Issue 67, Fall 1976
John Hall Wheelock passes his ninetieth birthday in September 1976. Born in Far Rockaway, New York, he was brought up in the neighborhood now occupied by Rockefeller Center, not far from the present location of Charles Scribner’s Sons, where he worked as an editor for many years. He spends his summers in the lowland sea-country of Long Island’s South Fork—in the background of much of his work—in a house to which he has returned for at least some part of every summer of the past eighty-seven years.
His first publication was a poem in the Morristown School paper in the year 1900. He has published twelve volumes of his poetry; in 1962, the year after the publication of The Gardener and Other Poems, he was awarded the Bollingen Prize. The eight-volume series which he edited, Poets of Today, 1954-1961, gave first book publication to twenty-four new poets, James Dickey, Robert Pack and May Swenson among them. He has also written a prose book, What Is Poetry? (1963). In 1970 he published By Daylight and In Dream: New and Collected Poems, 1904-1970. He continues to publish poems in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. A new volume of poems will be issued in late 1976 under the title Address to Existence. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a director and former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and an honorary consultant in American Letters to the Library of Congress.
When we called on him in his New York apartment, the front door was ajar, as he had told us it would be. He was waiting in the dark in a straight-back chair at the end of the hall, silhouetted in gray afternoon light from the living room beyond; he was dressed formally in a vested suit and tie. He is somewhat stooped and walks slowly, using a cane, but he rose immediately to greet us, and insisted on helping us hang up our coats. He ushered us into the living room and without further ado began to talk about his long life and poetry.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think America could ever produce a poet who would appeal universally to readers with many different levels of erudition? Do you think that such a poet would have to have a strong aural quality?
WHEELOCK
I think it was a Spanish poet—it may have been Calderón—who said that all his life he had been like a swimmer who could only use one arm, because with the other arm he had to hold his poems up over the waters. The things that he really cared about. It’s strange, but we live in a world which is even more alienated from poetry than it used to be; most people don’t care or know anything about poetry. Most civilized, cultivated people know something about painting, they go to galleries; they know something about music, they go to concerts; but no one cares or knows anything about poetry except the poets themselves. Since the poets don’t expect anyone else to read them, many of them have devised a way of communicating with one another through their poems, and readers often find such poetry difficult. Prose is, of course, easier.
INTERVIEWER
How would you define the difference between prose and poetry?
WHEELOCK
Robert Frost once made a witty definition of poetry. He said: “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” Since every word in a poem is precious, every syllable counts, and every pause gives a certain effect, it’s difficult to translate poems, because different languages make different sounds, and words with the same meaning may differ in their associative auras. In fact, so often a great poem is just sheer good luck because the language permits certain effects to be made by someone with long discipline in the use of language, who has a flash in which the words and ideas just fall in a particular way. If you have the instrument in good order, and you’ve worked at it for a long time, and are disciplined by long practice, even by a lot of five-finger exercises, work that was thrown away—you may be blessed by having things happen that are a little beyond you. “Chance aids the ingenious artist,” as Proust has said.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have an example out of your own experience?
WHEELOCK
I learned it very early in life. Once, when I was in college, I went to the theater to see Richard Mansfield acting in Richard III. In the tent scene, when Richard is lying there, with the ghosts—various people he’s murdered—speaking to him, I heard one of these voices say, “Sleep on, I lie at heaven’s high oriels.” I thought, God, what a wonderful line; I wish I’d written it.
It can bother you that you haven’t. So, I made up, while I was sitting in the theater—I was with my friend Van Wyck Brooks—a short poem which was eventually published in The Harvard Monthly. I used a Latin title, “De Coelo.” The epigraph was “Song on a line from Shakespeare.” Well, I began to get letters from people who wanted to know where this line occurred in Shakespeare. Among them was George Lyman Kittredge, a noted Shakespearean scholar and my professor in English. He looked it up in the Shakespearean concordances. No such line occurs. In fact, there isn’t any line in Shakespeare that begins, “Sleep on . . .” So, when I published my second book in 1912, I simply took out the epigraph. But I know that I heard that line! In that theater! One reason I know it was not my line is I consulted a dictionary to find out that an oriel was a window in a balcony that you could look down from. I had sensed that it was some kind of window, but I didn’t know. I looked it up, afraid that it might be the wrong kind of window and wouldn’t fit into the poem. Now I have taken that line on as my own, yet no one can convince me that I didn’t hear it.
INTERVIEWER
This would suggest that writing poetry involves some sort of mystical property.
WHEELOCK
Well, making a poem is like having a love affair with yourself. Artists are, in a sense, communing with the “anima,” which is the feminine principle in a man, and what is born of this is not a living creature, but a work of art. Of course, some of the best things that you do seem utterly hopeless at their conception. It’s hard work on them that brings them around.
INTERVIEWER
Has this been consistently true of your writing, that you had to devote a lot of work after the original conception of the poem?
WHEELOCK
Oh, yes. The Library of Congress has many of my manuscripts of the last thirty years; sometimes there will be as many as fifteen or sixteen versions of a poem. Of course, there is such a thing as carrying it too far. John Butler Yeats, the painter, the father of William Butler Yeats, would start out painting a springtime landscape in April but was so critical that summer would find him still working on it, which required changing it to a summer landscape, and eventually it would end up as a snow scene. He ruined his paintings by working over them too long. You can do the same with a poem. You’ve got to be the judge of when to stop.