Francis Edward Sparshott : Writing Philosophy

Having found another way to make a living, I have never depended on poetry for money or reputation. Having spend much of my mature lifetime studying the philosophy of art, I have been sufficiently inoculated against anything that could be called a writing philosophy. At the age of about twelve I felt that I knew what poetry was about in a way that my schoolteachers did not, and soon realized that to write poems was what I was for. Aside from the very few times when I have been asked to write something, I wrote poems that presented themselves to me as needing to be made, and my objective was always to bring to realization the specific fusion of experience, sound pattern and verbal structure that embodied that felt necessity. Making the result available to some public or other was a natural completion of the process. Doing this sort of thing has been a recognized activity in the cultural complex in which I was brought up and did not call for any more justification or explanation than any other culturally accepted activity. Some of my work has been appreciated by some readers, but that is not my affair. My obligation is to my emergent work.

Francis Edward Sparshott's works copyright © to the author.