W. S. MERWIN--PULITZER PRIZE-winning poet and author of over 30 books--is standing on Dunster Street talking about garden equipment. A window display for a Harvard Real Estate office, decorated with potted plants, has caught his eye.

He sees three trowels set next to the plants, and he wants them. "Would you mind stopping in there for a moment?" he asks. "I've been searching for stainless trowels."

Merwin, who lives in Haiku, Hawaii, devotes much of his time to gardening. "Every day, at about four o'clock, I go out and work outdoors till dark, and that's a wonderful part of the day..."He smiles, exposing gaps in the teeth.

The trowels, as it turns out, are not for sale. Nor are they stainless. We continue down Dunster Street.

But we still aren't talking about poetry. Instead, Merwin is reading aloud from a book given to him by a man at Au Bon Pain. The book has a king, a queen, and a character named Tumur. Merwin never mentions the title.

"On the train coming up here," he says, "I was reading...all the old, Egyptian funeral texts--what used to be called the Book of the Dead. It's very beautiful."

He squints, stops, and takes out a pair of sunglasses--enormous ones, which resemble safety goggles. He asks me to try them on.

Twenty minutes later, we are sitting in Winthrop Park, and the talk turns to poetry. Merwin speaks with the humility of a reader, rather than the assertiveness of an acclaimed writer.

"There are a lot more people reading and writing poetry than there were a few decades ago," he says. "I think that has to do with times being very critical. When, you're very upset about things, you're more likely to read a poem than something else."

He hesitates to past judgement on the literary scene. I can't evaluate [poetry]," he says. "Critics evaluate I'm much more like the old lady who was at the show and annoyed the impressionist painters and said, "I don't know anything about art. I know what I like."'

Analysis can only reveal so much. The best writing happens when "you forget you ever thought about it. You're just doing it. That probably doesn't happen for long or one hundred percent...[but when] you forget that you're watching, it just happens by itself, and that's wonderful."

The tendency to "think too much about it" is the chief "danger of a good education." Merwin looks suddenly paternal. "But that's not a reason you shouldn't have one."

Merwin himself had a Princeton education but does not let that binder his creativity. He uses the routine of writing to bypass his critical faculties. "I just try to work every morning." Flaubert said, "Inspiration consists of sitting down at the same table at the same time every day. That's wonderful, because it's so plain and takes all the sort of breathiness out of it. And Flaubert was a very great writer, don't you think?"

Merwin defers repeatedly to the masters--to Flaubert, to Shakespeare, to Dante. He hardly mentions his latest book, Travels, his speech for the Nieman Journalism Fellows, or his reading at the Poet's Theater--the occasion for his visit to Cambridge.

A Jazz quarter unloads some drums from a van and starts setting up behind the Newtowne monument, Merwin says, "You know, Auden said, 'Poetry makes nothing happen.' That's something everybody quotes and it may or may not be true."