The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose

Poets on Poets and Poetry

Poets on Poets and Poetry Wallace Stevens, in his 1951 introduction to The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, writes: “One function of the poet at any time is to discover by his own thought and feeling what seems to him to be the poetry at that time.” Eugenio Montale, in “Dante, Yesterday and Today,” translated by Jonathan Galassi: “Always, at all times, poets have spoken to poets, entering into a real or imaginary correspondence with them.” Poetry, Elizabeth Bishop writes in a letter to May Swenson— quoted in Edgar Allen Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments—is “a way of thinking with one’s feelings.” Gottfried Benn, in “Double Life: Future and Present,” translated by E. B. Ashton: “It is amazing . . . there is nothing more revealing than the word. It has always fascinated me to see experts in their fields, even profound philosophers, suddenly faced with the free word—the word that yields no tirades, no systems , no facts of external, historically buttressed observation, and no commentaries; that produces only one thing: form. How they operate there! Utterly at a loss. . . . Addendum: there really are now only two verbal transcendencies, the theorems of mathematics and the word as art.” Allen Ginsberg, in “Mind Writing Slogans”: “Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions. . . . Notice what you notice. . . . Catch yourself thinking. . . . Intense fragments of spoken idiom, best. . . . Subject is known by what she sees.” Jonathan Galassi, in “Reading Montale,” in his book of translations of Eugenio Montale’s Collected Poems: 1920–1954: “As Gianfranco Contini has observed, Montale’s work is written at the point of ‘veritable cultural saturation’; it is so heavily layered with allusion and quotation, particularly self-quotation, that at times it seems to approximate the echo chamber of Walter Benjamin ’s ideal work, the collage of borrowings.” 58 ...