Реферат: An Online Interview With W S Merwin

is that Milosz was so critical of the Communist world and there was a great deal of

leftist sympathy in the Sixties. For example, the SDS-oriented people felt that Milosz was

right-wing just as many Marxists felt about Camus and The Rebel. I’ve always felt

that this was wrong, I mean in the sense of being incorrect. There’s a kind of outlawry

that I have been drawn to all my life which is not doctrinaire, which is neither right nor

left. In fact, it’s opposed to them both. Every time I come back toward a political

stance, I never stay in one very long because every time I move toward one I tend to

partake of that anarchy, a suspicion of all their houses. That’s the only explanation I

can think of as to why Milosz was not accepted more widely and was not read more widely in

the Sixties. I don’t remember when The Captive Mind was published, 1958, 1959,

somewhere along in there. I know some of my friends read it and were excited about it at

the time and it just seemed to disappear. I think it went out of print, too. It’s been out

of print for a long time because I’ve tried to get copies of it for my friends and

couldn’t find it.

DB: The Seventies seemed a time of political relaxation, or at least part of it

did. Was it for you? Do you think your poetry seemed to turn away a bit…?

Merwin: It depends on what you mean by politics. If you mean concern with the

manipulation of human beings by other human beings, if you want to define it that way, you

could say that’s true. I was trying to say last night that what’s happening to the world,

what organized human activity is doing to the world, is that same thing it’s doing to

language and culture around us and to other cultures, to other people and species. The

natural world, as a whole, is all the same thing and to me it’s all political. One picks

it up where one feels most strongly and most immediately about it. Sometimes I feel more

immediately concerned with what’s happening to the elements, the sea, the animals, the

language, than I do with any particular society. I don’t make a distinction. The poisoning

of the soil, the imminence of nuclear disaster, are absolutely the same thing. You shut

your eyes and you open them and you’re staring at the same thing but the form of it looks

different. Here you are at a different movie but it’s all the same thing.

DB: Do you think you are influenced or have any sort of affinity for Robinson