Language cares.

Poetry is a means of seeing invisible things and saying unspeakable things about them.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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’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.