The Rage of Caliban

We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. [...] The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning [...] One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts.

-- T.S. Eliot, 'The Metaphysical Poets', 1921


What the poet does is as ordinary and mysterious as digesting. I question. I break life down. I impose chaos on order. [...] The body is a dark continent. The mind is another. So I can say very little about what I do. I accept nothing as read. I attack the pretence that we know how things work. 

-- Craig Raine, statement for 'Contemporary Writers', 1988


Eliot was one of the great High Modernists, who were notorious for their unbending intellectualism and their artistic difficulty. [...] This view of modernism has been so influential it has spawned a postmodern poetic school led by JH Prynne whose purpose is to be difficult -- emulatively difficult. (Not difficult to be difficult, actually.) [...] The reader shouldn't expect anything in the way of conventional "meaning" since the poetry was anyway fetched up from the dark womb of the poet's unconscious.

-- Craig Raine on T.S. Eliot, 2008