Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.

I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.

You have your identity when you find out, not what you can keep your mind ON, but what you can't keep your mind OFF.

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.

I take the walk to be the externalization of an interior seeking so that the analogy is first of all between the external and the internal.

Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet's health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.

Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without