528
PARTISAN REVIEW
many novels around. Prose gives a writer confidence whereas poetry
does exactly the opposite.
DM:
Efim Etkind, in his book
Notes of a Non-Conspirator,
called you a
very modern poet. He said even when you were quite young you
were presenting problems to yourself and dealing with problems
presented to you by your times. What new problems does the mod–
ern poet face unlike those faced by the nineteenth-century poet, or
even the poet prior to World War Two?
JB:
That's a big question indeed. Now one of the main problems that
a poet today faces - modern or not modern - is that the body of
poetry prior to him - the heritage, that is - is larger, which makes
you simply wonder whether you have anything to add to that body,
whether you're simply going to modify some of your predecessors or
whether you're going to be yourself.
But basically it's not so much the question asked at the
threshold, whether you're going to modify somebody or not. You ask
this subsequently, with the benefit of hindsight. It's a question you
ask yourself because of the critics around. But it's precisely because
you have such great people before yesterday who breathe on your
neck, that you have to go a bit further, where theoretically nobody
has been before. It simply makes it more difficult to write, because
you are quite conscious of not wanting to be a parrot. And the people
before you were quite great. To think that you can say something
qualitatively new after people like Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Auden,
Pasternak, Mandelstam, Frost, Eliot, and others after Eliot-and
let's not leave out Thomas Hardy - reveals either a very enterprising
fellow or a very ignorant one. And I would bill myself as the latter.
When you start writing, you know less about what took place
before you. It's only in the middle of your life that you come to amass
this knowledge, and it can dwarf you or mesmerize you.
That's one thing, one problem for the modern poet. The other
is obviously that the modern poet lives in a world where what had
been regarded as values, as virtues and vices, say twenty or thirty
years ago, have, if not necessarily swapped places, at least been
questioned or compromised
~ntirely.
A modern poet presumably
doesn't live in a world which is ethically, let alone politically, as
polarized as was the situation before the war. But I think the polar–
ization is still quite clear. I don't really know what Etkind had in
mind . Presumably, what he had in mind was a difference between
the modern poet and a poet, let's say, of the turn of the century. Our
predecessors perhaps had more to believe in. Their pantheon, or
