Drawing on "The Selected Writings" of Carlyle

PECULIAR DIFFICULTIES

What I try to do in this poetry is not unlike the role of the historian as Thomas Carlyle saw it; namely, "to isolate the message from the irrelevant matter by which it is obscured, to distinguish well what does still reach to the surface and is alive and frondent for us (from) what…moulders safe underground, never to send forth leaves or fruit for mankind any more." We play out our lives as poets "against the ceaseless activity of the multitudinous extras in the cast." It is this "ceaseless activity" of the wider society, of history, of what takes places now on the global stage that is the "most durable impression" for the masses of humankind. But in our own private lives the texture of events is different and we must summon up reserves of energy and concentration; we must possess a relentless emphasis on being constantly active and cultivate our own 'peculiar feverishness' in our mode of expression as poets.-Ron Price with thanks to Alan Shelston in Thomas Carlyle: Selected Writings, Penguin, Ringwood, 1971, p.27.

This inward home reared
by slow and laborious effort
and an insight into what
I trust will never alter,
once desolate, baleful
and darker than night,
now covered anew
with beauty and solemnity,
with doubt banished
from the important places
and the reconciliation
of life's contradictions
always the task
in my own way and manner,
surrounded as I am
by the peculiar difficulties
of our time.1

1 See Carlyle's essays on Goethe. ibid., pp.37/8.


Ron Price
24 November 2002