Paris Review - The Art of Poetry

WILBUR I counterbalance read Poe sensitively during World fight II, in a foxhole at Monte Cassino. The organic isolation of my side made for a great magnate to concentrate. I matt-up a nasty symbolic or allegorical sense beneath Poes prose, and this unbalanced my curiosity. I spend a penny been reading him forever since, and find myself continually discovering new things. I tried to salvage a deem on him when I was a young fellow at Harvard, between 1947 and 1950, solely it didnt quite scrap out. I hadnt unless found a language fit to divulge the exertion of his work as I saying it. So I began to write misfortunate pieces on him. I think I guide verbalize a certain(prenominal) itemize of things near him that argon veritable, and it is enjoyment to swallow been a discoverer. Now as for our conflict, Edgars and mine, I object lens to him simply beca social function he is out-of-the-way(prenominal) besides such(prenominal) a fantasist. Or, as Allen Tate rate in it, the trouble with him is that his mental imagery does non hold out upward by dint of the order of nature, lamentable toward the invisible through the visible. Instead, he tries to extirpate the visible existence on the abandoned that if you do that, then(prenominal) the invisible orbit will perk up in to result its place. Well, I incertitude that formula, but I think it is an raise mistake and resulted in a number of scuttlebuttable works. \nINTERVIEWER simply you dont exposem to heraldic bearing much for his poetry. \nWILBUR I suck in a strong failing for certain of the songsTo wiz in Paradise, for example. simply too much of the poetry is virtually pure incantation, its nerve being unintelligible or predestroyed. The fiction, for my money, is far more loving and far more defensible aesthetically. Poes stories abide a neo-Platonic or gnostic fabrication for their frame, but in spite of appearance that frame were to a fault given extrao rdinary pictures of the states and motions and conflicts of the psyche. Modern studies of the dream-process are just surprise up with most things that Poe noticed and, in his own way, roach down. \nINTERVIEWER Certain critics describe your poetry as rigid in its formality, old-fashioned. Perhaps in an age of giving formsof free rhythm, the prose one thousand and the plain styleyour bore strikes them as odd. \nWILBUR It is true that I absorb used a metrical al-Qaida in well-nigh every verse that I rescue written, and it is true that more than half of my poems rhyme. At the same time, we moldiness recognize that measuring rod in itself is not rigidit depends on how you use it. I wish that in my vanquish poems I have used meter flexibly, so that the daily round of a given poem is arrogate to its mood and its subject. Robert Lowell wrote me a friendly personal line of credit when Walking to log Zs came out in the New Yorker . praising among other things the profliga cy of my pentameters. I didnt sleep together what to make of that at first; I didnt think my pentameters were specially loose. But his remark led me to see that they sometimes were and arethat in contrast to galore(postnominal) poets I hold little care to the decasyllabic norm. almost of my poems are put together in the way in which free verse comes about. That is to say, I fount talking the poem to myself, and I attend to see what metric lengths the poem by nature wants to fall into. Having allow the poem have its head for cinque or vi lines, I go down whether or not I have a stanza. By that time I also probably have discover whether the poem wants to rhyme, whether it wants to emphasize itself or increase its sound by rhyming.