Part II

21) With this short rhymed section, it is necessary to say that my intention for the whole poem was from the beginning to write it in parts that would be complete poems in themselves, each an aspect of some time or area of my life. I thought from having reviewed a great many books of poetry that I had seen instances of a young poet making his appearance with a first volume of excellent poems, rousing critical admiration, and producing as his second book a hundred and fifty pages of blank verse on the life of Christ, the creation of the world, or the problems of good and evil, and I thought that I would try to avoid that sort of resounding failure.

This section, then, was inserted at this point as contrast. It had been written much earlier, a somewhat youthful credo. But it had legitimate autobiographical value: devotion to poetry had been and still is an important part of my life. It would be difficult or impossible to draw it on the map. But th short-lines in rhymed couplets, the difference in tone, would of themselves come to life, and more sharply following the cadences of the first section.

"Undiscovered country" is, I suppose, an echo of Shakespeare, and had been used with distinction by John Hall Wheelock, and yet it also conveniently echoed my "terra incognita."

22) I know that as I gathered from earlier poems those I wished to use in this long one, I revised them; not extensively, and not deliberately to create cross-allusions or anticipations or back-references. This reference to "my fathers wonder" is from the same tribal source as many others of its kind - my own father's genealogical researches and his talk. But it also stands here as a map-entry of a recurring theme in my poetry, therefore is part of the autobiography.

23) My father had been a civil engineer, his father a mill-worker and carpenter, and his generation farmers. I was the first and the only writer in the family history. What it was in my father's inheritance, combined with my mother's family's more artistic inheritance, had always interested me in a rather self-conscious way. A poem by Robert Louis Stevenson in which he apologized to his lighthouse-building forebears and yet claimed also to be a builder had caught my attention; but I could hardly dramatize myself that way. Instead, I was always curious about myself, believing that the poet must know himself.

24) "Envy is true here; if my words were achievement beyond carpentry and farming, music was beyond words; wordless. There was music and there were musicians in my mother's side of the family. I am ignorant of music, and play no instrument, and as with other things, a little music goes a long way with me. I dislike intensely to hear the same music repeated - it fixes itself in my head, to my great annoyance. And music moves me deeply, so much so that anything as long as a symphony is unbearable. I cannot understand people who drug and drown themselves in hours of rich music. But my poetry is full of allusions to music, and uses the word itself frequently, so that one. might get The impression I know it thoroughly and love it, as one might think I love the out-of-doors.

Yet in these lines there is also a kind of. self-chiding, an urging for more melody in my writing. This is recurrent, and is a part of a continuing examination and admonition, and an idealization of poetry and the act of writing it.