Wilbur: … [I]f you think (and it’s very unpopular to think so at present) of the poet as an agent of society and as a servant of the language, why, then, what the poet does all the time is to see what ideas and what words are alive, and, insofar as he can, to go right to the center of the words that represent the things that are vexing us. Now, if you do that, you’re bound to make things happen, because you’ll help people to clarify their feelings. They’ll have to know, a little better, what it is that they’re feeling. The path from that kind of clarification to action is not necessarily an immediate one. You don’t necessarily read a poem and pick up the telephone. But something you might call "tonalizing" does occur, a preparation to feel in a certain way, and consequently to act in a certain way. That does occur, I think, when you read a poem which goes to the words that are bothering you. I suppose you can’t expect, by means of a poem, to produce a perfect volte face in anybody; that would be very presumptuous; even a propagandist doesn’t expect to do that; but you can help a man to see what he may be about to see.

Hutton: Do you think, perhaps, you’ve done this in your poem, "Advice to a Prophet"? Might some people have read this and looked at fear in a different way?

Wilbur:Possibly.

Hutton: Because it’s about the words, in part, that stands for the facts which we really don’t know how to face, isn’t it?

Wilbur: Yes. I believe that what I was trying to do in that poem was to provide – myself, of course – with a way of feeling the enormity of nuclear war, should it come. The approach of that poem, which comes at such a war through its likely effect on the creatures who surround us, is a very "thingy" one. It made it possible for me to feel something beside a kind of abstract horror, a puzzlement, at the thought of nuclear war; and it may so serve other people. I hope so.

Hutton: To go back a bit to [Wallace] Stevens, wasn’t it finally the mind’s mode of perceiving itself in operation that fascinated him; the cognition, or at least a sense, of how the poet comes upon his comparisons?

Wilbur: Yes, I think Stevens once said that he regarded the essential thing in poetry as comparison. Metaphor would be the highest voltage kind of comparison. I suspect that this is what most poets are up to although you can think of exceptions. Most poets are up to the enforcing of such resemblances as they see as having some truth in them. This is one reason why I’ve always felt, and annoyingly said, that poetry is essentially religious in its direction. I know a lot of people, poets, who are not consciously religious, but find themselves forever compromised by their habit of asserting the relevance of all things to each other. A poetry being a kind of truth-telling (it’s pretty hard to lie in poetry), I think that these people must be making, whether they like it or not, what are ultimately religious assertions.