THE best response an established older writer can make to young writers who send him their work for criticism and advice is to repeat what William Faulkner wrote to Joan Williams in his letter to her dated August 8, 1952: “You must learn more. Where I beat you was, I set out to learn all I could sooner in my life than you did. I mean the reading.”

Like many young writers suffering from a delusional belief in the pristine virginal nature of their genius that fate gifted them at birth and which they do not wish to pollute by reading the dead writers, Joan Williams must have expressed some reluctance, for Faulkner wrote to her on June 18, 1953: “I learned to write from other writers. Why should you refuse to?”

Receiving poems and stories, and sometimes entire novels, from young writers, and sometimes not so young who have experienced years of rejection and are desperate for advice and recognition, evokes mixed feelings in an older writer. My first reaction is always one of pleasure that there are people born 50 or 60 years after me who have the same obsessions that I had as a teenager and that among them will be a gifted few who will take the trouble to do the hard work and, fulfilling their potential, maintain the vitality of the tradition of which each generation is the inheritor and custodian. But then, too often the work that is sent to me is depressingly disappointing, because it displays a conspicuous ignorance of what has already been achieved. These are people who think they are ready to play Test cricket at Lord’s when their body language shows they are playing rounders in a dusty pebble-strewn field and making no connection with the ball pitched at them.

But even to the young whose work appears talented, essentially all the advice one can give is again to repeat what Faulkner said to Joan Williams, reducing it to this brief formula: Read more, write more, good luck. To be published is gratifying, but it is not the ultimate criterion of your worth; it is a greater satisfaction, indeed a serene sensation within the soul, to know that your poem would have impressed T. S. Eliot or your story won an approving smile from Flaubert. The advice that follows is addressed to a young poet; the basic ideas apply, of course, to all literary forms, and with a few variations in the vocabulary of critical analysis, indeed to all art.

Technique. In cricket, in order to be a spin bowler you need first to learn how to hold the ball so that when bowled it comes up as an off-break or a leg-break or a googly, and you have to practice so that when you are playing you instinctively, without having to think about what you’re about to do and without even looking at the ball, hold it for the desired effect: your fingertips will have acquired knowledge. So, too, when writing a poem. You should have read enough and practiced enough so that your instinct knows the natural and fluent way in which to deliver a particular line. One common error some poets make is that they think they have something to say and that to write a poem is to express oneself. Other poets have stated what the Mexican Octavio Paz wrote on the subject of form and content: “Content stems from form and not vice versa. Every form produces its own idea, its own vision of the world. Form has meaning; and, what is more, in the realm of art only form possesses meaning.” (Alternating Current, Viking Press, New York, 1973.) A famous illustration of this is Paul Valéry’s description of how he came to write his poem, ‘La Cimitière Marin,’ about which he says that whenever someone asks what he “wanted to say” in the poem, he answers that he “did not want to say but wanted to make” (Valéry’s emphasis), and he goes on to state how he became obsessed with a stanza form assembled in the abstract in his mind, and how he discovered the poem “little by little, beginning with pure conditions of form.” (The Art of Poetry, Pantheon Books, New York, 1958.)

Actually, what you have to say is of little importance since essentially what you have to say has been said by many poets before you. What you have to say becomes interesting, and perhaps important, if you create an arresting form in which to say it. When he was 22 years old, Hart Crane wrote: “Nine chances out of 10, if you know where in the past to look, you will find words already written in the more-or-less exact tongue of your soul. And the complaint to be made against nine out of 10 poets is just this — that you are apt to find their sentiments much better expressed perhaps 400 years past.” (Letter to William Wright, Oct 17, 1921.)

That “much better expressed” is dependent on the style in which your idea is expressed. To use the cricket analogy again, any number of batsmen can score a century by patiently accumulating runs without taking any risks and boringly following an orthodox technique; but the batsman who is thrilling to watch is the one with a markedly distinctive style, one who amazes us with unexpected shots, and though he sometimes gets out early, the picture of his gracefully executed strokes continues to give us pleasure long after the match is over. Remember that line of Keats: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”

And as with the batsman, so with the poet: you have to train yourself to master form and to develop your distinctive style. In order to discover what your particular genius can create, first learn all the different forms of poetical creation of the past. Write a few villanelles and sestinas, compose a narrative poem in heroic couplets and another in blank verse, using iambic pentametre, study what poets have done with terza rima, ottava rima, and the Spenserian stanza and attempt writing poems in those verse forms, write a dramatic monologue in the style of Robert Browning, or an ode inspired by Keats. Much of this work will end up abandoned but without doing it the work you proceed to produce will be without that depth which makes poetical utterance such a profound pleasure. The villanelle, for example, was an ancient form by the 20th century, the age of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos, when it would have been understandable if a poet assumed that no serious poem would result from attempting a villanelle. However, William Empson, Theodore Roethke, and Dylan Thomas wrote villanelles that are among the most beautiful poems of the 20th century — many people use the line “Do not go gentle into that good night” without knowing it comes from Thomas’s villanelle.

Having practiced the established forms, you can then focus on what it is that you want to write, for now you can go beyond the technical constrictions of traditional forms, and let your mind release its own patterns. Your having absorbed the traditional forms will naturally direct you to discover the form in which to say what you want to say and that will be your style, your original presentation of the idea. No one is born with the gift of originality; you create the conditions of becoming original through the sheer hard work of absorbing all that the tradition has accomplished before you. Tradition is the bloodstream of originality.

Imagery. Without good, sharp and original images, a poem is merely the statement of an idea and therefore forgettable. Look for new images. Let’s stop invoking moons and roses, which too often comprise what passes for “poetical” imagery. And forget about your beloved’s eyes being as bright as stars and her teeth like pearls. Understand the difference between a generalised bookish image, which is like a stock photograph, and a particular personal impression which is a high-resolution projection within your brain of an image perceived uniquely by you.

A good poet draws his or her imagery from the real world. Look at John Donne (16th-17th century England) or Hart Crane (20th century America) as two brilliant examples of poets who draw their images from the contemporary world and not from a generalised bookish memory. In your own world today you’ll be lucky to see the poetical moon through the city pollution whereas there’ll be plenty of planes and helicopters and, invisible beyond them, all manner of satellites in the expanding universe, with a few black holes and big bangs thrown in. And your beloved’s starry eyes will probably be lost behind Gucci glasses.

Always remember today’s date. Right now we are in the middle of the second decade of the 21st century. Today we spend more time standing in security lines at airports than strolling about in Hyde Park or Shalimar Gardens smelling roses. Draw your imagery from your reality, not from bookish clichés.

Language. Clarity is important. Do not think that an affected obscurity, with a couple of impressive looking words, is going to intimidate a reader into thinking you’re a great poet. Nor are such tricks as E. E. Cummings’ (sorry, e. e. cummings’) keeping everything in lower case or scattering portentous phrases with wide blank spaces between them going to convince anyone of your poetical genius.

A typographical arrangement can look visually interesting but it is not the eye that receives the poem, it is the brain, and though there are instances when the typographical arrangement might influence what is communicated to the brain, it is always the quality of the language and not the way in which the language is printed that make that particular scattering of words on the page into an interesting poem. This is why such formal deviations as Concrete Poetry, in which the lines are so printed on the page as to represent a projected pattern of the idea (George Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’ is an early example), or Poetry and Jazz, in which a poem is read aloud accompanied by jazz played by one or more musicians, have remained aberrations. The serious poet always returns to plain words.

Clarity of language does not mean that one should employ simplistic phrases with such facility that the meaning is at once clear; a good poem is never comprehensively understood but continues to release some new meaning or subtle nuance each time it is read. If it were comprehensively understood, it would be forgotten. Your problem as a poet is that while you should use the language of spoken speech, never using a phrase that could not be uttered by a human being in the course of normal existence — allowing for the fact that sometimes that person might be speaking under severe emotional stress or in some other extreme situation — at the same time your language needs to be heightened or have that special ring about it that transforms that ordinary speech into an extraordinary expression.

There is no formula that facilitates a poet to perform this double act. What helps is for him to invent a constricting form, which can be metrical or simply a given quantity of syllables per line, with improvised rules that once established have to be obeyed to the end of the poem: this approach forces the mind to use language in a special way (because the metrical rule demanded by each line must be obeyed) while you make sure that it is still normal spoken speech. Study the better poems of poets like Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost to see how well they could work within a traditional form and yet use language so naturally that they appeared modern in their time.

Incidentally, both Hardy and Frost were what one would call second-tier poets, solid but not original, good but not great; but one can learn from solid second-raters while the real geniuses, like Yeats and Eliot, leave us in a state of shocked amazement and bewildered impotence. And when you write, you might keep two 20th-century slogans in mind: “Go in fear of abstraction” (Ezra Pound); “No ideas but in things” (William Carlos Williams).

Finally. Listen to your peers, the great poets before you who have written about their art. Some of the finest literary criticism has been written by the poets in their prefaces and essays, and most particularly in their letters. They offer the best inspiration to a young poet. While many academic critics (like A. C. Bradley who wrote on Shakespeare and F. R. Leavis who championed early 20th-century modernism) have come and gone, reigning briefly as the monarchs of literary opinion and then being consigned to eternal irrelevance, which is the natural habitat of opinionated professors of literature, unlike all of them, poets who wrote criticism several hundred years ago — Sidney, Pope and Dryden — to some of our recent contemporaries — Valéry, Auden, Paz — continue to be excitingly relevant. Another very important reading for the young poet are the letters of poets — especially of Keats, Eliot, Pound, Crane, Lorca and Baudelaire. Both in their criticism and in their letters, whether the poet is an 18th-century Englishman or a 20th-century Mexican, it is no coincidence that across centuries and cultures the poets say the same thing. It is all to do with language, style, and form.

All of this is what you will call heavy-duty advice. Yes, I know that, with a very few exceptions among the young who are seriously interested in the art and not entirely obsessed with finding a short-cut to fame, most of you will dismiss any advice that entails hard work with the age-old remark, “We live in a different time now and the fussy old methods of the older generation don’t apply to us.” Alas, that excuse won’t wash: there’s not been a generation that hasn’t expressed that evasive sentiment with the same confident arrogance which is so charming among the young, instilling in them a giddy sense of levitation that carries them into the clouds of imagined fame.

Well, dear poet, I’d better stop, for by now you must be wanting to shout into my ear that wise remark of Oscar Wilde’s: “It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal.”