SOURCE: "The Layers," in Ironwood, Vol. 24, Fall, 1984, pp. 71-4.

In the following essay, Kunitz discusses poetic imagination and explains the genesis of his poem "The Abduction."

A few months ago a graduate student at a Midwestern university sent me an elaborate commentary on an early poem of mine, requesting my seal of approval for his interpretation. Since I could scarcely recall the lines in question—they had been produced in my twenties—I needed first of all to reacquaint myself with them, almost as if they had been written by a stranger. Something quite disturbing happened to me. As I began to read, the apparent subject-matter crumbled away, and what I heard was a cry out of the past, evoking images of an unhappy time, the pang of a hopeless love affair, in a rush of memory that clouded the page. When I turned to my correspondent's thesis...