Stephen Spender on a poet’s memory

The poet, above all else, is a person who never forgets certain sense-impressions, which he has experienced and which he can re-live again and again as though with all their original freshness…It therefore is not surprising that although I have no memory for telephone numbers, addresses, faces and where I may have put this morning’s correspondence, I have a perfect memory for the sensation of certain experiences which are crystallized for me around certain associations. I could demonstrate this from my own life by the overwhelming nature of associations which, suddenly aroused, have carried me back so completely into the past, particularly into my childhood, that I have lost all sense of the present time and place.

—Stephen Spender