AT SOME point in their lives, perhaps in some stark, lightless January of their middle years, the question must occur to every poet: Why am I doing this? What is the point?

Certainly, some of the best poets — Milton and Tennyson, for example — have asked this very question, and, paradoxically, have asked it right in the middle of a poem. We who are reading them centuries later exclaim when we come across such passages: “Oh, for heaven’s sake, can’t you see? Your poetry has made a huge difference, consoled the hearts and clarified the vision of countless generations, up to and including this reader. How can you even ask that question?”

But, of course, the poet who is asking it does not know what the reader knows, cannot yet see in its full perspective the whole meaning of their achievement; they may not even know whether the poem that they are writing will find readers in their own day, let alone in years to come. And that is why the question is so crucial. They have to find a reason for writing which is intrinsic to the poetry itself, and does not depend on “success” as the world measures it.

Often it is grief, with its attendant sense of the frailty of life, that prompts the question. So, Milton asked it in “Lycidas”, the elegy that he wrote for his young friend Edward King, who, like Milton, was trying to become a poet, but who was drowned in 1637:

Alas! what boots it with incessant care
To tend the homely, slighted shepherd’s trade,
And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?
. . . But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears,
And slits the thin-spun life.

Milton answers that question by realising that, in the end, he is writing poetry for Christ, that his work will be known in heaven, however eclipsed on earth:

As he pronounces lastly on each deed,
Of so much fame in Heav’n expect thy meed.

Two centuries later, Tennyson was asking the same question, again in response to the sudden death of a friend whom he thought more talented than himself. So, he writes in In Memoriam:

What hope is here for modern rhyme
To him, who turns a musing eye
On songs, and deeds, and lives, that lie
Foreshorten’d in the tract of time?’

He foresees, gloomily, a time when his own poetry — even In Memoriam itself — will be discarded and unread, turned into scrap paper:

These mortal lullabies of pain
May bind a book, may line a box,
May serve to curl a maiden’s locks. . .

In the end, he has to conclude that poetry is worth writing in itself, regardless of fame or even notice. It gives expression to what needs saying, and what needs, and will always need expression, is love:

But what of that? My darken’d ways
Shall ring with music all the same;
To breathe my loss is more than fame,
To utter love more sweet than praise.

Perhaps the insight of these poets on their vocation is true for each of us in our vocation. It is of no importance whether we are “successful” in the world’s terms, only that we should do as well as we can what is given us to do.