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人需要有一種宗教信仰使他的生活有意義。我希望我也能有這樣的信仰，但我的任何信念總會充滿困惑和保留看法。然而，我寫詩就是努力發掘生活的意義。偶爾，我用詩歌表現自己的經歷和感受，從中也明白了我不曾意識到自己已經懂得的道理。因此，對我來說，詩歌創作的沖動表現出來的，不是因為不系統而不太真實的東西……而是一種信仰，那就是，人必須享受生活，探索生活的真諦，提高生活的品質。人可各盡其能，而我則通過寫詩盡善盡美地完成我的使命。
I Wish I Could believe
by C. Day Lewis
"The best lack all conviction,
While the worst are full of passionate intesity."
Those two lines of Yeats for me sum up the matter as it stands today when the very currency of belief seems debased. I was brought up in the Christian church. Later I believed for a while that communism offered the best hope for this world. I acknowledge the need for belief, but I cannot forget how through the ages great faiths have been vitiated by fanaticism and dogmatism, by intolerance and cruelty, by the intellectual dishonesty, the folly, the crankiness or the opportunism of their adherents.
Have I no faith at all, then? Faith is the thing at the core of you, the sediment that's left when hopes and illusions are drained away. The thing for which you make any sacrifice because without it you would be nothing - a mere walking shadow. I know what my own core is. I would in the last resort sacrifice any human relationship, any way of living to the search for truth which produces my poem. I know there are heavy odds against any poem I write surviving after my death. I realize that writing poetry may seem the most preposterously useless thing a man can be doing today. Yet it is just at such times of crisis that each man discovers or rediscovers what he values most. My poet's instinct to make something comes out most strongly then, enabling me to use fear, doubt, even despair as creative stimuli. In doing so, I feel my kinship with humanity, with the common man who carries on doing his job till the bomb falls or the sea closes over him. Carries on because of his belief, however inarticulate, that this is the best thing he can do.
But the poet is luckier than the layman, for his job is always a vacation. Indeed, it's so like a religious vacation that he may feel little need for a religious faith, but because it is always trying to get past the trivial and the transient or to reveal these as images of the essential and the permanent, poetry is at least a kind of spiritual activity.
Men need a religious belief to make sense out of life. I wish I had such a belief myself, but any creed of mine would be honeycombed with confusions and reservations. Yet when I write a poem I am trying to make sense out of life. And just now and then my experience composes and transmutes itself into a poem which tells me something I didn't know I knew.
So for me the compulsion of poetry is the sign of a belief, not the less real for being unformulated ... a belief that men must enjoy life, explore life, enhance life. Each as best he can. And that I shall do these things best through the practice of poetry.
