Interviewer: Lucidity, is this an important word for you?A related post: A Fool's Trick
MacCaig: I think it is, very much so. I don't mind a poem being difficult, if the poem is about a thing that is difficult to say. But if a poem seems to me willfully obscure, or obscure because the man has not got his mind clear about what he is writing about, then, to use a phrase I have used before, I consider it to be not only bad art, but bad manners, because poetry is surely a communication.
“I do not think altogether the worse of a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I have more confidence in the dead than the living.” — Hazlitt
26 September 2017
Bad Art and Bad Manners
Norman MacCaig, at about the 7 minute mark in the film A Man in My Position: