[In the following interview, conducted in 1977, Warren discusses his formative influences, his association with the Fugitive group, the means and development of his poetic composition, and the nature of his perception of the world as a poet.]

[Stitt:] You entered Vanderbilt at an early age, which leads me to think that you grew up in a home where the life of the mind was fully lived. Is that so?

[Warren:] Well, both my father and my maternal grandfather had books everywhere. I've got a lot of my father's books right over there. I recently reread Cooper for the first time since I was a boy, using my father's copies. And each book had the date he finished reading it—1890, 1891, and so on. I spent my boyhood summers with my grandfather on a tobacco farm—he was an old man then. His children used to say, “Poppa,” as they called him, “is an inveterate reader”—I thought they meant Confederate—“and he is a visionary.” He read poetry and quoted it by the yard. He was wonderful, an idol. His place was very remote and he allowed nobody on it except our family—he was totally cut off from the rest of the world. For one thing, it just didn't interest him. I mean, he read books all the time—Egyptian history or Confederate history or American history or Napoleonic campaigns, and poetry.

But there was nobody to talk to—there were very few people in the community who had any interests like his. Often I wouldn't see another boy for the biggest part of the summer. My grandfather and I were sole companions, except for dinner with my rollicking young aunt—and her husband, when she later married. So I got the benefit of his conversation. I spent hours a day with him, and I found him fascinating. He was against slavery but a good Confederate. He said, “In the end, you go with your people.” He was a captain of cavalry under Forrest for several years and fought in many battles. He loved to relive the war with me—under his direction I'd lay it all out on the ground using stones and empty rifle or shotgun shells. That's not the way children should be raised, but it was my way.

Was it the literary activity at Vanderbilt that drew you there?

What I actually wanted to be was a naval officer. I finished high school at the age of fifteen—no great intellectual accomplishment where I went—and later got the appointment to Annapolis. Those were all political appointments in those days, and R. Y. Thomas, our congressman and a friend of my father's, got me the appointment. But then I had an accident. I was struck in the eye by a stone and couldn't pass the physical. So I chose Vanderbilt. I started out to be a chemical engineer, but they taught chemistry primarily by rote—there was no theorizing, no sense of what it was about.

At the same time, I had John Crowe Ransom as a freshman English teacher. He made no effort to court the students, but I found him fascinating—as did many others. He taught ordinary freshman expository writing, but he had other things to say along the way, and he would shine. At the end of the first term he said, “I think you don't belong in here. I think I will have you go to my advanced class.” There was only one writing course beyond Freshman English at Vanderbilt. A few people in their sophomore year would study forms of versification, poetry writing, essay writing, things like that, with Ransom, and this is what I did the second half of my freshman year. Ransom was the first poet I had ever seen, a real live poet in pants and vest. I read his first book of poems and discovered that he was making poetry out of a world I knew—it came home to me. Ransom was a Greek scholar by training. He had never taken an English course in his life except Freshman English, which was required at Vanderbilt, where he had gone. And at least once he remarked in a tony way, “I don't see any reason to take a course in a literature where the language is native to you.” He laughed at himself for being an English teacher. He said, “I find myself completely superfluous.”

Was there much literary activity among the students at that time?

Well, it was a strange situation, and I really can't understand it even today. There was just a tremendous interest in poetry among students. There were two undergraduate writing clubs, junior and senior, where people would read poems and essays to each other. And there was an informal poetry club—with some overlaps from the other groups—which met about once a week. We'd read each other's poems and booze a little—white corn—talk poetry. All kinds of people wrote poems then—I remember an all-southern football center, a man who later became chairman of the Department of Romance Languages at Wisconsin, and another who later became the only Phi Beta Kappa private in the Marine Corps.

It is hard to believe now, but this is literally true—when an issue of the Dial came out, people would line up to get the first one. Freshmen were buying the New Republic or the Nation, to get the new poem by Yeats or the new poem by Hart Crane. This didn't last for very long, but it did last up to the thirties, when I was teaching there and people like Randall Jarrell were in as freshmen. And all this was going on outside of the curriculum. That's why I think graduate programs in creative writing are stupid. Sometimes I've been peripherally involved in them, but if people want to write they will write. If the community is right, it is nice if they can show their stuff to their elders, that's natural. But what we see now is just an attempt to formalize what since the beginning of time has been natural. It is only recently that giving courses and grades and all that crap has crept into it. In my time it was generally self-propelled among the students.

How did you become a member of the Fugitive group?

The Fugitive group was started before the First World War when some young professors, including Ransom and Donald Davidson, and some bookish, intelligent young businessmen got together to discuss literature and philosophy. But it turned toward poetry after the war. The moving force was a strange Jew named Mttron Hirsch, an adventurer of no education whatever, except that he had read something of everything. He had been, I was told, the heavyweight boxing champion of the Pacific Fleet and was a great friend of Gertrude Stein in her early days. He had also been a model for some of the painters of Paris—he was an enormously handsome man, very big, perfectly formed in his way, and he became the center, almost the idol in an odd way, of the group. He was in his early or middle forties then, and had or claimed to have a back injury. So he would lie flat on his back on a couch and be waited on by his kin. I think he made a good thing of it. He was the wise man of the tribe, and he liked to be able to talk with some learned friends, so he accumulated people around him. I guess that was the source of it originally.

I believe Allen Tate and Ridley Wills were the first undergraduates to be admitted to the group. They were six or seven years older than I. Tate had been ill and had come back to college, which is why he and I overlapped. He couldn't pass, or wouldn't pass, freshman math and freshman chemistry, both of which were required. He had all A's in everything else, things like Greek and Latin, but he wouldn't do the others—it bored him too much. So he was around. Then in my junior year, I guess it was, Ridley Wills and Allen Tate invited me to fugitive meetings. Greatest thrill I'd had in my life. By then it was mostly a poetry club—we read each other's poems and argued poetry. Everybody was an equal in that room—no one pulled his long gray beard. And it was a good time to be there—Ransom was writing his best poems then, and Tate was just finding himself. I myself was seventeen, and I said, “This is what I'm going to do.” I had no interest in fiction, though, not until later.

John Crowe Ransom must have been a very remarkable man and a strong presence in the group.

Well, he was an influence on everybody. For me then he was the oldest—also at the height of his powers and with a wizardly understanding of poetry. He was a center of this without ever trying to be—we just automatically looked to him, you see. He was very learned and a student all his life. And not only that, he was also a great player of games—a crack golfer and he played tennis, poker, and bridge, sometimes played bridge or poker for the whole weekend. People who didn't know him well sometimes think he was an unfeeling man, but that just isn't so at all. I recently had a letter from my goddaughter, who is Ransom's granddaughter. She said, “He is so often portrayed as being cold and self-absorbed that I wanted to write and tell you at least one thing that happened in my presence. When you were ill”—this was in 1972, I had hepatitis and they thought it was cancer—“Pappy either went or sent someone to the post office three times a day to see if there was any news, and he telephoned all over the country.” He was a man of great warmth—I wrote an essay in celebration of his eighty-eighth birthday, and the letter he wrote me in return is incredible. He ended: “I find myself at last brushing away a furtive tear.” He raised vegetables and flowers, and every morning he would decorate the whole house with fresh flowers. And he loved to cook breakfast—better breakfasts than I've had all the rest of my life. He always served them to his wife while she was still in bed. It was a habit, he said, that he'd fallen into during her first pregnancy, and he liked it.

Why do you suppose Ransom stopped writing poetry when he did?

Well, I can tell you exactly what he said to me before he stopped writing. We were sitting by the fireside one night back in the thirties, when he was at the height of his powers. And he suddenly said, out of silence, “You know, I think I will quit writing poetry.” Now he was at his very peak, and I said, “You're crazy.” He said, “No, I know what I'm doing.” And he did understand himself so well—he had the most systematic mind I ever knew. In everything he did, he was intellectual and introspective—he knew his own mind. But this is one time when he did not know what he was doing. “Now Robert,” he went on to say—he was a great friend and admirer of Robert Frost—“Robert has fallen to self-imitation, and his poetry has lost its cutting edge. I know I could write a better poem tomorrow than I've ever written in my life; I know how to write my poems. But just writing a better poem is not what I want to do. I want to have the joy of writing the poem of discovery.” He said, “If I get a new insight, a new way in, if I grow into something different, I will start again, but I don't want to be the same old John Crowe Ransom. I want always to be the amateur, the poet who writes because he needs to and loves it, and not because it is his profession. I hate the professional poet.” That's the way he explained it to me. So I said, “Well, you're crazy,” and I still think he was crazy. Randall Jarrell had a different idea, and I think he was right. He said that being a poet is like standing out in the rain, waiting for lightning to hit you. If it hits you once—that is, if you write one really fine poem—you are good; if it hits you six times, you're great. Ransom wouldn't stay out in the rain.

Do you think he was wise to go back late in life and revise his poems as he did?

I think frequently he did harm to the poems. He wanted to be back in touch with it, but he had lost the touch. The last time I went to see him was at the time of his eighty-fifth birthday. I went out there to give a reading and to see him. He was totally himself, not showing any sign of age. After we came back from the reading, we sat down and had a drink, and he said, “I've given myself a birthday present. I've written a new poem.” It was a new kind of poem, you see—published in the Sewanee Review. He went back into the rain at the age of eighty-five. And that was that.

I want to talk a bit about how you compose your poems. What gets you started on a poem—is it an idea, an image, a rhythm, or something else?

It can be a lot of things. More and more for me the germ of a poem is an event in the natural world. And there is a mood, a feeling—that helps. For about ten years, from 1944 to 1954, I was unable to finish a poem—I'd start one, and get just so far, and then it would die on me. I have stacks of unfinished poems. I was writing then—other things, Brother to Dragons and some short stories. Many times the germ of a short story could also be the germ of a poem, and I was wasting mine on short stories. I've only written three that I even like. And so I quit writing short stories.

Then I got married again, and my wife had a child, then a second, and we went to a place in Italy, a sort of island with a ruined fortress. It is a very striking place—there is a rocky peninsula with the sea on three sides, and a sixteenth-century fortress on the top. There was a matching fortress across the bay. We had a wonderful time there for several summers, and I began writing poetry again, in that spot. I had a whole different attitude toward life, my outlook was changed. The poems in Promises were all written there. Somehow all of this—the place, the objects there, the children, the other people, my new outlook—made possible a new grasp on the roots of poetry for me. There were memories and natural events—the poems wander back and forth from my boyhood to my children. Seeing a little gold-headed girl on that bloody spot of history is an event. With the bay beyond, the sea beyond that, the white butterflies, that's all a natural event. It could be made into a short story, but you would have to cook up a lot of stuff around it. All you have to cook up in the poem is to be honest with your feelings and your observation somehow.

This was a new way of starting poems for me—I had been writing two kinds of poems earlier—one kind tended to start from a verbal and abstract point, and the other kind was a sort of balladry, based on an element of narrative. “Billie Potts” was the last poem I wrote before the drought set in. It was a bridge piece, my jumping-off place when I started again, ten years later.

Now my method is more mixed. Some poems can start with a mood. Say there is a stream under your window, and you are aware of the sound all night as you sleep; or you notice the moonlight on the water, or hear an owl call. Things like this can start a mood that will carry over into the daylight. These objects may not appear in the poem, but the mood gets you going.

One poem, “Red-Tail Hawk and Pyre of Youth,” which I think is one of my best, was set off by a review of my work. Harold Bloom of Yale is kind enough to like my poetry, and he wrote a review for the New Leader in which he talks about the place that hawks occupy in my poetry. When I read it, I realized that it is all true. You don't know your own poetry—working on it so closely, you see it differently. And so I thought about the fact that I had killed a hawk, a red-tail, in my woodland boyhood. I brought him down with what was a record shot for me. I was then a practicing taxidermist, among other things, and I stuffed the hawk and carried him with me for many years—I used to keep him over my bookshelf. This is the key to the poem, a factual event, a memory. It can be like that, but I never know how the next poem will start—I don't want to fall into a formula.

You have said, in reference to both fiction and poetry: “For me the common denominator is always an ethical issue.” This is clearer, I think, in fiction than in poetry.

Yes, for me at least, it is much more obvious in fiction. But the relation between the abstract and the concrete is different in more recent poems. The germ of a poem for me now tends unconsciously to be something I might call a “moralized anecdote.” I don't mean that the poem will preach a sermon, but I don't want to be coy about what constitutes the germinal start. I would like to show the problem of the abstract and the concrete in the construction of the poem itself. I don't mean that the “moralization” is a “start”—it is the last thing that happens, and then by suggestion.

Brother to Dragons is, in some ways, your most abstract or intellectual poem—the balance between the abstract and the concrete seems somewhat different from that in other poems. Were you intentionally putting ideas first there?

For me, the process of writing, sometimes quite a long process, is to grope for the meaning of the thing, an exploration for the meaning rather than an execution of meanings already arrived at. There are plenty of people who work the other way around, but for me the poem has to start with something concrete and not with an abstract idea. I started Brother to Dragons with the tale, the story, which I had first heard from an old great-aunt in a localized and garbled form. Then I read a pioneer version and thought about it in various ways. Whatever idea I had was vague and general, the idea that there are two light-bringers—Meriwether Lewis and his cousin, Lilburne. They think they are bringing the light of civilization into the dark of the wilderness, but they discover that they were carrying darkness all along—the darkness that is in the human heart. They are carrying darkness to darkness. That's where it started, my thinking when I started writing. Now, I have learned a lot since then—there might be some Coleridge in it, and something of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which I have known from boyhood. All this has occurred to me much later, many years later. Perhaps it was there at the start, but it was not consciously in my mind at the time.

Brother to Dragons presents at least a partial portrait of human evil. The action takes place in a virtual wilderness and within a context that is notable in other ways. One of the epigraphs, for example, portrays Kentucky as “the dark and bloody ground.” There is also the notion of the annus mirabilis—1811, when the action of the poem takes place—the year in which nature seemed to turn backwards, perhaps becoming evil itself. Are these things presented in any sense as an explanation of or justification for the human deed?

Well, they occurred and it ties in, but there is no place where it is hammered home. To the Indians, Kentucky was an evil spot—they hunted there and fought there, but they would not live there. And there are times of disaster in the world's history. I think of the great disaster which destroyed the Mediterranean world at the time of Crete, and of what is probably behind the Atlantis myth. There are times of tremendous disaster in the world. Plagues, the black death, God knows what else. And this really occurred, the annus mirabilis, and it was called that back then. The Mississippi River flowed uphill for three days, knocking down settlements, destroying towns, making new lakes. There was an earthquake that did much damage to Louisville and many other places; the squirrels all dove into the river, killing themselves; horses turned carnivorous—nature was unhinged. But it isn't a moral thing—nature has no awareness of itself, it is neither good nor evil because good is something that somebody chooses. Behind the great disasters in nature there are causes that are wholly natural. So it is a question of the disorder of the human heart—you see, they all could occur.

What is nature? That's the question that is involved here. Is nature naturally good? Is man naturally good? Or does man have to earn his goodness bit by bit?—civilize himself and humanize himself, a long-term process. So the question of nature as good, nature as subject to bursts of inexplicable evil and destruction, is simply a metaphor for the human condition. And in this case the metaphor isn't made up. It is nice when history gives you a metaphor—you don't have to make one up. It has a degree of authority no made-up metaphor ever had. Just like the snake I saw as I climbed the bluff to the Lewis house. That snake is true—a great big snake, big as I ever saw, rose out of the rock and looked me right in the eye. Sometimes you have a lot of luck. I never would have thought of putting that snake there.

If nature is morally neutral in your view, then what about man? Do you subscribe to the doctrine of original sin, as many critics claim you do?

I would not want to be too rigid about this. A man has to learn to be good—he is not born “good” as a baby. St. Augustine was right about that. So in this sense I would say yes, there is original sin—man has to learn virtue; otherwise his sin is original. Certainly there is such a thing as evil. It exists in the world and we live with it every day; just look around you. I don't oppose the theological view, but I must say I am not interested in proving the theological point. It doesn't need proving. What I am interested in is the drama of the theological point—put it that way.

“The drama of the theological point”—that phrase must come from the side of you that is the storyteller—not the philosopher, but the man who loves to tell a powerful tale.

I know a million stories, everybody knows a million stories—you've seen them, you've heard them, and you know all about them. But how many do you write? Well, every once in a while, one of them catches on to you, gets in your hair or gets in your pants, and you have a hard time getting rid of it. That is the one that has some special meaning for you—it creates a disturbance or an upset somewhere inside. And it is that upset that gives you the poem or the novel or the germ of one—especially if you are uncomfortable because you don't quite understand all that it means. I play a novel ten years, fifteen years sometimes—one more then twenty. The germ of The Cave was the entrapment of Floyd Collins in Kentucky in 1925, when I was a junior or senior in college. I didn't even bother to go up there—I was too busy with Shakespeare and John Donne and Baudelaire. I couldn't become a southerner until after I got away from the South.

All the King's Men is another book that was years in the writing. It changed its form, from poem, to play, to novel, but it still isn't quite right. The one thing I regret about the book is that I have no real scene that catches the moment that would explain what Stark gives to Ann that she needs. What emptiness does she feel? That scene never occurs. I faced the question at the time, but I flunked it. I just couldn't see a way to do it. Now I see a perfectly good way. Jack would wonder about it; he would wonder and wonder, and then he would suddenly visualize the possible scene. He would do this in his room in Long Beach, California. We would take that as the answer. Then he would come home. But I just wasn't up to it at the time—I was still learning. I know more about writing novels now than I knew about writing novels then.

Earlier you explained that you don't start a poem with a theme in mind, that the theme emerges from your groping into your materials. Is something like this also true of your use of images, symbols? Do you, when writing, consciously and intentionally attach meanings to your images—to the birds, for example, or to the mullet in Incarnations?

Many things that I haven't noticed have been called to my attention by critics. I have gone past such obvious things as the motion of a bird in the sky, the relation of the bird and the man in things like Audubon, and the hawk—my fascination with hawks, which Bloom pointed out. I never had noticed this pattern of birds in the poems, though I notice it in my life all the time—that freedom and wonder in the sky, you know, it's something I have to look at. I look at gulls by the hour, hawks, buzzards, anything. But I never noticed about their place in the poems until it was called to my attention in print. You feel earthbound and your aspirations thwarted, while birds have that freedom and totality of being. I don't want to try to interpret it, but that's there.

Another question like this, but a little more personal, concerns the eye, the place of the eye in my work. Well, I'm blind in one eye. I had an injury when I was fifteen, and the eye gradually lost sight until it was completely blind. I spent several years thinking I was going to be totally blind. You see, sympathetic blindness can set in, where the uninjured eye can also go blind. Nobody knows why. So finally they had to remove the injured eye, and that seemed to solve it. But I had been living in horror of this for years, since I was in college. So the “eye” in the poems is very important, but I didn't even know that it was until some critic called attention to it. And this would be true of a great many things. I happen to remember those two things, but there are other things too, I just can't remember them offhand, where critics have caught hold of something significant which I had just walked past, and probably had some very good reason to walk past, something deep in the poems. I blocked it somehow, the business of the eye. But I can't see any reason for blocking this watching the birds. I spent a lot of time as a boy with glasses, identifying birds. I just liked the woods—I was out in the woods a lot.

Do you write your poems in longhand or at the typewriter?

Practically in my head. I do a lot of them when I am exercising. I find that regular exercise, any kind of simple, repeated motion, is like hypnosis—it frees your mind. So when I am walking or swimming, I try to let my mind go blank, so I can catch the poems on the wing, before they can get away. Then when I have a start and am organized, I will sit down with pencil and paper, but never—or rarely—at the typewriter. I once had a bad shoulder injury and must swim or exercise very heavily every morning in order to keep it functioning freely. And this I find is very conducive to writing my poetry.

Do you revise your poems heavily?

Very heavily. I read them and read them, and do draft after draft. And I retain the drafts—often if I am stuck I will go back to an earlier version to refresh myself—I may have been on the right track and taken a wrong turn. Sometimes, after ten or more years, I go back to old fragments and suddenly see what I was after.

Have you ever had an experience some poets speak of, where a poem just comes to you in a burst, as though by inspiration, and all you had to do was write down the words?

The best parts of a poem always come in bursts or in a flash. This has been said by many people—Frost said in a letter, “My best poems are always my easiest.” My notion is this, that the poet is a hunter on the track of an unknown beast and has only one shot in his gun. You don't know what the beast is, but when you see him, you've got to shoot him, and it has got to be instantaneous. Writing a poem is like stalking the beast for the single shot. Then, you can labor on the pruning, and you can work at your technique, but you cannot labor the poem into being.

As you've reprinted your collections, you have often left poems out, sometimes many of them. Why is this?

Sometimes I think they are bad, and sometimes other people think they are bad. For instance, when I was preparing my Selected Poems of 1966, I consulted with Allen Tate, William Meredith, and Cleanth Brooks. If two of them were strongly negative about a poem, I would take it out, unless I had my own strong reasons for leaving it in. And my editor for thirty years, Albert Erskine, is an honest man and an honest critic, who doesn't mind hurting your feelings for your own good; he is a man of extraordinary intelligence and judgment.

Do you feel that your two creative activities, fiction and poetry, are complementary to one another?

I feel this—they have the same germ; they are very different in the way they manifest themselves, but they spring from the same source. I always put the poem first—if a poem falls across a novel, I will take the poem first. I will stop the novel and go whoring after the poem, as I have done several times. I mentioned earlier how writing short stories kept me away from poetry. Well, All the King's Men is a novel, but it started out as poetry, a verse play. The original idea was implicit in a single word, the name Talus, my first name for Willie Stark and also the name of the groom in Book V of The Fairy Queen. I was thinking that people like Hitler or Huey Long are machines, executing the will of Justice. Now reducing it to one word is highly poetic, but it is purely private. As for the verse play, some years later, looking back on it for revision, I saw that, as a play, it left out the action and the complications needed to show that power, the man of power, flows into a vacuum—a vacuum in society, government, or individuals. So my man Talus became Stark in a novel—a man whose power fulfilled the weaknesses of others. Stark's gunman, for example, his bodyguard and chauffeur, is a stutterer. When Stark is dead, this man pays him his ultimate tribute: “He t-t-t-talked so g-g-g-good.” Stark fulfilled this man's desire to speak.

Now many of my poems have an implicit story or narrative line—I don't feel these generic divisions so sharply as some people do. At a certain stage your feeling moves in the direction of a certain form. Way down there early, your feeling determines what it is going to be. But it can be wrong on a first try.

Some critics feel that poetry has displaced fiction as your most important concern in recent years. Do you think that is true?

I don't know—I still try to roll with the punch and write what needs to be written on a given day. But I started as a poet and I will probably end as a poet. If I had to choose between my novels and my Selected Poems, I would keep the Selected Poems as representing me more fully, my vision and my self. I think poems are more you. Another thing about fiction. When you undertake a novel, you are selling three years in hock, and time, I should certainly say, makes a difference. And, although you can't tell about your financial future, I would have to say I don't need to write a novel right now. Ultimately, I guess I just feel that I like writing poems.

How did you come to write your beautiful poem on Audubon?

There is a little story about that. I never research a book, except if I get in a pinch on some detail, then I will look that up. But when I was thinking about writing World Enough and Time, I began to soak myself in Americana of the early nineteenth century, histories of Kentucky and Tennessee, that sort of thing. Well, Audubon appears in that history, so I went ahead and looked at his Journals and so forth. I got interested in the man and his life, and began, way back in the forties, as I said, to write a poem about Audubon. But it was a trap—I was trying to write the wrong kind of poem, I had the wrong style for it. I was thinking of it as a narrative poem, but that wasn't right for me. I did write quite a bit, but it wouldn't come together, so I set it aside and forgot about it.

Then in the sixties I was writing a history of American literature with Dick Lewis and Cleanth Brooks, and I did the basic section on Audubon to offer for their comment and criticism. We all read everything, then one person would write up a given section and the others would rewrite the first draft to their hearts' desire—a continuing process. So I got back into Audubon. Then one day, when I was helping my wife make a bed, there suddenly popped into my mind a line that had been in the first version of Audubon that I had abandoned, and this became the first line of the new version—“Was not the lost Dauphin, though handsome was only.” I never went and hunted the rest of it up, so I only had that one line to go on. I knew then that that was all I needed. I suddenly saw how to do it. I did it in fragments—snapshots of Audubon. I began to see him as a certain kind of man, a man who has finally learned to accept his fate. The poem is about man and his fate—all along Audubon resisted his fate and thought it was evil—a man is supposed to support his family and so forth. But now he accepts his fate. Late in his life he said, “I dream of nothing but birds.” Audubon was the greatest slayer of birds that ever lived—he destroyed beauty in order to whet his understanding and thereby create beauty. Love is knowledge. And then in the end the poem is about Audubon and me.

I wrote that poem mostly at night, between sleeping and waking, or early in the morning, or shouting it out loud in the Land Rover going to Yale two days a week, scribbling all the way. Then when I got a draft, I sent it to I. A. Richards. He didn't answer right away, but two weeks later I saw him at a cocktail party in Boston, and he said, “Let's go talk.” He said he liked the poem, but there was one thing wrong with it—it needed some more lyricism or lyrical sections, to give a kind of relief. I thought about that for a while, and decided he was right. So some of the lyrics, like the one on the bear, were composed after I talked with him and then inserted.

Do you have a sense of change, of evolution, as you go from book to book of poems?

Well, I would rather answer it this way—I have a horror of self-imitation. I don't want to repeat myself. I want and need (Who doesn't?) a basic continuity. But—if I didn't feel that I was onto something a little bit new, a little bit different from what I had been doing, I think I would stop. Poetry comes to me in phases, fits of a few weeks or a few months, perhaps a half-year, and then there is a break. I know pretty thoroughly when I have finished a phase—every book is based on a curve, and I know when the curve is closing in and the book of poems is over—or even a general phase of poetry. For years now I've worked that way. It is purely intuitive. When I finished the book Promises, I was completely through with poems like that. Now the next book—You, Emperors, and Others, has no real center. I was groping for a center—there may be some good poems there but no center. But after that I feel that each book is somehow a long poem. Each has one center, a feeling, and I know when that center feeling is over. Then in the next book I will discover some new body of feeling, implying experience. And that's true I think of all the books.

Now the latest book, for instance—Being Here—is quite different from the last one. Basically, it is a kind of autobiography. It didn't start out that way, but when I was well into it and began to set the true chronology of the poems, I discovered that it is a kind of shadowy autobiography. Not straight autobiography—it shouldn't be taken as a source of information. But that book is closed, and the one I'm in now is very different. I've written about forty poems since that book was sent to press, and I'll probably keep about thirty. I'm also writing a longish poem, which is going to be a book by itself—it'll be about thirty or forty pages—on Chief Joseph. I've always had in my mind a book like that, so I thought I'd go ahead and find the time this summer.

This notion of change from book to book—do you see that as a stylistic thing as well?

I think that you could find similarities in the style from early to late poems of mine, but I don't make a study of this—it's a problem, but I don't take it as my problem. For me, it's a question of working along and doing the best you can. You must try to approach each poem as a new problem, and try not to fall into the trap of thinking you have found the perfect answer, a formula for how to write a poem. This becomes more acute the older you get, and when you are seventy-five, it becomes very acute. The tendency is to imitate yourself, to repeat something that seemed to work. What I do is, if I get into a poem and find the form is going sour for me, I just throw it into a folder of old poems. Now and then I read the old stuff over and find something there which can be said and seen afresh—it could be a phrase, a line, a group of ten lines. I've done that for years.

Could you apply the idea of your essay “Pure and Impure Poetry” to your poetry?

I would say that I write an impure poetry. Sometimes the lines are almost prosaic, a limited breakoff of a lyrical process. Some poems contain prosaic lines alternating with lyrical passages, and this deliberately produces a poetic tension. I could take for example my three poems on Dreiser—well, they're really one poem. I'm a great admirer of the fiction of Dreiser—I've read him over and over again. So I wrote these three poems. One is in terza rima—a few high-flown poetic bits, but looking like a prose lyric, and ending with this line: “May I present Mr. Dreiser? He will write a great novel, someday.” That line has a different flow entirely. The second poem is in yet another style—open and free. Then the third is three tight stanzas, short lines. So they are all about Dreiser, but in very different styles—three different ways of going at him. Almost all of the composing of those poems was done in the bathtub. I was in Vermont in the winter, and would go on long hikes, getting very cold. I would warm up with long baths, so that is where the poem was written, in the bathtub.

You have some reputation as a critic and editor, though in more recent years you seem to have turned away almost completely from this type of writing.

Those are ways of being in contact with things that interest me—I never wanted to make a career of it, although I did enjoy the work. I could spend my life very happily studying Coleridge, studying Dreiser, and so forth. I just like something else better. I have more need for something else. Writing criticism is a little bit like teaching. I like to talk about books I have read, and I always liked the association with the students. I think that only in the university can you find a certain kind of humanistic temperament to deal with—I don't mean that everybody who teaches has it, but some people are quite wonderful. They know something disinterestedly, and know how to apply it, and it is a privilege to associate with them. But I couldn't have stood teaching beyond a certain point—I got sick of hearing myself, for one thing. And I have ceased to have any interest in writing criticism, even though there is a new edition of my Selected Essays in preparation. I have sworn that I will never write another line of criticism of any kind. I will write some fictional prose, I want to write a couple of more novels that are in my head, but I really enjoy writing poetry more now.

How do you feel about the common designation of you as a New Critic?

I think it's a label of convenience—a great big tent trying to cover a vast and varied menagerie. Yvor Winters is a New Critic, and I'm a New Critic, but we couldn't be more different. He believed that a firm pentameter line indicates moral strength; I think it indicates a firm pentameter line. Winters I admire, but I think he committed suicide as a poet by theorizing himself out of poetry. Cleanth Brooks is another New Critic—a devout and studious Christian, a theologian, and a historical literary scholar. He was trained at Oxford as an eighteenth-century specialist, and with his tutor, Nichols-Smith, he edited twenty-five volumes of eighteenth-century letters. Well, history and theology are supposed to have nothing to do with New Criticism. Richards is another New Critic, but he and Cleanth have both nothing and everything in common.

Ransom wrote an ontological criticism, and I am a pragmatic critic—I'm just trying to make sense of what is in hand, not trying to prove a theory. All my criticism is basically drawn from social conversation or from teaching—trying to deal with a text with a friend or a small group of students. I do believe in exegesis—poetry has to be gone into, has to be studied. I don't mean just grammatically; there's also the question of the nature of metaphors involved in poetry. And you have to pay attention to the historical context. But you can't be responsible for everybody's foolishness—your own's enough. There's more bullshit with regard to the subject of New Criticism than any other you could name, except transubstantiation.

You have lived through a whole tragic generation of American poets, people like Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Randall Jarrell—poets suffering from alcoholism, neurosis, and so on. Do you have any explanation for that whole phenomenon?

I think you can very easily cook up romantic explanations, as some of them did, and blame it on the age. It is true that there was a time when poets had a firmer place in society, performed a clearer function. But I don't think any competent psychiatrist would say the age killed these poets—I think they would find some other explanations, closer to home. I wouldn't undertake to do a psychoanalysis of these cases. I don't know enough about them, for one thing, though it is clear that there were difficulties in their lives. Berryman was an alcoholic, Crane was an alcoholic and a homosexual, very unhappy—losing all his friends.

And Randall's life was a life of tension and torment. I was very fond of Randall, I often had him to the house when he was a freshman or a sophomore, and we became good friends for life. He was very depressed the last time I saw him. But then in the last letter I had from him, just before his death, he said, “I feel very happy now. I will teach again, I have new things to say and new poems to write. I feel better and more like myself than I have for years.” But he was having a mess of trouble too. I think poets and artists in general tend to be a little more precarious of balance in certain ways than other people. But many of them are very tough customers and know how to take their punishment; and many of them are people of great energy.

Since the fifties, your own poetry has been mostly optimistic and affirmative, emphasizing the glory of the world and its promises. And yet you also have poems on ugliness, death, racial violence, and so on. How do these poems fit into your general vision?

Well, that's all part of the picture, just the other side of it. You have people like Dreiser, who are humanly monsters but who make great things. There is Flaubert, whose main reward in going to Egypt was to get syphilis, and yet he had his inspiration for Madame Bovary, and he thanks God to be alive, appreciating the curve of the wave on the river. It is the complication of life—nothing more complicated than that.

Harold Bloom has written of certain similarities between your thinking and Emerson's. You are also the author of a poem called “Homage to Emerson.” Are you an Emersonian thinker?

Bloom has kidded me about this. We are good friends, and I admire his work greatly. Some of it leaves me far behind, but I am ready to take the fault for that. But I just don't see Emersonianism. Emerson evolved a style which allowed him to say great-sounding things, but I really think he suffers from a modern disease—self-righteousness, the idea of natural virtue. I think he just has a basic idiocy in him, the old Emersonian disease. Then there is Emerson's Platonism—I'm just not a Platonist. He would say, “We have to carry the wood into the house as though it were real.” Well, wood is real—I've cut and carried too much not to know.

What about the transcendental side of Emerson, as opposed to his more social or political commentary?

I'm not a transcendentalist. I find that kind of talk just doesn't make any sense to me—well, in some ways. I'll put it this way: I hope we can find meanings in nature, in the viewing of nature, and I am a lover of nature. I've spent a lot of time alone in the woods just watching. I've long since stopped my systematic looking at things, being scientific about it. Now it's just watching streams or something. And I think there is a rapport of man in nature, but the rapport is man regarding nature as metaphor, nature as image in emotional response. I put nothing mystic in that. Nature presents an image of meaning, it carries all of our force in itself—a hawk on the wing or a tree on the cliff. The meaning is there, but not as a god-sent message. The object is there as what it is, but its imagery can carry this vague, certainly unintended, metaphorical sense. I wouldn't go any further than that.

There is in Emerson a tremendous sense of man's potential for joy, and this seems to be an idea that you also have.

I do think man has a potential for joy. Some are lucky and some are not, and I've been lucky—knock on wood right quick. We all have troubles and difficulties in life, but I am fortunate in having a happy marriage, children to be proud of, and an occupation that can support me and that I love. Of course we don't know what tomorrow may bring, but I feel I've been extremely lucky in parents, in family life, in friends, in so many ways. I feel a very fortunate man. It is just plain joy to look at the sky or a leaf sometimes. This abiding world.

And this sense of joy is, for you, not a mystical thing, not related to any notion of an afterlife, but based on your feeling about the life we live on this actual earth of ours.

Well, I am a creature of this world—but I am also a yearner, I suppose. I would call this temperament rather than theology—I haven't got any gospel. That is, I feel an immanence of meaning in things, but I have no meaning to put there that is interesting or beautiful. I think I put it as close as I could in a poem called “Masts at Dawn”—“We must try / To love so well the world that we may believe, in the end, in God.” I am a man of religious temperament in the modern world who hasn't got any religion. Dante almost got me at one stage, but then I suddenly realized, My God, Dante's a good Protestant! If you don't believe me, read about Manfredi in the Purgatorio. Where have I gone?! I would prefer to reverse the whole ordinary thing—I would rather start with the world for my theology.