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INTERVIEWER
Staying in touch with the whole self is tough work, isn't it, if you're trying to make reasonable words in the media about Apollo Eight or the Pentagon Papers?
MACLEISH
Tougher, you mean, than keeping in touch with the whole self when you’re writing about a private part of your experience? It isn’t the subject that betrays a writer, but the way he takes the subject. Rhetoric, in the bad sense of that abused word, is just as bad in confessional writing as it is out in the open air. What matters in either case is the truth of the feeling—the feel of the truth. If you can break through the confusion of words about a political crisis like the Pentagon Papers to the human fact—such as the human reality of an attorney general’s behavior—you have written the experience. And the fact that the writing appears in The New York Times won’t change that fact for better or worse. Journalism also has its uses—and to poets as well as to journalists. You spoke of the Apollo flight—the first circumnavigation of the moon—the one that produced that now familiar, but still miraculous, photograph of the earth seen off beyond the threshold of the moon . . . “small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.” This was one of the great revolutionary moments of the human consciousness, but the moment was not explicit in the photograph nor in the newspaper accounts of the voyage. Only the imagination could recognize it—make imaginative sense of it. Are we seriously to be told that the imagination has no role to play here because the event is in the newspapers?
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| Authors Mentioned |
| Charles Baudelaire, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, Richard Wilbur, William Carlos Williams, Stephen Benét, Geoffrey Chaucer, E. E. Cummings, Dante, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Mark Van Doren, Ralph Waldo Emerson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tu Fu, Homer, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Keats, John Milton, Li Po, Carl Sandburg, William Shakespeare, Sophocles, Wallace Stevens, Henry David Thoreau, Edmund Wilson |
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