Реферат: An Online Interview With W S Merwin

Merwin: It’s been a long time since I read him and I may be very unfair and I

love some of Robinson Jeffers. But there seemed to me to be a kind of relishing of his

misanthropy, a kind of hugging to himself of a bitterness which really, I thought, in the

long run, was egocentric, feeling very superior to the world around him, to the human

race, a real kind of hatred of it. I don’t feel close to that at all. I certainly feel it

with a sense of elation or relief, but one of great sadness, a feeling that if I stay

there it would be a kind of moral defeat. One really has to find a way to move out of

there. One doesn’t stay in nihilism, I think.

DB: In many ways, both of you seem to be dealing with the same thing or the same

perspective, but that you’re both attacking in completely different ways.

Merwin: The one thing I feel close to is his sense of our self-importance as a

species, which I think is one of the things which is strangling us, our own bloated

species-ego. The assumption that human beings are different in kind and in importance from

other species is something I’ve had great difficulty in accepting for 25 years or so. To

me, it’s a dangerously wrong way of seeing things. I think that our importance is not

separable from the importance of all the rest of life. If we make the distinction in a too

self-flattering way, if we say we are the only kind of life that’s of any importance, we

automatically destroy our own importance. Our importance is based on a feeling of

responsibility and awareness of all life, the fact that we are a part of the entire

universe and our importance is not different from the importance of the rest of the

universe. We’re not in that way the only valuable and interesting thing to have appeared

in the universe.

DB: Would you answer the criticism that’s been leveled about there not being any

people in your poems with the fact that this perspective on your work might arise out of

Anne Sexton-Sylvia Plath analysis-type poetry?

Merwin: I don’t know where it comes from. I can see where it comes from in some

of the poems, I suppose. It seems to me that people who make the criticisms have been

reading other critics rather than reading the poet, generally. Are there any people in

poems like "Western Wind" or "Ode to Melancholy"? Are there