Jordan Davis, the Poetry Editor of The Nation, interviews W.S. Merwin in the May 16, 2011 issue. Some quotes pulled from their conversation:

“Jeffersonian democracy, faulty as it is, and only the fragment of it that we have, is a thing of such preciousness, a thing of such value. It’s been bequeathed to us by Jefferson, but also by a serious of people who took it seriously, and it’s echoed in some of the great writers of American literature. Emerson and Thoreau are certainly party of the whole of it….”

“The Gettysburg Address is so revealing when you start to read it like a poem, phrase by phrase. There’s that wonderful phrase where he talks about a country `so conceived, and so dedicated,’–`Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether the nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.’ We’re still there, right there in that sentence.”

“What turned me into an environmentalists, on my eleventh birthday, was seeing the first strip mine. To treat the earth like that, to me, is like murder. Rape. I just hate it. I don’t think we have any right to treat the living world like that.”

“I never wanted to have even a typewriter on my table. I’ve used power tools, but I always feel that the complicated tools get between me and the job I’m doing.”

“I don’t see any point in negative criticism, because if the piece of writing isn’t any good, time takes care of it, just gets rid of it.”