This section contains 3,565 words (approx. 12 pages at 300 words per page) |
SOURCE: "Making Poems," in American Poets in 1976, edited by William Heyen, 1976, pp. 392-406.
In the following essay, Stryk traces his poetic development.
I
"The thoughts expressed by music," wrote Mendelssohn in 1842, "are not too vague for words, but too precise." Replace "music" with "poetry" and, perhaps paradoxically, considering of what poems are made, you have a way of seeing into the difficulty of drawing conclusions about the nature of art. There are days when I feel that the main thing, all else equal, is what the poet has to say; other days, that it is his craftsmanship, not what he's trying to express, that distinguishes him. What colors my view on any given day, tipping one way or the other, may be far more interesting than the whole issue of aesthetics, which is after all the sphere of aestheticians, not artists. All theories on art strike me as...
This section contains 3,565 words (approx. 12 pages at 300 words per page) |