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 greatest kindness would put a bullet in his bright eye.

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.

We made in those days tiny identical rooms inside our bodies which the men who uncover our graves will find in a thousand years shining and whole.

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.

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

The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.