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...