Q&A …

… A Conversation with Poet David Ferry on the Occasion of His 96th Birthday | Literary Hub. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Stevens, along with Frost, were my two biggest experiences, experiences for my listening ear at Amherst. I wrote my senior thesis about Stevens and I was elated about having done so. I wrote him a letter asking him about Whitman, even though I knew the answer, because I knew his lines about him. He wrote back and said something like, “Walt Whitman was the only writer back then whose writing wasn’t a book.” That is, he was what Stevens called “the latest freed man.” I wish I had the letter, but I lost it. I keep hearing all those lines of his that are entranced and entrancing: “Keep you, keep you, I am gone, O keep you as / My memory, is the mother of us all.”