Q&A …

… James Matthew Wilson on Truth, Beauty, & Goodness - The Imaginative Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I follow Yeats’s practice of recognizing that many lines, actually, have to be quite plain, precisely because you want the opportunity to suddenly tighten the rope or crack the whip when you’re ready to give a line a perfect epigrammatical or lyrical expression. You need to be able to do that freely, and over the course of the poem, and write plainly in order to be able to pull that off, so your reader can tell the difference.