Life & Wisdom Quote by Galway Kinnell

Refusing the culture of the curated self, Kinnell snaps the ego down to size: "The self is the least of it". It reads like a rebuttal to the modern reflex to make every feeling a brand and every wound a credential. The opening, "Never mind", isn’t indifference so much as a hard reset - a decision to stop polishing the story we tell about ourselves and attend to what hurts, what endures, what connects.

Then the poem turns a knife into a needle: "Let our scars fall in love". Scars aren’t raw pain; they’re pain that has survived long enough to change form. By making them the agents of intimacy, Kinnell sidesteps sentimental healing narratives. He doesn’t ask for unbrokenness, or even for closure. He imagines attachment happening at the site of damage, where history can’t be edited out. The phrasing is crucial: not "let us fall in love", but our scars, as if the truest meeting between people happens below the level of personality, where defenses have already failed and the body has written its own record.

Kinnell, a mid-century American poet shaped by war’s shadow and an era of political and personal upheaval, often sought the sacred in the bruised and ordinary. The line carries that ethic: love as an agreement to stop auditioning and start recognizing. Not redemption, not self-improvement - communion, rough-edged and earned.