If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat.

If one were forced to select a single word to exemplify Bishop's peculiar charm and power, it might well be 'No.'

I cling to the optimistic belief that the haphazard and the hopscotch, the creature that sips among many flowers, may actually come up with something.

If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat.

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth's ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.