SOURCE: An interview with Stanley Kunitz, in The Gettysburg Review, Vol. 5, No. 2, Spring, 1992, pp. 193-209.

In the following excerpt from his interview with Stitt, which occurred on May 3, 1990, Kunitz discusses his childhood, his education, his early aspirations to be a poet, the publication of his first book, his relationship with Theodore Roethke, and the physicality of language.

[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...