Malcolm Guite answers a question about writing poetry.

“You bring up depression. Many of your poems are helpful companions during dark times. When your poems touch on difficulty, they do so as one who has experienced it and yet you’re such a jolly man. How is that?” 

“Ah, yes, well, a couple of things about that.” He laughs. “As you know, these are things we all share in common. One of the things I consciously resist and rebel against is the idea of poetry as just personal self-expression. The idea of the lonely, romantic genius in his weird, peculiar place, who everyone has to make allowances for leads to this kind of confessional poetry which gets worse and worse and more and more obscure. What does it amount to? Another strange adventure in the little world of me. I don’t buy that at all. No, I want to be the bard of a tribe, to tell the great, collective stories that bind us together, but, of course, I tell them as they’ve happened to me. Whatever is personal of mine, is most emphatically not in the poems as purely self-expression.

“Confessional poetry becomes very tedious after a while. The poetry I want to write and that I enjoy reading articulates the joys and sorrows of life. As to the jollity, I suppose I would say that anyone with lighter emotions who hasn’t experienced any pain is in danger of sentiment. I trust them about as much as I trust a Thomas Kincaid painting. You know, there’s a term Tolkien coined, eucatastrophe. Eu, meaning good, so a good catastrophe, but it still has the word catastrophe in it. In some sense, the eucatastrophe at the end of the Lord of the Rings is trustworthy because we’ve been with these characters to the very edge of the crack of doom. That’s why I trust the resurrection because the church doesn’t backpedal on Good Friday.”

From the Rabbit Room