John Baker’s Blog

1. Why do you blog?
I started because, for a time, I was caught fast at home and it brought me the outside world. Now I can’t seem to stop. Though sometimes tiresome, the exercise of regular writing brings discipline and creative pleasure. It is admittedly a quest for audience approval and its thread of journalism [...]

TS Eliot was concerned that poetry attain what he called impersonality.
‘Tradition,’ he said, depended on the poet obtaining an historical sense, and:
this historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in [...]

The miraculous yield of 1922.
The year of Ulysses, The Waste Land, Rilke’s Dueno Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus(written in three days). Of Brecht’s first play, Baal, Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod. Virginia Wolfe’s Jacob’s Room, Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah, Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christy, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned Galsworthy’s The [...]

Why do you want to do it? It might be the wish to connect with other people on a deep level. The need to speak of inner feelings. It could be the pressure of emotion, which you can’t ignore. What are your own reasons?
Remember the element of play in writing. Build it up and knock [...]