Eleanor Wilner, recipient of the 2019 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America, published her first book of poetry when she was forty-two. She has published eight collections of poetry across her career, but until this year, her earliest work has remained in a drawer; now, Gone to Earth: Early and Uncollected Poems 1963-1975 adds those first poems to her distinguished catalog. In this interview, conducted by email, Wilner reflects on the transformations our earliest writing can undergo, the corrective possibility of communal myths against culture-wide violence, and what art offers us.