‘He was mine before I was taught him’

The title quote is from Terrance Hayes, in his Paris Review interview. He’s talking about Yusef Komunyakaa: ‘I got a great deal from his work before I felt like I could explain what I was getting. He was mine before I was taught him’

It set me thinking – who were my poets before I was taught them? Or after?There were poets who were hard to make mine because I’d had to write about them for exams, had to use them to demonstrate my competence. For Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Hopkins, Donne, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas and Sylvia Plath I needed to answer the question ‘Would you still read this, (buy it even) if you didn’t have to?’ With Owen and Plath the answer was easy. As a teenager (and as an older reader) it’s hard not to be drawn into their bleakness and intensity. Hardy felt familiar because I loved Dorset from family holidays. Thomas too; I grew up in South London, like him, with an enthusiasm for hill-walking. I knew the kinds of landscapes he wrote about.

Donne and Hopkins were harder, knottier, but I’d grown up in a Church of England background. I knew something of their religious intensities, though it was also a little off-putting; we tended to frown at over-commitment. Wordsworth I think became ‘mine’ when I walked the coast-to-coast path (Yorkshire coast to Cumbria) with ‘The Prelude’ in my rucksack. I still have the copy (see above), battered and swollen from soaking up rain.

Browning I never took to. I could see he was clever, skilful, that his monologues with their unreliable narrators were innovative. Also highly influential, I later realised, on poets like Ezra Pound and Robert Frost (the way Browning gets the rhythm of people talking into a poem, without it sounding forced). But he left me, and still leaves me, untouched, unmoved, except for a handful of poems.

I was touched, and moved by Dylan Thomas, who I discovered after I left school. Hugely famous, greatly mythologised but not on the exam curriculum in the 1970s. I had spent my childhood summer holidays in my grandparents’ village near the coast in Cornwall so ‘Fern Hill’ and ‘Poem in October’ flooded me with nostalgia:

‘My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.

And then more poets to prove my competence at university….