A Poet's Statement

SOMEONE: Doesn't poetry, by its very essence, stand for "freedom" of human(e) expression of content and form? I am for POETRY.

BOWERING: Well, my reply would be "I hope not," on two counts. I do not like the notion of poetry as human expression. That, for my taste, is too much like the sprawl of the ego as well-argued in "Projective Verse." I prefer the kind of sense of the origin of poetry as seen by Yeats and Spicer, that the source is outside the human, and that the human being trains and trains, hoping to be in condition to receive it. It seems to me that if you express yourself, your limits will be the poem's limits. Thus I do not think of poetry as an act of freedom, but rather as being captured. I believe that such a vision is the source of the irony that Shelley's poems are spurred by a muse but are written with the hope of freeing humans from the Hapsburg empire and its church.