Jeanette Winterson on life-changing language
At sixteen, about to be thrown out of her home by her mother, Jeanette Winterson accidentally found T. S. Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral, saw the line “This is one moment / But know that another / shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy,” and started crying. The article is titled “Shafts of Sunlight” and appeared in The Guardian.
The unfamiliar and beautiful play made things bearable that day. . . .
So when people say that poetry is merely a luxury for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read much at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy.
A tough life needs a tough language — and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers — a language powerful enough to say how it is. . . .
Art lasts because it gives us a language for our inner reality, and that is not a private hieroglyph; it is a connection across time to all those others who have suffered and failed, found happiness, lost it, faced death, ruin, struggled, survived, known the night-hours of inconsolable pain. . . .
When I read him [T. S. Eliot] that day, gales battering me within and without, I didn’t want consolation; I wanted expression. I wanted to find the place where I was hurt, to locate it exactly, and to give it a mouth. Pain is very often a maimed creature without a mouth.
Through the agency of the poem that is powerful enough to clarifying feelings into facts, I am no longer dumb, not speechless, not lost. Language is a finding place, not a hiding place.
Next: Evelyn Waugh on blowing up stumps.