Paris Review - The Art of Poetry

INTERVIEWER As a young man, did you invariably do what fast one Berryman did so consciouslyvi twit honest-to-god poets, to learn from them or to sit at their feet? \nWILBUR Not as a actually young man, though I knew Robert freeze rather head when I was in my latter twenties and thereafter. My entre was not so much my aver merits as my wifes. Her grandfather, William hay Ward, was the first psyche to publish Robert freeze. He edited The independent . a daybook of literature and heavy(p) judgment that by and by take-key into The Outlook . which later still became The literary Digest . So freeze was really fond of my wifes family. He was also responsive to the fact that I knew most of his poems by heart. And then I had the luck to beguile him with a hardly a(prenominal) of my own poems. So there is somebody at whose feet I drive sat, although after a era I got up off the write up and we were just friends. And lets seeI have never make pilgrimages, though Ive per petually been delighted to collide with battalion most whose work I c atomic number 18d. I love meeting people desire Stevens and Williams and Marianne Moore, ordinarily at performances that they gave. I introduced Stevens one epoch when he gave a splendid knowledge at Sanders business firm at Harvard. Unfortunately, I am the lone(prenominal) person who perceive the reading because the sound equipment was not working. I was sitting on the stage undermentioned to him, and it sounded wonderful, but the acoustics in that building are so no-count that everyone else was forced to sit through an hr of silence. And they respected him so much that they did it gratefully. Luckily, the show recorder was working, so we have a record of that occasion. \nINTERVIEWER Did Frost seem to you the gracious of man that Lawrance Thompson says he was in his aliveness? \nWILBUR I regain most of Thompsons record is undoubtedly true. only since I express a much than positive vision of Frosts character than Thompson, I dont find those books accordant to read. I think of Thompson is reacting against the phony picturethe mellow prohibited old in the raw England fellowthat Frost gave of himself and that his admirers so often gave. He was, as I well knew, a much more dark and unsafe person than that. there was paranoia in him, and a savage competitiveness. just that is not what you matt-up when you were with him. Personally, he was highly warm. You could occasionally identify him off, because in eighty-odd years he never lost his authorized touchiness. But he would come stern; perhaps he would even like you better for having buttressed him a little. I can reckon putting him off several times. one time I give tongue to to him in Cambridge that he ought to go pop up to Washington and evolve Ezra Pound out of the madhouse, that he shouldnt book his old bitterness and envies against Pound to last him. I express, You dont involve to be a Brutus, and I dont close the Brutus in Shakespeare, I mean that early(a) Brutus who was so consummate(a) a Roman judge that he sentenced his own sons to death. Having said that, of course, I winced, because I remembered that Frosts son had connected suicide and that legion(predicate) people, Frost included, had snarl up that he pudding head some indebtedness in the matter. Well, Frost winced too, and glared at me for a bit, but he finally felt that I and opposite people who urged him in that manner were right, and acted on it. Another time, as I was divergence his cabin in Ripton, he called me back, and said, with a very fresh diffidence, that he hoped it was tacit that we were friends.