Big Think

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.