SOURCE: “An Interview with Stanley Kunitz,” in Gettysburg Review, Vol. 5, No. 2, Spring, 1992, pp. 193–209.

[In the following interview, conducted in 1990, Kunitz discusses his early life, formative experiences, education, beginnings as a poet, literary relationships, and his approach to writing and experiencing poetry.]

Stanley Kunitz, who will turn eighty-seven on July 29, 1992, is the reigning dean of American poets. Not only is he still writing, but he is writing as well today as he ever has, as is evident from the new poem, “Chariot,” published below. The third child of Solomon Z. Kunitz and Yetta Helen Jasspon, Stanley Kunitz was born and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts. He earned his B.A. from Harvard in 1926 and his M.A. in 1927; at his first graduation, he won the coveted Lloyd McKim Garrison Medal for Poetry, was awarded highest honors, and was elected Phi Beta Kappa. After graduation, Kunitz worked briefly for the Worcester Telegram and then, from 1928 to 1943, served as editor of the Wilson Library Bulletin. His first book, Intellectual Things (1930), was praised both for its “fresh utterance” and for its “intricate and metaphysical” style. From 1943 to 1945 Kunitz served in the Air Transport Command of the United States Army, and in 1944 he published his second volume, Passport to the War.

A Guggenheim Fellowship awarded in 1945 allowed Kunitz to live in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for a year, and in the autumn of 1946, at the urging of Theodore Roethke, he returned to academia by beginning a three-year teaching stint at Bennington College in Vermont. Since then he has regularly taught at many places, but—by design—only on a year-to-year basis, and never with tenure. While Kunitz was filling in for Roethke as poet-in-residence at the University of Washington (1955–56), he taught the young James Wright. His Selected Poems was published in 1958 and won for him the Pulitzer Prize in 1959. Kunitz began his twenty-two-year association with Columbia University in 1963, and in 1968 he helped to organize the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts; he will work there again this summer, for the twenty-fifth consecutive year.

In 1967 Kunitz visited Russia as part of a cultural exchange program, reading his poems and lecturing. Thus began his deep commitment to the poetries of oppressed peoples: his translations of Anna Akhmatova and Andrei Voznesensky are particularly notable. When The Testing-Tree was published in 1971, Kunitz was praised for revising and enlivening one of the most-recognizable styles in American poetry. He himself explained that “as a young poet I looked for what Keats called ‘a fine excess,’ but as an old poet I look for spareness and rigor and a world of compassion.” The publication of The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928–1978 in 1979 won for Kunitz the Lenore Marshall Prize, signalling his ascension to the top of his field. When Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays was published in 1985, critics responded by saying that “Mr. Kunitz is a living treasure” whose spirit “is sensual and mythic, cosmic in its deep searchings for connections between the worlds of nature and man”; he is “the finest living American poet.”

With his wife Elise Asher, Stanley Kunitz spends his winters in New York City and his summers in Provincetown; his flower garden is both one of his great passions and one of the primary attractions of Cape Cod. He visited Gettysburg College on the twelfth and thirteenth of March, 1990, to read his poems and to visit classes in creative writing and contemporary American poetry. The interview was conducted in his apartment in New York on the third of May, 1990.

[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 the 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.

That is a lonely story, a story without companions, and it reminds me of another great loneliness in your life. A moment ago you referred to the “testing-tree” as a “patriarchal” tree. I am aware that you grew up in a single-parent home. How aware were you as a child of the absence of your father? How aware were you of how he left you?

I do not remember exactly how or when I learned that he had committed suicide a few weeks before I was born. There must have been a prior state of innocence, but I cannot recall it. It is as though I had plucked the knowledge of his death out of the air.

My most vivid memories are of stumbling by accident on a few bits of information. In my tenth or eleventh year, I was rummaging in the attic among old garments and trunks and some odd pieces of furniture. In one of the trunks I found my father's Masonic robes—apparently he was a thirty-second degree Mason—and some documents pertaining to his membership in that order. I have written about this discovery—which I kept secret then—in my poem “Three Floors.”

On another occasion, something far more dramatic happened. Rummaging again in the attic, I came across a pastel portrait that I knew immediately, intuitively, was a portrait of my father. I brought it down to show to my mother. Her instant reaction was to slap me and tear the likeness into shreds. This was out of anger, I am sure, but not anger directed at me. My mother wanted to erase my father out of her memory. She never referred to him, never spoke the slightest word of him. And that one gesture was the only manifestation of her emotion about him that I ever saw. I never dared question her, dreading the consequence. This of course made him all the more mysterious and important to me. I was compelled to create a mythical father to replace the real father I never had. This mythical being is the one who has dominated my imagination and my poems through all the years.

Did anybody else in the family ever mention him?

The only person I could talk to was my older sister. She was only six when he disappeared, so her memories were limited. I tried to pump her for information, but she had little to offer. The detail that I remember most clearly relates to my father's funeral. At the cemetery, when my mother became hysterical and tried to leap into the grave, our family physician—whose name was Dr. Nightingale, all so mythic—restrained her and said, “Be quiet! Don't forget, you have a lot to do with this.” Now that is my sister's story, I do not know how accurate. Late in my mother's life, actually forty-six years after my father's death, I persuaded her to write an informal memoir. She was able to describe her life, in exact detail, up to the moment of her marriage, but at that point she froze. She could not write another word.

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 of 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 inter-school 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 of 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.

How did all that come about?

At Harvard, since I needed to supplement my scholarship income, I applied to Captain Roland Andrews, editor of the Worcester Telegram, for summer employment. It did not strike me as absurd that, in order to impress him with my qualifications for a job as cub reporter, I enclosed an essay I had written on James Joyce. This must have been in 1924, shortly after the publication in Paris of Ulysses, a book judged then and for an entire decade to be obscene and unfit for American consumption. I still wonder what an old-school conservative New Englander could have made of my panegyric. Nevertheless, I got a letter back from Captain Andrews saying, “You certainly can write. There's a job waiting for you. Come in whenever you are ready.”

My major assignment on the Telegram was to report on the last-ditch effort to save Nicola Sacco and Bartolemeo Vanzetti from the electric chair. Like tens of thousands of others, I passionately believed that this pair of Italian immigrants had been condemned to die, not because they were proven guilty of murder during the course of a payroll robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts, but because of their radical politics. Their case became the cause of a whole generation of writers and artists, who joined the demonstrations in the streets. Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a poem of outrage whose title, “Justice Denied in Massachusetts,” was picked up as a battle cry. I was sent to interview the judge of the trial, Judge Webster Thayer, a mean, little, frightened man who hated what he called “these anarchistic bastards.” In the end, all the efforts to reverse the conviction or to secure clemency failed. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in August 1927. It seemed to me the closing of a chapter. After consulting with members of the defense organization, the Committee for Justice, I decided to leave my job and go to New York in the hope of finding a publisher for Vanzetti's proud and eloquent letters, the ones he wrote in prison. A few months later I arrived in Manhattan and made the rounds, beating on every publisher's door. But my mission was a failure. Because of the Red scare, nobody would touch so controversial a project. Besides, I was young and unknown, just the wrong person to enlist support for this risky enterprise. The letters needed and, luckily, found a better advocate in the person of Felix Frankfurter, whose sponsorship insured that a dead man's voice, his poignant broken English, would yet be heard. As for me, I had to face the hard reality that I was jobless in a strange city, without friends or prospects.

As I recall, you ended up working for The H. W. Wilson Company, the great library publisher.

It was not what I had hoped for, but it was my last resort. That was 1928, and the Depression was coming on. I tried every literary publisher and newspaper in New York. The letters from my editor in Worcester to the editors of the Times and the Herald Tribune did not get me past the reception desk. Finally, when I was virtually penniless and did not know how I could survive, I spotted a blind ad in the Times for a “correspondent”—whatever that might mean—at a publishing house. That led me eventually to the sprawling plant of The H. W. Wilson Company, uptown is the Washington Heights area, near the Yankee Stadium. The Wilson Company is the leading publisher of reference works for the library profession, The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, The Cumulative Book Index, and countless other invaluable tools. The founder and president, an entrepreneurial Scotsman, who had started the business in the back room of his Minneapolis bookstore, was still in charge, running the show like a family shop. Halsey W. Wilson was obviously impressed with my credentials and indicated I might be the right person for the job. I asked what the job involved, and he said writing letters. When I expressed some diffidence about this prospect, he commented, “Well, maybe we can find something better for you. I'll let you know in a week.” True to his word, he called to offer me the job, for twenty-eight dollars a week. I had been earning forty in Worcester, so I did not think this was great progress. Nevertheless, I told him I would report for work the following Monday. In the meantime, Alfred Knopf called me up—I had been to see him, and he had not been very encouraging. But now he said, “I think, on later consideration, that we can use you.” I said, “I’ sorry, but I've given my word.” Maybe that was a great mistake. Who knows what might have happened if I had gone to the great house of Knopf?

So were you a correspondent, did you work at home?

I was given a desk in a vast loft with people sitting at open desks; there were no enclosures of any kind. It was like going back to the nineteenth century, to a Dickensian world. Even the president—well, he had some filing cabinets stacked around him, but otherwise nothing separated him from his staff of several hundred employees, most of them doing indexing of various kinds. When I came in for work on the first day, one of the editors approached me and asked who I was. I told her my name and introduced myself as a new employee. She said, “You'll have to punch in on the time clock.” I recoiled in absolute horror: “Oh no, I can't do that.” She said, “Everybody punches the time clock.” I stood my ground: “Nobody told me.” She said, “Well, you'll have to see Mr. Wilson.”

“What is the trouble?” he asked. When I told him, he said, “Everybody does it. Nobody has ever complained.” I asked him, “Do you punch a time clock?” He replied, “No, but I'm the president!” I said, “Well, I'm only me, but it goes against my grain.” We looked at each other for a few minutes. At last he said, “If I make an exception for you, it would not be good for my relations with other people in the office. But I'll tell you what: suppose somebody else punches the time clock for you, and you don't have anything to do with it.” I said, “That suits me.” Looking back, I can only marvel at his tolerance and patience.

Then I sat at my solid oak desk for three long days, and nothing happened. Nobody gave me any work to do, not even a single letter to answer. I was a correspondent who didn't seem to exist. Was this a test of some sort? When Kafka appeared in translation some years later, I had a sense of déjà vu reading him. It was embarrassing for me to have to go back to Mr. Wilson to complain how useless I felt, but he gave no sign of being vexed or surprised. “What would you like to do?” he asked. I had been studying the firm's operations and did not have to hunt for a reply. My first suggestion was the publication of a library periodical that—without repeating the details now—would be livelier and more literary than the trade competition. My other proposal went something like this: “It's amazing that there's no standard reference work available in this country, or anywhere for that matter, on contemporary world authors. I visualize an illustrated series of books on writers, presenting biographical, critical, and bibliographical information for ready reference, in encyclopedic format.” “Go ahead,” said Mr. Wilson. “Let's see what you can do.” So that was how the Wilson Library Bulletin, Twentieth Century Authors, and the whole multi-volumed Wilson Author Series got their start. They are still flourishing, but of course I am no longer connected with them. That's ancient history.

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.

What was Ogden Nash like?

Soft-spoken and amiable, keeping his witty persona under wraps—but I never got to know him well. I should explain that my foreign adventure was made possible by a free-lance arrangement with Mr. Wilson. Living abroad then was extraordinarily cheap. I remained in France and Italy for about a year.

Did you return then to The H. W. Wilson Company?

Yes, but not for long. My taste of freedom had spoiled me for office routine. I decided to move to a run-down farm in outer Connecticut that could be acquired for a pittance. “I suppose this will be goodbye,” I said to Mr. Wilson. He paused for a moment before replying: “Not necessarily. There is always the U.S. mail. We can send manuscripts and other materials, and you can continue to do your work in the country, just as you did in Europe.” But then he added, “Of course, you'll have to take a cut in salary.” I was back, financially, where I had started. Nevertheless, I felt enormously relieved.

You mentioned your sense of isolation from any kind of literary community in your early days. Was that isolation absolute?

Not by this time. But keep in mind that in those days there were no creative writing programs, no poetry readings, few arts organizations or fellowships. Poets tended to work in isolation unless they were motivated to meet by a convergence of political passions. The old established writers were, as a rule, indifferent or hostile to the new upstart generation. If I have spent so much of my life trying to build a sense of community among writers and artists, it is largely because I know from experience how much the lack of it means. And yet I realize as well that I have been luckier through the years than most and am accordingly grateful for the many acts of friendship and generosity and hospitality that have eased my journey. In 1928, when I still thought of myself as a stranger in New York, I was invited, out of the blue, to be a guest at Yaddo. This was shortly after it had opened its doors as an artists’ colony. I was one of the first to enjoy its lavish hospitality.

Really? How did that come about?

I suppose that without realizing it, I was beginning to acquire some sort of underground reputation. More to the point, I was seeing a girl who knew Lewis Mumford, and I believe she told him about me and showed him some of my poems. He and Alfred Kreymborg were editing a publication called The American Caravan, which collected the new writing of the day. They asked me to contribute to it, and they also recommended me to Yaddo.

What was Yaddo like then?

It was still shaping itself, and there were not many people there. The guests included Kreymborg himself—rather an avuncular figure in contemporary poetry at that time, editor of an avant-garde magazine called Others. One special attraction to me was a poet in her thirties, Helen Pearce, a great beauty, whom I courted and later married, disastrously. Then there was the playwright Hatcher Hughes and a painter named Carl Schmitt. Only two others, I think. I was by far the youngest there. It was a fateful visit, though it lasted only two or three weeks, when I had my encounter with a ghost, an incident that has become part of the Yaddo legend.

A ghost?

Yes. Here's what happened. Yaddo is a big, baronial estate, and the great house, with its old-world, stone architecture, built for the ages, could be the setting for a Gothic novel. My bedroom was upstairs in the spacious tower room. One night, while I was lying in bed reading, I heard something scratching at the casement window. It must be the scraping of a branch, I thought, and went back to my book. The scratching continued. I rose, went over to the window, and looked out on the silent landscape. There was nothing suspicious in sight. I went back to bed and turned off the light. It was well after midnight. The moment I stretched out, the scratching began again, growing louder and louder. I got up again and again found nothing. I used all my willpower to ignore what was happening, even putting a pillow over my head, but the noise sifted through, clawing at my ears. I gave up trying to sleep and sat up straight in bed.

Suddenly, the wall I was facing became eerily luminous, and a mottled shape appeared on it—a winged creature, suspended from a pendulum, which kept swinging back and forth in a wide arc. The tempo of the scratching on the casement accelerated, the pendant bird swung faster and faster, and the glowing wall began to pulse. I was spellbound, terrified.

And then I heard the glass shatter! Everything went wild.

In panic I turned on the bedside light. The wall showed me its usual blank face; the closed casement was perfectly intact. I crept out of bed and fled downstairs. I lay down on the sofa in front of the enormous stone fireplace and spent the rest of the night there.

In the morning I went back to my room, where everything looked serene. I was too shaken to reveal my story. Then at breakfast, Elizabeth Ames, the founding director of Yaddo, said to me, “Stanley, wouldn't you like to make a tour of the painting gallery? You'll be interested, I'm sure, in the family treasures.” Like everything else at Yaddo, the paintings—mostly nineteenth-and early twentieth-century portraits—belonged to the estate of Spencer and Katrina Trask. The tour consisted largely of anecdotes about the subjects of the portraits, several of them illustrious or wealthy friends of the Trasks. I was only half-listening when at one point I found myself standing mesmerized—I did not know why—in front of a portrait of a delicate young girl. “Who is that?” I asked. “The daughter of the Trasks,” said Mrs. Ames. “She was at the center of the great tragedy of their marriage.” And she continued: “One summer evening this lovely child disappeared. She was last seen walking down the path to the pond at the foot of the rose garden. When they instigated a search for her, they found her floating among the lilies; she had fallen in and drowned.” I had a premonition of the answer, but I asked the question, “Can you tell me where she slept?” Mrs. Ames said, “Yes, in your room.” I thanked her, packed my bags, and left Yaddo.

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.

I would like to turn more toward talking about your own poetry. You have said something elsewhere that intrigues me. I think this might have to do with poetry, but maybe not. Apparently you played the violin as a child, and then you gave it up—because you resisted playing other people's music.

That's right.

Would you have kept it up if you could have played your own music?

I doubt it. My deep, sensuous delight in language made me feel that this was the art I was born for. Once I became absorbed in poetry, I lost interest in playing the violin.

Perhaps the connection would be between the way a violinist can physically feel the music and the way you feel about language.

All the arts, in varying degree, are somehow connected with the human body. The violin tucked under the chin—what an intimate and comforting sensation! I must tell you about my teacher, Margaret MacQuade, who invested so much hope in me. She had been a favorite pupil of the famous Belgian virtuoso Eugène Ysayë, and he had presented her with one of his violins, saying, “Pass it on some day to your best student.” I still have that violin—a beautiful, old, Italian instrument—and I feel guilty about its lying there in my closet, abandoned and unused. Perhaps I have made amends by trying to pass on to some of the gifted young poets who have worked with me the sense of having inherited, if only metaphorically, the equivalent of Ysayë's violin.

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 rhetoric and a dearth of the compassionate imagination.