Words seem like drops of water in a stream that has its own wholeness and its own motion.

To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content.

If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.

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

I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.

Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.

Each year the big garden grew smaller and Jane - who grew flowers by choice, not corn or stringbeans - worked at the vegetables more than I did. Each winter I dreamed crops, dreamed marvels of canning . . . and each summer I largely failed. Shamefaced, I planted no garden at all.