[In the following excerpt from his interview with Stitt, which occurred on May 3, 1990, Kunitz discusses his childhood, his education, his early aspirations to be a poet, the publication of his first book, his relationship with Theodore Roethke, and the physicality of language.]

[Stitt]: What sort of childhood did you have?

[Kunitz]: As I look back on it, my main impression is of how lonely I was. Aside from school, where of course I did have a degree of companionship, it was a childhood without much company outside the household itself, largely because, for so much of that time, we were living far out at the edge of the city without any neighbors. My main refuge was the woods that lay behind the house, where I wandered every day. That is where I invented the game I write about in "The Testing-Tree." I would throw three rocks at the tree, and the results would determine my fate. In retrospect I realize that those three throws of the stone against the patriarchal oak reveal much of the meaning of my life, at that point and in die future. If I hit the target with only one stone, somebody would love me. If I hit it twice, I should be a poet. And if I hit it three times, I should never die. That was the game, and I think it expresses my deepest yearnings.

How old were you at that time?

I must have been in my early teens. Thirteen or fourteen.

It is interesting that you should have wished to be a poet at that age. When were you first conscious that this was your desire?

It is hard for me to define exactly. I was writing from the very beginning, from the moment I went to school. Writing was what gave me the most gratification. I was also reading omnivorously. Every week I would walk to the public library, about three and a half miles from where we lived, and I would pick out this great bundle of books. The librarian would say, "Now, Stanley, you are permitted to take only five books, no more. That's the limit." So I would wrestle with the problem of which five books out of this big bundle I should take. The regulation was that you could do this only once a week; I do not know why there was such a limitation. But I would always be back a day or two later, wanting five more books. So eventually she consented to bend the rules and let me have those extra books. Then I would trudge all the way home and devour them. My taste was indiscriminate. I did not know what I was reading—I just grabbed anything that caught my eye.

I take it this was going on even before you were twelve.

Yes, it started early. I still have—on yellow sheets of sketch paper—a collection of short stories I wrote at the age of eleven, recounting my adventures in the far north. All of them are very detailed, very tragic and desperate. They are about survival. I am mushing through snow and ice with my team of huskies. We are lost in this terrible storm, and one by one they start dropping off, dying of the cold. Finally, there is just one left and we sort of keep each other warm. No doubt I was influenced by Jack London….

Let me go back to what you were saying about your early reading and writing. Was Worcester the sort of community that would support that kind of activity on the part of a very young man?

It was hardly an ideal environment. The Worcester that I knew was largely an immigrant city. It was built on seven hills, like ancient Rome—as the town fathers liked to boast—and each hill was inhabited by a different ethnic group: Irish, Swedes, Armenians, Italians, Jews, etc. Each group was isolated from the others. In fact, you were apt to encounter animosity and even some violence if you strayed into the wrong neighborhood. I bitterly resented the all-too-visible signs of parochialism and sectarianism and vowed to make my escape at the first opportunity. Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, with its depressing picture of the frustrations of small-town existence, was a book that reinforced my determination.

In high school, I founded a literary magazine called The Argus, in which I published early poems and other writings. In the old WASP section of Worcester, there was a group called The Browning Society, staunch survivors of what had once been a flourishing network of chapters. I have no idea how it came about, but as a young poet and editor I was granted the privilege of joining them. The elderly ladies of the Society, in their prim hats and long dresses, drank tea and discussed the poetry of Robert Browning in reverential terms. That was my first taste of the literary life, that invitation to The Browning Society.

Let me add that despite the reservations I have expressed about the Worcester environment, I remain forever grateful for the quality and breadth of instruction I received in the local schools, particularly at Classical High, a sort of magnet school, though the term hadn't been invented yet. I still treasure the hand-inscribed copy of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations that the faculty presented to me at graduation. No prize since then has meant as much to me. Those teachers, I believe, were superior to almost any you would find today in the public school system. I'm not even sure you could find their equivalent in the private sector.

Was there a special teacher at Classical High School who encouraged your poetry?

One such teacher was Perry Howe, the coach of the debating and declamation teams. In those days debating and declaiming were taken very seriously—there were interschool competitions in both categories, and silver cups were given to the winning teams. I was chosen captain of teams that successfully defended Classical's championship record. These were big events, held in the main auditorium of the city, with overflow audiences of students and parents in attendance. One of our first debates was on the subject of granting suffrage to women; fortunately, we drew the right side. Perry Howe helped me to overcome my native shyness and taught me how to project my voice.

I am indebted most of all to Martin Post, whom students joked about because of his love of poetry. One day he tossed aside the textbook from which he was reading to us a set of soporific quatrains—you know, the kind of didactic verse they fed to youngsters then—and reached into his pocket, saying, "I want you to hear some real poetry." That was my introduction to Robert Herrick: "Get up! get up for shame! … / Get up, sweet slug-a-bed and see / the dew bespangling herb and tree." And those other unforgettable lines: "Whenas in silks my Julia goes, / Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows / That liquefaction of her clothes." I had never heard such delightful music. Right after school I dashed to the public library on Elm Street and took home Herrick's poems. I have been smitten with them ever since.

In another session of his class, Martin Post went over to the piano, struck a sequence of bass notes, and asked us, "What color did you hear?" In the midst of the snickers, when I saw that nobody else was tempted to respond, I raised my hand. The bottom notes, I said, were black, but a bit higher in the scale they moved toward the purple. Then Mr. Post put me to the test with the high, tinkling notes at the other end of the keyboard. I told him the topmost notes sounded white or crystal, moving downward toward the yellow. He turned to me and said, "Stanley, you're going to be a poet." Years later I read about the new findings by psychologists in their study of sensory perception. At birth all our five senses are fused; their differentiation is a developmental process. So that synaesthesia, the translation of one sense into the language of another, is tantamount to a return to a state of innocence. It is one of the great metaphorical resources of the poetic imagination. What was it Emily Dickinson wrote?: "To the bugle, every color is red." I don't know where Martin Post got his information.

Tell me something more about the magazine you founded, The Argus. How long did that go on and how much writing did you do for it?

I must have been a sophomore when I started it. Publication continued for a good many years after my departure. Eventually the school shut down: classical education was no longer considered to be essential. Somewhere I have a file of The Argus tucked away. Among my contributions, I can recall, were parodies of Poe's "Raven" and Longfellow's "Excelsior." I suppose that parody was my way of learning metrics, as effective a discipline as any I know of. Perhaps, too, I was already beginning to distance myself from the nineteenth-century worthies who dominated the literary landscape.

How did you happen to go to Harvard after high school?

This was the period in which there were heavy restrictions on the number of Jews in the colleges. Even as valedictorian of my class, I had no assurance of being admitted to the college of my choice, especially since I needed financial assistance. The principal of Classical High School, Kenneth Porter, had his heart set on my going to Amherst, but failed to persuade his alma mater to accept me. Fortunately, Harvard—which I scarcely dared dream of—came through with the grant of a handsome scholarship. This despite its notorious two per cent quota.

I recall that you were an English major at Harvard. Did you receive any encouragement there as a writer?

In my second year I took a course in composition with visiting professor Robert Gay. His requirement was the submission of a one-page typed manuscript every day, Monday to Friday, on any topic of our choice—an heroic assignment, since he read and commented on every paper. After a month or so, he wrote on one of my papers, "You are a poet—Be one!" That was an even clearer signal than Martin Post had given me, and I tried, as best I could, to apply myself accordingly. In my senior year I was awarded the Garrison Medal in Poetry. During my graduate year, 1927, I took a course in versification with Robert Hillyer, but not with any appreciable benefit, since I resisted the mechanics of his approach to prosody.

Alfred North Whitehead came to Harvard, from England, while I was still an undergraduate. I knew his work and was eager to study with him, but his only offering was in advanced mathematical theory and philosophy. When I inquired about auditing his lectures, I was told that as an English major with inadequate scientific background I did not qualify. So I went to Whitehead himself. He examined my record and asked, "Why do you want to study with me?" I replied, in the firmest tones I could command, "Because I admire your work extravagantly and because I hope to be a poet." He looked at me in some astonishment and said, "You're in."

But I ended up bearing no great love for Harvard. This is an old story now, but I don't want it forgotten. After graduating summa cum laude, I assumed I would be asked to stay on as a teaching assistant. When I inquired of my counselor why I had not been approached, he said that he had wondered about it himself and would discuss the matter with the head of the department, Professor John Livingston Lowes, who was famous for his book on Coleridge and his course on the Romantic poets. He came back, looking embarrassed, and delivered his message, carefully giving each syllable equal weight: "What I've been told is simply this—'Our Anglo-Saxon students would resent being taught English by a Jew.'" That really shocked me. I felt crushed and angry. At that point I abandoned all thought of an academic career. How could I foresee then that eventually I would thank heaven for having been deflected from that course? After I received my master's, I left Harvard for good. During the previous summers I had been working as a cub reporter on the Worcester Telegram. Now I returned to Worcester as a full-fledged member of the staff and a few months later became assistant Sunday feature editor….

I take it that you were also working on your poetry at this time?

I was working on the poems that constituted my first book, writing them at night and feeling good when they began to appear in various magazines, including Poetry, The Nation, The Dial, Commonweal, and The New Republic. Early in 1929 I put my poems together and sent them in the mail to the biggest publishing house in the country then: Doubleday, Doran. Only a few weeks later I had a telephone call from an editor who identified himself as Ogden Nash; he had read my poems with pleasure and wanted to congratulate me on the acceptance of my manuscript. Would I please come in to talk things over? So that is how I got my first book published. I felt that I was fortune's child. By the time Intellectual Things came out, in the spring of 1930, I was abroad….

How did you happen to meet Theodore Roethke?

In the late thirties, when I was living in Bucks County, Pennsylvania—this was after the breakup of my marriage with Helen Pearce—Ted drove down in his jalopy from Lafayette College, where he was teaching, and knocked at my door. He was wearing a voluminous raccoon coat, and he had my book, Intellectual Things—much of which he knew by heart—under his arm.

He was very large, very formidable, and he stood on the doorstep reciting lines out of my poems. Then he said, "May I come in? I'd like to talk with you." With an introduction like that, he was more than welcome. Of course, he had also brought his own poems with him in manuscript. He was working on the poems that were to constitute his first volume, which I titled for him, Open House. It was clear to me from the start that Ted was a force of nature, a real poet. The poems he was writing then were by no means great—they were quite formal, somewhat imitative, and restricted in range. But there were signs everywhere of his ultimate destiny.

He was the first poet I had met whose passion for poetry was like mine—who had the same rather terrifying immersion in the poetic medium and who had read everybody. Through the years we learned a lot from each other, though I, being a little older and having already published, was certainly at first in the position of being more his mentor than he was mine. Later he was to open doors of the imagination for me, particularly during the period when he erupted into the poems of The Lost Son. To me those were the most important poems written by anyone in my generation….

You once said, "The language of the poem must do more than convey experience, it must embody it." Does that mean for you the physicality of language?

Definitely. The poems that mean most to me are the ones to which I respond physically as well as intellectually or aesthetically. When we say that we are moved or stirred or shaken by a poem we are describing a kinaesthetic response to fields of verbal energy. In the dynamics of poetry, all the sounds are actions. It is as though some intrinsic gesture of the soul itself were being expressed through the resonances of language. In that context the marriage of sense with sound seems to me to be a deep metaphysical action.

Is this why you love the Metaphysical poets so much, and why your own work has been grouped with that of the new metaphysical poets?

I don't care much for these groupings. Through the various stages of my work, I've been put into some rather strange company. But seriously, I'm inclined to think of myself less as a metaphysical than as an existential poet. To me, the struggle of words to be born, to arrive at the level of consciousness, is like the struggle of the self to become a person. I think that what the poet is trying to do is to bring words out from the darkness of the self into the light of the world. That is like the primordial act of creation, what Coleridge meant when he spoke of the repetition in the finite mind of the infinite I AM.

As you were talking about the physicality of the language, which would seem to imply the necessity of a rich verbal texture, it occurred to me to ask if you have that same feeling about your more recent poems, those beginning with The Testing-Tree.

Some years ago, in commenting on my later work, I said I was trying to write poems with a surface so simple and transparent that you could look through them and see the world. I didn't mean to suggest that I had lost interest in the orchestration of the world within. Texture is more than a superficial phenomenon and is not to be confused with the maintenance of a high style. My main concern is with psychic texture, which is a deeper and more complex thing.

When you compose your poems, is there that same sense of actual physical engagement?

I have never known how to compose poems except by saying them. The problem always has been to discover a rhythm on which I can ride. When that happens, I am on my way. A poem springs to life when its energy begins to flow from one's deepest wells.

In my interview with him, James Wright quoted you as having said to him when he was a young poet: "You've got to get down into the pit of the self, the real pit, and then you have to find your own way to climb out of it. And it can't be anybody else's way. It has to be yours."

Very sound advice!

Do you write regularly, say a little bit every day?

No.

How do you know when it is time to write a new poem?

I have never been able to sit down and write a poem as an act of will. My poems seem to have wills of their own. They keep their own schedules secret, and they don't answer the phone. They usually come to me at night with a phrase or image that starts troubling my sleep, gradually hooking up with other words and images, often counter-images, searching—as I've already indicated—for a controlling rhythm. It's a slow process.

Have you ever had poems come to you ready-made, a kind of spontaneous perfect composition?

Miracles happen now and then, but not if you count on them.

I am going to name a few poems and see if you have anything to say about the story behind the poem or its genesis: "End of Summer."

That's one I happen to have written about. It dates back to the time I was living in Bucks County. I was hoeing in the corn field when I heard a clamor in the sky—it was the season for the wild Canadian geese to be flying south. Great v-shapes, constellations of them. Something in that calling of the birds disturbed me. I dropped my hoe, ran into the house, and started to write. After the geese delivered their message to me, they flew out of the poem. They told me to make an important decision, to change my life, and I did. It is a poem about migration.

How about the poem "No Word"?

That's simple. I don't believe anyone has ever asked me about it before. I was waiting for a telephone call from someone who meant a lot to me, and the call did not come. Well, it did finally come, but too late.

How about "Open the Gates"?—Jim Wright's favorite of your poems.

"Open the Gates" originated in a dream. The landscape suggests the cities of the plain, Sodom and Gomorrah, from which I am fleeing—at least that was my interpretation on waking. In the climactic action, the monumental door I knock on is the door of revelation. Many of my poems speak of a quest, the search for the transcendent, a movement from darkness into light, from the kingdom of the profane into the kingdom of the sacred. As a rule, I don't feel I'm done with a poem until it passes from one realm of experience to another.

Your interest in politics is profound, as we see in your devotion to poets who have lived under totalitarian governments. But your poems are never overtly political.

Well, almost never. I maintain that to live as a poet in this society is to make a definite political statement. The politics is inherent in the practice of the art, as well as in the life. At the same time I feel that poetry resists being used as a tool. The truth is that we are suffering from an excess of political thetoric and a dearth of the compassionate imagination.