An Elegant Epigraph: William Matthews on Subject Matter in Poetry

“You don’t take on subject matter because of an objective sense that one sort of subject matter is more important than something else. You take on what you can handle, what you can transform, what you can make your own, what you can make explicable and clear to somebody else, the reader who might stumble across the poem and recognize his or her life in that cloudy mirror.” — William Matthews

—From “The Pleasure of Experience, The Experience of Pleasure,” a 1997 interview conducted by Peter Davison, which first appeared in The Atlantic and is reprinted in the University of Michigan Press’s Poets on Poetry series (David Lehman: General Editor), The Poetry Blues: Essay and Interviews, edited by Sebastian Matthews and Stanley Plumly, published in 2001.


[“An Elegant Epigraph” serves as the recurring title for a continuing series of posts with entries containing brief but engaging, eloquent, and elegant excerpts of prose commentary introducing subjects particularly appropriate to discussion of literature, creative writing, or other relevant matters addressing complementary forms of art and music. These apposite extracts usually concern topics specifically relating to poetry or poetics. Each piece is accompanied by a recommendation that readers seek out the original publication to obtain further information and to become familiar with the complete context in which the chosen quotation appeared as well as other views presented by its author.]