"I despair of ever writing excellent poetry"

The confession is brutally simple yet freighted with artistic conscience: a refusal to grant oneself the comfort of adequacy. “Despair” here is not melodrama but an ethical position, the recognition that the bar for “excellent” rises with every encounter with great art and with every attempt to render experience faithfully. The key word is “ever.” It enacts a horizon that recedes as one approaches, implying that excellence is not a destination but a perpetually deferred standard that keeps craft alive. To speak of it is to acknowledge the chasm between what one imagines and what language, in its stubborn finitude, can carry.

For a poet forged amid poverty and war, the anxiety intensifies. How to shape slaughter and grime into verse without embalming them in beauty’s false consolations? The fear is that the poem might succeed aesthetically while failing ethically, that form could polish away the grit of truth. Such despair is thus a protest against complacency. It refuses the easy poem and also the relief of giving up. It is the difficult middle ground where work continues under the pressure of a standard that may never be met.

Paradoxically, that very pressure can generate clarity. When excellence feels unattainable, every word must justify itself; ornament drops away; metaphor earns its keep or is cut. Despair becomes a discipline. It aligns with the modern condition of strained utterance, the sense that the old poetic garments no longer fit the body of experience. Out of that tension, a new voice can emerge, plain but piercing, unsentimental yet humane.

There is also humility. The statement casts the poet not as a master but as a supplicant before language, tradition, and reality. Readers trust a writer who distrusts himself in this way, because the admission acknowledges the magnitude of the task. In the end, excellence, if it arrives, often slips in by the back door, born of the very refusal to believe it has been achieved.