Pearl London: Yeats in A Vision had written about the moon as that "yellow curd of moon," and at that moment it seemed absolutely visual and right and even exact. And then he took it out and he put in "brilliant moon." Because, he said, "I cannot let it become so theatrical."
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Derek Walcott: There's a poem by Larkin that I quote very often, and he says, "If I were asked to construct a religion, it would be of water." And the poem ends, "Where the many-angled light would congregate endlessly," which is lovely. A glass of water, the element encased in something, is the clearest, truest kind of simplicity, elemental in its simplicity.
A writer like Rilke, at the end of the Duino Elegies, saying that what a poet lives for is ultimately to arrive at the point where when he says "house, bridge, fountain, gate" it is itself. It is like the thing Blake arrived at. Blake as an old man could write as an experienced child. The simplicity in Blake that Yeats went for, and every great poet arrives at, is finally when you can use nouns, and those nouns are reborn in the experience and life of the poet's work. That when it is said, it is renamed. To take out the "yellow curd of the moon," which is Pre-Raphaelite or mid-Yeats, and simply say "the brilliant moon" is so cliché that it is stunning. You don't think he would dare say something that any guy walking out on the beach would say. "Wow, what a brilliant moon."
- Derek Walcott, in conversation with Pearl London in 1982, from Poetry in Person: Twenty-five Years of Conversations with America's Poets (ed. Alexander Neubauer, Knopf, 2011).
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