Deepening the Furrow

Abstract

I found having to write about religion and literature very difficult, and talking about it even more so. A lifetime of questioning reduced to a 15- minute statement! I wince hearing the untransmuted voice (my own in particular) trying to formulate what my teachers and poets like Auden and Eliot long ago assured me was none of poetry's business to deliver, namely, a message. As Alan Bennett remarked about Prince Charles at John Betjeman's memorial service: 'Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don't try and mean it.'