INTERVIEWER: You've often said that you think poetry should be ‘‘chiefly hair-raising.” At the same time, however, you’ve spoken of the desirability of a strong bond between the poet and the community he lives in—a bond that you seem to believe has been broken in modern times. Do you see any contradiction or tension between such social concern and the requirement that poetry be, above all, hair-raising?

FITZGERALD: Well, don’t we have Emily Dickinson, the wondrous lady of Amherst, as an authority for that: ‘It’s a poem if it makes you feel as though your head were taken off’? And A. E.. Houseman: ‘If while I am shaving a line of poetry strays into my mind, my beard bristles so that I can’t cut it’? This is an extreme, and this kind of poetry is part of the extreme literary experience—extreme both for the maker and for the reader. That’s at one end of the spectrum. At the other end there is Dryden, sitting in his coffeehouse, turning out couplets to insult someone whom he feels like insulting. So, one has the gamut between what is essentially a private, we might say a metaphysical experience, and the other which is simply a refinement of prose—verse devoted to wit, or to the quotidian purpose of making something clear or making somebody ashamed, of exposing somebody, of putting into a witty form someone’s foibles . . . which can be read with amusement and without a touch of the other extreme, which is private and rare and precious. I don’t see why we can’t live with a decent consciousness of these two poles of poetic experience. I once said, too, that poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation. That says it pretty well—“‘is at least an elegance’— something that is well-formed, readable, and then again something that takes you up.