I’m not particularly interested in ideas

Pearl London: Coming back to the body of the poetry, wouldn’t you say that right from the beginning, all of the poems—somewhere, somewhere—are living in a moral universe. 

William Matthews: I think of the issue of equilibrium, both as a sense of personal poise or balance and also the notion that you can’t deal fairly with the world if you don’t have the ability to make yourself equal to people. These are notions that have seemed to me important. And it seems to me that in writers like Stevens and Nabokov and Bishop the real love is for the ability to experience the physical world. And to make connections by means of elaborate linguistic patterns that imitate in some way the profusion and inventiveness of the creation. In one sense it’s about order, but in another sense it’s about the unbelievable diversity of the world that we can apprehend with our senses. If you imagine what an expiring Nabokov or an expiring Stevens is most annoyed at, at three minutes before death, it’s “I’ll never make another metaphor.” They’re not thinking, “Oh, my idea of order turned out to be really interesting.” I’m not particularly interested in ideas—which have wrecked lots of poets. I think they ruined Ezra Pound. His fascination with ideas turned a great lyric poet into a kind of raving village idiot.

 - William Matthews, in conversation with Pearl London in 1994, from Poetry in Person: Twenty-five Years of Conversations with America's Poets (ed. Alexander Neubauer, Knopf, 2011).