Poems come from incomplete knowledge.

But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.

Sometimes the archaism of the language when it's spoken is why we are all in love with the Irish today.

I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.

Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.

American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.

I don't like political poetry, and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers.