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

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

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

" A chronicle is very different from history proper. "

" 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 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 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. "

" A lot happens by accident in poetry. "

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

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

" I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I have a plot, but not much happens. "

" Language cares. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" A teacher is a person who never says anything once. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "