SOURCE: “An Interview with Stanley Kunitz,”¹ in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 15, No. 1, Winter, 1974, pp. 1–14.

[In the following interview, conducted in 1972, Kunitz discusses his formative influences and approach to writing poetry, his artistic development and changing existential and mythopoetic concerns, and his views on the significance of poetry and the place of the poet in contemporary society.]

[Davis:] Mr. Kunitz, you said once to a group of students studying your poetry that no one has the “right answers” in interpretation, and that after it's published the poem belongs as much to them as to you. Are you generally reluctant to explain your poems?

[Kunitz:] I often don't really know what a poem means, in rational terms. There are so many currents that flow into the poem, of which the poet himself can't be totally aware. Years after you have written a poem, you come back to it and find something you didn't know was there. Sometimes, I grant, a poet can be helpful about a specific image or an obscure portion of his poem.

Do you think it's helpful to talk about the circumstances that led to your writing a poem?

If they can be recalled, they may, in some cases, prove illuminating. But, as a general rule, the poem ought to have released itself from the circumstances of its origin.

Is that related to the idea of myth—poetry as myth?

Yes, it's that, but it's also related to my feeling that the poem has to be found beyond the day, that it requires a plunge into the well of one's being, where all one's key images lie. The occasion for a poem, which may have been something quite casual, is not the true source of the poem—it has only helped to trigger the right nerves.

When I asked about myth, I was thinking of the idea that I find in the poems of The Coat without a Seam especially, the idea that myth is something constant that can be expressed in many different kinds of circumstances, but that goes beyond circumstances—even beyond the individual. So a great poem speaks to everyone because all share a common condition.

Jung spoke of archetypal images that go beyond the individual persona and that pertain to the collective history of the race.

Is that a reason for your use of dream and hallucination in the poetry—to reach that archetypal material?

I think of dream as an actual visitation into that world, as a clue to secrets of which one is only faintly aware in ordinary consciousness.

But you wouldn't agree with the “psychic automatism” of the surrealists?

No. Because I think a poem is a combination of unconscious and conscious factors. One is trying to reach a level of transcendence; at the same time, one has to keep a grip on language, not to let it run away with itself. Automatic writing is such a bore!

Is your use of metaphysical techniques—exploiting the metaphor in extended conceits—one of the ways of exercising that conscious control over language, giving form to the raw materials of the unconscious mind?

The image leads you out of yourself into a world of relatives. The beautiful risk to take is to extend the image as far as you can go, until it turns in upon itself. The danger is in jumping off into absurdity, but that's part of the risk.

Perhaps we can consider some of these questions by talking about changes in your development. You eliminated almost half of the poems in Intellectual Things (1930) in later volumes. Was that because they were technically unsuccessful, or because you no longer agreed with the ideas you expressed in them?

My main feeling was that they were immature. Maybe I felt a little embarrassed reading them, so I thought it would be better to drop them, that's all.

I felt that many of the poems in that book placed much greater emphasis on the power of the intellect than later poems. I'm thinking of poems like “Mens Creatrix” (IT, p. 16), in which you seem to talk about the superiority of the intellect over the emotions. I wondered if perhaps one of the reasons for elimination of such poems was that you had changed your emphasis.

I doubt it. Certainly when I was writing the poems in Intellectual Things, I meant to demonstrate, if I could, not that the poem was a cerebral exercise, but the contrary, that the intellect and the passions were inseparable—which is the whole point of the Blake epigraph to the book, “The tear is an intellectual thing.”

Then why the poems in which you talk about putting away passion, or subduing it by intellectual power?

It's not a question of putting it away or rising above it. Remember, I'm thinking back a good many years, so that I wouldn't swear to this—but my recollection is that my characteristic figure at this stage, in speaking of mind and heart, was of each devouring and being devoured by the other, an act of mutual ingestion. In “Beyond Reason” (IT, p. 62) I spoke of taming the passions “with the sections of my mind”—as though it were a sort of dog food—but then I wanted to “teach my mind to love its thoughtless crack.”

One of the poems that impressed me on this theme was “Motion of Wish” (IT, p. 52).

I'll take a look at it and see whether you're right or not. … Yes, I think the lines you were thinking of were “… wish may find / Mastery only in the mind.” This poem I haven't looked at in so long, but as I read it now, I see these lines as the key to understanding of the poem: “… mariners eat / One lotus-moment to forget / All other moments, and their eyes / Fasten on impossible surprise.” And then the end: “A man may journey to the sun, / But his one true love and companion / Sleeps curled in his thoughtful womb. / Here will the lone life-traveler come / To find himself infallibly home.” But you have to consider here that the mind is the eater of the passions, and the passions rest in that mind, so that what one is asserting is a sense of the unity of all experience, not a separation.

And the mind contains that sense of unity.

Yes. The mind stands for the whole experiential and existential process. I think that the confusion here is to think that when I talk of mind in this volume, that I'm talking about brain. I'm not talking about brain; I'm talking about the whole process of existence.

What about poems like “Very Tree” (IT, p. 21), where it seems that what you're saying is that you perceive the essence of the tree—its treeness—and discard its particulars? That the particulars are not important?

One of my great influences was Plato, and I was very deep in Platonic lore, especially at this period of my first work. The theme is the idea of tree, treeness, as opposed to the shadow of the idea.

But you're not really suggesting that particulars of experience are unimportant?

You arrive at universals through the perception—the clear perception—of what Blake called “Minute Particulars.”

These earlier poems are much more abstract than your later work, aren't they?

I suppose so. That may have been the Platonic influence, as much as anything else that I can think of.

Did you become dissatisfied with that kind of approach?

As I became more of a political being, I wanted to fasten my poems to the reality of the day. I turned away from poems that began with the grandeur of generality. I wanted to find the general through breaking the kernel of particulars.

Is this why, in Passport to the War (1944), you make so many references to contemporary events? As concretions for your general themes?

Don't you think that is possibly simply the result of maturing a bit and having more experience of the world? At the time of writing Intellectual Things, I was in my early twenties and was an innocent in so many ways. I had developed intellectually more than I had emotionally or experientially.

This volume, especially, the war poetry, seems very different even from your later poetry.

It was my darkest time.

Do you still have the same feelings about the conditions of the modern world and what it does to man?

I've never stopped being a dissenter. I have no use for a superior technology that breeds hatred, injustice, inequality, and war.

What do you think the poet's position should be in relationship to that kind of society?

Number one, he must not become a subscribing member of it. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the poet has been the prophetic voice of a counterculture. Poetry today speaks more directly to the young than ever before because they recognize its adversary position.

Then you think it's more difficult to be a poet now than it was before the nineteenth century?

The poet before the Industrial Revolution could identify himself with State or Church, but he certainly has not been able to do so since. That's why he is a creature apart.

You often talk about guilt in Passport to the War. Sometimes it's played upon by society, but sometimes you seem to say that everyone carries a load of guilt around with him. What is this guilt caused by and directed at?

When I speak of “The Guilty Man” (PW, p. 27), I don't mean someone who has sinned more than anybody else. I mean the person who, simply by virtue of being mortal, is in a way condemned; he's mortal and he's fallible, and his life is inevitably a series of errors and consequences. Since he cannot really see the true path—it is not given to him to see it, except in moments of revelation—he is denied the rapture of innocence.

Like Original Sin?

Without the theological furniture.

Is this related to the existentialist idea of the fear of freedom?

I was making noises like an existentialist before I knew what it was to be one. I keep on trying to record my sense of being alive, which means in practice my sense, from moment to moment, of living and dying at once, a condition of perpetual crisis.

In particular, when I read “The Fitting of the Mask” (PW, p. 28), I thought of Sartre's “bad faith”: the attempt to conceal one's own being from oneself.

If we did not wear masks, we should be frightened of mirrors.

You say in “Night Letter” (PW, p. 9) that you “believe in love” as the salvation from this fear of one's own being and from the evils of modern society. Are you speaking primarily of love for mankind or personal love?

Abstract love is not love at all. One expresses love in relation to another—that's the germinal node. I don't really care much for people who are always talking about love for mankind and hate their neighbors.

The treatment of the love theme is another difference I found between the first volume and later ones. In Intellectual Things, the love poetry is often about relationships that fail; it isn't until the later poetry that you really celebrate fulfilling relationships.

That's more or less to be expected. After all, the disasters of early love are legendary and part of one's education. For that reason, among others, poets in their youth tend to be melancholy. “When I was young,” said Yeats, “my Muse was old; now that I am old, my Muse is young.”

It wasn't, then, that you had a more pessimistic conception of the relationship?

I've always been an optimist about love. Three marriages are the proof.

I'd like to talk a little about Selected Poems. Perhaps we could begin with a poem that seems central to that volume, “The Approach to Thebes” (SP, p. 31). That poem ends with these lines: “… I met a lovely monster, / And the story's this: I made the monster me.” Is this just acceptance of one's fate?

More than that. … I have a theory about monsters. I remember, a few years ago, telling Mark Rothko, who was a dear friend of mine, that every genius is a monster. Mark thought about that for sometime, and then, with the typical vanity of an artist, said, “You mean I'm a monster?” I replied, “Well, I'm not talking about anybody in this room.” But of course I was. The adversary artist in our time pays a price, in human terms, for his excess of ego and sensibility. He has had to sacrifice too much; he is poisoned by ambition; and he carries too big a load of griefs and shames—that's the hunch on his back. You're not likely to find him open, generous, or joyous. Rothko, incidentally, killed himself by slashing his wrists not long after our discussion. I have a poem about him, entitled “The Artist,” in The Testing-Tree.

And the burden of monsterdom is placed on mythic heroes, too?

Yes.

There's one mythic hero that you seem to consider more than others, and that's Christ. Why is the Christian myth more important in your poetry than other myths?

Because it shakes me more. It is the supreme drama of guilt and redemption. I have no religion—perhaps that is why I think so much about God.

When you speak of myth in poetry, you mean a re-creation of the human drama embodied in religious myths such as this?

Poetic myth is nourished by all the great traditions.

Then you are saying that all myths attempt to do the same thing, to tell the same story.

All myths are the same myth; all metaphors are the same metaphor. When you touch the web of creation at any point, the whole web shudders.

And poetry has the same function as myth?

Metaphorically.

You draw many parallels between the poet and the mythic hero. Do you, like so many poets, see the poet as supreme example of affirmative action, of what a man can be?

As I said a while back, he can be a monster. But ideally he is the last representative free man, in that he is beholden to nobody but himself and his own vision of truth. Almost anybody else you can think of is beholden to others: the pastor to his congregation, the politician to the public, the actor to his audience. But the poet, since he is not a commodity, is more blessed than others—he can strive toward the absolute purity of his art.

Aren't you beholden to your publisher and your readers, at least in some measure financially?

No. I don't think so. One manages to survive. If I felt for a moment that I had to write lies in order to publish, I would stop publishing. It wouldn't matter that much. I could still go on writing.

You're especially concerned with the question of what it is to be a poet in “The Coat without a Seam,” and nearly all of the poems in that section are new in Selected Poems. Why is it that you became more concerned with poems about poetry in that volume?

I'm not sure that I did. Periodically one tries to redefine and reassert one's vocation—not always in obvious terms. Wallace Stevens made a career out of doing precisely that. “Poetry,” he wrote, “is the subject of the poem.” As you rightly perceived, I keep trying to relate poetic function with mythic or heroic destiny.

You note that relationship in other sections, too, in poems like “Green Ways” (SP, p. 5).

I wonder whether you caught the logic of the various sections in the Selected Poems. They were meant to indicate my primary thematic concerns.

Perhaps you would talk about a couple of those sections; for example, “The Terrible Threshold.”

That title—“The Terrible Threshold”—comes, of course, from one of the poems, “Open the Gates” (SP, p. 41), where the poet sees “The end and the beginning in each other's arms.” I think of the poems in this section as visionary experiences, culminating in a moment of illumination.

In speaking to a group of students studying “Prophecy on Lethe” (SP, p. 61), you said that that moment was one of fleeting awareness, and that you couldn't state what that awareness was of. If you can't state what you see in that moment of epiphany. …

I don't have to state it. The awareness is in the poem, not in my memory of it. Come to think of it, I don't even remember what the last lines were!

“With your strange brain blooming as it lies / Abandoned to the bipeds on the beach; / Your jelly-mouth and, crushed, your polyp eyes.”

I see all those death images piled up on that shore. The key word, the transcendental word, for me is “blooming.”

There's a movement there toward a sense of identity, isn't there? First an anonymous figure floating on the stream, and at the end you speak directly to the “you.”

Death-in-Life. Life-in-Death. The glory of the senses. …

This is what I was trying to get at: I saw the poem as, at least partially, a myth of the birth of consciousness, moving from a Being-in-Itself state—unconscious and no perception—to that sense of identity that you have because you're conscious. And of course, a sharper awareness of your own sensuous perceptions. I don't know whether that would be valid or not.

Thanks—I'll buy it. It just occurs to me that there's a comparable evolution in my later poem, “Green Ways.” I hadn't seen the affinity before.

And part of the point of “Green Ways” is that it is the duty of the conscious being to accept his consciousness, isn't it?

More than that, he must affirm his vegetable and mineral existence, as well as his animal self.

Not discarding them with consciousness, then.

Accepting them, in the fullness of the life-process.

Could you talk a little about “The Serpent's Word” section also?

Those are love poems, or deal with the love experience. The phrase is always the key to the section that it heads; here it's from the line: “Who taught me the serpent's word, but yet the word.” Which takes us back to the Garden of Eden.

In “The Dark and the Fair” (SP, p. 33), the source of that line, there's a Fair Lady and another Dark Lady, and the Dark Lady replaces the Fair. The Dark Lady is from the past; is she symbolic of the Fall?

She's Lilith, in the poem.

There is another poem in “The Serpent's Word” that I find more difficult than most, “As Flowers Are” (SP, p. 10).

That poem records the changes in a field through the seasons. And at the same time, it offers by implication a metaphor of the aspects of love. From week to week each species of flower, each hue, struggles to gain possession of the field.

Is that the “war” of the flowers?

Yes. The yellows and whites of spring yield to the hot tones of summer, a riot of colors. The chill nights bring the lavenders in; and, with the first frost, the whole field turns bronze. It's a parable, I suppose.

I think I see it now.

It's not so difficult, if you listen to the music.

You've said that in an open society, poetry tends to become hermetic, more difficult, and very private. Do you think this is true of your own poetry?

The important question is, do I still think we live in an open society. Certainly America seems to me less open than it was. And certainly my work has undergone a sea-change. Robert Lowell wrote something to the effect that I've broken with my “passionately gnarled” earlier style and am writing in a language that “even cats and dogs can understand.” Perhaps in my age I've managed to untie some of the knots of my youth. I want to say what I have to say without fuss. I want to strip everything down to essentials.

You talked about some of these ideas in Passport to the War, and that volume also had a more open style than the first one.

Poets are always wanting to change their lives and their styles. Of the two, it's easier to change the life.

In that last volume, The Testing-Tree (1971), you included several of your translations of other authors. Why did you pick those particular ones?

Obviously because I liked them as poems. And because they seemed to have an affinity with my own work. For example, I've been working on the poems of Anna Akhmatova for several years—they make up my next book. I've been so absorbed in her verse that it would be surprising if I hadn't been affected by it. Incidentally, I tend to think of a book as a composition, a joining of parts into an architectural whole, not just a throwing-together of the poems as written. A book ought to have an interior logic: these few translations seemed to me to fit into the logic of this particular book. I deliberately excluded scores of others.

Are they fairly strict translations?

Close, but not slavishly close. Translating poetry is an exercise in paradox. “Be true to me!” says the poem to its translator. And in the next breath, “Transform me, make me new!” If you follow the original, word for word, and lose the poetry—as you must, if you insist on a literal rendering—your translation is a dud. But if you find the poetry in a free act of the imagination, it's a lie. I'm reminded of the citizen in Kafka's aphorism who's fettered to two chains, one attached to earth, the other to heaven. No matter which way he heads, the opposite chain pulls him back with a jolt. That's pretty much the condition of the translator.

Do you read the originals yourself?

My knowledge of Russian is rudimentary. Though my parents came from Russia, I am not a Russian linguist or scholar. So I nearly always translate with somebody whom I can depend on for roots and connotations and allusions. Max Hayward helped me with Akhmatova, as he did before with Voznesensky.

Did you do many translations earlier?

A few … from French, Spanish, and Italian. I included one of my Baudelaire translations in Selected Poems. He was important to me.

You spoke of the “internal logic” of a volume of poetry. Does The Testing-Tree have a definite logic for its sections, as Selected Poems does?

A logic, but less definite, perhaps. I shuffled those poems all around. The first section is the overture, anticipating the main themes. Section two is dominated by poems of place; three, political; four deals with the role and character of the artist.

The title poem seems most like your earlier poems in theme.

Not in form, certainly. But that and “King of the River” go back to the mythic.

Were they written earlier?

No. Quite late.

Would you say, then, that your themes are the same, that you're just expressing them in a different way?

A man's preoccupations and themes aren't likely to change. What changes is the extent to which he can put the full diversity of his moods and interests and information into his poems. Formal verse is a highly selective medium. A high style wants to be fed exclusively on high sentiments. Given the kind of person I am, I came to see the need for a middle style—for a low style, even, though that may be outside my range.

I was interested in Robert Lowell's review of The Testing-Tree because I thought that he was saying, among other things, that the new poetry was more like his, more like confessional poetry.

I've always been an intensely subjective poet. There's never been any shift from that.

The sort of open description of autobiographical detail that appears in your last volume is generally considered confessional poetry.

Confession is a private matter. Most so-called confessional poetry strikes me as raw and embarrassing—bad art.

Do you think you've been influenced by any of the confessional poets? Lowell and Roethke?

In the first place, you mustn't call Roethke a confessional poet. He would have vomited at the thought. We were friends for thirty years, till his death, swapping manuscripts and criticism. My friendship with Lowell dates from the publication of my Selected Poems in 1958. Intellectual Things had brought Roethke and me together—he was still unpublished. But these are more than literary friendships. In these long and deep associations it's idle to discuss who influences whom. Friendship is a sustained act of reciprocity. We have all been touched by our interchange. Vulnerable human beings affect each other; that's all there is to it.

You wouldn't then put yourself in any group?

Now or at any stage, I can't imagine to what group I could possibly be attached. A one-to-one relationship is the limit of my herd instinct.

What earlier poets would you say influenced you greatly?

Donne and Herbert and Blake were my first major influences—Donne and Herbert stylistically, Blake prophetically. I must have learned something, too, from Wordsworth's “Prelude” and his “Intimations of Immortality.” For awhile I steeped myself in Keats and Tennyson. After that, almost nobody until Hopkins overwhelmed me during my college years. And Yeats, of course, whom I consider to be the great master of the poem in English in this century. I suppose Eliot to a degree, though I opposed him, quarreling with his ideas, his criticism, and what I thought of as his poverty of sympathy. His theory of the depersonalization of poetry struck me as false and destructive. My work didn't fit into that picture of his at all. Both Roethke and I felt from the beginning that the Eliot school was our principal adversary. We fought for a more passionate art. Nevertheless I was so aware of his existence that even in a negative way I was influenced by him. So was Roethke. That Eliot rhythm had an hypnotic effect.

I'd like to go back for a moment to the question we discussed earlier, your differences from confessional poets. Your latest volume is certainly more directly autobiographical than the others. Rosenthal justifies the use of autobiographical material in confessional poetry by the poet's assumption that the literal self is important and that it becomes symbolic of the world—what happens to the self is what the modern world does to man. How does your idea of poetry differ from that?

I phrase it differently. I say that the effort is to convert one's life into legend, which isn't quite the same thing. Secrets are part of the legend. My emphasis isn't on spilling everything. It's on the act of transformation, the ritual sense, the perception of a destiny.

Is it possible to see these mythic connections even if you're not a poet?

I'm not contending that the poet is set apart from others. On the contrary, he is more like others than anybody else—that's his nature. It's what Keats meant by negative capability, the predisposition to flow into everyone and everything. A poetry of self-indulgence and self-advertisement is produced by the egotistical sublime—Keats's phrase again—and is simply ugly. God knows a poet needs ego, but it has to be consumed in the fire of the poetic action.

Then your view is almost the reverse of the confessional one; you begin with a general idea of the human condition.

The only reason you write about yourself is that this is what you know best. What else has half as much reality for you? Even so, certain details of your life can be clouded by pain, or fear, or shame, or other complications, that induce you to lie, to disguise the truth about yourself. But the truth about yourself is no more important than the truth about anybody else. And if you knew anybody else as well as you know yourself, you would write about that other.

Note

1. The interview was conducted on March 9, 1972, at Mr. Kunitz's home in New York. Mr. Kunitz kindly consented to read and edit the interview. Poems quoted are identified by page number with the following abbreviations: IT—Intellectual Things (New York: Doubleday, 1930); PW—Passport to the War (New York: Henry Holt, 1944); SP—Selected Poems, 1928–1958 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958); TT—The Testing-Tree (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971).