I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.

The true feeling of sex is that of a deep intimacy, but above all of a deep complicity.

To be precise and reckless: that is the consummation devoutly to be wished.

So much destruction in modern war takes place miles and miles away from the source of the destruction, the human being who has caused it.

The body is the one thing you can't fake; it's just got to be there.

I don’t believe that a reviewer or a critic can really criticize well unless he can praise well.

A poet trains himself to stand out in a storm and be struck by lightning. If he is lucky enough to be struck six times, he becomes immortal. Randall Jarrell said it and he's right.