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INTERVIEWER
You once said—and here is another quotation for you—“there’s always some impulse in the American writer to set out for the frontier in some sense, to head for the savage, the original, the uncivilized, to stand loose from whatever actual coherences people may try to thrust upon him.” Have you felt this impulse, and do you think it shows up in your poetry?
WILBUR
Yes, I feel the impulse. I think that, like most Americans, I have considerable respect for the actual and physical. We are all kickers of stones, you know, and we are not as likely to get enchanted with abstract thought systems as some Europeans, especially the French, are. The French are always coming up with enormously boring notions which they consider très très très interessantes. A man like Sartre can get a whole book out of a proposition which is, on the face of it, untrue, the proposition that Jean Genet, because he is masochistic, has the humility of a saint. There isn’t any point in saying that even once, but a French intellectual can get a whole book out of it.
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| Authors Mentioned |
| Anna Akhmatova, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Joseph Brodsky, Robert Duncan, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Graves, Stanley Kunitz, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, William Meredith, Marianne Moore, Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, Gary Snyder, Stephen Spender, Dylan Thomas, Robert Penn Warren, William Carlos Williams, James Wright, W. H. Auden, André du Bouchet, Witter Bynner, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, D. H. Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allan Poe, Jean-Paul Sartre, Wallace Stevens, Allen Tate, W. B. Yeats |
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