Is it Poetry?

Sir: I think that your correspondents are gravely mistaken in their estimate of Fleur Adcock’s prize-winning festival poem. No doubt the full rhyme and tom-tom rhythms of Tennyson’s In Memoriam would have contented them; but each poet has to find his or her personal idiom. Fleur Adcock’s poem relies on conversational rhythms and delicate half-rhymes. The final shape, appropriate for an elegy, is like that of stone from the quarry with some of the chisel-marks showing. The reticence and indirectness of the poem seemed to me, after several readings, to give an exact and very moving impression of grief held in check by a difficult resignation. It did surprise me that a prize- winning poem should also have happened to be a very good one and I was glad that the Listener had chosen to make it available to a wide audience.

1961 (249)