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William Carlos Williams WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
The Art of Poetry No. 6
Interviewed by Stanley Koehler
Issue 32, Summer-Fall 1964
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From the Interview
INTERVIEWER
You think it is easier for the English to conform, in poetry, to their kind of speech pattern than it is for an American? You don’t think for example that Frost is as true to the American idiom as you are trying to be?

WILLIAMS
No, I don’t think so. Eliot, on the other hand, was trying to find a way to record the speech and he didn’t find it. He wanted to be regular, to be true to the American idiom, but he didn’t find a way to do it. One has to bow down finally, either to the English or to the American.

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Sappho, Malcolm Cowley, Robert Creeley, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Marianne Moore, Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, Charles Tomlinson, Maxwell Bodenheim, Tram Combs, Emily Dickinson, Ford Madox Ford, Alfred Kreymborg, John Reed, Lola Ridge, Muriel Rukeyser, Win Scott, William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman
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