Latest W. S. Merwin Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I think it's good for anybody to learn languages. Americans are particularly limited in that way. Europeans less so... We're beginning to have Spanish move in on English in the states because of all the people coming from Hispanic countries... and we're beginning to learn some Spanish. And I think that's a good thing... Only having one language is very limiting... You get to think that's the way the human race is made; there's only one language worth speaking... Well, this isn't good for English.

  W. S. Merwin

  Country, Moving, Thinking

  "An Interview with W. S. Merwin, Poet Laureate". Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

• I also think that life itself is both indifferent to us and the source of all of our joys and everything that we love. And it's necessary to accept the one in order to love the other.

  W. S. Merwin

  Thinking, Order, Joy

  "An Interview with W. S. Merwin, Poet Laureat". Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

• The Divine Comedy is a political poem and when you say poetry is not about - he's always quoted out of context, that "poetry makes nothing happen," that doesn't mean you shrug your shoulders and don't try to make anything happen. And Dante felt that poetry was engaged, there was a point of view; it's not my point of view, it's orthodox medieval Christianity, and I have my troubles with that. He didn't feel that you could just rule out so important a section of life - we care about these things, and it's out of caring about them that we write poetry.

  W. S. Merwin

  Writing, Mean, Caring

  "An Interview with W. S. Merwin, Poet Laureate". Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

• If you can't bear what's happening to the natural world, if you can't bear the way we treat each other; if you can't bear wars, you just can't bear the whole idea of war, which is possibly unavoidable. But still, you resist it. Because you just hate our treating each other that way and causing that suffering.

  W. S. Merwin

  Hate, War, Ideas

  "An Interview with W. S. Merwin, Poet Laureate". Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

• There are poets who believe that you shouldn't engage at all in any cause. And there's something to be said for that. Because you don't want to - I think most political poetry is very bad. And it's very bad because you know too much to start with. You have a sense that you're right, and you're trying to tell other people what's right. And I think that's always kind of fundamentalism, and I don't like it.

  W. S. Merwin

  Believe, Thinking, People

  Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

• But most love poetry is awful; nobody knows how to write good love poetry either. But that's not a reason not to write love poetry. Some of the best poetry ever written has been love poetry, and some of the greatest poetry ever written has been political poetry.

  W. S. Merwin

  Good Love, Writing, Political

  "An Interview with W. S. Merwin, Poet Laureate". Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

• I wouldn't be happy about being considered a love poet or an environmental - I don't want any of those tags.

  W. S. Merwin

  Environmental, Want, Tag

  "An Interview with W. S. Merwin, Poet Laureate". Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

• It's an attitude of superiority. We are superior to the rest of life. The Book of Genesis says: 'Increase and multiply and have dominion over the birds of the air and the animals and so forth.' You run it; it's yours; do what you like with it. I don't know how old that text is, but it represents an attitude that probably really got going with the beginning of agriculture. Before that, the hunter-gatherers were gentler people than the agriculture.

  W. S. Merwin

  Running, Attitude, Book

  "An Interview with W. S. Merwin, Poet Laureate". Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

• Politically it would be terribly repressive to prevent people from having as many children as they want. But something's got to prevent it; and it won't be pleasant... We're still behaving in ways that have become disastrous... I don't think this helps us to survive... We're very species-centric... and now exist at the expense of every other form of life on Earth.

  W. S. Merwin

  Children, Thinking, People

  "An Interview with W. S. Merwin, Poet Laureate". Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

• The attempt to live that way, the attempt to treat everybody - it fails all the time - but the attempt to treat people as equals is a good attempt. It's a very good attempt. And there have been very few governments that have come anywhere near it in the past. The Greeks began to, the Romans began to - they both failed.

  W. S. Merwin

  Past, Government, People

  "An Interview with W. S. Merwin, Poet Laureate". Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

• The global warming is going on. These are not single cases. These are all part of a general way we've been looking at the world. As long as we look at the world that way it's going to go on. Because the idea that the important thing is for some people get rich while the rest of the people work for them is very deeply dug in...

  W. S. Merwin

  Ideas, Long, People

  "An Interview with W. S. Merwin, Poet Laureate". Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

• The moment we turn over the soil we start poisoning it and we go on poisoning it all the way through... and there's probably not a river in the United States that doesn't have pesticide poisoning in it. The fish are dying. The seas are getting polluted. All of these things are happening. The rain forests are going. That's what the context is.

  W. S. Merwin

  Rain, Sea, Rivers

  "An Interview with W. S. Merwin, Poet Laureate". Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

• We're losing a species every few seconds. We cannot put them back. If we change our mind and say, 'Oops, we made a mistake' - it's too late. This is the world we live with.

  W. S. Merwin

  Mistake, Mind, Too Late

  Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

• If there'd been a better-balanced society, where there were other ways of making a decent living, I think it might have been different. That's not the way this setup work.

  W. S. Merwin

  Thinking, Different, Might

  "An Interview with W. S. Merwin, Poet Laureate". Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

• I'm very pessimistic about the future of the human species. We have been so indifferent to life on the whole that it will take its toll. It's not just the polar bears that are having a hard time; what we're doing is gradually impoverishing and poisoning the whole of the rest of life.

  W. S. Merwin

  Hard Times, Rest Of Life, Tolls

  "An Interview with W. S. Merwin, Poet Laureate". Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

• There is part of a structure in which every species is related to every other species. And they're built up on species, like a pyramid. The simpler cell organisms, and then the more complicated ones, all the way up to the mammals and birds and so forth. We call it 'developing upward'... The whole thing depends on every part of it. And we're taking out the stones from the pyramid.

  W. S. Merwin

  Cells, Pyramids, Bird