“Redemption is a theme that concerns me. We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.”

--Stanley Kunitz in the Paris Review interview.

In the same interview he says Bob Dylan ( Robert Allen Zimmerman) couldn’t have existed if Dylan Thomas (Remember Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night?) hadn’t existed before him.
Do Not Go Gentle... was a call to the poet's father to fight death. It explores the personal experience of grief and death. Dylan Thomas, in the words of Robert Lowell, is a "dazzling obscure writer who can be enjoyed without understanding."

"Understanding," writes Knausgaard, "must not be confused with knowledge for I knew next to nothing- but should there be, for example, skirmishes in the borderlands of an ex-Soviet republic somewhere in Asia, whose towns I had never heard of, with inhabitants alien in everything from dress and language to everyday life and religion, and it turned out that this conflict had deep historical roots that went back to events that took place a thousand years ago, my total ignorance and lack of knowledge would not prevent me from understanding what happened, for the mind has the capacity to deal with the most alien of thoughts. This applied to everything..."