George Plimpton was at Cambridge, and I was at Oxford, and I won the Newdigate, and George, whom I had known a little at Harvard - we had lunch together - we were on different warring magazines at Harvard - I was the literary magazine, and he was the Harvard Lampoon - the humorous magazine. But we were friendly... know each other well. He came over with his Cambridge college, King's, to play tennis against my college. I was not playing tennis, but, after the match, he wanted to have dinner with me, and we had a bibulous dinner, at Whites, on... oh, on this side of town, and it turned out he had an idea. He, and some friends of his in Paris, Peter Matthiessen, Thomas Ginsberg, Harold Humes, were starting about... talking about starting a magazine, The Paris Review, and he wanted to solicit my Newdigate poem for the first issue. So I gave it to him, and he also wanted me to find some other poems that he could print. None of them... they were all fiction people, and so on... none of them cared anything about poetry. So for that first issue, I published a poem by Robert Bly, which was the first real publication of his, and I think, maybe Adrienne Rich, I did shortly. Second issue was Geoffrey Hill, but also in that first issue, I published a poet called F George Steiner, who is no longer known as F and is no longer known as a poet, and oh, one or two other people. But before the second issue, I was invited to become Poetry Editor of The Paris Review, and it was great fun. I did it about for about nine years. I was... I was mentioning in connection with the anthology, but the feeling really began with this book - the notion that I was trying to define a generation, or we were - a bunch of us - and that these were to be poets of... in our 20s, and we got older [sic]... but I think it worked very well. The Paris Review became influential, and it is still going now, 52 years later. George died just two years ago, suddenly, unexpectedly. I had talked with him on the phone the day he died, we've stayed in touch. I was no longer Poetry Editor, but every now and then he had wanted my advice about something or other, but, for nine years I had a happy, combative sense of suppressing stuff I thought was no good, and seeking out stuff I thought was wonderful. I remember one day, when I was in the Society of Fellows, writing letters to two strangers, I had been reading their poems in magazines - James Wright and Louis Simpson, and they both became close friends - they both sent me poems. Louis sent me one and I got him to change one metaphor in it - he never forgot that - and Jim Wright sent me four or five - he was the expansive type - and I probably took three, which I liked very much and which are in his collected poems. And then I got to know them, and Louis Simpson was one of the anthologists talking about making the book, the New Poets of England and America, and in fact, he knew, I... because of The Paris Review in particular, I knew more of what was going on, both in England and America, than either he or the other editor did, so he brought me in. And we published this book, and it was reviewed everywhere, the New Poets of England and America. It was the first post-war collection - came out in 1957 - two years after my book of poems, and it was the first attempt to collect a new generation of poets, so it got a great deal of attention. And then, it got attention as the academic book would for the next 10 years or so with the battle of the anthologies. We, the poets, for the most part, from the two sides of the war, got to be friends and started mingling. I got to know Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, and lots of the people that were in the other anthology, and we worked together, and in lots of ways our work came more nearly together, finally.
