Spoken vs. written …

… From the archive: Philip Larkin on the voices of poets. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… The price of having the poem re-created in the element in which it was conceived (as they say) is the interposing of a new factor, the reader, between me and the poem. He will not read it with the emphases that I should use, and this will irritate me. Or he will have the kind of voice I associate with brown-eyed young men called Frank.

Happily, my eyes are hazel.