Billy Collins: Well I mean poetry, I think, moves . . . most art moves in a kind of pendulum. I think poetry . . . You can see even from the Greeks the argument as to whether literature should be in the common tongue, or should it be in an elevated language? And this runs . . . This pendulistic battle goes back and forth. Wordsworth for instance, to go back to him, wanted to write poetry, as he said, in the speaking language of men the way . . . he wanted to get speech back into it. And so did Frost. And as _____ also the idea of bringing . . . bringing poetry into context with common speech. And the other . . . the other camp would say that poetry has to be completely different from regular speech, that regular speech is down here and poetry is . . . takes place on another linguistic level. Those . . . those two voices, or those two opposed positions, I think pretty much throughout the history of English literature at least, have determined these various movements back and forth. And that would seem to be thanks to a number of poets that were . . . that came after the high modernism of T.S. Elliot and Ezra Pound. And you can add Harper and Wallace Stevens. There’s been a movement back to . . . to the connection between poetry and common speech. The . . . the modern . . . those big modernists tried to get beyond personality. They wanted to make something . . . poetry into something more than the expression of the individual personality. But personality seems to have returned to poetry.
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Darin McNabb Costa on January 8, 2008, 12:31 PM
If someone makes a film about Collins someday Kevin Spacey would be a shoe-in to play him. Brothers separated at birth?
Darin McNabb Costa on January 8, 2008, 5:31 PM
If someone makes a film about Collins someday Kevin Spacey would be a shoe-in to play him. Brothers separated at birth?
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