SOURCE: Wilbur, Richard. “The Genie in the Bottle.” In Mid-Century American Poets, John Ciardi, pp. 1-7. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1950.

Before answering the present questionnaire, I should like to say that I have certain reservations about it. For one thing, I think artists do well not to talk too much about art, their natural language being that of their media, and not that of abstract analysis. A writer who talks too much about writing runs the risk of becoming a Literary Figure. For another thing, I mistrust most “statements of principles” by artists, since they are necessarily in the nature of apologia. Works of art can almost never be truthfully described as applications of principles. They are not coerced into being by rational principles, but spring from imagination, a condition of spontaneous psychic unity. Asked to produce his “principles,” the average artist (fearful of being thought frivolous if he declares that he has none) studies his best work of the past for whatever consistencies he can find. From this post facto enquiry, which another might have made as well as he, the artist derives a list of constants in his performance, which he then formulates as “principles.” This self-codification may in some cases be harmless; but there is a danger in it, particularly for younger artists. The drawing up of an aesthetic Deuteronomy, the committing himself to a set of “working principles,” is very likely to be a hindrance to a younger artist, if he has any taste for consistency. It may very well dissuade him from experiments he ought to make, and if so would prove a bad thing to have done.

These reservations of mine may serve to explain why some of my answers to the questionnaire below are a trifle short and oblique, why I have omitted several topics altogether, and why in certain cases I have re-phrased the questions to harmonize with my answers.

1. Is the poem meant to be read aloud?

Any poem written by a man or woman with an ear profits by being read aloud. But we are a long way now from the times of oral epic, scops, and ballad singers. Many modern poems take a bit more doing than one can manage in the course of a single hearing; the ear cannot gulp down in two minutes what the eye was meant to drink in at leisure. This is not to say that there is no pleasure to be got from partial comprehension: a good audience can respond to Yeats' “I saw a staring virgin stand” without a preparatory lecture on the Vision. But I find on the whole that I most enjoy hearing modern poems with which I am already familiar. In such cases there are no problems of discontinuous comprehension, and I can concentrate on how well the reader supplies the patterns of sound and emphasis, and the prevailing emotional tone.

It is said that there are more public poetry-readings these days than ever before, and that they are better than ever attended. If so, this is an opportunity for American poets to furnish the poetry public with a sharper awareness of that part of the meaning of a poem which is carried by the sound. Most poetry at present is not of course heard with the ear, but seen with the eye and heard, if at all, in the inner ear. The inner ear is that part of the memory which stores the sounds of words. The keenness of a reader's inner ear depends somewhat on his natural sensitivity to sound, but also on what kinds of sound he has heard. I strongly suspect that Americans in general are now suffering from degeneration of the inner ear, owing to the unpopularity or decline of many forms of heightened utterance (sermon, oration, declamation, recitation, soliloquy) and the taming and flattening of our daily speech.

Like all poets who value sound, I want the sounds in my poetry to be heard, and I am always grateful for the opportunity to read aloud. If, however, poets are to be of any use in regenerating the public's inner ear, they are going to have to study recitation. With several striking exceptions, our poets (myself included) read in such a way as to convince their audiences that “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.”

2. To whom is the poem addressed? How difficult may a poem be?

A poem is addressed to the Muse. It is one function of the Muse to cover up the fact that poems are not addressed to anybody in particular. During the act of writing, the poem is an effort to express a knowledge imperfectly felt, to articulate relationships not quite seen, to make or discover some pattern in the world. It is a conflict with disorder, not a message from one person to another. Once the poem is written and published, however, it belongs to anyone who will take it, and the more the better.

I am sure that in all poets there is a deep need to communicate. But a poet by his nature has to see and say things in his own way. Though the wish to communicate may be one desire which prompts the poet to write, the experience of writing cannot include any calculations as to the public intelligibility of what is written. While writing, the poet is singlemindedly pursuing a glimpsed perfection of utterance, and he is the only person to whom the poem must be clear. If the poet is something of a human being, and has talent, his poem's being clear to him is a near-guarantee that it will be clear to some, if not all, others.

The question of difficulty does not much interest me, really. I think there are many justifications for poetry's being difficult at present. On the other hand, I do not feel that all poetry must be difficult at present, or that the man who writes readily-understood poetry is criminally opposing the Zeitgeist. The League for Sanity in Poetry to the contrary, I think that among our good poets “wilful obscurity” is extremely uncommon. Those who attempt to arouse public opinion against difficulty in poetry are appealing, I think, to the laziness and uneasy pride of a half-educated and excessively comfortable middle class, whose intelligences have so long been flattered by all our great entertainment media that they cannot associate pleasure with effort, and therefore receive any demand for spiritual exertion as a calculated insult.

It seems to me that there are two ways of thinking about universality. A poem may be said to be universal when it is for everybody; it may also be said to be universal when it is about everybody. In these incoherent times, to try for the first kind of universality is generally to become a literary whore. Provisionally—that is, until the arrival of the millennium—I think we had better cling to the second criterion. A poem is not the less universal for being incomprehensible to some; so long as it deals humanly with some human experience, so that the imaginative order it contrives may enrich another, it may be said to be about everybody—and that is the only kind of universality we can sensibly desire. “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men” seems to me no less possible now than in Emerson's time. The poetry of those who so believe, however difficult it may be, is never guilty of solipsism.

3. What is your attitude toward the language of the poem?

I have no special theory of diction, but I am strongly in favor of the greatest possible catholicity in the choice of words. Some of the poets of our older poetic generation accomplished, before and after the first world war, a necessary subversion of the poetic diction of their predecessors. Since then their imitators have been so slavish as to establish in current verse several recognizable argots. The Auden school of the 30's, which gave poetic language a refreshing infusion of slang and technical terminology, has also been aped quite enough now. In an age of separation and specialization, poets can serve the public sensibility by making continual recombinations of all our many modes of speech—by trying incessantly to counterfeit a general language. If this is to be done, we must hope that no particular combination will be allowed to harden into a poetic dialect.

The borrowing of words from other tongues should not be condemned as mere elegance. Self-confident cultures like the Elizabethan have always very cavalierly taken whatever they needed from foreign languages; and the Elizabethans pronounced their borrowings as they chose. Whenever a foreign tongue can supply us some word more exact or more suggestive than those at hand, I think we may profitably do the same.

4. Do you have anything to say about allusion?

I think the point should be made that one does not, merely by referring to the dying god or what not, evoke a legitimate emotional response. The value of the reference must in every case be proven. I think it possible that the basic aesthetic mistake in Finnegan's Wake is what one might call, in the language of the new critics, “the fallacy of mere reference.” This is not of course to say that references must be explained in poetry. Artistic economy won't allow it. But it should be the use of the reference, and not its inherent prestige, which demands response.

5. What is your attitude toward irony and paradox?

There should be no flight from irony and paradox in writing poetry, rather an insistence on them. They are often the source, I think, of what richness and honesty we may sense in a poem. But “the corruption of the best is the worst,” and it is unfortunately the case that these devices, which when honorably handled are the best means of telling the whole truth, can also be the slickest tools for saying nothing at all. Putting reverse English on one's words, uttering apparent contradictions and oxymorons—these can make for the stark, condensed presentation of divided feelings and irreconcilable facts. But when irony and paradox are employed as a compositional tic, when they are used as a means to simultaneous assertion and retraction, when they produce only a brilliant surface of mock-logic, then what one has is the current version of “pure poetry”—a highly camouflaged way of being vox et praeterea nihil.

In a poem which makes proper use of irony and paradox, the materials will be grandly polarized, and the contradictions made sharp. In a poem which makes cheating use of these devices, one will discover on analysis only a dispersion of flashy short-circuits, and one will end by feeling like poor Alice, when she and the Red Queen had flown so fast to get nowhere.

I dwell so much on this matter because I think that current critical enthusiasm for the ironic has led us to be somewhat uncritical of the perverse and the deviously aimless. For some time now, the ideal conception of the modern poet has been that of a deeply divided man—so much so that when Mr. Eliot turned to the writing of meditative-religious poetry, some complained of him as a lost leader who had “taken the easy way out.” The complexity of the age still appears to demand a corresponding complexity in the poet: he is expected to refine our awareness of contradictions, rather than to resolve them, and whenever he approaches a synthesis of modern experience, through faith, politics, or what have you, we seem to prefer him at all costs to eschew serenity. I think it true that any simplicity of understanding is very likely, in 1950, to be fraudulent, and I imagine we may rightly persist in demanding that our ideal poet be as divided as honesty requires. But we need not extend our admiration from the divided man to the shattered man and the liquefied man. The poet ought not to be divided and re-divided to the point of disappearance, and our respect for irony should not betray us into a toleration of the “pure poetry” of intricate aboulia and evasion.

6. What is your attitude toward subject-matter?

Ideally, the “subject-matter” of poetry should be limitless. For the individual poet, however, limitation in subject-matter seems often to be a condition of power. The jack-of-all-subjects is likely to be master of none. As for bigness and smallness in subject-matter, I do not sympathize with the cultural historian who finds a poem “serious” and “significant” because it mentions the atomic bomb. Scope and assimilative power are highly to be respected, but there are other values in poetry, and Milton and Herrick have an equal loftiness in my private Pantheon.

It does not upset me to hear poetry paraphrased and its “subject-matter” stated. But I don't usually care for the sort of poem which too readily submits to paraphrase. A poem ought not to be fissionable. It ought to be impossible satisfactorily to separate “ideas” from their poetic “embodiment.” When this can be done to a poem, it is a sign that the poem began with a prose “idea”—i.e., began wrongly—and that the writer was not a poet but a phrasemaker.

7. Do you have anything to say about imagery?

I think it a great vice to convey everything by imagery, particularly if the imagery is not interrelated. There ought to be areas of statement. But the statement should not equal and abolish the “objects” in the poem, as Arnold's does in Rugby Chapel. All those rocks and cataracts gone in a puff of piety! The statement should have obliquity, and congruence to the imagery, as Marianne Moore's does—not vitiating the objects, but rather finding in them another and ideal dimension.

8. What about rhyme?

Aside from its obvious value in the finished poem as a part of poetic form and as a heightener of language, rhyme seems to me an invaluable aid in composition. It creates difficulties which the utterance must surmount by increased resourcefulness. It also helps by liberally suggesting arbitrary connections of which the mind may take advantage if it likes. For example, if one has to rhyme with tide, a great number of rhyme-words at once come to mind (ride, bide, shied, confide, Akenside, etc.). Most of these, in combination with tide, will probably suggest nothing apropos, but one of them may reveal precisely what one wanted to say. If none of them does, tide must be dispensed with. Rhyme, austerely used, may be a stimulus to discovery and a stretcher of the attention.

9. What is your attitude toward the structure of the total poem?

As my friend Pierre Schneider has observed, some writers think of art as a window, and some think of it as a door. If art is a window, then the poem is something intermediate in character, limited, synecdochic, a partial vision of a part of the world. It is the means of a dynamic relation between the eye within and the world without. If art is conceived to be a door, then that dynamic relation is destroyed. The artist no longer perceives a wall between him and the world; the world becomes an extension of himself, and is deprived of its reality. The poet's words cease to be a means of liaison with the world; they take the place of the world. This is bad aesthetics—and incidentally, bad morals.

The use of strict poetic forms, traditional or invented, is like the use of framing and composition in painting: both serve to limit the work of art, and to declare its artificiality: they say, “This is not the world, but a pattern imposed upon the world or found in it; this is a partial and provisional attempt to establish relations between things.”

There are other less metaphysical reasons for preferring strictness of form: the fact, for example, that subtle variation is unrecognizable without the pre-existence of a norm; or the fact that form, in slowing and complicating the writing-process, calls out the poet's full talents, and thereby insures a greater care and cleverness in the choice and disposition of words. In general, I would say that limitation makes for power: the strength of the genie comes of his being confined in a bottle.