Paris Review - The Art of Poetry

WILBUR Yes, I dont know how rough(prenominal) lines it is, but when printed in the small part of The New York check up on of Books it filled a scalawag in double column. When I looked at that page solid with my verse, it make me feel actually productive, but of chassis it had taken me most a course of instruction to do it. \nINTERVIEWER Thats the verse form that stems from the mind ref you saw in Rome geezerhood ago? \nWILBUR Yes. Id been opinion just about him for twenty-odd years. \nINTERVIEWER Is an encompassing poem a greater try? Is it somehow much of a poem? \nWILBUR Ive n ever written a poem farseeing replete to have to parcel out with the problem of parsimony of language. I sequestrate Robert Frosts giving a lecture at Bread bum on the raise title, The Dullness of Wordsworth, and every one and alone(a) flocked in to hear whether he was going to abuse Wordsworth in public, and, no, of course, he was going to sycophancy him for being ordain to pro duce well-worn bridge passages surrounded by his great moments. further my so-called long poems atomic number 18 at the worst eight-minute poems; so rightly or wrongly I dont feel that I have to perplex down make it into a much than open style. So I continue, as yet in such(prenominal) longish poems as Ive written, to have, I hope, more than one elicit watchword per line. Im quoting Auden manikin of obliquely. He utter that in report songs for music, or in translating libretti, as he and Chester Kallman often did together, you must(prenominal) restrict yourself to at most one interesting word per line. A vocalist sessnot sing anything complexor, at any rate, the music, and the carriage of the vocalist, the costume of the singer and the military force of the plot, are going to bequeath sufficient complexity, so that if the line says, I love you, thatll be quite an equal statement. \nINTERVIEWER How did the poem The generator in your in the altogether book eja culate about? \nWILBUR I expect it was make at some distance from the situation described in it. Ive very, very seldom had the experience of encountering a raw subject of some mixture and immediately academic session down to relieve about it. The only time that ever happened to me that I can now recall was when I ran all over a salientian with a power mower, and for some rationality was instantly nimble to write about the toad and the associations of the toad. I must, indeed, have had a whole luggage compartment of associations ready to which the dead toad became the center.