However loudly some poets, for example Rabindranath Tagore, proclaim the poem to be separate from the poet, people respond to poems as if they are real people speaking. I became conscious of this at the start of my massive production of poetry in 1992-3. For more than a decade I had written a good deal of awefully complex stuff and some readers told me so. In those ten years, too, I had written a first edition of this memoir, but it was so tedious, so boring, I could hardly bear reading it. I was more than a little conscious of Tolstoi's remarks that: “an artist teaches far more by his mere background and properties, his landscapes, his costume, his idiom and technique—all the part of the work, in short, of which he is probably entirely unconscious, than by the elaborate and pompous moral dicta he fondly imagines to be his opinions." This background and its properties had to be changed.
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There are endless ways of telling one’s story. For this reason poets and writers like Tagore, Roger White and Bernard Shaw may be wrong to think that the passive nature of their lives disqualifies them from even attempting to write their autobiography. Roger used to say that he did not think it was possible for a biographer to make anything at all interesting out of his life. I think time will prove him wrong. He, like Shaw, thought his life was in his writing, or as he once put it, quoting Rabindranath Tagore: “the poem not the poet.”
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