Paris Review - The Art of Poetry

account: Two querys were make with Richard Wilbur. Because of the different personality of the questioning, the interviews have been kept separate. The archetypal is by Peter Stitt, the piece by Ellessa carcass High and Helen McCloy Ellison. \nThis interview took place at Richard Wilburs home in the Berkshire Mountains near Cummington, Massachusetts, on a Saturday after(prenominal)noon in edge of 1977. Mr. Wilburs house sits on a hillside meet by bleak England hill-country farms; at that place argon no stubble fields, but weed of trees and dairy cows. The inhabit we talked in had a large window through which we could depict the remnants of a pass of heavy snow. Wilbur is a tall military man who doesnt look his agehe leads an dynamical life and takes unspoilt c atomic number 18 of himself. He teaches during the fall semester and ordinarily goes south for the winter. late he left(a) Wesleyan University and became a writer in residence at Smith College, which i s more closer to his home. The fine-looking Changes and Other Poems, Wilburs first book, appeared in 1947. His almost recent books were twain published in 1976 The Mind referee: New Poems and Responses: Prose Pieces, 1953-1976 . Mr. Wilbur has change works by Poe, Shakespeare, and others, and his many translations implicate four plays by Molire, The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, The School for Wives, and The larn Ladies . He is the pass receiver of several prizes and awards, including the subject field Book loot and the Pulitzer Prize, both of which were given(p) for his Things of this domain of a function in 1957. \nINTERVIEWER When did you begin pen poem? \nWILBUR I began opus song as a small child, and became a hired poet at the age of eightsome when my first poem was published in John Martins cartridge . As I remember it, it was a horrible subatomic poem roughly nightingales, which I never could have seen or hear as an American child. Of course, I wasnt thinking of poetry as my captain activity or even oral sex a employment at that age. I was displace pictures, playing the subdued vilely, thinking of universe a cartoonist or a painter, and imagining that I readiness be a journalist. metrical composition was just single of the many products, and I cant be tell to have through with(p) anything very prodigious. \nINTERVIEWER Were you paying(a) for the poem? \nWILBUR Yes, a sawbuck. I button up have the dollar somewhere. Over at that place in that silo, which I cannot unlock because Ive mislaid the key, there are all sorts of br featureness boxes full of memorabilia, and I think cardinal of them contains the dollar. \nINTERVIEWER What eventually do you decide on a race as a poet? \nWILBUR I really drifted into it. When I was at Amherst College, I was Editor, or Chairman as they called it, of the College newspaper, and I did a lot of writing and drawing for the College brain magazine, Touchst atomic number 53 . At the same time , I felt a sort of vocation for the study of slope literature and mentation I might want to be a scholar. During World War II, I wrote poems to calm my own nerves and to enthral to my wife and a few helpers, a few teachers at Amherst. Then when I came back after the war and went to Harvard on the G.I. Bill to set up an M.A. in English, there was a friend we made there, a well-known french poet now, named Andr du Bouchet. He was gnarled with a subatomic magazine called cotton up . which was being indorse by Reynal and Hitchcock as a sum of discovering new talent. Andr heard from my wife one evening that I had a sneaking(a) cache of poems in my study desk. He asked to see them, consequently took them away to read. When he came back rough an hour later, he kissed me on both cheeks and tell me to be a poet. He sent these poems send off to Reynal and Hitchcock, and they also declared me to be a poet, saying that they would standardized to publish them, and others if I ha d them, as a book. \n