SOURCE: An interview with Stanley Kunitz, in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 15, No. 1, Winter, 1974, pp. 1-14.

In the following interview, which was conducted on March 9, 1972, at Kunitz's home in New York, Kunitz comments on a number of subjects pertinent to his work, including the relationship between poetry and myth, his poetic development, the function of intellect and passion in poetry, the poet's position in society, his influences, his aversion to being called a "confessional poet," and the themes of guilt, love, and life and death in his verse.

[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...