Date of birth: 1899-11-19
Date of death: 1979-02-09
Quotes number: 26
Nationality: American
Profession: Poet
A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all.
According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.
At twelve I was determined to shoot only For honor; at twenty not to shoot at all; I know at thirty-three that one must shoot As often as one gets the rare chance - In killing there is more than commentary.
But in our age the appeal to authority is weak, and I am of my age.
Dramatic experience is not logical; it may be subdued to the kind of coherence that we indicate when we speak, in criticism, of form.
Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.
For some reason most critics have a hard time fixing their minds directly under their noses, and before they see the object that is there they use a telescope upon the horizon to see where it came from.
Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.
How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.
I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.
