There is an image of the potter Michael Cardew in old age, almost as wrinkled as Auden, gaunt and with sunken cheeks, dressed in a medieval-looking shirt with cut-off arms, wearing shorts, throwing a pot on a kick-wheel. He has wet clay plastered up his arms, and his hands are in mid-flight and are as wild as any conductor’s. He is surrounded by young students and he looks completely and utterly enthused, in the grip of the compulsion to make and talk and inspire. The photograph seems to suggest that making a pot is simply not enough – discipleship is called for. In Tanya Harrod’s magnificent biography of Cardew she traces his complicated trajectory from the romantic attempt to revive a folk-tradition of country pottery in the Cotswolds through his 25 years of experiment in West Africa to his later life as counter-cultural seer in Cornwall. The people who fell into his orbit were rarely unchanged by his charisma, the fierceness of his arguments, or, indeed, by his pots.
more from Edmund de Waal at Literary Review here.