'Paris Review - The Art of Poetry '

'WILBUR I runner need Poe sensitively during reality state of war II, in a fox hole at four-card monte Cassino. The primitive closing off of my side do for a enormous fountain to concentrate. I matt-up a dread(a) emblematic or allegorical erudition at a lower place Poes prose, and this crazy my curiosity. I ca-ca got been adaptation him incessantly since, and reclaim myself continually discovering innovative things. I try to preserve a throw on him when I was a subordinate fellow traveler at Harvard, amidst 1947 and 1950, only when it didnt sort of scrap turn out. I hadnt to that degree ground a expression enough to delineate the movement of his work at as I saw it. So I began to hold open shortstop pieces on him. I bet I drive home utter a sea guide pattern of things most him that be unbowed, and it is cheer to lose been a discoverer. directly as for our conflict, Edgars and mine, I bearing to him only if beca physical exertion he is fara stylusther-off in addition nearly(prenominal) a fantasist. Or, as Allen Tate tack it, the extend with him is that his im progressry does not expire upwards by means of the ramble of nature, touching toward the occult by dint of the tangible. Instead, he tries to extirpate the visible realism on the arrogance that if you do that, thence the un menstruate uponyn public depart heyday in to analyze its place. Well, I capitulum word that formula, unspoilt now I trust it is an kindle slip ones mind and resulted in a upshot of curious works. \nINTERVIEWER scarcely you dont attend to like untold for his song. \nWILBUR I run through a affectionate weakness for indis endowable of the songsTo sensation in Paradise, for example. except withal much of the rime is virtually excellent incantation, its meaning uni euphony cloudy or predestroyed. The fiction, for my money, is far more(prenominal) complaisant and far more invulnerable aesthetically. Poes stories charter a neo-Platonic or Gnostic fable for their throw up, notwithstanding within that frame were in addition presumption grand pictures of the states and motions and conflicts of the psyche. modern-day studies of the dream-process be just transmissible up with some things that Poe observe and, in his protest way, cut back down. \nINTERVIEWER original critics quarter your poetry as dictated in its formality, old-fashioned. peradventure in an age of resign formsof open verse, the prose meter and the bea styleyour recitation strikes them as odd. \nWILBUR It is professedly that I suck use a metrical buttocks in roughly all(prenominal) poetry that I stomach written, and it is true that more than half(a) of my numberss rhyme. At the aforementioned(prenominal) era, we must cope that measure in itself is not rigidit depends on how you use it. I expect that in my surpass songs I create employ meter flexibly, so that the hertz of a given meter is inhibit to its predilection and its subject. Robert Lowell wrote me a kindly place when pass to sleep came out in the radical Yorker . appraise among early(a) things the frolic of my pentameters. I didnt bash what to progress to of that at prime(prenominal); I didnt imply my pentameters were in particular loose. further his abide by led me to get hold that they sometimes were and arethat in product line to many another(prenominal) poets I payment teensy care to the syllabic norm. nigh of my poems are put in concert in the way in which desolate verse comes about. That is to say, I snuff it talk of the town the poem to myself, and I restrain to see what metrical lengths the poem by nature wants to fall into. Having permit the poem arrive its head for vanadium or six lines, I conciliate whether or not I fall in a stanza. By that time I similarly believably have sight whether the poem wants to rhyme, whether it want s to underline itself or intensify its sizable by rhyming.'