You’ve spoken a couple of times—in Ushant and more guardedly or more subtly in the poetry—of your faith in consciousness. You speak of the “teleology of consciousness” at one point. This sounds almost as if you’re looking for a new spiritual attitude toward life, a new religion not based on religious dogma or revelation or a conventional God. Is there anything to this?
Possibly. I don’t know whether I’d put it quite like that. Of course I do believe in this evolution of consciousness as the only thing which we can embark on, or in fact, willy-nilly, are embarked on; and along with that will go the spiritual discoveries and, I feel, the inexhaustible wonder that one feels, that opens more and more the more you know. It’s simply that this increasing knowledge constantly enlarges your kingdom and the capacity for admiring and loving the universe. So in that sense I think what you say is correct. Ushant says this.
One statement that’s always impressed me is the preface you recreated for The House of Dust in 1948 in which you wrote that “implicit in this poem was the theory that was to underlie much of the later work—namely, that in the evolution of man’s consciousness, ever widening and deepening and subtilizing his awareness, and in his dedication of himself to this supreme task, man possesses all that he could possibly require in the way of a religious credo: when the half-gods go, the gods arrive; he can, if he only will, become divine.” Is that too extreme a statement, do you feel, now?
No, I would stand by that. Which is really, in sum, more or less what my Grandfather Potter preached in New Bedford.
You once wrote, speaking of the great writers of the American nineteenth century—Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne, James, Poe: “We isolate, we exile our great men, whether by ignoring them or praising them stupidly. And perhaps this isolation we offer them is our greatest gift.”* It seems to me you didn’t receive much attention from the time of your Pulitzer Prize in 1930 until, at best, fairly recently—that you were ignored in the way you speak of for almost thirty years. “This isolation we offer” as “our greatest gift”—would this be true of yourself also?
I think so. I think it’s very useful to be insulated from your surrounds, and this gives it to you because it gives you your inviolate privacy, without pressures, so that you can just be yourself. I think that what’s happening today, with all the young poets rushing from one college to another, lecturing at the drop of a hat and so on, is not too good; I think it might have a bad effect on a great many of the young poets. They—to quote Mark Twain—“swap juices” a little too much, so that they are in danger of losing their own identity and don’t give themselves time enough in which to work out what’s really of importance to them—they’re too busy. I think Wordsworth and Coleridge had the right idea, too—they deliberately sequestered themselves.
* London Mercury, vol. 4, no. 23, Sept. 1921. [link to New Republic, Oct. 12, 1921: 174, quoting this line]
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