Interview with W.S. Merwin - Paris Review

The Art of Poetry, No. 38

INTERVIEWER​

Would you say something about the hymns you used to write for your father? Were those your first poems?

MERWIN​

I suppose they were. I was about five years old when I wrote them. I wrote them on my own, and I was very disappointed that they weren’t used in church.

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MERWIN
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I don’t think it was an urge to improve the world. It was an urge to love and revere something in the world that seemed to me more beautiful and rare and magnificent than I could say, and at the time in danger of being ignored and destroyed. I think I felt that as a very small child. Though how much of it I owe to my father or his family, I can’t say. The world around me did not seem to me to be satisfactory. There was something incomplete about the world of streets and sidewalks and cement—and I did have a very strong sense of growing plants and trees and so forth, and still do. I remember walking in the streets of New York and New Jersey and telling myself, as a kind of reassurance, that the ground was really under there. I’ve talked and tried to write about that, but I feel that I haven’t even begun to say it. But that hunger, that tropism, is something that I don’t believe we can live without, even if we aren’t aware of what we’re missing and by now many of us aren’t aware of it. We’re missing it just the same. We’re deprived of something essential.

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You're welcome. He is not one I am as familiar with as I'd like to be, but I have appreciated all I've come in contact with, and I feel especially supported by this: I remember walking in the streets of New York and New Jersey and telling myself, as a kind of reassurance, that the ground was really under there. I’ve talked and tried to write about that, but I feel that I haven’t even begun to say it.

Because it is something I also have felt and struggle with.

His face in the picture accompanying that article looks very kind. Nice to hear he was open and friendly!