At that time, I knew only that free verse was ill-suited to my spirit….But I lacked faith in traditional meters….And besides I had parodied them too often to take them seriously now….I knew of course that traditional meters don’t exist in any absolute sense, but are remade according to the interior rhythms of each poet’s imagination. And one day, I found myself muttering a certain jumble of words (which turned into a pair of lines from “South Seas”) in a pronounced cadence that I had used for emphasis ever since I was a child, when I would murmur over and over the phrases that obsessed me most in the novels I was reading. That’s how, without know it, I found my verse, which was of course for “South Seas” and several other poems as well, wholly instinctive….Gradually I discovered the intrinsic laws of this meter…, but I was always careful not to let it tyrannize me and was ready to accept, when it seemed necessary, other stress patterns and line lengths. But I never again strayed far from my scheme, which I consider the rhythm of my imagination.
—Cesare Pavese, from Pavese’s essay “The Poet’s Craft,” quoted by Geoffrey Brock in the introduction to his translations of Cesare Pavese in Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950 (Copper Canyon, 2002)
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