The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.
I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
Language cares.
I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.
I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem.
Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around.
I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.
I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
We're not in love with Literature all the time - especially when you have to teach it every day.
Obvious enough that generalities work to protect the mind from the great outdoors; is it possible that this was in fact their first purpose?
I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.
Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.
When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.
When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.
For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.
