You can find things that inspire your writing in the strangest places. This morning I found a quote from a poem in a column in the Wall Street Journal by Peggy Noonan.  This is the line she quoted from a poem by William Meredith: “Look hard at the world, they said – generously, if you can manage that, but hard.” 

This was so perfect for the class I’m teaching this fall that I Googled  Meredith and found the whole poem. It has the wonderful title of “What I Remember The Writers Telling Me When I Was Young”.   Here’s the link to the rest of it and more of his poems:

www.conncoll.edu/meredith/works/volumes-of-poetry/op_parti.htm

Go read the whole poem. The second half is even better than the first. Here’s the first part of the poem:

Look hard at the world, they said —
generously, if you can
manage that, but hard. To see
the extraordinary data, you
have to distance yourself a
little, utterly. Learn the
right words for the umpteen kinds
of trouble that you’ll see,
avoiding elevated
generics like misery,
wretchedness. And find yourself
a like spectrum of exact
terms for joy, some of them
archaic, but all useful.

–  by William Meredith  (first half of poem)

What has inspired you own writing recently? Please click the comment button below and let us know.

Auden and Meredith