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INTERVIEWER
You have always been a formalist. Today’s poets seem to prefer free verse. Do you think that’s an aversion to discipline?
AUDEN
Unfortunately that’s too often the case. But I can’t understand—strictly from a hedonistic point of view—how one can enjoy writing with no form at all. If one plays a game, one needs rules, otherwise there is no fun. The wildest poem has to have a firm basis in common sense, and this, I think, is the advantage of formal verse. |
 Download a PDF of the full interview |
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| Authors Mentioned |
| Truman Capote, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Isherwood, Rainer Maria Rilke, James Thurber, P. G. Wodehouse, Hans Christian Andersen, William Barnes, Hilaire Belloc, Thomas Campion, Lewis Carroll, Dante, Ronald Firbank, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Harry Graham, H. Rider Haggard, Thomas Hardy, George Herbert, Heinrich Hoffmann, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. E. Housman, Henry James, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Beatrix Potter, Marcel Proust, William Shakespeare, Paul Valéry, Jules Verne, Josef Weinheber, William Wordsworth, W. B. Yeats |
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