In putting ideas and feelings into poetry, I have tried in each case to
use the medium most adaptable to the specific purpose. I own allegiance
to no master. I have never found it possible to accept in entirety any
one poet. But I have loved and joyed in what I consider the finest in
the poets of all ages.
The speech of my childhood and early youth was the Jamaica Negro
dialect, the native variant of English, which still preserves a few
words of African origin, and which is more difficult of understanding
than the American Negro dialect. But the language we wrote and read in
school was England’s English. Our text books then, before the advent of
the American and Jamaican readers and our teachers, too, were all
English-made. The native teachers of the elementary schools were tutored
by men and women of British import. I quite remember making up verses in
the dialect and in English for our moonlight ring dances and for our
school parties. Of our purely native songs the jammas (field and road),
shay-shays (yard and booth), wakes (post-mortem), Anancy tales
(transplanted African folk lore), and revivals (religious) are all
singularly punctuated by meter and rhyme. And nearly all my own poetic
thought has always run naturally into these regular forms.
Consequently, although very conscious of the new criticisms and trends
in poetry, to which I am keenly responsive and receptive, I have adhered
to such of the older traditions as I find adequate for my most lawless
and revolutionary passions and moods. I have not used patterns, images
and words that would stamp me a classicist nor a modernist. My intellect
is not scientific enough to range me on the side of either; nor is my
knowledge wide enough for me to specialize in any school.
I have never studied poetics; but the forms I have used I am convinced
are the ones I can work in with the highest degree of spontaneity and
freedom.
I have chosen my melodies and rhythms by instinct, and I have favored
words and figures which flow smoothly and harmoniously into my
compositions. And in all my moods I have striven to achieve directness,
truthfulness and naturalness of expression instead of an enameled
originality. I have not hesitated to use words which are old, and in
some circles considered poetically overworked and dead, when I thought I
could make them glow alive by new manipulation. Nor have I stinted my
senses of the pleasure of using the decorative metaphor where it is more
truly and vividly beautiful than the exact phrase. But for me there is
more quiet delight in “The golden moon of heaven” than in “The
terra-cotta disc of cloud-land.”
Finally, while I have welcomed criticism, friendly and unfriendly, and
listened with willing attention to many varying opinions concerning
other poems and my own, I have always, in the summing up, fallen back on
my own ear and taste as the arbiter.