Every soul is vast and wants to express itself fully. If it’s denied an adequate instrument (and we’re all denied that, at birth, some more than others), out comes…poetry, i.e., truth forced out through a restricted opening.

The criteria that determine artistic success are ultimately determined by artists, not critics, and great art itself changes what these criteria are. Stalin attempted to define artistic merit in terms of socialist realism. The Nazis denounced art that was not directly representational as decadent. The attempt to define the quality of artistic endeavour by predetermined rules had the effect— and the intentions— of freezing creative innovation. In consequence, little work of enduring merit emerged.

What is true of art is also true of other areas of human endeavour. What made Henry Ford or Walt Disney or Steve Jobs great businessmen was that they modified the rules by which their success, and the success of others in their industry, were measured. They changed our appreciation of what is good and bad in personal transport, in children’s entertainment and in computing. They sold us products we had not imagined. What we mean today by a good means of personal transport is very different from what we would have meant by the same phrase a hundred and fifty years ago, as a result of people who conceived vehicles so different from those that had already existed. The criteria of achievement are constantly redefined by great achievers.

The job of the artist or the poet or the educator or the business person is not just to paint what we want to see, write what we want to read and hear, teach what we want to learn or produce what we want to buy. Their role is to interpret the underlying high-level objectives that we seek from art, poetry, education, or goods and services more fully than we could ourselves articulate them. Success in recasting problems to achieve our objectives more effectively than we had conceived distinguishes the great from the merely competent and demonstrates why the direct approach is so often banal.

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.

The superiority of one writer over another is not just in the quality of language; but also in the quality of the story and the storytelling; the quality of enchantment; and the timelessness of that enchantment. It is therefore futile to speak of superiorities. There is only that which lives, and which keeps on living.