You think that their dying is the worst thing that could happen. Then they stay dead.

Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.

Baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.

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

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.

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

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.