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PARTISAN REVIEW
polysyllables exist as solidly as if they were nature. And how does that
happen? It happens because Heaney allows the voice in.
Poets who frantically try to escape any accusation of sounding like
anyone else, who bloat themselves up, are the ones who have eventually
sort offloundered.
DM:
In your earliest poems, there's already a maturity in the voice. Some–
how your poetry doesn't evolve, in a sense, as if you were whole at the be–
ginning. And yet there are many changes. What would you say the changes
are over the span of your poetry?
DW:
I agree with that. I'd say only the suffering is different, the quality of
the suffering is different. You see, one can have an unembarrassed
conversation and say at fifty-seven, without any fake humility, that I was a
prodigy in the sense that I wrote very well very young.
Tonally,
it some–
times amazes me that I don't seem to be any different from when I was
eighteen. You know, it seems to me to be the same person talking. Now that
may be an imitation, because there may be no wisdom there. But it may be
in my nature, and may be in the nature of the eighteen-year-old writer, to
avoid
wisdom. There's a kind of prerogative attached to wisdom, which has
to do with style. There are certain great poets who achieve wisdom, and it's
very inseparable from style. Yeats and Eliot are two who are full of wisdom,
but you can't separate the wisdom from the style. The wisdom of Eliot is the
style of Eliot; the wisdom of Yeats is the style of Yeats.-But the wisdom of
the Bible is wisdom; the wisdom of Isaiah is wisdom, and so forth.
I think that that openness is what I've always had. I have been very
flattered , as opposed to being insulted, when I've been told that I sound like
someone else who was great. I always considered that to be an honor and
not an accusation. You see - and maybe I have a medieval mind - I'm really
part of a
guild.
I don't consider myself to be an individual. And if I were
working as a stonemason in a guild, that would be my contribution to the
cathedral. If I was an apprentice to Leonardo, I would feel terrific if someone
said, this is as good as Leonardo, or you got this from Leonardo. Obviously,
I'd say, yes, thanks very much. But the twentieth century - and especially in
this country - is obsessed with the idiosyncratic genius, the doing your own
thing, having your own style. It's like the movies. It turns everybody into a
movie star. Television extras - there are no extras in American poetry.
DM:
In "Sea Grapes," you say: "The classics can console but not enough."
Does this need any explanation?
DW:
Well, I don't think so. All of us have been to the point where, in ex–
treme agony and distress, you turn to a book, and look for parallels, and you
look for a greater grief than maybe your own. You can immerse yourself for
awhile in that tragedy, and hope there will be some elation, as tragedy's
supposed to provide. And it does. It provides a distance - the distance of
character, of experience, and you can distance your own experience through