Great literature, if we read it well, opens us up to the world and makes us more sensitive to it, as if we acquired eyes that could see through things and ears that could hear smaller sounds.

If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.

The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.

To grow old is to lose everything.

Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.

Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.

Joe DiMaggio batting sometimes gave the impression, the suggestion that the old rules and dimensions of baseball no longer applied to him, and that the game had at last grown unfairly easy.