Success Quote by Galway Kinnell

“The first step... shall be to lose the way” is Kinnell turning the self-help staircase into a trapdoor. The ellipsis matters: it’s a held breath, a refusal to give you the comforting middle. “First step” promises instruction, progress, maybe even a map. Then he breaks the promise. In Kinnell’s hands, getting lost isn’t a mishap on the route to meaning; it’s the route.

The intent feels both spiritual and stubbornly bodily, in line with a poet who distrusted clean, managerial versions of the self. Mid- to late-20th-century American poetry is crowded with quests for authenticity that don’t survive contact with ordinary grief, sex, family, and mortality. Kinnell’s work often insists that whatever is true will not arrive polished. “Lose the way” is a refusal of the tidy narrative, the idea that you can optimize your life into enlightenment.

The subtext is a critique of control: maps are authority, and authority is often a story we tell to keep panic at bay. He’s also quietly warning the reader that transformation costs dignity. To lose your way is to surrender the identity that knows where it’s going, to endure the humiliations of uncertainty, to risk arriving somewhere you didn’t intend and can’t easily explain.

Contextually, it reads like a postwar, post-ideology line: skeptical of grand systems, allergic to certainty, but not nihilistic. The destination isn’t despair. It’s a deeper kind of attention, earned only after the plan collapses.