Conversations with Donald Hall

Conversations with Donald Hall offers a unique glimpse into the creative process of a major American poet, writer, editor, anthologist, and teacher. The volume probes in depth Hall’s evolving views on poetry, poets, and the creative process over a period of more than sixty years. Donald Hall (1928–2018) reveals vivid, funny, and moving anecdotes about T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and the sculptor Henry Moore; he talks about his excitement on his return to New Hampshire and the joys of his marriage with Jane Kenyon; and he candidly discusses his loss and grief when Kenyon died in 1995 at the age of forty-seven.

The thirteen interviews range from a detailed exploration of the composition of “Ox Cart Man” to the poems that make up Without, an almost unbearable poetry of grief that was written following Jane Kenyon’s death. The book also follows Hall into old age, when he turned to essay writing and the reflections on aging that make up Essays after Eighty. This moving and insightful collection of interviews is crucial for anyone interested in poetry and the creative process, the techniques and achievements of modern American poetry, and the elusive psychology of creativity and loss.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Mar 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781496822482

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The Poetic Situation: An Interview with Donald Hall

David Ray / 1958

From Southwest Review, vol. 43, no. 1, Winter 1958, pp. 47–52. Reprinted by permission of David Ray.

When Donald Hall read his poetry at the 1020 Art Center in Chicago recently, David Ray arranged an interview with him the next day. The following is a transcript.

David Ray: We might as well start out with a big one. Do you approve of the trend, in so many of the younger American poets, back to formal and even intricate technical concerns in their work? Yesterday, for example, you read a poem in terza rima and a little later, a sestina.

Donald Hall: I think you are behind the times with your trends. In a gross, popularizing way (the only way in which trends exist or matter) I think we have passed out of a formal period into a wild one. Time and Life have been calling for artists to behave like artists for a long time now, and those people out in San Francisco have responded. They will have their rewards, for a time, and you may be sure that the word academic will be tossed around even more than it has been. The question of form, or trends in form, is not serious. It is certainly dangerous, and of course absurd, when the question of form is regarded as some sort of opposition between constriction and freedom. There is no freedom in art, from automatic writing to anagrams. Freedom is the expression of the will and art is not free because the will is a servant of the Muse, which is the personification of the artist’s intuition of excellence. Anyone who finds an opposition between freedom and bondage in art should be given a PhD. Form vs. free verse is not a problem for the intelligence. All and no verse is free … sestinas and cantos are as good and bad as you make them. Besides, in what sense is the trend toward form a fact at all?

DR: A symptom if not a fact.

DH: Well, sestinas were rescued from Swinburne by the lyrical Mr. Pound. Who are the revolutionaries after whom has come the conservative reaction? Auden was being formal in 1929; Hart Crane wrote practically no free verse. Eliot is always close to regularity and Pound is often perfectly regular. Wallace Stevens has written the best blank verse since Wordsworth. Is Yeats conservative? Then is Richard Wilbur? The idea of recent literary history most of us have is screwy. The revolution that existed was largely a revolution of diction not of metrics. I’m talking about what really happened, not about what people said was happening. There is more cant about contemporary poetry than there is bad poetry, which must be a record of some sort. Considerations of gross form (as opposed to minute formal qualities of a poem, the style) are usually irrelevant, and evasive. The word sonnet does not describe a poem very accurately, yet William Carlos Williams (who is about as repetitive as Swinburne in his rhythms) thinks so. Evasion of the real issue, by concentrating on some false issue, is historically a proven method of failure. What matters for any artist is to keep his eye on the apple, and not get distracted into evasion like the great majority of his would-be colleagues. I suppose the apple is the most efficient use of language—words used fully to describe and judge human experience, leaving nothing out. Of course one may decide, with good reasons either historical or personal, that one writes best, or should write best, in one particular gross form or lack of it. One may attempt a new way of writing for the sake of its difficulty. I find poets now capable of great technical extension, the best of them, and I cannot regret it. Wilbur and Merwin, very different poets, are both capable of excellent translation. The vulgar trend, though, as I said before, is against this kind of writing. The same people who think that growing a beard, or going to bed with another man when they really prefer women, is going to help them write poems, make an equation between formlessness and life, an old mistake and a powerful one. Watch out for people whose programs as artists really concern only behavior. Most likely they are vicious fakes. Their eyes are not on the apple, they are evasive, and they substitute behavior as artists for making