stone dropping straight to the subliminal bottom.

Every description of the visible world; every association past, present, future; every bit of memory, conjecture, or speculation implies a state of being destitute of human connection. On a small propeller plane that services the route from Amsterdam to Norwich the point is suddenly driven home:...

Clearly, the bleakness originates from within. It is the material condition of the narrator’s inner life, the walls that contain him, the prison of his own personality. It is from inside this prison that he is speaking.

In a key letter, written to his brother and sister-in-law when he was twenty-three, he [Keats] said that being intelligent is not enough. Your intelligence has to be converted into a soul. “Do you not see,” he wrote, “how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?...Call the world if you Please ‘The vale of Soul-making.

From prison, Oscar Wilde wrote, ‘I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art.’ Not all great art is possessed of the darkness we are probing, but much of it is.

Virginia Woolf sets out the scope of illness in her brief essay “On Being Ill”: ‘Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness . . . it is strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

We must not force our poets to limit the world any further. That is a crime against life itself. If the poet begins to speak only of narrow things, of things that we can effortlessly digest

and recognise, of things that do not disturb, frighten, stir, or annoy us, or make us restless for more, make us cry for greater justice, make us want to set sail and explore inklings murdered in our youths, if the poet sings only of our restricted angles and in restricted terms and in restricted language, then what hope is there for any of us in this world?

Those of us who want this are cowards, in flesh and in spirit. We fear heroic heights. We dread the recombining of the world, dread a greater harvest of being. We sit lazily and demand that our poets draw the horizon closer. We therefore become separated from our true selves. Then even beauty can seem repugnant. Then, we no longer recognise who we are, and we forget what we used to be, what states we sometimes inhabited, what extended moments of awareness.