As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
This melancholy London - I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.
The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.
Some people have human muses - mine is a city. I feel a startling ambivalence towards London, but for better or worse my work has come utterly to depend upon it.
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
London has been used as the emblematic English city, but it's far from representative of what life in England is actually about.
Sometimes I miss the spirit of London, but it's a very gray place.
Finally, there's a sense in which I look at this Westminster village and London intelligentsia as an outsider.
Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without.
And, I mean, I think poetry does need to be met to some extent, especially, I guess, 19th century poetry, and for me, it's just been so worth the effort. It's like I'm planting a garden in my head.
By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can show.