“But I did. And you did.”

It made sense. Perfect sense. Poetry involved phlebotomy: blood simply had to be let somewhere along the cycle. And poetry was, in essence, a regenerative exercise, no holds barred. It made perfect sense that an ur-poet specifically had to die, and specifically dramatically and ceremoniously, so that Ted could be born.

But poetry made converse sense, or rather a dearth of any sort of sense at all, out in the vast Yorkshire wilderness, his playroom as a boy, his questing grounds as an adolescent, the seat of his ever-waiting grave, and a reservoir of inspiration throughout his lifetime. In the midst of all the teeming competition for survival set against the strictest of formalisms, where one being’s death perpetuated another’s sustenance, there was also the transposed element of chaos and the intimation of not some greater good, but pure, unfathomable, random dramaturgy. Regal beasts toppled mock-forlornly at the blunt of a bullet. There was the scintillation of the sudden drizzle of gold through the boughs above. There was the wren’s cryptic recitative. The insouciant intricacy of a single kestrel’s wing. The grave stag’s silent cameo. The larval sinews of a loping, tick-shorn blood-hound. The way in which a bear would map the site of a kill with a swath of gore along the column of a tree trunk. This was all reflective not of what God had created in the space of seven days, but of what He had intuited in the space of a single instant. All of this was not the prudent, consummate work of a master, but the extravagantly brilliant, though immoderate, work of a dilettante, a god who could imagine pipers playing amid carnage.

The shock of Ted’s life—well, up to now, anyway, Sunday evening, 10 February 1963—was when he found out that the other lads in his boarding school thought poetry sissified. The rest of the boys were readers of the adventure stories, the same Sir H. Rider Haggard and Rafael Sabatini that Ted’s father had had the opportunity to scorn as a child and would not sanction his son to read. The lads seemed convinced that adventure was something that had sadly taken place only in previous centuries. They thought that the mooning over of anachronisms of their births would suffice as their lives’ adventures. They went to parties in pirate costumes, de rigueur. Ted thought, actually he still thinks, that adventure stories were scattershot and pandering, written for the rabble, whereas poetry is a living vine of direct communication; one mind milking another, an artery feeding tissue. The other boys wrote QUATERMAIN and SCARAMOUCHE on their cricket batons. They took copious piss out of Ted for writing OMAR KHAYYÁM upon his, but said nothing when he knocked their bowls to heaven and ran the creases with a dust devil obscuring his legs. He was always the biggest, shyest, most notable lad among them. He was eleven when he received his first love poem, written under the pseudonym of Hippolyta. He resolved to take the high road. He recognized the offending sixth former by the impertinence of his stare. He thanked the boy for his attentions. Then he threatened to break his arm if he or any of his schoolmates heard of this unfortunate and aberrant crush ever again.