The Paris Review - Fall 2016

about Parmenides as an author you could disagree with. But I wrote it
straight into the poem.
The study of these roundabout sources left me with something about the
molecular structure of matter, which of course was a theme of great interest
to the pre-Socratics. They were struggling to understand the nature of
the material world. The molecular view of the structure of matter seemed
to me—I don’t suppose I would have thought of it like this, but this is one
simplified way of putting it—an antidote to a certain kind of spiritism. It
provides an argument against a whole slab of metaphysics in the German
tradition, a whole slab of metaphysical idealism in the English Romantic tradition.
I found myself resentful about this idealism, partly because it philosophically
and theoretically no longer seemed to command my loyalties,
and partly because it was a very expensive dodge that provokes a great deal
of trouble in thinking clearly about the world situation. These comfortable
middle-class values assume loyalty to an accepted class structure which by
clear implication denies shared social justice to large segments of the planetary
population.
I’ve always held this view that poets had better be clear about where
their allegiances lie, because otherwise they’re going to go sailing off into an
empyrean, which is a luxury they should never afford themselves. I was rather
on my guard about this, and that meant that, well, in particular one of my
targets was Wordsworth. There are remarks in this poem which are directly
anti-Wordsworthian digs about the elevation of spirit that Wordsworth so
cogently and eloquently propounds. I have believed that kind of worldview,
despite the burden of explicit complication that it contains. Implicitly, for all
my working life, Wordsworth has been a kind of icon in my way of thinking
about the world, for so many different reasons. So, to find Wordsworth becoming
a figure of opposition in my writing practise was of great surprise to me.
INTERVIEWER
We would like to ask you about a particular passage. Just a few lines:
For sure not in good likeness, profile in slant along the catchment
proposed, the speech corridor. The sentence in word build is additive
but logic partitions the stream, sense outriders thicken its purpose
impossible for anything not to be or not if by its own option
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