Viewing page 5 of 7

00:29:14
00:31:28
00:29:14
Playback Speed: 100%

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Transcription: [00:29:15]
{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
I guess you can call it egoism, but this sense that he's not going to put up with anybody criticizing him, and that he's gonna be invulnerable, he's gonna be bulletproof. And that makes him very difficult to deal with. I mean he says about his son who commits suicide, he says "I tried everything with him. I tried everything with him. And everything I did was wrong." And there's really that sense of heartbreak because he knows that he was unable to reach him because he himself is so self-contained.

[00:29:43]
Yeah.

[00:29:44]
{UNKNOWN SPEAKER}
So you said that he wrote most of his favorite work when he was 39 right?

[00:29:48]
Yeah, even younger.

[00:29:49]
So, oh, so he wrote it younger, so most of his stuff that's printed in his books that he had is from his younger years?

[00:29:57]
Yeah, it's again as I said, it's hard to know because one of the things that he did was he would rewrite continually.
I mean, he'd do, he would write a poem in 1912 and then come back to it in 1938, change it, come back to it, he has it's, I don't know, it's not even like a savings account, cause the money, it's not like he's taking the money out, it's like he has this storehouse of instruments.

[00:30:21]
And he works on them and he lets them out, but it's very hard to know, because he's always playing this game of being the innocent, being the bumpkin, the "oh all I am is a chicken farmer from Vermont. I'm really not that good a poet."


[00:30:37]
In the meantime he's working like a maniac on his poetry. But there's this element here, I mean it is 40 years, he's working on poetry for 20 years, you know, along with raising chickens and trying to raise a family and farming his land, and it's just, he's working on that, and, and it's in those years that, you know, he bags everything. It's like a reservoir for him, where he can ta-, he can draw on it and then remake it. I mean he does, I just the, the other thing I guess is the things we know he wrote before 1926 are much better than the things we know he wrote in 1940-45. The poem that I ended with, Directive, is probably the only really good poem in his, in that book, I don't remember, the book was published in the '40s. It's a very curious case. Yeah.


Transcription Notes:
Unsure how to show stuttering in text.