body. Cocteau has a lovely image: he says, ‘I shit my books.’ In a wonderful way, that’s what readers want. They want to smell the feces of authenticity. So when a translator comes on, he appears to be an intercessor . . . because he didn’t write it.” It is, of course, possible to be both true to nature and true to art. There is such a thing as authenticity of form, or rather propriety of form, not in an absolute sense, but in relation to content: using the form that best expresses the content. This is what the best writers do. And this is what Richard Wilbur was saying when he told me about the joys he gets from translation: “What excites me is to pursue the illusion of exactitude on all fronts.” But today, art usually gives precedence to nature; form becomes secondary, and what we have is writing like Robert Bly’s translation: simple, straightforward, formless, free, transparent. Its content is subjective, but its form is objective, unnoticeable. The message sent to aspiring poets is that expression is more important than form, that free verse frees the poet from the restraints of conventions and that the poet need not make a whole host of formal decisions central to the creation of works of art in earlier times. Bly himself made these decisions, at least in his youth, but the result is something that appears as if the decisions had not been made, as if the poem had flowed as naturally out of his pen as conversation flows out of our mouths. This is also true of prose. The result is that for many poets free verse is no more free than the work of earlier poets, who felt that every poem they wrote had to fit one of a prescribed number of possible forms. In other words, this freedom is not so much an expression of freer choice as it is the following of different conventions. What is different here is that today’s conventions contain an underlying message that they do not contain artifice, they do not follow conventions, that we’ve done away with, gotten beyond, improved on the falseness of artifice and are left with the truer reality of nature and our feelings. Free verse and flat prose also allow writers to be lazy, to not read through the history of poetry and prose, to not try their hand at all sorts of forms and styles, to not build up their skills or their intuition or their ear, to not be able to differentiate between what is good and mediocre. Writing is all expression and experience, the artist has no
obligations, and our opinions of the results are equally valid. This is
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