I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

I have a plot, but not much happens.

Obvious enough that generalities work to protect the mind from the great outdoors; is it possible that this was in fact their first purpose?

Language cares.

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.

I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.

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.

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.

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 sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.

When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.

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.

Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.

I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.

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.

A lot happens by accident in poetry.

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

A teacher is a person who never says anything once.

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.

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.

We're not in love with Literature all the time - especially when you have to teach it every day.

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.

Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.

Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.

When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.

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 like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.

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 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.

Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.

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 would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

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.

The spirit world doesn't admit to communicating with me, so it's fairly even.

When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.

The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.