A chronicle is very different from history proper.
A lot happens by accident in poetry.
History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.
I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.
I have a plot, but not much happens.
I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.
I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.
It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.
Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful.
Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree.
The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case.
The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.
The spirit world doesn't admit to communicating with me, so it's fairly even.
When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
