“I fear that many people are put off by poetry because they don’t know where to start. If I have any advice for them, it is this: find what you like.

Who is to say what guides this process?

In my own case, it has simply been the fact that certain phrases, poems, and figures have acted like flare-lights along the path of my own life. Sometimes you see a flicker in the darkness and know that it is saying something—often something of great importance—and you sense that you have to go toward it, to get near to it, all the time looking out for other lights.

My love of certain poets stems from a single phrase they wrote that hit me like a great freight train of truth.

At other times, I have been attracted to a poem or a poet because I am taken by that feeling of recognition that someone else has felt or thought exactly the way I did. As C.S. Lewis says, as a character in the film Shadowlands, “We read to know we’re not alone.”

Sometimes, we read poets because we want to be like them, or because they are arbiters of good taste, or have been through something we want to know about. Literature—poetry, in particular—offers us a way to become different from what we are or might have been otherwise.

In the end, I suppose the question is: What is the purpose of all this? Why is it worth making our heads into a well-furnished room?

I think it’s because what we have up here—in our heads—is the only thing that cannot be taken. So long as we have memory, we cannot be made into automatons by man or machine…”

Which brings me back to Shakespeare.

The Tempest is the last play Shakespeare wrote on his own. And because of that—and because we know so little about his life that we always look for clues in his work—a lot of autobiography has always been read into the play.

It is about a magician, Prospero, at the end of his magical days. At the end of the play, he promises to drown his magic book and break his staff. It is impossible not to read a certain amount of biography into this, Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage.

Every now and then, somebody comes up with a new theory about Shakespeare. All have been heard before—for example, the vivid description of the sea in The Tempest indicates Shakespeare must have spent time as a sailor.

My response to this? In that case, Shakespeare must also have been a Roman emperor, several English and Scottish kings, a Danish prince, a shepherd boy, a teenage girl in love, a murderer, and almost every other person who ever lived. It is a reductive argument, because it forgets that in the realm of the imagination, you can be all things without actually being them.

And, in any case, at the end, it all disappears, falls apart, and comes together again somewhere else.

This speech, by Prospero, in the fourth act of The Tempest, is the finest farewell of any I know, and one I hope to keep in my own head for many years to come.

**Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep