From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished ‘nature poems’ in the Georgian style. At eleven, when the war or 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a patriotic poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death of Kitchener. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had ‘chair-like teeth’ – a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake’s ‘Tiger, Tiger’. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. seriously intended – writing which I produced all through my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. Nevertheless the volume of serious – i.e. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books. This material remains under copyright and is reproduced by kind permission of the Orwell Estate and Penguin Books.įrom a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Home / Orwell / Essays and other works / Why I Write Why I Write
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