'Cynicism Is Such a Pall on the Arts'

While looking for nothing I found a genuine curiosity: an interview with Tom Wolfe focused on poetry. The interview was conducted in 2011, seven years before the novelist/journalist’s death at age eighty-eight. His favorite poem as a child, he tells Aaron Rench, was Honey Bear (1923) by Dixie Willson. He describes the poem as being written in “a rollicking kind of meter.” “I use a line from it in every book I write” he says. “There’s always a line from this poem.” If you’ve scanned Wolfe’s books and can verify this claim, please be in touch. More than many poets, Wolfe is alert to meter: “That rhythm, to me, just went right, as I was mentioning, right to the heart. There’s very little intervention by Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area of the left hemisphere. It just comes, streams, streams, because of the music.” Wolfe goes on to describe other favorites, including Kipling, especially Barracks-Room Ballads (1890): He was never forgiven for being for the Empire, instead of against it. He…